Jim Lampley shares his deep ties to boxing, from calling fights with legends like Roy Jones Jr. (who controlled bouts with tactical footwork) and George Foreman (whose 1994 comeback proved intelligence beats brute force) to witnessing Mike Tyson’s 1990 upset against Buster Douglas—a 42-1 favorite—where his restrained call reflected Jack Nicholson’s advice. He critiques modern boxing’s flawed matchmaking, like Devin Haney vs. Ryan Garcia, and the media’s role in shaping myths, including referee controversies (Richard Steele’s suicide after the Mancini-Kim fight) and unloaded gloves (Erik Margarito’s alleged plaster-filled gloves nearly blinding Shane Mosley). Lampley’s career began unexpectedly in 1974 as ABC’s first sideline college football reporter, despite being labeled "arrogant" by executives unaware of his childhood connection to their boss, Rune Arledge. His reflections reveal how boxing’s golden era—marked by geniuses like Sugar Ray Robinson and Bernard Hopkins—has faded into corporate mismanagement and lost artistry. [Automatically generated summary]
And he was always fantastic, too, as a commentator because he would give insight that you're really not going to get from someone that's not with these fighters day in, day out through an entire camp.
If you look at what happened, we go from a situation where the television networks have the authority and the self-belief to choose the commentators the way they want to.
Then you get into a more subdivided and widely disparate marketplace.
And now the star promoters have a great deal more influence than you would have thought before.
And now the star promoters start getting involved in influencing who's on the air.
And the bad thing about boxing is that the fighters don't get paid as much on the undercard fights and don't get paid as much coming up as is the case in the more broadly organized UFC universe, right?
I saved lawn mowing and car washing money for months to buy a ticket that in my memory was $100, but I don't really know for sure what the cost of that ticket was.
I didn't save it.
It would be worth millions now.
And my mother took me over from our crappy southwest Miami tract house rental and dropped me off at the Miami Beach Convention Center and then came and picked me up afterward.
It was the first live prize fight I had ever attended.
It was all about my hero worship for Cassius Clay.
Two days later, he stands on Brickle Avenue in Miami and tells two reporters that he's a follower of the nation of Islam, and now his name is Muhammad Ali.
And I'm in shock, okay?
What do you mean?
You're Cassius Clay.
You can't.
And so nowadays I say the lesson he taught me then was a man's identity is his own.
And it does not matter how much I love him or cherish him or feel connected to him.
He has the right to say who he is.
I mean, back in those days, Islam?
What is that?
I had no clue.
But, you know, he got over with me on that when I understood it was his right.
Then he taught me my stance on the Vietnam War.
My mother was double widow of two United States military heroes.
I grew up with a basement filled to the gills with memorabilia from their tours of duty as B-17, B-24, and B-29 pilots in World War II.
So there was nationalistic and patriotic material all over my household.
And when Ali said what he said about Vietnam, I mean, about Vietnam, that moved the meter for me in that regard.
And I understood.
And eventually my mother said, you'll go to Canada before I'll ever allow you to accede to being drafted into the Army and going to Vietnam.
Because her thought was that it was a pointless war.
They robbed us, too, because he came back and he's a different fighter then.
He was much more easy to hit, and, you know, he became, you know, he relied on his chin more, and, you know, he didn't have the fleet of foot movement that he had before then.
Could you imagine what we could have seen in those three years if Ali had never been robbed, never took his title away, and allowed him to fight all those guys like Joe Frazier, George Foreman, all those guys with keeping the same skills that he had when he was younger.
The fact that he was able to come back from those three and a half years off, the fact that he was able to rise to the top again, the fact that he was able to beat Foreman the way he beat Foreman and beat Frazier in the third fight in the kind of fight you would never have imagined him being in.
All these things combine to create the unique mystique of Muhammad Ali.
And Roy, you know, Roy famously, after Jerry McClellan was hurt when the Nigel Bend fight, he was really concerned because Gerald McClellan was the guy that a lot of people thought was a giant threat to Roy.
For a long period of time when Roy and I were working together, he was providing helpful financial support to McClellan's sisters who were caring for Gerald and, you know, keeping him alive on a daily basis.
I think in Illinois or Ohio, someplace like that.
But yeah, Roy loved all other fighters and he did what he could to help with McClellan.
I know that that loss that McClellan had and the subsequent medical issues, the stroke and the aneurysm, all that stuff really disturbed Roy and made him think, you know, about getting out early.
