#2346 - Jim Lampley

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Oh, really?

That was your closest male friend?

Unexpected, unexpected, but over a period of time, we just got closer and closer and closer, and you know,

very brotherly.

And

the last public appearance Emmanuel ever made made

was my wedding in

September of 2012.

And that night, the wedding was at our house in Del Mar, California.

And that night

his girlfriend came to me and said, we have to leave early.

Emmanuel's having stomach pains.

He was in oncology by the next week.

He was gone by three weeks later.

So

very touching to me and, you know, deeply symbolic of my love for him and thus the Cronk hat.

Yeah, what a classic Jim.

And he was one of the first guys to realize, like, if you crank the heat up, it actually gives guys better conditioning.

He realized a lot of things.

Emmanuel was a genius in a lot of ways.

And there were a lot of

sort of time-honored rules and techniques in boxing that he quietly upended.

Yes.

Because he was more advanced in his point of view and thought process.

And then everybody else sort of followed his lead.

Once they understood what he was doing.

If you saw the McCrory's and Tommy and those guys, why wouldn't you imitate, right?

Right, right, exactly.

Yeah, no, he was.

And he did it at both the amateur and pro level, too.

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.

He really understood.

But you need to consider the privilege I had

and the expert commentators I work with, starting with Ray.

Yes.

That's one perspective.

Then gravitating through George Foreman

and

Roy Jones.

Emmanuel's in there.

And to me, he was the best.

I agree with you.

The public responded more to Roy and Ray.

Of course.

You know, famous guys.

Because of their stardom, et cetera.

And And they were really good, too.

And they were good.

But Emmanuel taught me more, you know, because he was

totally well-rounded.

Yeah.

As a human being as well as as a boxing trainer.

I was very pleased to hear you back on the microphone for that Times Square event.

Thank you.

Because it had been so long.

Six plus years.

God, I was like, that's crazy.

It didn't make any sense.

You were the best in the business.

HBO was the best in the business.

And when they stepped away from boxing, I was really heartbroken.

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.

So PBC,

Mayweather was never a fan.

I mean, we got along, but he became a little bit of a musician.

It was the famous thing with Larry.

Well,

and I guess he associated me with Larry, which makes all the sense in the world.

Kind of, but you weren't nearly as critical.

I was just the blow-by-blow guy.

I'm not an expert commentator.

So I tried very hard, not always easy, but I tried very hard never to go over the line into doing what the experts were supposed to do.

Right.

No, you were excellent at that.

It just, it didn't make any sense to me that, you know, and Kellerman, he's also excellent.

That's another guy we should.

And now he's back.

Yes.

It's nice.

And Andre Ward is another excellent guy.

Totally.

It just,

the good thing about boxing was that HBO was completely independent from these promoters.

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?

Yeah, there is a difference.

Yeah, there's a giant difference in the undercard pay.

I learned that from Joe Rogan.

Yeah.

Well, the UFC treats the entire card as an enormous event.

So they have elite fighters fight in the entire card.

It's not top-heavy.

Like, one of the problems with boxing is you would just say, when's the main event?

When is Canelo fighting?

And you didn't, the other stuff is just nonsense.

Whereas the UFC, you look at it like, oh, look who's fighting first fight of pay-per-view.

There's five fights on pay-per-view.

First fight of pay-per-view is a banger.

And

the seats are packed and everybody's excited to see it.

Whereas everybody starts shuffling in about 20 minutes before Canelo fights in one of these big boxing events.

That, I think, is kind of unfortunate.

I totally agree.

It's a little bit short-sighted.

And I accede to your point of view because,

and I've made this point before,

I'm not a UFC expert.

Any comment I make about UFC is

atmospheric, but it's not expertly informed.

I didn't have the bandwidth for that.

I was trying to be knowledgeable about every single tributary and every single meaningless pocket in the boxing world.

That's a lot.

That's a lot.

That's a lot to find.

It took time.

And frankly, you know, I decided it would be distracting to me to try to keep up with two combat sports at once.

This is the one where I make my living.

This is the one where the audience identifies me.

This is the one that's on HBO.

And I know that

Dana, in particular,

is said by some to have been quite upset that he had a deal with HBO and the deal with HBO went away.

If that's the case, and I don't know, I'm very sorry to hear it,

because I think it would have been good for both if UFC had been on HBO.

I think so as well.

I mean, HBO at that time was the premier network for combat sports.

The show.

The work that you guys had done in boxing was the top of the food chain.

It was the best.

Well, Larry Merchant, Ray Leonard, George Foreman, Roy Jones.

It was also the production.

Everything was on point.

It was just so well-honed.

Good production.

Yes.

It was just a well-polished machine.

One of the issues is they wanted to replace the commentators.

HBO did.

Oh, they did?

Yeah.

So if we came over there, I wouldn't go over there as well.

Oh, really?

Yeah, because HBO was always about their own producer autonomy.

Yes.

So they wanted to have a

billing us what to do.

Exactly.

Right.

The problem with that is in mixed martial arts, there's a very small pool of people who have a deep understanding of the entire history of the sport.

Yep.

And you can't just hire a regular sports guy to take that part.

They're not going to be able to.

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Well, going back to the developmental stages

and I try very hard not to use the word unique.

It's massively overused in American society.

Sports media have beaten it to death.

It means only one like this on the whole planet.

But you were unique in those days because you had the full knowledge of UFC and you also knew some stuff about boxing.

So

I think you were not just unusual, but unique.

Well, all I was doing was just following my interests.

And I've always been a huge boxing fan.

From the time I was a child, I was...

Do you remember what your first fight was?

The first fight I watched, my parents watched it, which was crazy because my parents were hippies.

And they were really interested in Ali's rematch with Leon Spinks.

New Orleans.

Yep.

When Leon had beat Muhammad Ali.

Because Muhammad Ali was

a cultural icon as much as he was a sports figure.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, like, multiply that by 100, you know, to get to where he was.

He was very, very unique.

And

his opposition to the Vietnam War made him a hero to many Americans.

Well, I always say

he was my childhood hero, and he was my childhood hero as Cassius Clay.

The very first live prize fight I ever attended was Cassius Clay versus Sonny Liston, February 25, 1964, in Miami Beach.

Oh, you were there for the first fight?

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.

And And I went in alone.

And that was the first live prize.

How old were you?

I was 14.

14.

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 as 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.

Wow.

And when Ali said what he said about Viet Comm, I mean, about Vietnam,

that

moved the meter for me in that regard.

And I understood.

And eventually, 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.

Yeah, and she was correct.

Yeah.

She was right.

Yeah, and they took three years of his prime.

That's what's crazy.

I always point to the Cleveland Big Cat Williams fight.

That was his best.

Yes.

You're totally right.

That was his number one performance, and he was never 100% the same after that.

But he still had his mind changed.

Yes, but he didn't train for three years.

That's part of the problem.

Of course.

And, you know, at 30 years old, in that day and age, it was just a different world.

Like, you don't train for three years.

Not as much knowledge of nutrition.

Right.

Not as much knowledge of training techniques.

You know, the old-fashioned stuff in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania,

not the same as no hyperbaric chamber,

et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah, it's just, they just robbed him.

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.

But he found a way to rise to the top.

Yes, he did.

Wow.

The championship mind was always there.

That's 100% correct.

But as a fan of boxing, it drives me crazy.

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.

But, and I think you're 100% correct, Joe.

But isn't it, in a perverse way, a part of his mystique?

Yes.

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.

Oh, for sure.

Yeah.

And then also the tragic ending, you know, the staying in too long long and too many beatings, you know,

just the seeing him at the end of his life was just so horrible.

