One Of Boxing’s Uncommon Treasures: A Q&A with Jim Lampley

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Jim Lampley is the voice of boxing. It’s not a proclamation that you will hear the recently minted hall of famer state publicly or privately, but if you speak to anyone in or around the sport, the most informed will tell you Lampley is this generation’s Don Dunphy.

Lampley has simply become the standard of boxing blow-by-blow announcers, a man whose hall of fame induction in June was about 15 years overdue. Again, it’s nothing you would hear from him.

Sherdog.com had a chance to sit down and speak with the legendary announcer who is now a proud grandfather. The interview covered a variety of topics, from what it was like getting the call from International Boxing Hall of Fame Executive Director Ed Brophy to how he actually got the HBO gig that’s now in its fourth decade and the roots from which his love for boxing sprang.

To some degree, Lampley has been a fighter himself, pushing through the myopic vision of a prominent TV exec who wanted him out early in his career and overcoming a tragic personal childhood loss of his father, who died of cancer. It’s easy to say Lampley possesses the “it” factor, but a large reason for that is because he gets “it.” He made sure his hall of fame induction speech specifically thanked the fighters; and he was emphatic about thanking the many people behind his HBO broadcasts for putting him in the hall of fame.

Lampley is one of boxing’s uncommon treasures, whose truest connection to the sport came long before he ever put his own magic touch on it. His boxing odyssey began through the eyes of a 14-year-old on an historic night. It’s a love affair that has lasted a half century and still going strong:

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Sherdog.com: What was it like getting the call from the hall of fame informing you that you were being inducted?
Lampley: I did think about it, particularly in dalliance of my friends, who I had hoped at some point I would join. I’m very happy that it did happen. I know it made my colleagues at HBO and my family very happy, and it’s something that I wouldn’t have to think about anymore. I wasn’t anxious, but the day Ed Brophy called me, it did occur to me that there weren’t that many blow-by-blow announcers in the hall. I believe that there are only five of us: Reg Gutteridge, Al Bernstein, Don Dunphy, Howard Cosell and myself. It’s an extremely small, very exclusive group. You feel real complimented by being among them. I also feel proud of HBO’s commitment to boxing. The network has done a tremendous job of establishing, promoting and honoring the boxing franchise; and I’m very glad to be a part of that. While I think there is honor there for me, I think there’s honor also for everybody who’s worked with me on those telecasts. We’re part of the same team. The reason that I’m in the hall of fame is because I’ve had the privilege of calling fights for a network that broadcast more prominent prize fights than any other television network in America for a period of about 30 years. I’m grateful for the people who hired me, who pay me, who work with me and who keep me in the job to be recognized that way.

Sherdog.com: How did you get the job at HBO in 1988 and how did you react when HBO called?
Lampley: I’ll be bluntly honest about this, and it’s one of the hardest parts of our business. I’ve had jobs and positions in the past that other people wanted and made no bones about wanting to take those jobs and replace me; and I can’t say that that’s never happened, because it has happened. I left ABC in the summer of 1987, because I was forced out by a chief executive who didn’t want me there anymore. In fact, the great irony was one of the reasons he assigned me to cover fights at ABC in the first place was because he thought it would offend me and it would make me more eager to leave ABC. He figured that I wouldn’t like boxing, but he didn’t know anything about me. He didn’t know boxing was my favorite sport. That was the great irony. The person that put me in this position did so with the expressed purpose to make me uncomfortable. I called those fights for ABC before I left in the summer of 1987. At that time, my agent, Arthur Kaminsky, a great man who is now deceased, asked me what I wanted to do. The first thing I said to him was that I would really love to call the fights at HBO. Now, I watched Barry Tompkins call the fights. I’m friendly with Barry Tompkins, always have been. He’s one of the nicest, most respectable people in the business, but I also wanted his job. I told my agent that, I don’t know if there is any chance that this can happen. I was sure that HBO was very happy with Barry. He was so established. If there is any way we can be in position to negotiate for that job, I would love to call the fights for HBO. Within the period of the next several months, my agent was able to determine that such an opportunity might exist, and eventually, I got hired to call the fights. When my agent told me I had a meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel with [HBO Sports President] Seth Abraham, he believed the meeting was more or less a formality. He believed we had an agreement. He wanted me to meet with Seth face-to-face, get to know him, and I did. I walked out of that meeting thinking this is an amazing life. One moment you’re getting kicked in the teeth by someone who wants you to go away, and not much later, you’re being welcomed aboard by the network that you most want to work for in the business. I was excited to be on the premium pay cable side of the business, because there’s an implication for content that goes without selling commercials. It’s a lot less complicated a process to tell the truth and get away with it on a network that doesn’t sell commercials than on a network that does. That was one of the reasons why HBO’s boxing coverage was so good. Barry, Larry Merchant and Ray Leonard, who was calling the fights at the time, had the right to tell the truth. No one from Chevrolet was going to call advertising executives with anything to complain about. I really wanted to explore it if that opportunity might be available. I’ve always been honest with Barry about that. He’s such a great person that he understood. He weathered it and went on and had a great career of his own; but at the end of the day, [landing the HBO job] was not an out-of-the-blue accident. It was something that I sought to do.