When he stood against the ropes in Miami against Glenn Kelly and put both hands behind his back and made Kelly miss, miss, and then hit him with one straight hand and knocked him out.
You know, he was one of those guys that's a unique once-in-a-lifetime talent.
Unfortunately, though, his mistake was going up to heavyweight and then trying to go down to 175, which is unbelievably grueling because he was, when he was 200 pounds at heavyweight, he was 200 lean, muscular, fast pounds.
That was not like fat to lose.
And so to starve himself to get down to 175, like he was diminished.
Well, not only that, it diminishes his endurance, it diminishes durability, gets compromised because you can't take a punch as well because you've cut so much weight.
So he was the expert commentator in the weeks leading to his fight with Moore.
He and I together had called Moore against Holyfield when Moore won the championship.
And in the weeks before he fought Moore, I would pull him aside at crew meals and fighter meetings and other occasions when I could get a minute with him.
Three, four times I asked him, George, how are you going to beat Moore?
He's a southpaw.
He's a mover.
He has great feet.
Holyfield couldn't find him, and Holyfield was much faster than you.
And every time I said it, George would fix me with that implacable George Foreman gaze and say, Jim, you watch.
There will come a moment late in the fight.
He will come and stand in front of me and let me knock him out.
Always the same words.
He will come and stand in front of me and let me knock him out.
Challenge his will, you know, because he's a self-constructed person.
You're talking about a guy who, as a teenager, 17 or 18 years old, says to himself, I want to get out of the Fifth Ward of Houston.
I don't want this life as a gangster or a laborer or whatever I'm going to get by living in the Fifth Ward of Houston.
I want something else.
So he goes to the Job Corps in Hayward, California and enrolls in the Job Corps.
And that's where he learned to box.
That's what set him up a year and a half later to win his Olympic gold medal in Mexico City and then go on to his storied professional boxing career.
But, you know, he was in his own mind proving he could do something that other people didn't think he could do even at that point.
He told me that when he first got to Hayward, he befriended one of the other people in the job corps, who was a white kid, and said, you know, they're talking about things that they like, and the guy talks about Bob Dylan, how much he likes Bob Dylan.
So George got the first two or three Bob Dylan albums and listened, wanted to hear what this is all about, and absorbed the lyrics and paid attention.
And when George told me this story, I said, George, you, Bob Dylan?
So he was just an amazing person, you know, so broad-based, you know, and that was, I think that was part of what burned in him was that everybody, myself included, gave Ali credit for all that.
And George wanted, in his own way, for people to see, hey, I'm not that different than that.
And I mean, one thing he said to me was, you can't win the heavyweight championship in the world without being smart.
Okay?
A stupid person couldn't do this.
That's true.
Yeah.
So he respected Moore's intelligence, but he also understood something that I didn't understand.
He'll come and stand in front of me late in the fight and let me knock him out.
Well, I used to say to people all the time, these are fine margins of competition.
You think you see a lot of wipeouts in boxing because you see a second-round knockout or a third-round knockout and you think that means there's a huge talent gap between the two fighters?
No, it means one fighter made a mistake.
90% of the time, it means one fighter made a mistake.
And if he thinks about it and trains against it, he won't make that mistake again.
This is like the margins, as you were saying, are so small for victory that when you see like a spectacular result, you do automatically assume, oh, that person's just that much better.
And so much so, you know, in any matchup between the great counterpuncher and the great attacker, you know that the counterpuncher has the advantage.
He's got more options, he's got more ways of winning.
The attacker has to break through the wall, so to speak.
So, in the years before Mayweather Pacquiao, people would run up to me on the street, run up to me in the shopping center in Vegas, run up to me in a hotel.
When am I going to see Mayweather Pacquiao?
And I would say, well, we don't know, but what exactly is it you think you're going to see?
Oh, I can't wait.
It's going to be such a great fight.
No, it's not going to be a great fight.
It's going to be watching, like watching somebody pluck the legs off a spider.
All right?
You know, at a step-by-step method.
And you're going to watch Mayweather pluck the legs off the spider that is Pacquiao.
And it's going to be pretty easy for him.
And it's not going to be wildly entertaining.
But it is going to be a one-sided victory.
So why are you so excited about the Pacquiao?
Oh, no.
I don't think that's the case.
But if you knew Floyd, you know, Floyd was only about winning the fight.
Yeah, give them a cortisone shot, throw them out there.
