I’ve been on 100s of media conference calls over the years. I don’t recall ever one being canceled because of bloggers, but there is a 1st time for everything. I was on the call this afternoon that was supposed to be Manny Pacquiao and Freddie Roach talking about the Mayweather fight and then this happened.
It started with a series of technical glitches – trainer Freddie Roach was muffled and was barely audible – and ended with Arum yelling an obscenity and ending the call after a reporter for Examiner.com, Michael Marley, was identified as the first to ask a question by the moderator.
“Oh (expletive),” Arum said, before Marley could even ask the question. “Let’s just cancel the call.”
Arum goes on to explain that he hates conference calls and thought it would just be A-LIST media.
“It was all f—– up,” Arum told the News. “First of all, I told them I didn’t want a conference call and they said, ‘No, we’ll just have the ‘A’ journalists on the call.’ And there were so many people that (Ed) Keenan, who was supposed to monitor this, didn’t get through and the first call is from (expletive) Mike Marley. So I mean, I told them I didn’t want the bloggers on.”
“First of all the conference calls are stupid,” he said. “What they should do is get a group of five or six writers and talk to Manny. Manny is no good on these calls. Once I heard that the first caller was Mike Marley I knew that they were screwed up. And that’s nothing against Marley but who the (expletive) is the ‘Examiner?’ Or whatever he said.”
The ironic thing is the Examiner is about as the NY Daily News who Arum gave the quotes to, but I digress. They said they would reschedule the call, but I don’t think that is happening.
One thing that Arum needs to understand is the bloggers and non “A-Listers” are the ones who help make these events as massive as they are. It is the bloggers and non “A-Listers” who have been covering boxing when the mainstream media ignored it. Just something for Arum to keep in mind.