You know, and we all know that that was trauma-induced.

We all know that.

And it's just, it was just sad to see.

We haven't seen that yet in MMA, right?

No, not quite.

But you're seeing some damage.

You're seeing some guys that are really struggling.

You know, they're not as public, so you're not seeing it from George St.

Pierre or someone like that.

George is one of the very unique former champions who has all of his wits, his faculties, retired as champion, very healthy.

Roy Jones.

Roy Jones is a good example.

And Roy, you know, Roy famously, after Gerald 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

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 about getting out early.

100%.

Yeah.

Because Roy was nothing if not smart.

Right.

Roy was brilliant.

Okay.

And Roy very assertively fought in a style that would limit harm.

He didn't want to get hurt.

His gifts.

I mean, what a guy.

Like, who else in recent memory has been a huge fight?

There's heavyweight boxing and then there's weight class boxing.

Ali is the unique physical specimen in heavyweight boxing.

Roy is the unique physical specimen in weight class boxing.

So much so that he actually won the heavyweight title.

Well,

exactly right.

Whatever he wanted to do, if he put his mind to it, he could do that.

And a part of the ongoing cliché was he could play any sport.

He could be great in football, basketball, baseball, et cetera, et cetera.

And of course, he did go through the theatrics of playing a basketball game on the same day that he fought a fight.

Which was so crazy.

It was.

It was insane.

It was so crazy.

But that was, his talent was insane.

But it was also like, he was just showing people, he was kind of playing with his food.

He's like, I'm going to play a basketball game and then go and easily win a fight same night.

It's interesting.

You use the phrase playing with his food.

Yeah.

And I like it.

Roy liked to play with his food.

It gets to a certain level.

Sometimes you do things because you can.

He knew what he could do.

Right.

So.

Yeah.

I mean, his speed was so preposterous.

When he would forego the jab to lead with left hooks, which was just so crazy.

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.

Yes.

That's Roy Jones.

Oh, it was incredible.

How about the Vinny Pazzienza fight when he didn't get hit for the entire round?

The only round in Compu Box history where someone never got hit.

It was crazy.

And I was with Roy at the International Boxing Hall of Fame induction ceremony a few weeks ago, and we were talking about exactly that.

We were talking about Passiens, and I said, is he the guy that you shut out for a round?

And he said, yeah.

And I did it just because I wanted to do it.

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Yeah, well, he was just so far above so many of the guys that he fought.

They just had no business being in there.

That he had to create competition by doing stuff like that.

He had to have fun.

He had to play with his food.

Well said.

Yeah, no, he was spectacular.

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.

And you saw that in the Tarver fight.

I'm not here to feather your nest, but you're brilliant.

That's 100% correct.

Yeah, if I was in...

And he lamented it afterward because he understood how he had penalized himself in that way.

25 pounds is so much weight to lose.

Lean muscle mass.

And you made the point.

When it's muscle.

Muscle.

If it's fat,

you can go into the steam room and sweat it off.

But once it's muscle,

it's there.

It's a part of the structure.

It's a part of the building.

Now how are you going to rip it out?

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.

It gets to his confidence.

And his confidence was unshakable.

Right.

It was everything.

Like when you go into the fight fatigued, you're feeling fatigued.

And then you've got a guy like Tarver who's infinitely talented and has legitimate knockout power and is talking shit to you

right before the fight.

Got any excuses tonight, Roy?

Remember that?

And then he knocks him out like, holy shit.

With the brilliant straight left hand against the ropes, I can see it in my mind.

And the glasses are not going to be a little bit more.

And you know, I just worked with Tarver a few weeks ago when you mentioned the Times Square card.

Yeah.

And Tarver was my expert commentator on the Times Square card.

So energetic.

Yeah, Tarver's great.

So lively.

Really good.

Yeah,

I was thrilled.

He's another guy that, with his boxing skill, went all the way up to heavyweight because he was just so much better than everybody else.

How many South Paul heavyweights?

Right.

Very few.

Very few.

Michael Moore.

Yep.

Yeah.

He was South Paul.

But again, another.

And won the championship.

Yep.

Another light heavyweight.

And lost it to my man.

George Foreman.

One punch.

Yeah, that was crazy.

You know, thus the title of my book.

Thank you so much, George.

You know the reason why my book is titled It Happened?

Why?

Where I came up with It Happened?

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.

Wow.

So now as Moore is on the canvas and Joe Cortez is six, seven, eight, and I'm thinking, what am I going to say about this?

How in the world do you establish this without being self-glorifying?

You know, I've got to say something that's meaningful, but I want it to be about him.

And I thought about what he had said to me.

And what came out spontaneously was it happened it happened yeah it's really me talking to george saying to him okay i get it you told me it was gonna happen and it happened well do you remember when george came back and he was 300 pounds and everybody was laughing at him and he was in his late 30s i believe was he 34 35 something like that when he made his comeback he hadn't fought in 10 years everyone dismissed him like what is he doing he was very overweight and he started the bum of the month tour

you know i mean?

And

that's not a fair way to say it.

They weren't bums, but they were people that he knew he could beat

to build a dossier toward what he really wanted.

And get in shape.

Yep.

And no one believed in him.

No one.

I remember me as a boxing fan watching that comeback being sad.

Like, oh, George Foreman's coming back and he's all fat now.

This is sad.

Well, I'm sure you've known a lot of people like this, Joe.

You want to see George do something?

Tell him he can't do it.

Right.

Right.

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.

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, you know,

how am I supposed to process all this?

And he began quoting lyrics for me.

Wow.

Okay.

From Blowin' in the Wind, from Don't Think Twice, It's All Right, et cetera, from early Bob Dylan songs.

Yes.

He knew about Hurricane.

Yes.

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 of the world without being smart.

Okay?

A stupid person couldn't do this.

It'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.

Crazy that he predicted it that way because that's exactly how it plays out.

Oh, yeah.

Go to YouTube.

If you haven't seen it,

it's uncanny.

It really is.

I was a giant Michael Moore fan when he was a light heavyweight.

I think a lot of people forgot how dangerous he was at light heavyweight.

He was one of the great light heavyweights.

No question.

Terrorists.

Because of the southbaw punching power.

I don't know if it's true in UFC as it is in boxing, but you don't see southbaw punchers very often.

Southpaws are technical.

They box.

They take advantage of their foot skills and their hand speed, and they beat you with boxing skills.

You're not often going to run into a southpaw who's going to knock you out.

But we've already talked about Tarver, and Mururo was another one who had punching power.

And it's, you know, kind of Cooney.

Cooney was a southpaw with punching power.

It's kind of doubly effective if you've got that because you're worried about the technical issues with a southpaw, and now he brings a cannon.

Right, right.

Yeah, the southpaw thing was always so confusing to people because if you ever boxed before, you're so accustomed to that left hand being forward.

Right.

And then all of a sudden, everything's reversed, and now you're thinking.

Right.

And if you don't have a lot of southpaws that you train with on a regular basis, things aren't automatic anymore.

And one of the things that George used to talk to me about all the time was angles.

That, you know, you're standing in front of another man, you're confronting him, you're trying to deliver and stop delivery.

Angles.

It's all about where where does it come from and where is it going and how can I deal with that?

Now

I was never a fighter, so I can't empathize, but I can sympathize when I listen to that guy.

Well, you can see it, right?

And I think the greatest at angles of all time is Lomachenko.

Nobody.

Nobody knows that.

The greatest footwork.

Oh, my God.

The greatest hand skills.

The most effective training by his father.

Yeah, what a genius move to take him out of boxing for two years to study Ukrainian dance.