Yeah, unfortunately.
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Unfortunately for us, I remember there was like a class action lawsuit.
It was a lot of people were upset that Pacquiao fought injured.
Yeah, I got to tell you this while we're talking about him.
All right.
I apologize for going off script here a little bit.
I was with Manny three weeks ago, less than a month ago, at the Hall of Fame inductions in Canistota, New York, where he was being inducted into the Hall of Fame.
And on the night before the induction ceremony, there's a big banquet in a banquet hall at the Turningstone Casino.
And I'm sitting up on the dais between Roy and Ross Greenberg, my former boss at HBO, and right across to the left of us behind the podium is Manny.
And several people spoke.
I didn't know that I was going to speak.
I was asked to get up and speak.
I did.
Roy did a speech, et cetera, et cetera.
Eventually, Manny got up and made a speech.
Now, I met Manny Pacquiao 24 years ago in a fighter meeting room in Las Vegas before his fight against Leschanola Ledwaba, which was his first appearance in the United States.
Infestation level pool player, et cetera, all of that.
And then fast forward 24 years, and he's being inducted at the Hall of Fame.
And without warning, he's asked to speak that night.
And he stands up and makes a 15-minute speech, maybe 12 minutes, but it was more than 10, all in English, all perfect, all more or less off the top of his head, unedited.
It was brilliant.
And I went to him afterward, hugged him, told him how much I loved him, and I said, Manny, I first met you 24 years ago when you couldn't put three words of English together.
And I know that politics had something to do with this.
And he said, yes, but a lot of my political speeches were in Tagalog.
And I said, well, some of them were in English.
He said, yes, some.
And I said, I don't think there's any sport other than boxing where somebody could have achieved the kind of personal transformation that you have achieved.
This is the only one.
And he said, well, it sure helped me.
That's for sure.
Now, you probably know the story about Muhammad Ali and graduating from high school in Louisville.
Okay, so just for our listeners and consumers, Ali had very bad grades.
And in his senior year, he was flunking a math course.
And in order to graduate, he had to pass the math course.
And he was nowhere near it.
And the math teacher went to the principal of the high school and said, I'm going to give him a passing grade, even though he has not performed on any of the tests and he doesn't do the homework and stuff like that.
And the principal is like, why would you do this for this kid?
Why would you give him a passing grade when he hasn't earned it?
And the teacher said, you have to understand, he's going to be the most famous man in the world.
And we cannot be the high school that denied a diploma to the most famous man in the world.
What I did learn that may relate to that is Foreman was at great pains to explain to me and explained a couple of times that power punching is not a physical gift.
Power punching is a science.
Power punching is the product of real technical knowledge.
Power punching is about footwork, weight shift, the angle at which you deliver the punch, you know, all sorts of things not directly related to your strength or, quote, power.
And George was a disciplined and knowledgeable scientist about stuff like that.
And he explained it all to me one time.
And of course, if you watch the Moore knockout, he lands the first one too, right on the button.
And then, having Moore where he wants him, he puts a little more mustard on the second one, too.
You know, can you push your weight forward in a way that might leave you open to the counter and believe that you're going to get the better of that exchange?
If you believe you're going to get the better of the exchange, go ahead, go forward.
And that enhances your chance of knocking someone out.
And of course, we all know that Ray partially won the judges and the crowd with showbiz with the way that he threw his arms up at the end of every round and called attention to himself.
And he was quite aware of what he was doing.
And he was quite aware also that it would get under Hagler's skin.
So there was an element of genius in Ray, as we talked about already that went to more than just his spectacular physical gifts.
He figured out how to flurry at the end of the rounds and make a big impression in the judge's eyes.
That was a very close fight, but that fight always bothered me.
And one of the things that bothered me is I felt like there were moments where Hagler could have turned it up and didn't.
And then when he retired after that fight and went to Italy and became a giant movie star in Italy, the conspiratorial part of my brain was always like, was that like one of those deals where everybody assumed that Hagler was going to win?
Hagger was a destroyer.
Hagler had knocked out Tommy Hearns.
Hagler had beaten everybody in the division, knocked out Mugabe.
Well, you know, he had accomplished so much, and also his training camps were the stuff of legend.
I mean, he would spar 100 rounds a week sometimes, which is just insane.
Hagler was a monster.
I mean, his conditioning and his drive and his will and his discipline, he was a monster.
He would scare the shit out of everybody just from his work ethic.
