LAS VEGAS -- When Golden Boy Promotions president Oscar De La Hoya paid a visit a couple of months ago to the Los Angeles home of Top Rank promoter Bob Arum, it was to put the years of animosity behind them, not to talk any specific business.
After all, for many years they had been a great team. Between De La Hoya's work in the ring and Arum's brilliant promotion of him they made hundreds of millions of dollars together and tons of big fights.
But the relationship ultimately went south, De La Hoya went out on his own, and the Top Rank-Golden Boy so-called cold war raged. It had a detrimental impact on boxing over the past several years because the companies refused to match their fighters against other, depriving fans of numerous fights we all wanted to see.
When De La Hoya decided he wanted to make amends and open the door to working together, Golden Boy CEO Richard Schaefer was adamantly against it. He didn't trust Arum and didn't like him either. It was a major bone of contention between De La Hoya and Schaefer and one of the many reasons Schaefer resigned from Golden Boy in an acrimonious split in early June.
With Schaefer gone, De La Hoya reached out to Arum for the initial meeting, which went well as they reminisced about the many good times they had together.
On Thursday, things turned more serious as De La Hoya -- in Las Vegas because Golden Boy is co-promoting Saturday night's Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Marcos Maidana rematch at the MGM Grand -- paid a visit to Top Rank's offices and met with Arum and Top Rank president Todd duBoef, Arum's stepson.
Unlike the meeting to bury the hatchet, this one was about business, their first in many years.
"It was a good meeting," De La Hoya told ESPN.com inside the media center at the MGM Grand on Friday. "[We are] just basically opening the doors to working together, to possibly making fights that are worth watching."
So, any fights in particular?
"Well, obviously Canelo came up," De La Hoya said of Canelo Alvarez, Golden Boy's biggest star, whose eventual showdown with middleweight champion Miguel Cotto, who is aligned with Top Rank, seems inevitable and is boxing's biggest fight not involving Mayweather or Manny Pacquiao. "I told Bob that I'm gonna sit down with Canelo next week. He's flying to L.A. and I'm going to sit down with him. So I have no news there. But we talked about Mikey Garcia, we talked about other fighters. We were just talking boxing. We talked about Abner Mares, various fighters and fights that we could possibly make."
De La Hoya said there are plenty of fan-friendly matches the companies can make with each other and that he is hopeful they will be able to do them. Since De La Hoya has taken over the day-to-day operations of Golden Boy in the wake of Schaefer's resignation, he has preached that the only important thing to him in boxing is to make the best fights for the fans. He can now make it more than just talk -- as long as Arum is up for it also. Arum has said multiple times that he is also willing.
"The way it ended was I told Bob, 'I'll give you a call next week,'" De La Hoya said. "We're gonna see what happens this weekend, we'll see what Canelo wants and then we'll talk.
"There was no dialogue before, so the fact that we are having dialogue, the fact that the doors are open, we're on the right path."