And brilliant.

Absolutely brilliant.

And

by the way, he had an effect on the national team for several years.

And what culture in the world has had more

accomplishments and surprising new stars in boxing

other than Ukraine?

Right.

And Usuk, who is basically like moves like a giant Lomachenko, just not quite as effective.

That's a really great phrase that I had never conjured before this moment.

Thank you, Joe.

A giant Lomachenko.

That's exactly what he is.

You can't quite move that well when you're 220 pounds.

You're just dealing with gravity and mass.

But you're still creating unique angles.

You're coming at them from unique approaches, etc.

They're hard for your opponent to figure out.

And Usik is impossible for most of the heads.

Constant motion.

Constant motion, constantly cutting off the ring with his feet

and hammers you to the body as often as he can.

Yep.

Yeah.

Lomachenko in his prime was just a magical thing to watch.

Brilliant.

It was like you were just watching poetry.

And I had the privilege of calling those fights.

You know, it was an extreme privilege.

Yeah.

It was amazing watching him just do something where you'd seen so many different versions of boxers.

And you watch him do it and you're like, oh my God, he put a new thing on this.

That's why I can't understand at this moment, I can't really figure out what's up with Teofimo Lopez.

How do you beat Vasily Lomachenko

and then wind up

with somewhat indifferent results since that time?

Yeah, the Cambosos.

He fought better than the other guys in Times Square.

I give him credit for upholding the card.

But still, there's nothing since the Lomachenko win.

I mean, you lose to George Cambosos?

I think the Cambosas fight was...

I think he was just a little overconfident and he got caught.

And then that really rocked him.

That really shocked him.

He got dropped early in the fight.

Remember that?

It's a bad sport to be overconfident in.

It's the worst sport.

The worst sport.

Whether you're talking UFC or boxing.

Yeah, any combat sport, when you don't appreciate the potential that your opponent has to do damage.

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.

Okay, 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.

So, like perfect examples, Juan Manuel Marquez versus Pacquio.

100%.

They have three insane fights that are very close.

Marquez lands one bomb and starches Pacquio.

This one error.

He got a little overconfident, a little, a little too

greatest counterpuncher of his era.

And And power.

Yeah, and with power.

With the straight-ahead power from the shoulder.

Marcus was a gifted fighter.

Very gifted.

But just like that one moment, like if that had happened in the first fight, we would look at the whole thing very differently.

100%.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's just 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.

But sometimes it's just one error.

It's a moment in time.

If it's a knockout,

now if somebody gets knocked down six times, then you're talking about something different.

But one knockdown that leads to a 10-count, that was a momentary mistake.

And that's, again, that goes to the fine margins of competition.

You can't make the one mistake.

Right.

And then, you know, it's also how do you bounce back from that?

Like, some people, the one moment,

even if just a knockdown, they don't have the capacity to correct and stay safe and then regroup.

Like they get shook, and then now they're fighting from this position, this defensive position, where they're a little bit gun-shy.

So Mark has exposed the difficulties that Pacquiao could have against a great counterpuncher.

And now we get ready for Mayweather Pacquiao.

Right.

Mayweather just did such a smart thing, but also a devious thing.

Waiting until Pacquiao was older, waiting until he slowed down.

And then...

devious is not illegal in boxing.

It's encouraged.

Yeah.

In any entrepreneurial sport, devious is not illegal.

No.

Devious can be an asset.

That's how you retire with a fifth.

I give Floyd credit for brilliance, okay?

Because Floyd wasn't just a smart fighter.

Floyd was a brilliant fighter.

He was on his own level.

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 pack?

Oh, no.

I don't think that's the case.

But if you knew Floyd, you know, Floyd was only about winning the fight.

He'll make fans other way on the web.

I call him the first great social media genius.

Yeah.

He was great at talking shit.

He got everybody upset at him so badly that they wanted to see him lose, and that was sell tons of pay-per-views.

He realized you could build an audience with negativity.

Yes.

You didn't have to be an omnibus character.

You didn't have to be somebody everybody loved.

You could be totally negative.

And that would build a following, too.

Yeah, when he shifted from Pretty Boy Floyd to Money Mayweather, changed the whole thing.

He knew what he was doing.

He definitely did.

Look,

it would have been an interesting fight had he fought Pacquiao when he was younger, in his prime.

It would have been a very different fight.

It would have been a more interesting fight.

Much more different.

Because

any go-forward physical warrior like Pacquiao is going to wear down.

Right, exactly.

And any brilliant counterpuncher like Floyd is going to retain more.

Yeah.

So he did.

Yeah, it would have been much more interesting when they were younger.

Also, the fact that Pacquiao fought him with a bum shoulder, that was a disaster, too.

Money talks.

Yeah.

I mean, look, I guess he was faced with this thing, Legacy, or, I mean, it was the biggest pay-per-view of all time in boxing, correct?

I believe so.

I believe so.

And I think it was like 4 million buys or something crazy like that.

It was huge.

So, like, what is it?

It was massive.

Yeah, it just lured Pacquiao into.

All those people who had run up to me on the street corners for years finally got the chance to see what they wanted to see.

Yeah, give them a cortisone shot, throw them out there.

Yeah, unfortunately.

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Unfortunately, I remember there was like a class action lawsuit.

It was a lot of people were upset that Pacquiao fought injured.

A lot of the gamblers.

I never talked to Freddie about that, but, you know, at the end of the day, the fighter makes the decision.

Well, the money, yeah.

And the money.

And the money, yeah.

That happens a lot in the UFC.

There's a lot of fighters that fight injured.

And, you know.

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 Lesionola Ledwaba, which was his first appearance in the United States.

What weight class was that?

He was a kind of a throw-in opponent.

What weight class was that?

Yeah.

So that would have been 122.

Isn't that nuts?

And Larry and I were 100% convinced that Ledwaba was the best 122-pound fighter in the world.

We had seen him on the undercard of Louis Rockbahn in

Johannesburg, South Africa.

There's nobody who could possibly be better than that.

Grace, style, hand skills, all the stuff.

And I meet Manny in that room.

He can't put three or four words of English together.

I learn his backstory, that he survived by selling stolen cigarettes on the streets of General Santos City in the Philippines.

I

get and understand that his big activity outside of the gym is to go play pool.

He's a pool player in barrooms.

He's a festival level.

In bar rooms, exactly.

Yeah, he plays ball room.

Festival 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 Loho.

Yes.

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 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.

That's such a crazy statement.

I wonder if it's true.

I wonder if it's true, too, but it's a fun story to tell.

And of course, it's secondhand.

You're exactly right.

It is.

It's so.

Because I don't know the teacher and I don't know the principal.

I just know the story.

And

I know Ali's primary biographer, Tom Hauser.

So maybe I got it from Tom.

Yeah, I'd like to believe that that's true.

I'd like to believe it's true, too.

It makes it more fun.

Let's make a Pacquiao believe it's true.

The thing about Pacquiao that's so extraordinary is that he kept his power through eight weight classes.

That is just wild.

Like, what other fighter can you name that went through eight different weight classes as a world champion?

I can't.

None.

No, obviously.

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.

And we're out of that.

But there are physical gifts that you are just, they're just God-given gifts of power.

Big hands.

Big hands.

Big hands are...

Shoulders.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All that.

There's just certain guys, though, that just have extraordinary power.

Like, you remember Julian Jackson in his prime.

Oh, my gosh.

Hawk.

Oh, my gosh.

Extraordinary power.

At some moment or another, he's going to get you.

Yeah, it was just disturbing how hard he hit.

It was just different than everybody else.