I remember I told the story, there was a news piece when he was training on the Cape and it was in the middle of the winter and he was fighting Mustafa Hampshire.
And he was running down the sand dunes screaming war with combat boots on in the winter.
And this is part of what Terrence is facing as he gets ready to fight him in September, is you're fighting a guy who, up to this moment in his career, has been utterly knockout proof.
It's not one shot, but it's this thudding volume that never ends, this constant attack has made his two fights with Bivol so spectacular to watch, you know, because Bivol is not a make-fire fighter.
I remember when he was middleweight champion and he wasn't getting the credit that he felt like he deserved and he was, you know, squabbling with promoters and they kept him on the shelf.
I'm like, my God, he's like wasting away in the prime of his life.
And I felt like we're going to miss out on the prime of his life.
And then here he gets into the Felix Trinidad fight.
And I was like, this guy's, this is crazy watching this guy like completely outclass Tito Trinidad.
You know, and I, you know, when I first started calling fights, I was assigned to call boxing at ABC Sports by an incoming new president of the sports department who wanted to get rid of me and who thought that I would be such a misfit in boxing that if he assigned me to boxing, the audience would reject me.
And then I would walk away from my contract, which is what he wanted me to do.
He wanted me to, he thought my contract was absurd, too lucrative.
He didn't like the guarantees relative to exposure.
And he told my agent flat out, he said, I'm going to get rid of Jim.
I'm going to make him walk away.
And his first method for doing it was boxing.
So, of course, that means he didn't know that the very first sports event my mother ever sat me down to watch when I was six years old, after my father died when I was five, was Sugar Ray Robinson versus Bobo Olson for the Middleweight Championship on Gillette Friday Night Fights.
That I had grown up all through my childhood and teenage years watching Gillette Friday Night Fights.
And later, people would say to me, who's the voice in the back of your mind when you're calling fights?
Is it Kosell?
I said, oh, hell no.
I would never try to emulate that.
Don Dunfy, crisp, precise, factual, on point.
That's who I'm hearing in the back of my head when I call fights.
Yeah, so he thought he could get rid of me by assigning me to boxing.
And he also did not seem to be paying much attention to the fact that his division, with leadership of a guy named Alex Wallow, who was a boxing freak, had just signed a get-acquainted look-see contract with a 19-year-old heavyweight from upstate New York whose name was Mike Tyson.
So the first fight I ever called on TV was Mike Tyson versus Jesse Ferguson in Glens Falls, New York.
And this is the famous drive his nose bone into his brain fight.
Alex went to do post-fight interview after Tyson had obliterated Jesse's nose with an uppercut.
There was blood all over the ring.
And Alex said, you know, Mike, tell me about the uppercut.
And Mike said, Catamara taught me that the purpose of the uppercut is to drive the opponent's nosebone into his brain.
I was trying to drive his nosebone into his brain.
And I'm standing on the other side of the ring listening to this, headset on.
And I thought to myself, oh my God, look at what I've stumbled into here.
This kid is not only going to be the biggest attraction in boxing, he's going to be the biggest attraction in American culture if he can keep coming up with quotes like that.
And of course, within the next few weeks, they all started spilling out.
Boxing is a hurt business.
Everybody's got a plan until you hit them.
All the things that D'Amato had taught him, which he memorized and then reproduced in his media contacts.
So Alex Wallow and I lived five blocks apart on Upper Fifth Avenue in New York.
And when we went to upstate New York for the Tyson fights, of which there were several, we would always ride up in his green Jaguar, and he knew the route.
He would drive, play me his esoteric rock music.
You ever heard of Cockrobin?
Try him out sometime.
And so all the way up to Albany for the Marvis Frazier fight, Alex is saying to me, you know, I'm thinking of saying in the opening on camera that Mike will knock him out in the first round.
Do you think that's too audacious?
And I said, well, Alex, you're the expert.
You know, I'm just a throw-in blow-by-blow guy who's trying to get my feet wet here.
I'm the last person who's going to tell you what it is you should say.
So if you believe Mike is going to knock him out in the first round and you're confident saying that, first of all, no one's going to penalize you on Monday if you're wrong.
Nobody's going to print some big headline that says, Wallow was crazy or something like that.
It goes into the wash at that point.
And second of all, if you're right, you will get credit for it.
If you're right, Rudy Martzky will say so in USA Today.
And so that's our position for two-thirds of the trip to Albany.