Sherdog.com: People forget that you were part of the broadcast team that called the transcendent 1980 Olympic hockey game between the United States and Russia. You have such a diverse sports broadcasting background. Where at that time in 1988 was boxing for you?
Lampley: I’ve had a very big career covering all sorts of things. I hosted Super Bowls. I covered a number of World Series. I did 14 Olympics, and I was the recipient of being very lucky and knowing the right people along the way. A lot of great things had happened to me in my first 13 years of working for ABC. No one even mentioned the word boxing, because Howard Cosell had covered it and did so for a long period of time. He was very concerned with controlling his turf and it certainly would not have been in my best interest early in my career to cover boxing, so it wasn’t all that surprising that the ABC sports executive who wanted to get rid of me thought it was going to achieve that by assigning me to boxing. It wasn’t supposed to be the desired place to be, but I was a kid who was introduced to boxing when I was 6 years old, one year after my father died [of cancer] when I was 5. I grew up watching boxing [on] “Friday Night Fights,” [with] Don Dunphy doing the telecasts all through the late 1950s and into the early 1960s. I saw the Emile Griffith-Benny Paret fight. My first love was Cassius Clay, and I transferred my affection to Muhammad Ali. I have a very deep emotional boxing fan background. When I first realized I was going to call the fights on ABC, I was scared to death, because I had never narrated a fight, other than the one that I had to call into a videotape machine to give them an idea that I can conceivably do the job. I didn’t know at first that I could do it. I just had a powerful urge to try. It’s different from other kinds of sportscasting. In some ways, boxing is more challenging because there are fewer statistical markers to work with. Action isn’t broken up into televisable segments, which makes room for commentators to know when they’re supposed to speak. Unlike in football, basketball and baseball, in boxing, the action is always flowing. In boxing, it goes for three minutes. In boxing, more than any other sport, an expert commentator might make a comment that sounds something like the blow-by-blow guy would have said; or the analyst might make a comment the expert commentator might have said. You’re going all of the time and have to deliver as it goes. It gives you more editorial freeform. You can be a little more subjective, because of fewer statistical concrete markers. A pro football play-by-play man can go three hours without offering an opinion, because he doesn’t have to, but in boxing, you don’t get that kind of luxury. In one year of calling fights for ABC, I had the good fortune of working with Alex Wallau, who was in charge of boxing, both as an executive and expert commentator. He taught me to see fights, not just to watch a fight but to see the fight. He showed me little nuances to detail that as a fan I hardly paid any attention to. Alex didn’t just wait for me to learn those things; he taught me those things. By the time I went to HBO, less than two years after I called my first fight, I had gotten a legitimate education, a crash course, and I hadn’t learned just from my own experience. I had a professional who showed me how to see the fights. To this day, I don’t call a fight without at some moment remembering something in my head that Alex taught me. It’s really quite a privilege. Alex hasn’t been directly involved with boxing in a long time. He battled throat cancer and received high executive positions at ABC. He’s an amazing person, who’s done a lot of amazing things, but he taught me how to see fights.

Sherdog.com: You are identified with boxing. Do you like being identified with boxing?
Lampley: I love being identified with boxing. I’m going to be completely honest about this. There are dozens of guys who call football games and dozens of guys who call baseball games and dozens of guys who call basketball games, and everybody thinks that that’s what everyone wants to do. To a certain degree, they are, but you have a greater chance of establishing an identity all of your own in boxing. It’s very personal. It’s a storyteller’s sport. In some ways, a boxing audience is the most intelligent audience, because they’re very opinionated. They generally have some base in the history of the sport. You don’t know a lot of boxing fans who don’t know a lot about Jack Dempsey. They usually know something about all the precepts of what they’re watching right now.

