Only a handful of events are deemed worthy of being featured at the New York Stock Exchange’s bell-ringing ceremony.

The impending Katie Taylor-Amanda Serrano undisputed lightweight championship bout to take place at New York’s fabled Madison Square Garden has recently been deemed worthy enough of that century-old tradition.

On February 2, Taylor and Serrano stood on the balcony hovering above the NYSE trading floor on Wall Street to ring in a new day of furious exchanges of money and goods, in anticipation of their upcoming furious exchanges of jabs and hooks that will start and stop at the sound of a different bell in nearby Midtown. The boxing world made its bet already, fueling the buying frenzy with an unparalleled media attention worldwide and a successful pre-sale for tickets.

There are no safe bets in the shark-infested waters of the world’s toughest and roughest trading floor, but Taylor-Serrano may just be the biggest boxing IPO in history. After years of unselfish investing by hundreds of fighters who plied their trade and risked their neck without knowing whether the gamble would ever pay off, this is redemption time. Women’s boxing lands its biggest fight ever in the biggest boxing stage possible.

A few investors, however, are still skeptical about the whole thing.

Hall of Fame promoter Bob Arum is one of them. And even as women’s boxing stock rises, Arum still chooses to stay away from the action even when the facts prove him wrong.

The recent comments made by Arum in regards to Taylor-Serrano not being palatable enough for big audiences were not met just with catcalls and hoots of derision from his adversaries and the wokest members of press row. They were defeated by facts. Every ticket sold and every headline written on this event across the globe is a slap on the face of an older gentleman who has lost one train too many to be pointing out at other people’s penchant for being on the platform too early. Yes, maybe big-time women’s boxing is still a few years away, but Bob is doing his part to keep that train running even slower.

This, of course, has a lot to do with Arum’s ability to conjugate the verb “to promote,” a task to which he has devoted most of his adult life. Turning boxing gold medalists into mainstream crossover superstars was his favorite magic trick. Building up a fighter locally and gradually growing him into a national-then-international superstar was just another day on the job for Bob. And finding raw talent abroad and then polishing and making it shine in the biggest boxing scene on Earth was a cakewalk.

Ring lightweight champion Katie Taylor and challenger Amanda Serrano pose at thee Fearless Girl Statue on Wall Street. Photo by Michelle Farsi for Matchroom/ MSG

But this time it feels different already, even though this is not Arum’s first struggle with the very meaning of his job as a promoter, of course. There is his ongoing confrontation with Terence Crawford, a shaky legal case that can nevertheless become a public relations’ nightmare for Arum’s Top Rank promotional outfit. There is his inexplicably hands-off approach to Teofimo Lopez’s career. And there is also the not-so-distant memory of Arum selling Floyd Mayweather the remainder of his contract for what turned out to be less than five percent of Mayweather’s future career earnings.

This is not, coincidentally, my first evaluation of Arum’s quickly-eroding business savvy. As I have famously said in a certain award-winning column a while ago under the colorful title of “Billion Dollar Daddy – Or how Bob Arum lost his fight to Father Timing,” Arum’s grip on that most essential skill for a promoter has been on the decline for quite some time, having reached its boiling point during the Mayweather-Pacquiao buildup.

That fight, which he almost prevented from happening altogether before becoming a destructive force during the promotion of the bout itself, all but proved that age was finally catching up with Arum. But at least he had a dog in that fight. His main cash cow was one of the fighters involved in that mega-bout, and a loss could have meant the end of the most profitable part of his career (it did not, in the end).

In this case, Arum has nothing to gain and quite a bit to lose. After disrespecting the top ESPN brass by putting words in their mouths about their alleged lack of interest in women’s boxing, one is left to wonder how would Arum approach a future negotiation with the network for a fight involving Arum’s top female talent, Mikaela Mayer. An attempt to throw the ESPN big wigs under the bus after an eventual failure to produce a mega-fight of her own for Mayer could be futile, since Arum is the one basically driving the bus. Where does he go from there?

In earlier times, it would have been easier picturing Arum promoting female fighters. Claressa Shields would have been a great hire for him, for example. Arum, as we remember, cut his teeth in this business by promoting a loudmouth, then-unpopular, polarizing and self-aggrandizing black fighter who called himself The Greatest of his time and beyond. Time will tell if the similarities between Muhammad Ali and Claressa Shields end there, but one would think that Arum, of all people, could have been the first one to recognize the opportunity to promote an unpopular product and refine it for mass consumption. And yet, he allowed that train to go by as well, wagering it all on the usual boxing recipes that served him so well so far instead of going for a deeper understanding of his role as a driving force in this business.

The picture is entirely different now. Arum’s ill-advised advice on women’s boxing stock will hurt him in the short run, and not only with his network of investors in the form of fighters, managers and fellow promoters. After almost costing men’s boxing the biggest fight in history, who will listen to Arum again every time he concocts a doomsday prediction that fails to materialize? How long until it’s no longer funny or even polite to take swipes at a 91-year-old who rolls a blunt for breakfast? After one more faux pas too many, how many promoters or networks will finally let go of his hand, and how soon?

As a nonagenarian who made it his business to tell countless boxers to retire, time is fast approaching for Arum to heed his own advice. As I said in my aforementioned column from 2015, “If the fight ends up being as big as everyone predicts it to be, and the rest of the main characters in this production deem Arum as more of a nuisance than anything else, his role in the (future) will be limited to a minimum, if anything.”

Yes, he’s been counted out a second too early before, and more than once. But now the times are different. For Arum, a different bell may be ringing. The trading floor is closing in on him, his blood is in the water and the margin call may be upon him. Economic solvency has never been a problem for Bob.

His ability to read the tea leaves and be the one to jump first into the next big investment, though? Not so much anymore.

Ring lightweight champion Katie Taylor and challenger Amanda Serrano signing the guest book at the New York Stock Exchange on Feb. 2. Photo by Michelle Farsi for Matchroom/MSG

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