And now in the last, oh, 40 or 50 miles, he starts saying, what if I said he's going to knock him out in the first minute?
Do you think that's too brave?
Same thing.
Alex, if you believe he's going to knock him out in the first minute, go ahead and say he's going to knock him out in the first minute.
I'm not here to control you or tell you what to say.
Say whatever you want to say.
I think I'm going to say that he's going to knock him out in the first minute.
So the following day, we do a rehearsal for the opening on camera, and he says he'll knock him out in the first minute.
Then when we do the live opening on camera for the show, he gets a little more cautious, and he pulls it back to, there you are.
It was a perfect Fight for Mike to showcase because Marvis had the giant name because he was Joe Frazier's son, and Joe Frazier had been trash-talking Mike.
That was one of the best things about you and Merchant and just the entire commentary team at HBO was that you had these intelligent, articulate people involved in what many people think of as the most barbaric of all sports.
But in a way with the commentators, it frames everything.
The same exact event with crude commentators is not the same experience because you don't get that intelligent, articulate analysis.
And a guy like Larry Merchant, who'd been around boxing for his entire life and had a deep understanding of it, and you, and then it's even the funny back and forth banter between Larry and George Foreman when they would disagree on things.
And I'm very proud to say, not blowing my own horn, but Larry and George in particular, there's a sports television columnist in the New York Daily News named Bob Raceman, R-A-I-S-S-M-A-N.
And at some point in that arc, Raceman wrote in his TV sports column in the Daily News, Lampley, Merchant, and Foreman are the greatest three-man broadcasting team in the history of sports television.
And no commercials means you get one of the most meaningful and communicative parts of the narrative, which is what goes on in the corner between rounds.
So you're watching Tyson Douglas, for instance, and you see these two novice trainers struggling with a condom filled with water to try to do something to ease the swelling in his eye.
No inswell.
Unbelievable.
I remember Ray nearly fell off his chair when he saw that.
This is so hard to believe that you could achieve the highest level of combat sports, the heavyweight champion of the world, and yet have this really rank amateur corner.
There was so much that was taken for granted about Mike during that stage of his career.
The only person in that camp, once D'Amato died, the only person, and Jimmy died, the only person in that camp who was really aware of how vulnerable he could be was Mike.
Mike was a boxing genius.
Mike knew much more than those guys about how to prepare for a fight, et cetera, et cetera.
So we talked about the call of Foreman Moore and where that call came from.
The other call that is on that same level in terms of, you know, people remembering and stuff like that is that call.
And you just came very close to identically articulating what my call was because, you know, I'm watching the rounds in Tokyo, and I've arrived in Tokyo with a firm opinion that Mike is going to knock this guy out in one, two, three rounds, something like that.
And as the rounds go on and you're watching the debacle unfold, the, you know, water in the rubber glove to try to stop the swelling and stuff like that, you realize that the preparation might not be all there.
And Douglas is getting more confident.
And Douglas is landing his jab, et cetera, et cetera.
But I was developing a golf relationship with the greatest actor of my generation, Jack Nicholson, who became a close friend and later saved my career.
But that's another story.
And I had asked Jack on the golf course about two or three weeks before Tokyo, I said, Jack, when you're going to the set to deliver the fulcrum line in the movie, when you're going to the set to do the one thing that everybody in the audience is going to remember, when you're getting ready to go deliver, you can't handle the truth, what is it you have on your mind?
What's your mantra?
And he said, Lamp, same thing I've been saying to myself ever since I first went to acting class, don't overact.
So I'm in Tokyo.
The count reaches four or five.
And I hear in the back of my mind Jack's voice, don't overact.
And that call became, Mike Tyson has been knocked out in about that tone of voice.
I wanted to make it as matter of fact as possible because there was nothing I could do to elevate it by screaming or shouting or delivering any kind of window dressing, etc.
And we have to recognize, okay, well, when Canelo fought Floyd, it was 152 pounds, right?
So he had dropped down, which was a struggle for him, which is why Floyd was so brilliant in getting him to go down to 152 because he knew he would be drained.
Roach knows that his counterpunching can be effective against Tank, and Tank knows that he has to make an adjustment if he's going to land a power shot.
Well, it's also Tank is another guy that has experienced all the trappings of fame, all the success and the money and all the jewelry and all the craziness and the ladies.
And both of our sports, boxing and an MMA, are littered throughout their history with these things that are egregiously unfair at the moment, but also prompt us to remember the fight and remember both fighters.