Sherdog.com: Do you find yourself defending boxing to friends who are general sports fans?
Lampley: To friends, to strangers, to people I meet on a train or a plane. I constantly find myself ... I don’t want to so much say defend boxing as trying to explain the current state of boxing to someone whose perceptions are rooted in the 1960s or 70s. You run into a whole lot of that. I always say, in my generation, the baby-boomer generation, we are somewhat debilitated from understanding the heavyweight division because we think it’s always supposed to be Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Ken Norton, Ernie Shavers, Larry Holmes, etc. In fact, it’s only been that way one time. People of my generation look at the heavyweight division. At almost any time other than that, it was crap. In fact, Jack Dempsey went three years without defending the championship, because there was nobody for him to fight. Joe Louis fought the so-called “Bum of the Month” club. Rocky Marciano’s opponents weren’t anything to write home about. People don’t realize that they grew up in the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier era. That’s one of the most frequently prominent discussions I encounter: Whatever happened to the American heavyweight? I have to explain globalism. Another complaint is that there aren’t any more American stars. People don’t like Floyd Mayweather. You have to explain that to really appreciate boxing today, to get the maximum entertainment value possible, you have to be totally open-minded about Russians, Kazakhs, Ukrainians and [boxers] from every culture around the world. They need to understand that’s the reality of it and not a drawback. There are so many discussions that take place, which amount to helping people understand that boxing is just as enjoyable as it ever was.

Sherdog.com: Your show, “Fight Game” on HBO, is in its fourth year and is one of the few strong voices of the sport. Where is the show today?
Lampley: We started out quarterly, and now we’re up to doing eight episodes a year. They tend to be front-loaded in the beginning of the year and then taper in the fall, but the franchise has grown. The viewership is great, so we’re very, very happy with that. We have a significant audience that demonstrates that there are fans that are hungry for analytical information and context for watching and enjoying the fights. It’s what we’re trying to provide. I have a continuing desire to try and make the show a larger enterprise that covers the entire sport, not just the fights on HBO. That’s been difficult to do because television is driven by pictures and people outside our political territory have been reluctant to provide the show with video. If I’m considering content, and I have the choice to show everything that happened in a Terence Crawford fight or a Gennady Golovkin fight or a Vasyl Lomachenko fight because it took place on HBO, or talk over still pictures about something that happened on PBC or Showtime, I’m more inclined to use video. I’ll talk about significant events when they go on, but I’m not talking about it for one minute, 45 seconds because I don’t have video. Therefore, the show doesn’t reach as broadly into the sport that I might have hoped; but I probably should have seen that reality from the beginning, as a platform for helping viewers to understand what fighters are most deserving of their attention, which fights are most important and where the entertainment value lies. That’s because the show is a celebration of the culture of risk. My greatest goal is when I’m gone, I want the show to go on with another host, the most likely being Max Kellerman.

Sherdog.com: Boxing can be frustrating on many different levels. I recall seeing you after the first Evander Holyfield-Lennox Lewis fight, the infamous draw, at Madison Square Garden and you politely said to me, “Joseph, I can’t really say anything to anyone right now. I’m that pissed off.” How have you been able to maintain your tolerance level through the years with boxing?
Lampley: What happened that night at the Garden was hard for us to make up for. As I stated earlier, I have these conversions with people about boxing, and heavyweights are always a big subject. Here we had, with all the confusion of the sport, too many governing bodies and too many belts, the identity problems that the sport is constantly facing dealing with the audience, and here we had a chance for complete clarity in the heavyweight division. Two of the best heavyweights in the world, and there was a general media focus, not just a boxing media focus. All the lights were on. There was a chance for clarity, and the fight yielded that. The fight made it 100-percent clear which one was the best heavyweight in the world, and the judges contradicted that. A lot of people were encouraged to turn away in disgust. There was a chance that the judges got it right, the sport got it right and it was going to be a great night for boxing. None of that happened. That’s why I was upset that night. Nothing against Evander Holyfield. He’s a great fighter, but he only won a couple of rounds the night of March 13, 1999 at Madison Square Garden. I maintain my tolerance level because I love the fighters. Regardless of what happens outside the ring, regardless of what happens in terms of how the sport is governed or the decisions being made, all of the things that we don’t like, it’s the fighters we love. They’re great people. They do a noble and beautiful thing. They deserve all of the support that we can give them. They deserve every effort that people like you and I can see to it that their lives are better. All of that is a good reason to stick around. I love the fights and the fighters.