And it looked like he was doing the same thing, but the results were so much different.

How about Andy Lee?

Skinny, not somebody you would expect to have, you know, heavy hands,

knocking everybody out.

How about Deontay Wilder?

Yeah.

Another one.

A 209-pound heavyweight that's flattening people.

209 pounds when he fights Tyson Fury the first time.

Some of it is the bravery to commit.

Right.

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.

But

there's physical gifts that you are just God-given, and some people have them.

And these are the extraordinary outliers, the Deontay Wilders, the Julian Jacksons, the John Mugabe's.

Remember Mugabe?

John the Beast Mugabe.

Ooh, I re-watched that Mugabe-Hagler fight the other day in the chat.

What a great fight.

What a great fight.

What a fight.

What a fight.

Hagler was my hero when I was a kid.

And he was.

So you're probably...

So I'm sure you're an advocate with regard to what I call the number one elevator fight of all time.

That Hagler was the winner.

No, the number one.

Which one?

The number one elevator fight of all time.

And an elevator fight is the fight where you're Jim Lampley or you're Joe Rogan or or you're any combat sports expert, et cetera, and you step onto an elevator with six people and somebody turns around and says, who won Leonard Hagler?

Okay.

The debate about the decision, you know?

Yes.

And,

you know, I'm sure you say Hagler beat Ray.

Yes.

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.

Sure.

That went to more than just his spectacular physical gifts.

Right.

Yeah, no, he gamed the system a little bit.

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 Haggler was going to win?

Hagger was a destroyer.

Hagler had knocked out Tommy Hearns.

Hagler had beaten everybody in the division, knocked out Mugabe.

He was the man, you know?

You fought, right?

Yeah.

So you fought.

I didn't.

I mean, I've only talked.

But because you fought, you probably have an even stronger sense than I do of how difficult the sport is.

Yes.

The training is difficult.

The fear factor.

is certainly part of it.

The level of concentration and devotion that it takes,

it's not easy.

Team sports are easier.

For sure.

And so, you know,

I'm thinking that every fighter reaches a point where enough.

Yes.

And they might reach that point without really cognitively knowing that they've reached that point where it's enough.

Hagler went to Italy, as you say.

Maybe he had already reached something like enough

before he fought Ray in that fight.

Well, you know, he had accomplished so much, and also his training camps were the stuff of legend.

I mean, he would spar a hundred 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 I remember thinking,

war, war.

Because you think you're disciplined, you think you're driven, you think, you know, you're special.

And then you see a guy like that.

He's like, he's what my friend David Goggins calls uncommon amongst uncommon men.

Great line.

So where does Hagler Hearns rank among your all-time favorites?

One of the greatest of all time.

One of the greatest fights of all time.

Because Hagler just threw caution to the wind.

Fuck all this boxing.

Just

jumped out.

So did Tommy.

So did Tommy.

Tommy did.

Both of them did.

Tommy didn't go in with a self-protective approach.

He tried to box.

Remember after he broke his hand, he tried just throwing the jab out there.

You could tell early on in the first round when he broke his hand.

Yes.

Because from then on, he's moving,

but he's already endured so much damage.

I mean, they have just thrown each other into the wood chipper.

Both guys were just blasting away.

I hope a lot of people are going to listen to this and go watch Agler Hearns

on their web attachment.

They have to.

It's as great as anything has ever been.

It was insane.

I remember being in my living room when Hearns went down and just going, wow.

Like, I can't believe it.

And this was after Hearns had knocked out Duran.

And I thought nobody could knock out Duran.

When Hearns flatlined Duran, I was like, good Lord.

Good lord.

Like, to see Duran face down on the canvas is like, you have to check your eyes.

Like, is this real?

Well, did Tommy break his hand with that right hand in the first round against Hagler?

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There you go.

There you go.

You've lost Haggler.

You've lost your primary weapon.

He has one knockdown attributed to him in his career, and it's bullshit.

The Juan Roll Dan fight.

Bullshit.

Not really a knockdown.

And now we deal with Canelo.

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Who has had one knockdown attributed to him in his career, and in my view, it was bullshit.

Which fight was that?

So it was Miguel Coto's little brother, Jose Coto.

It was the first time we had Canelo on

HBO.

Believe it was an undercard of a top-ranked pay-per-view.

I'm not 100% certain

about that.

And Cotto's little brother, Jose,

caught Canelo with a right-hand body punch to the chest.

And Canelo hit the ropes behind him and bounced off the ropes, kind of unbalanced.

He didn't go down.

but he came off the ropes ungainly, unbalanced, etc.

And the referee, and I can't remember which referee, stepped in and very technically ruled that the ropes had held him up.

So that's the only official knockdown in Canelo's career, and he didn't touch the canvas.

That's crazy.

Nobody has ever put him on the canvas.

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.

Knockdown proof.

Well, even against a guy like Bivol, who's huge.

Yeah.

Exactly.

A huge, light heavyweight.

Yeah, but Bivol is Bivol is,

I'm going to say, at least 50-50 a backup counter-puncher.

And they don't muster exactly the same power as a go-forward attacker.

True.

You know, you notice that he hasn't fought Better BF.

And I'm not sure that Better B Up would be the right matchup.

For Canelo.

Yeah.

I think that would be a nightmare matchup.

Yeah.

Better BF, especially.

even though he's almost 40 now, right?

Is he 40?

He might be 40.

He might be 40.

But he's still in shape and he still comes forward and he's a, you know, naturally heavy hands.

Big kid.

One of the scariest of all time at 175.

He's another one of those guys.

It's just like, but with him, it's volume.

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.

He's a natural counter-puncher.

But if you insist on making the fire and you're strong enough to make the fire, then Bivol has to fight, which he's done twice against Betterbriv.

Well, he made brilliant adjustments in the second fight.

Brilliant adjustments.

He's a brilliant guy.

Yeah, I mean, he really, really made the proper adjustments and the counter-strikes and the movement, and he was just much better in the second fight.

It's another country with very good boxing training.

Oh, phenomenal.

Do you think that are they having a rubber match?

I don't know.

The third?

I don't know.

Yeah.

I don't talk to promoters anymore.

So

I'm not sure about that.

I hope they do.

Yeah.

I think it's a fantastic idea.

I think Riyadh Season was trying to put that together.

I think they're trying to put together a third fight, and I really hope they do make that fight.

Go turkey.

Yeah, you kind of have to do it now before Better Be of is just,

he's probably past his point.

41, 42, etc.

These numbers sound forbidding.

Yes.

But still, even as

remember, Foreman was 45.

Right.

What did he still have?

Right.

Power.

Right.

Okay.

And skill, the skill thing.

Like, here's the best example of that, Bernard Hopkins.

Who has maintained their skill deep into their 40s?

In fact, at a world-class level at 49 years old, beating

top contenders at 49 years old?

One of the smartest men I've ever met.

Okay.

Bernard Hopkins is smart beyond smart.

He has

PhD-type type intelligence.

He really does.

And he was also a very critical and thoughtful self-examiner.

So those two things helped Bernard to sustain long into

antiquity and an extremely disciplined personal life.

Yes, that's the big one.

He kept his prison tattoo.

on his arm.

And he kept that number on his arm to remind him that he was never going to go back.

And I asked him one time, I said, what's the hardest thing you've ever done?

And he said, well, the hardest thing I've ever done was to walk off nine in the neighborhood in which I grew up.

I said, what do you mean walk off nine?

Nine years of probation.

Nine years of living on and in the same streets where I was the king of the streets when I was on the other side of the law.

Nine of reminding myself that I could never go back, that my behavior had to change completely.