If you're a fighter who has been victimized by a severe injustice in one of your fights, the audience is going to remember you sympathetically and be more interested in your next fight.
Absolutely.
So this is an entertainment enterprise.
And anything that contributes to your legend is ultimately going to pay you back somewhere down the road.
But in that moment, I guess, you know, in that moment, especially if you're a person who imbibes and you've had a history of cocaine, and then, you know, what does it do?
So with Margarito, I think it was just the raps, where they had put plastered Paris in his wraps.
But Billy Collins Jr. and Louis Resto was a fight where Billy Collins was this up-and-coming fighter, and he fought Louis Resto, and Louis Resto was like breaking his face open with every punch.
I hope everybody who is listening to this will go to the web and pick up some of these things because you are touching on a lot of the most meaningful and poignant stories.
I mean, his vision was fucked for the rest of his life, for as long as he lived after that.
Never fought again.
And everyone was so confused because they couldn't believe that this guy, Louis Rusto, was not known as being this big puncher, was just busting him up with every shot he landed.
It was confusing.
It's a dirty business, man.
And Panama Lewis was, he did some corner work with Mike Tyson as well.
Remember?
Like later in Mike's career when everything was kind of chaotic and he had all those wackadoos in his corner?
Panama Lewis was like on the sidelines there, but wasn't able to be officially a part of it because he was still banned.
Well, you know, Mike, by late in his career, had a very clear understanding of his vulnerabilities.
You know, Mike was a boxing scientist, and he knew better than anybody that styles make fights and that there were certain stylistic matchups which for him would be difficult.
He had spent a week training with Lennox Lewis when they were 14 years old because Lewis's Arnie Bem, his amateur trainer, had brought Lennox from the Toronto area to Canistota, I mean, not to Canistota, but to upstate New York to the Catskills.
And Mike and Lennox spent much of a week, maybe all of a week, watching old black and white bike films on the wall, sleeping in the same room, training and sometimes sparring every day.
I was watching a piece yesterday about, it was a YouTube video on Sugar A. Robinson and his training and the type of training that Sugar Ray would do and how phenomenal his dedication was.
And if you think about a guy that, like, when he had his first loss, how many fights had he won?
And the last thing she said before she left the room and left me in front of a little TV set on a TV dinner tray was, Sugar A. Robinson's my favorite fighter because he dances while he fights.
He, you know, it was the thing about his training, you know, this video that I was watching was so interesting to watch someone who's really just ahead of the curve, like above everybody.
Like no one really understood how to move like that.
And then, of course, Cassius Clay, his favorite fighter, Sugar Ray Robinson.
And you can have an idea of what's effective, but until you see someone come along and do something totally different, that's where the innovators come in, where the real groundbreakers come in.
Like I bet before Sugar A. Robinson, nobody, like you had Willie Pep.
I asked the great Larry Merchant, 94 years old, living on Ocean Boulevard in Santa Monica, looking out at the ocean, reflecting on all the amazing things he did.
And I asked Larry, I said, do you think Terrence Crawford has a chance to beat Canelo Alvarez?
And Larry said, Jim, did Ray Leonard get an official decision victory over Marvelous Marvin Hagler?
And I said, yes, he did.
He said, well, if Ray Leonard could beat Marvelous Marvin Hagler, then Terrence Crawford can beat Canelo Alvarez.
And I said, why do you say that?
He said, same equation.
Get in, get out.
Get in, get out.
Over and over and over.
He's got to figure the angles and the approaches that will allow him to step in, land to the body, or occasionally upstairs, and then get out before he's facing any damage.
That's what Ray did so effectively against Hagler.
And it frustrated Hagler.
And the more you frustrate the opponent, the better off you are.
And it wasn't really a knockdown in my personal view.
He didn't touch the canvas.
He's never been on the canvas and we call it chin and I think that we kind of missed the point by calling it chin because I used to be Canelo's neighbor in Del Mar, California.
I used to run into Cheppo, his senior trainer at the grocery store.
I'd look into the cart and say, oh, he's eating tuna.
And he said, yes, and he's eating chicken, da-da-da.
And so I also used to go down the hill from my house off of Via della Balle in Del Mar and watch him train at the equestrian center, where he would go to the equestrian center in the morning and do two and a half hours of hunter jumper riding before going to his gym in the afternoon to do three and a half hours of boxing training.