Sherdog.com: In your opinion, who’s the greatest fighter you ever saw live?
Lampley: I saw greats like Roy Jones and Ray Leonard seated ringside in my commentator position, but I have to go back to the very first live prizefight I ever saw, which was on Feb. 25, 1964, in Miami Beach, Florida: Cassius Clay against Sonny Liston. I was 14 years old. My mother dropped me off at Convention Hall with my $100 or $150 ticket from the laundry, car-washing, lawn-cutting money I had saved for months. Because of that, I have to say Cassius Clay was the greatest prizefighter I ever saw live. Two days later, he was Muhammad Ali. The stupidest thing I ever did in my life was not save the ticket to that fight. I remember that third round when Clay hit Liston with a right hand that cut him under his left eye. Blood spurted out, and Liston literally put his glove up and pawed at the cut with a shocked look on his face. I could see that like it was yesterday. My mother dropped me off, had dinner and circled the arena until after the fight. I remember going back to my home in southwest Miami, climbed the roof of the house shouting, “We’ve upset the world, we’ve upset the world!” All of my white suburban neighbors were rooting for the ex-con Liston to beat “The Louisville Lip.” I loved Clay and later Ali. That was my first live prize fight.

Sherdog.com: What in your opinion is the biggest fight you ever called?
Lampley: Biggest means significant. It means impact. Did the boxing have an impact on the audience? A lot of people asked me before the Manny Pacquiao-Floyd Mayweather fight if it would be the most significant fight that I ever called. I said to all of them that I didn’t know, because you never know the significance of a fight until it actually takes place. Taking that into consideration, the most significant prizefight that I ever called involved an utterly perfunctory Mike Tyson title defense in Tokyo, Japan, against a guy who didn’t have a chance -- an event to which some American newspapers did not send their staff boxing reporters, because it was regarded as perfunctory and the outcome they figured was done in advance. That is, to this moment, the single greatest fight I ever called because of the result, when Buster Douglas knocked out Mike Tyson.

Sherdog.com: What is the best fight you ever called?
Lampley: There are a lot of them. The three that always come to mind are Arturo Gatti-Micky Ward I, Marco Antonio Barrera-Erik Morales I and Holyfield-Riddick Bowe I. That’s not because each of those fights were the beginning of a great trilogy, but they all portrayed a level of intensity and skill that is hard to match. Those three always come to mind when talking about the best.

Sherdog.com: Where do you think boxing is today, and in your opinion, what can be done to improve it?
Lampley: Boxing is globally in great shape. There are, at least in terms of audience appeal, some great fighters who are fighting at this moment. In terms of that, boxing is in very good shape. In terms of how boxing is administered, it’s in lousy shape. It is amazing that boxing prospers and survives in despite of itself. I like to say that, as long as there are human beings walking on the planet, they’re going to fight each other for money. The only question is how it administers it and whether or not the fighters get their just rewards. That’s very important to me.

Sherdog.com: In doing some research and in the people that I’ve spoken to about you, the accolades obviously come rolling in. There is only one person I’ve found that rips you to threads, that questions your work ethic and diligence. Do you know who that is?
Lampley: No, who?

Sherdog.com: You. You’re incredibly demanding of yourself. Why?
Lampley: Ask anyone if they want to be really good at something. They have to be their own worst critic. I say I’m lazy, because I know how much more I could do if I drove myself a little harder. I had a conversation with a prizefighter recently, and he called and asked me why he lost a fight. He asked me what he needed to do. The first thing I told him was to completely eliminate the possibility that the reason you lost the fight was anybody’s fault other than your own. The second thing you need to do is examine, in excruciating detail, was it preparation, everything you brought to the fight, everything that you thought would happen, as opposed to what happened and make sure you’re responsible for every second of that. The only way to win in this sport is to take complete responsibility for yourself. All of the great fighters are like that. When Lennox Lewis got knocked out by Oliver McCall, he could have very easily dismissed that with a variety of different excuses. He didn’t. Instead, he looked at himself and made sure that it never happened again. He went back and hired the guy who had trained Oliver McCall to knock him out: Emanuel Steward. The bottom line is to be great you have to be your own severe critic. If it’s true for prizefighters, it’s bound to be true for all of us.

Joseph Santoliquito is the president of the Boxing Writer's Association of America and a frequent contributor to Sherdog.com's mixed martial arts and boxing coverage. His archive can be found here.