That's what he called walking off nine.

Wow.

What a phrase, huh?

Yeah, what a phrase.

What a guy.

Yeah.

Really, what a guy.

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.

I'm like, this is nuts.

Of all the fighters I've ever known, if you were to ask me

who is the one most likely to still be holding every dollar he ever made, that's Bernard.

Right.

Okay.

He gives nothing away.

And he protects himself.

He protects his family.

He protects everything about his experience in an extremely devoted way.

Why?

Walking off nine.

Wow.

Never wants to go back.

Wow.

Well, those are the stories that are so inspiring about boxing, right?

The people that have used boxing as a vehicle to get out of their circumstances.

Totally.

Yeah, and Bernard's one of the greatest examples imaginable.

I love him.

You know, I had him on my show, The Fight Game, on HBO.

I had him do technical pieces because he was better than anybody at explaining footwork, technique, et cetera.

Andre Ward could have done it too, but Andre was still fighting at that period of time.

Yeah, that was a great show, man.

That was another bummer when HBO stopped doing boxing.

Well, look,

it was successful for them.

That's super important.

I like to say this.

It wasn't HBO, okay?

The minute that Time Warner was bought by a bunch of cell phone salesmen from Dallas, AT ⁇ T,

the character of the operation changed.

And

the first thing that went away was boxing.

It's in my book.

You'll read it.

There's an anecdote about me

at a post-Emmy Awards or post-Golden Globe Awards event in Hollywood shortly after AT ⁇ T had purchased HBO.

And I was seated at the table of Richard Plepler, the longtime brilliant chairman of HBO, my beloved boss.

And Plepler said, see that guy over there in the gray suit?

And I said, yeah.

He said, that's your new boss.

That's John Stanky, the CEO of ATT.

I think you ought to go say hello.

I think you ought to go meet him and just spend a little time with him.

I took his advice.

I went over and had a 10-minute discussion with Stankey.

Very nice,

very cordial, fun.

And I walked back to Plepler's table and he said, So what do you think?

I said, I think boxing is dead.

He said, I agree with you.

I just wanted to be sure that we were on the same page.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

So it was clear.

It was clear from that moment that they were not interested in going forward with something as.

Why did you think boxing was dead?

Why did you say that?

Well,

I could just tell from the way in which he spoke to me and the

diffident replies to questions like, Are we going to do this fight?

You know, what do you think about that?

Stuff like that.

It was abundantly clear that they just

saw it as a negative rather than a positive.

And public perception or profitability?

Profitability.

Really?

Too many unpredictable.

Many unpredictables in boxing.

You schedule a show, somebody gets hurt, etc.

I think they didn't want that kind of

real-life upheaval.

And also, they saw it as unsavory, or at least it felt that way to me.

You know, so

this goes to the fact, and you know this as well as I do, or maybe better.

People from outside combat sports don't understand combat sports.

You know, you're either in the culture and you get it, or you're not.

Right.

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.

Really?

They would see me as the successor to Kosell.

That would cut my throat.

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 Dunfield, crisp, precise, factual, on point.

That's who I'm hearing in the back of my head

when I call fights.

Interesting.

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 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, Catnamato 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.

One of my favorite TV fights was him versus Marvis Frazier because it was such a terrifying execution.

I'm giving away too much of the book, Joe.

My publisher would say, wait, don't tell him the whole book.

Come on, people are going to buy it anyway.

Don't worry about that.

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.

No.

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 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 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.

Look at you

lamps in that lamp.

Look at you.

Hairported on the right.

We'll get to that in a moment.

He pulls it back and when we do it live on camera, he says Mike will knock him out in the first round.

Was it 33 seconds or 31 seconds?

I think it was 33 seconds.

And all the way back to New York,

he should have said that.

He's moaning and groaning.

Why in God's name didn't I say what I really believed?

Like,

Alex, you said he'd knock him out in the first round.

And you were right.

You're going to get credit for that.

You were right.

Yeah, but I could have gotten more credit if I'd said what I really believe.

That's such a silly perspective.

I mean,

we talk about fighters freezing.

Marvis froze on Saturday.

I mean, on Friday.

The day before the fight.

Marvis was frozen.

Well, we knew.

We knew coming into that fight.

We knew.

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.

It helped to create what ultimately became.

Yeah.

The myth of Mike Tyson.

The notion that he was going to knock everybody out.

And it was

And partially because of stuff like that, that Douglas is a 42-1 underdog in Tokyo.

Yes.

When if you looked at the record for the preceding year, year and a half coming into Tokyo, Mike went the distance with James Bonecrusher Smith.

Mike went the distance with Tony Tucker.

Mike went the distance with James Quick Tillis.

There were scorers at Ringside in upstate New York who had Tillis as the winner in the fight.

He went to the last 10 seconds with Jose Ribalta.

He went the distance with Mitch Blood Green.

What did they all have in common?

They were all taller than Mike.

Some of them have a right hand that would come over the top where he would have difficulty seeing the delivery.

And

when you get to Douglas, best athlete of the group, former college basketball player with good feet, had a big right hand.

I mean,

looking back, Pure logic, no way in the world Mike should be a 42 to 1 favorite against Buster Douglas.

But Buster Douglas had underperformed most of his career and had not been motivated.

Then his mother dies.

That's correct.

100% correct.

And you're right on point for saying it at this moment.

Yeah, his mother died.

And then...

And that lit him up.

Lit him up.

And

never again.

And Mike was at the height of his differences with Robin Gibbons.

Right,

right.

Yeah.

Constant turmoil and

partying and feeling invincible.

Nothing that can do more damage to a good man than the wrong woman, right?

And she was the wrong woman.

She's the wrong woman, period.

Yeah, that was it.

There's certain women out there like that.

They can tank your life.

Yeah, and unfortunately.

O.J.

used to say to me, if you want to know what the daughter is going to be like, look at the mother.

And if you looked at her mother and the background relative to Dave Winfield and all of that, maybe you could have predicted.

Or, as Merchant said,

in our on-camera prior to the Tubbs-Tokyo fight, Tyson versus Tubbs in Tokyo, first fight I ever did on HBO.

Larry had a line before the fight where he said,

this is the beginning of the Robin thing.

Cuss had died.

Jimmy Jacobs had died.

No, Cuss hadn't died.

Jimmy Jacobs had died.

At any rate,

Larry Keverooney was already out.

Yeah, right.

That's That's right.

Larry said, since the beginning of organized boxing, heavyweight champions have often consorted with actresses

and never to their benefit.

It's a classic merchant line.

Among many classic merchant lines.

I love them.

That was one of the best things about you and Merchant and just the entire commentary team at HBO was that there's you had these intelligent, articulate people involved in what many people think of as the most barbaric of all sports.

Yes.

So it defined it in a very different way.

That's the HBO way.

Yeah.

Elevate it.

Yes.

It certainly was elevated.

And HBO's executives were smart enough to see that you can treat it as an intellectual event.

Yeah.

And if you're doing it right, you'll get away with it.

You'll just be 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.

It was brilliant.

Absolutely brilliant.

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.

Now think about that.

That's amazing.

This is not Monday night football.

This is HBO boxing.

Right.

Yeah.

Right.

You know, I mean, and so he was saying, in effect, this is better than Gifford, Meredith, and Kosell.

Wow.

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And, you know, I was

very, very flattered by that, you know, which I should have been.

Yeah, that's incredible.

Yeah, having a great team like that.

And then, and it was also, there was the flow where you guys had worked together so often.

You really know.

And

there was

the between rounds, though.

Yeah.

What?

Set Showtime and HBO apart from ABC, CBS, and NBC?