I trained Hunter Jumper for a couple of years in the early 90s trying to please a wife who was a horse freak.
Okay.
And I had a really great trainer at the stables over next to Griffith Park in Los Angeles.
Fabulous trainer named Jonathan Seraci.
Hey, John, if you hear me.
And I trained for, I don't know, I want to say three quarters of a year riding Hunter Jumper.
And I got to the point where I was jumping 36, 38 inch jumps.
And I was riding quality horses.
And I was doing pretty well.
And one day after my training session, I was in the stall combing the horse down, brushing to do the things, the busy work that you're supposed to do to be a part of it.
And Jonathan came in and said, how do you feel about your riding?
I said, I think I'm doing pretty well, don't you?
He said, I think you're doing really well.
He said, but I think that this would probably be a great day for you to quit.
I said, quit?
What are you talking about?
You just said, I'm doing pretty well.
He said, well, you're doing pretty well because you love to do the fun stuff.
You love the jumping and you love the riding around the ring fast, et cetera, et cetera.
But you don't want to do the busy work.
You don't want to do what we call sitting trot and the other things that help you to build your awareness and your command of what you do.
And the result is that you're getting closer and closer to the stage at which something negative is going to happen.
And the first time something negative happens, you're not going to be able to respond to it.
So I think today would be a great day for you to quit.
Well, I mean, he did say, look, I'm perfectly happy to keep training you if you will come and do the busy work that I need you to do to 20 to 30 minutes before you go out and jump.
But if you just want to come here, sit on the saddle and run and jump, you're asking for trouble, and I'm not going to be part of it.
You had an unbeaten American Olympic star who's on the verge of his career-defining victory.
There's no question at this moment that he has won the fight.
When he stands up and Steele is counting, watch how he gets distracted when Lou Duva steps up on the ring apron and when he looks away from Steele, Steele uses that as his pretext to stop the fight with two seconds left.
If Duva had not stepped up on the apron and distracted Meldrick in such a way that Meldrick looked away from Steele, then I think that Steele would have caught a lot more heat and wouldn't have had any valid pretext for stopping the fight.
When you look back at your career and all the fights that you called and think about the beginnings and think about when they were trying to just get you out of the business and by giving you boxing, it's almost like it's very much a storybook tale.
But part of the reason for using It Happened as the title of the book is that there are so many circumstances in my career which are like that, counterintuitive, somebody wanted to do something with me that turns in the other direction, et cetera, et cetera.
That was not the first time that that kind of thing had happened to me.
My whole career begins when I win a talent hunt in 1974 to become one of the first two people ever to stand on the sideline of a college football game with a camera and a microphone.
So first of all, this emerges from the Munich massacre.
This emerges from the 9, 10, 11 days of captivity of the American athletes, excuse me, the Israeli athletes By black September terrorists in Munich.
And during that period of time, ABC is of course the broadcast organizer for the United States.
And during that time, two reporters, Howard Kosell and Peter Jennings, are pushing the control room.
How can we get more information?
How can we get sound out of the dorm room?
How can we get pictures from some adjoining building through the windows, etc., etc.?
And in trying to service the needs of those two reporters, Jennings and Kosell, ABC Sports learned things about radio frequency cameras and microphones, wireless cameras and microphones, that they had not known before.
So they came back to New York and they convened a meeting.
This is after the 72 Olympics.
They convene a meeting among the sports division, the news division, and the engineering division to figure out, okay, now that we know these things, now that we've learned what we learned in Munich, what can we do with it?
And one of the first ideas that gets adopted is we can put a reporter on the sideline of a football game.
So in 1974, Rune Arledge's chief administrative assistant, a guy named Dick Ebersoll, who later became a constant and meaningful factor in my career, Dick Ebersoll takes two lieutenants out to conduct a search at 16 different college campuses, and they talk to a total of 432 college-age or extremely close to college-age candidates for this job.
I am at first harvested out because I'm number 34 out of 36 on a 97-degree day in Birmingham, Alabama.
I have driven overnight from Chapel Hill to get there.
I'm wearing my best discount plaid suit.
I look ridiculous in a pair of shoes I bought with two and a half inch heels, so they'll make me look taller.
And I go into the room and have the screening interview.
And the screening interview is 12 minutes.
And before, and when we all have to draw numbers out of a fishbowl to determine in what order the interviews are going to take place, and I'm number 34 out of 36.
So I know I'm going to have to sit around in the Parliament House Hotel lobby for hours in Birmingham waiting to go in.