No commercials.

Right.

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 Ray nearly fell off his chair when he saw that.

It's just 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 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.

But again, before Tokyo, he was distracted.

Yeah.

Thoroughly distracted.

And it comes with success, all the trappings.

I mean, he was just constantly, you know.

You know Mike, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Have you had him in here?

Oh, a couple times.

Yeah.

One of the most lovable people in the world.

Death.

Yeah.

He's great.

You can't not love Mike if you know him.

No, if you know him.

I mean, the first time I met him, it's hard to believe he's really in the room.

You're like, I can't believe he's real.

Like, he's right there.

This is Mike Tyson.

Me as a child, I remember when I was a kid,

I guess I wasn't a child, I'm only a year younger than him, but when he lost to Buster Douglas, I didn't watch it until after the fight.

I watched a replay of it and I still expected him to win.

You know how crazy that is?

That's the kind of aura.

So you've read in the paper and on the web that he's lost, but you're still expecting him to win.

I remember I heard about it in a gas station.

Someone told me in a gas station.

And I can't believe this is true.

I was getting gas, and I heard, did you hear Mike Tyson got knocked out?

And I remember pumping gas going, what the fuck are you talking about?

Like, what?

Like, Buster Douglas knocked out Mike Tyson.

What?

For real?

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 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

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, etc., etc.

And hooking off the jab.

And hooking off the jab.

And I mean,

people think that he knocked him out with a right hand.

It was the left hook that did did the damage.

The left hook was thunderous, and Mike stumbled to his side.

But at any rate,

I'm sitting there in Tokyo.

It's 10.30 or 11 o'clock in the morning.

There are 34,000 people seated around me making no noise whatsoever.

Right.

The culture of a Japanese sports event.

It's as though they are at an opera, you know, and that's just cultural.

It's the way they are.

And as that count is rising, five, six, seven, and it's abundantly clear that Mike's not going to get up.

And I'm thinking, oh my God, what am I going to say about this?

The very first live fight I ever attended was the biggest upset in boxing history.

And now, here in front of me, 12, 14 feet away, is the result that's going to supplant that as the biggest upset in boxing history.

Wow.

So what do I say?

And I've told this story many times.

If you've heard it, I apologize for repeating.

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.

It was what it was.

Mike Tyson has been knocked out.

That was that.

I remember that.

Yeah.

Now that you said it, I remember that.

Well, thank you.

I appreciate it.

This is so It was energetic, but matter of fact.

Well, there it is.

It's over.

Mike Dyson has been knocked out.

All right, so I did shout a little bit.

Yeah, I did shout it a little bit.

All right.

I give myself too much credit for the matter of fact.

But that, of course, was that's my younger voice.

It was a little bit higher.

That was what a name.

Octavio Meirand Meirand was the name of the referee.

I just remember Buster Douglas winning that fight thinking, man,

what happens to him now?

Now he's going to be.

Well, what happens to him, of course, is that he goes on a celebration rampage.

He puts on, oh, I don't know, 40, 50 pounds, something like that.

He tries to train them off, but not effectively enough.

He goes into the ring against Holyfield, and Holyfield delivers one left hook.

One perfect counter left hook in the first round, and we're out of there.

Yeah.

That's what it was.

It was a left hook?

I thought it was a right hand.

Might have been a right hand.

I don't remember.

I could be wrong.

See if you can find it.

Might have been a right hand.

They'll find it.

Yeah, Jamie will find it.

But yeah, he just never reached those heights again.

That was it.

He just never.

Money.

Yeah, I mean, also, like, the

food.

Food.

Yeah.

He got real fat.

He was an addictive eater.

There it is.

Okay, let's see.

On the right.

Right hand, you're right.

Then there was a left hook following, but

the right hand is the one that did it.

I think the left hook missed.

Yeah, the left hook missed.

You're right.

All right, so one for Rogan,

zero for Lampley.

It's cemented in my mind because I remember,

what year was that?

Well, it's 1990 when Buster knocks out Mike.

Was it?

Yeah.

No.

Got to be earlier than that.

Huh?

No, it was.

It was 90.

Was it?

it?

February 10, 1990.

Wow.

February 10 in the United States, February 11 in Tokyo.

Okay, right.

And so this is probably 91 then?

It might have been 90.

Yeah.

I think it was later in 1990.

Yeah.

I just remember...

You know, when someone does something extraordinary and rise to the occasion, I always root on them.

I always root for them.

Like, wow, he's going to turn his life around.

He's going to be great.

So now you're rooting for Buster to beat Holyfield.

well and also I was a giant Holyfield fan too so it was one of those conflicted fights and Holyfield to me was extraordinary because what he did with Mackie Shillstone and his training October 25 1990 there it is

this time I was right yeah it was one of those things where Holyfield was one of the first guys that really embraced weightlifting and I remember as a young fighter I was always told if you lift weights it'll slow you down weights weights will make you stiff weights will slow you down you should never lift weights And so I listened to that and I never lifted weights.

And then I remember watching Holyfield train for his heavyweight debut thinking, God,

I remember his fight with Dwight Muhammad Kawi.

Remember that fight?

Incredible fight.

That was when he was a cruiserweight.

And I was thinking, how is this guy going to go up to heavyweight?

How is this going to work?

Strong mind.

Holy shit.

Very strong mind.

Unquestionably.

You want to see Evander do something?

Tell him he can't do it.

Oh, for sure.

Yeah.

But also, one of the first applications of real modern science in regards to strength and conditioning.

What Mackie Shillstone was doing was like very revolutionary.

And to see him do all these crazy strength and cardio routines and putting all that mass on and seeing all the doubters and naysayers.

So which other fighter looked at that and realized who Mackie was?

Bernard Hopkins.

Right.

Genius.

He worked with quite a few fighters, didn't he, Mackie?

I believe Mackie worked with quite a few fighters after

quite a few fighters.

Everybody saw that the results were there.

So everybody kind of changed their opinion on that.

Did he work with any MMA guys?

I don't know.

I don't probably.

There's probably a few.

It makes sense.

Yeah, I mean, MMA guys are led.

I mean, this is with MMA, you have the grappling aspect of it.

Without strength and conditioning, you really can't compete.

It's not really possible at this day and age.

Everyone uses strength and conditioning.

There's very few fighters that just train using skill,

just train skills.

Like

George St.

Pierre did that for a certain period of his career.

I wonder if there's anybody left in boxing who trains just using the gym skills.

There were a lot of them when I was first involved in the sport who would never have touched a weight.

Oh, yeah.

They subscribe totally to the notion that that was negative.

Right.

And the worst case, I mean, they definitely did calisthenics, but that was it.

It was just bodyweight exercises.

Which brings us to Crawford, which I think is really interesting.

The Crawford-Canelo fight.

Beyond interesting.

Fascinating.

Fascinating.

Because how does Crawford compete with that size?

And, you know, 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.

52 or 54?

Well, the weight class, I believe, was 54, but I believe the clause in the contract for that fight was that he'd get down to 52.

You're ahead of me?

Let's see if that's true.

Find out if that's true.

I'm pretty sure that that's true, that they had a fight at 150.

I love fact-checking on the fly.

Yeah, it's interesting.

That was a struggle.

The 54 was a struggle.

Now Canelo goes all the way up to 68 and then even to 75 and now back down to 68.

Whereas Crawford is leapfrogging.

He's going, he goes to super middle.

47 to 54 and now to 68.

And the Madrovaugh fight in 54 is

a difficult fight.

Yeah.

Difficult fight.

152.

52.

You were weight.

Joe Rogan scores again.