And by the time I go in, I'm grinding my teeth.
And the first thing one of the other guys in the room, Terry Jastro, says to me is, well, what do you think of our idea here?
What do you think of what we're trying to do?
And I couldn't resist.
I said, I think it's the biggest crock of crap I ever heard in my life.
And he said, what do you mean?
I said, well, you tell us that you're going around the country to interview 432 people for eight to 10 minutes each.
And on that basis, you're going to choose what you describe as the face and voice of the American college student.
He said, yeah?
I said, I rest my case.
I think this is ridiculous load of crap.
And I'm embarrassed that I drove from Chapel Hill overnight to be a part of this.
Later, much later, I was shown the evaluation form on which Eversol had written, arrogant, abrasive, alienated, antagonistic.
When I was finally chosen as one of the two people, that became known in the college football production truck as the forays.
Every time I would bitch about something, every time I would get obstreperous about something and raise my voice a little bit, there it is, the forays, arrogant, abrasive, alienated, antagonistic.
But the bottom line was, through a long and highly unusual process, I was the person who was chosen.
Now, what was ridiculous about it?
The most ridiculous thing about it, which I've never really revealed until this year, the book, Media Appearances, this, the most prominent media appearance with your 19 million followers, was that Rune Elich was still the dictatorial and canonized president of ABC Sports.
And I, when I was under 11 years old, maybe 10 or 11, 12, living in Hendersonville, North Carolina, had asked my mother while watching Wide World of Sports one day, is this guy, Rune Arledge, is he related to the Arledges who live around the corner from us?
Yes, he's their son.
So I grew up around the corner from Arledge's parents.
I caddied for both his mother and father at the Hendersonville Golf and Country Club.
And when I was finally the person chosen, counterintuitively because I was 25 instead of 22, and because I had already done a lot of sports broadcasting, this person was supposed to be completely fresh, when I get chosen, I meet Rune in the restroom at 1336th Avenue in New York.
And hi, Rune, I'm Jim Lampley.
Oh, great to meet you, et cetera, et cetera.
And as he's going out of the restroom, I say, by the way, how's your dad?
And he turns around, quizzical expression, says, why would you ask a question like that?
I said, well, I guess nobody told you because probably nobody could have known, but I'm from Hendersonville originally, and I've caddied for both your mom and dad.
In fact, my mother's in the same bridge club with your mother.
The famous red face turned white, and he said, don't ever tell anybody that.
We are getting ready to announce the college-age reporter thing, and we think we've settled on one person, but Rune is a little concerned about putting on the air somebody who has never had any on-air experience at all.
And within that discussion, that brought us back to you.
Would you be willing to go to Birmingham, Alabama, and do a film, in those days, 16 millimeter film, do a film audition for us?
And I said, what do you want me to do in Birmingham?
He said, well, there's a quarterback there named George Myra.
He's now with the Birmingham Americans of, I think it was the World Football League.
He's already been busted out of the NFL, the AFL, Canada.
This is his last shot as a pro football quarterback.
And we think it's an interesting story, and we want you to go interview him.
So, of course, they didn't know that I had watched George Myra play all three years of his college career at the University of Miami.
He was a huge childhood hero of mine.
I had once hitched a ride in his very dull, beige Ford Balcon going to pick up basketball on the campus of the University of Miami.
I knew more about George Myra than probably some members of his family did.
I still had a number 10 green and orange George Myra jersey in my closet in Chapel Hill.
So they think they're putting me on the spot here to send me to interview George Myra.
And I'm going to have to do a quick research job with no web in those days to find out what I need to ask this guy.
And I know more about George Myra than people in his family.
So I go down to Birmingham.
I'm laughing about it.
I do the interview.
I go through all these things in his college career and stuff like that, his 49ers experience, and send the film off to New York.
And about a week before the first game, I get a call and he said, you're going to be on the sideline.
You're going to be, we're going to have two college football reporters.
You're going to be on one sideline.
Don Tollefson will be on the other.
Rune feels a lot better about this because he can see that you have on-camera performance skills and understand what you're doing.
You know, because there's a lot of people that have said that Turkey is spending so much money, that he's spoiling these guys and they're afraid to lose and that they're fighting safe.
So It's not as if he's coming back two months later and you can draw a straight line from the mentality of his Garcia fight to what he's doing in the ring that night.
That doesn't happen to be the case.
But it was definitely a disappointing performance.