Yeah, well, I have a goofy memory.

It works a lot of the time, but sometimes not.

Sometimes it's like a huge thing.

I don't think you could do this podcast without having a spectacular memory.

Sometimes it's super accurate, and sometimes it's just terrible.

I don't understand why.

But certain things I do remember.

And I do remember it because of the weight-cutting thing, because I remember thinking, like, what a brilliant move to get him to do that.

The same thing that Javante Davis did with Ryan Garcia.

Yes.

Like, you can't rehydrate.

Right.

Like, which is like

a sucker bet.

That's such a sucker bet.

But it's like the same thing with Pacquiao taking the fight with a solution.

And some of that, don't you think some of that is Tank reading Ryan's personality and playing him a little bit?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, you're fucking with him.

Yeah, you're giving him other things.

Tank is a brilliant con artist.

Oh, he's so good.

Yeah.

He's so good.

And boy, the Lamont Roach fight.

Ooh.

Well, that was a knockdown.

100% was a knockdown.

And that's a

knockdown.

That's a dramatic mistake by the referee.

Without that, you have a decision victory for Roach, and he's a superstar.

Now you have this fucking draw that they have to fight again.

But now Javante knows what's coming.

They had fought in the amateurs, correct?

Well, they both have knowledge now.

Roach knows that his counter-punching 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, you know, all the jewelry and all the craziness and the ladies.

And Roach hasn't.

And Roach has not.

And Roach is a hungry motherfucker who can really fight.

He can really fight.

And he should have got his flowers after that fight.

And, you know, a lot of the boxing people recognize, like, that was a knockdown.

But forever in the history books it's not a knockdown when you take a punch to the face and then you take a knee that is a fucking knockdown period end of story I don't care if you got your hair fucking permanent it's like a literary idiosyncrasy okay and both of our sports boxing and an MMA are littered throughout their history with these things that are egregiously unfair at the moment yes but also prompt us to remember the fight

and and remember both fighters if 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 right and be more interested in your next fight so this so this is an entertainment enterprise and anything that contributes to your legend is ultimately going to pay you back somewhere down the road.

Yes, that's true.

There's definitely something to that.

And then, so Lamont will have a lot of fans on his side going through that section.

Oh, big time.

Yeah.

In fact, I would put the fight in D.C.

Although I don't think Tank would want to do that.

Is that fight scheduled?

Not to my knowledge.

Not to my awareness.

Gervante Davis.

I'm totally focused on Canelo Alvarez and Terrence Crawford at this particular moment.

Are you calling that fight?

No.

All right, at least, wait a minute.

Let me say I don't know.

You don't know?

No, no.

There was a news conference in New York yesterday, and they announced that Max Kelleman is part of the broadcast team.

Okay.

So that's only one person they've announced.

Obviously, I'd love to call the fight, but I don't know yet.

August 16th.

Scheduled.

Scheduled for August 16th in Las Vegas.

Wow, boy, I might go to that.

I might go to that.

Maybe I'll go with you.

Maybe we should.

That would be fun.

Hey, we're getting along really well here, aren't we?

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

So I enjoy the conversation.

It would be fun to go sit at a live fight, wouldn't it?

Oh, no.

Is that a UFC weekend?

God damn it.

Let me check real quick because it might be.

Yep.

Shit.

UFC in Chicago.

Shit.

All right.

I'll call you later that night and let you know.

I'll watch it.

I will have it on my phone.

I'll set my phone up and have it there while the fight's going on.

Just

looking forward to it.

So who do you like in Canelo versus Crawford?

Well, I'm a giant Crawford fan because I think he's the best Switch hitter since Marvin Agler.

I'm a giant Crawford fan because I called his coming out fight against Brady Sprescott

and then various other stepping stones throughout his career.

I also think he's one of those guys that if you tell him he can't do something, he wants to show you and shock you.

A thousand percent.

Absolutely right.

I also think Canelo is slowing down and Canelo is a more of a one-punch fighter now than the combination fighter he was when he was Wouldn't it be great to manage your portfolio on one platform?

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It's younger.

We'll see.

Not yet ready to subscribe totally to that because again, you're talking about somebody who is stubborn

and

who wants to prove everything he can prove.

100%.

I agree with that too.

But I think there's this, there's a, like in boxing and certainly in MMA, there's a certain amount of years where a fighter can keep the RPMs up.

And, you know, when they're in the red line, and I, there's, there's some people subscribe to the idea of nine years.

There's nine years is the most that an elite fighter in MMA has performed at their prime.

I think that's a bullshit number because I think it's entirely dependent upon lifestyle, nutrition, discipline, physical attributes.

There's a lot of factors.

George Foreman won the heavyweight championship of the world in boxing at age 45.

True, but he took 10 years off.

Yes.

So exactly eight years off.

So you have to factor in.

But were the 10 years off good or bad?

Did they dull his reflexes or did they actually allow his body to recover in such a way that, I mean, you could could debate that all night.

All night.

And George is biologically very unusual.

I mean, he had canned hams for fists.

They were gigantic fists.

And intellectually unusual, as we discussed before.

Yes.

And boy, you know, one of my favorite all-time heavyweight wars was him and Ron Lyle.

That was one of his all-time favorite heavyweight wars.

Yeah,

he loved to reminisce about the Lyle fight.

Oh, that fight was crazy.

Every fighter loves drama, and they love having been a part of drama.

Yes.

So George loved that.

That was an insane fight.

Insane.

All the knockdowns.

Yep.

Both guys rocked and hurt.

Yep.

Woo.

And Ron Lyle's another one of those guys who's just kind of lost in the history books.

You know, people sort of forgot, except for that fight.

You know, there's a few of those guys that people just kind of have forgotten.

They attached them to one fight

because they didn't ever have that shining moment again in their career.

Yeah.

What a cruel game.

What a cruel game.

You know,

Ali and Cleveland Williams.

Sure.

Same thing.

Right, right.

Cleveland Williams is a murderer.

He was.

He was a nasty knockout puncher.

Absolutely.

But Ali just boxed his face off and put him away.

That's exactly right.

Big cat.

That was the one that

caused a lot of people to realize, oh, Cassius Clay is a really legitimate, meaningful talent.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's on the way to the first Liston fight.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Special.

It was a special fight.

The first Liston fight was crazy.

It was crazy.

And also, the crazy thing was there was something probably on Liston's gloves, right?

He got in Cassius' gloves.

There was unquestionably something on Liston's gloves.

And Cassius, at one point, asked Dundee to cut his gloves off.

That's right.

That's right.

Because he was blinded.

Yeah.

So I think it's the fifth round where he ran

and had to stay away because he was waiting for his eyes to clear.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then by the seventh round, he knocks Liston down.

Yeah.

And Liston effectively quits.

What a dirty business to put something on your gloves to get in someone's eyes when you punch them.

So crazy.

What a dirty business to load someone's gloves with what amounts to cement and send him in to fight Miguel Cotto in a pay-per-view in Las Vegas.

Yes, yes, yes.

Yeah, they

put holes in the gloves, removed some of the stuffing, and watered it down.

And then he also did something to his hand wraps as well, right?

He was hitting Coto with bricks.

Yeah.

That's all I know for sure.

And he could have killed him.

Cotto went through a life-threatening experience.

And I always, you know, don't fall in love with a fighter.

You could not know Miguel without falling in love with him.

He was a wonderful, sweet,

great person.

So I was very, very

deeply disturbed and upset and sentimental calling that fight that night.

Not because I knew that Margarito's gloves were loaded.

I didn't.

I just knew that.

I didn't know until

we were loaded.

We didn't know until the Shane Mosley fight.

That's exactly right.

Right.

Shane Mosley's.

And I remember walking away from Vegas with a bad feeling after the Coto fight.

How could that happen to Miguel, et cetera, et cetera?

And then it's, I don't know, several weeks later, maybe three months later, when we're in L.A.

getting ready for

the Mosley versus

Margarito fight, and I hear in my headset, there's a disturbance in Margarito's dressing room.

They're making him take his gloves off and da-da-da-da-da.

And at that moment, it all comes together.

Yeah, that was a hand-wrap thing.

I'm conflating these two stories in my mind with Louis Resto and Billy Collins.

Plaster pass.

Yes.

So Louis Resto was with Panama Lewis.

Yes.

With Panama Lewis, who famously gave that drink to Aaron Pryor.

Yes.

Yes.

Get me the one that I fixed.

And then Aaron Pryor goes out and knocks out Alexis Arguello, which is alleged to have been cocaine.

A lot of people think it was cocaine because Aaron then went to famously have a cocaine problem.

Right.

But the Louis Resto.

I don't see how cocaine could help you in a fight.

I really.

It's a stimulant.

It's a stimulant.

Yeah, I guess you're right.

It's a stimulant.

Yeah, if you're exhausted and all of a sudden you get a bump and you fire it up and you go out there and fuck him up, he could help you.

Certainly if you're tired.

Yeah, 100% it would help.

ruin some i've never done cocaine but i'm just guessing it ruins a lot of other things that's all oh yeah it does but in that moment i guess you know in that moment especially if you're a person who imbibes and you you know you've had a history of cocaine and then you know what does it do it boosts up confidence and it's a stimulant i would imagine that alexis argueo fight woo

Phenomenal.

Oh my goodness.

Phenomenal.

And he was, you know, again, another great person,

another really,

I didn't know Aaron all that well, but Alexis was lovable in every way.

Wasn't he murdered?

He was a politician in Nicaragua, right?

Was he murdered?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nicaragua.

Yeah,

man.

So I was conflating those.

So with Margarito, I think it was just the wraps, 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 breaking his face open with every punch.

And there are photos that you can find on the web of Collins that show that.

Yes.

And so Resto, then, when the fight was over, Billy Collins' dad grabs Resto's gloves and realizes there's no padding in the gloves.

Right.

And then Billy Collins' career is over, and he winds up drinking himself to death.

He actually

drove into a tree.

Yeah.

So we don't know whether that was suicide or not.

We don't know.

No.

you know, the guys, he couldn't see after that fight.

It's a great story.

The guys were fucked.

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.

Yeah.

There's the photo right there of the fight.

Billy and there's his dad in the photo.

Crazy.

Just crazy.

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 Resto, who 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.

Now, Mike

was a boxing scientist.

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 bite films on the wall, sleeping in the same room, training and sometimes sparring every day.

Wow.

And so Mike had known Lennox for a long, long time.

By the time they met June 8, 2002, in

Memphis.

And

I don't know that he would subscribe exactly to me saying he knew what was coming, but I think he had a pretty good idea.

And you'll recall that at the first

news conference, he ran across the stage and bit Lennox on the leg.

Yeah, he went crazy.

Lennox claimed that he drew blood through the pantsless.

And my interpretation of that at the time was he wants to get the fight canceled.

He wants to get this fight wiped away.

Well, you got to think, this is also 12 years after the Buster Douglas loss.

Yes.

It's a long time in boxing.

Long time and a lot of trials and tribulations.

Prison.

Yep.

I mean, you might, maybe you get a little chance to train in prison, but not the way you train in a boxing gym.

No.

So he paid a lot of prices for a lot of experiences.

Here it is.

I didn't know this happened with this.

Lennox throws a right hand.

I'm not sure he landed that right hand.

Might have broken his hand if he'd landed it on Tyson's jaw.

Crazy.

That's the hard part about bare knuckles boxing, right?

Oh, yeah.

They break their hands all the time.

You know why gloves emerged?

Gloves emerged because John L.

Sullivan got tired of breaking his hands.

Really?

Yeah.

He was a big proponent of, behind the scenes, of going to gloves.

And then, of course, in the first gloved prize-fighting heavyweight championship fight, he loses to Corbett.

Ah.

Because Corbett was a boxing scientist.

And back then, they probably had terrible medical treatment for broken hands.

Like, what did they do?

I don't know.

I mean, they didn't have the kind of surgery that they had.

Certainly not the sophisticated surgeries that take place now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If there were any surgeries at all.

Yeah, they probably.

He got tired of breaking his hands.

Along comes this idea, this phenomenon of gloves.

Yeah, absolutely.

Let's do that.

Wow.

And then he loses to Corbett.

Wow.

I was watching a piece yesterday about,

it was a YouTube video on Sugar Ray 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 he won 120.

you know how crazy that is yeah stop and think i sort of have a sense of it yeah stop and think about how insane that is did you ever drink in jimmy glenn's bar in new york no jimmy's corner oh that's too bad jimmy glenn was a

really great, well-known corner man who worked with Robinson, worked with Joe Lewis, worked with a lot of really big-name fighters.

And he had a bar on 44th between 6th and 7th.

It's the

to this day, I think his son is running it now.

I hope he still is,

the ultimate boxing bar.

The photographs on the wall, the atmosphere.

Oh, there we are.

Oh, what a cool little horse.

We're in Jimmy's corner.

Yeah.

44th between 6th and 7th.

There's Jimmy.

Is it gone?

There's Jimmy down to the left.

Is it still there?

Is it gone?

The bar, I think, is still there.

Jimmy's gone.

What a wonderful, wonderful, loving man.

He was like an uncle to me because I spent so much time in the bar.

And just

his stories were fantastic because of the people with whom he worked.

Wow.

That's awesome.

You got to go sometime.

I would love to.

I'd love to go sometime.

Sugar Ray Robinson was one of the first guys also that showed how effective being a great dancer.

My mother's favorite fighter.

Really?

And yeah.

And I told you that the first fight she ever sat me down to watch was Sugar A.

Robinson versus Bob Old West.

That's right.

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.

Wow.

And he did.

And he did.

He did.

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, Clay, his favorite fighter, Sugar Ray Robinson.

100%.

So he's like a heavyweight version of Sugar Ray Robinson.

So what's the greatest asset for any fighter?

Is it his punching powers?

Is it his hand speed?

Is it his footwork?

Or is it his intelligence?

It's the mind.

It's the mind.

It's the willingness to accept what you need to accept and to see what you can do.

Right.

That's what makes for great fighters.

And also the ability to objectively analyze your skills and recognize where you need to advance and what you need to to do differently.

Because you have a trainer to help you with that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But you don't have coaches per se the way you do in organized team sports and stuff like that.

At the end of the day, you're the one.

You got to figure this out.

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 Pepp.

Well, you've mentioned what I think of as the modern supreme innovator earlier,

yeah.

Yeah.

He recreated

our approach to the sport.

Well, you see a lot of that now in MMA.

You see a lot of footwork and movement and switching stances.

It's like a fighter that can't switch stances in MMA.

It's kind of archaic because you...

I think we'll reach that point in boxing, too.

Right.

I think eventually as time goes by.

Well, Hagler was an example of one of the first guys that'd be a switch hitter that people sort of dismissed.

So you just you earlier we talked about Canelo versus Crawford.

Yes.

Do you think Terrence Crawford can beat Canelo Alvarez?

Yeah, I think he can win.

Okay.

I don't know if he's going to win, but I think he can win.

He's going to have to box a brilliant fight.

Okay, what kind of a fight?

I'm going to get to that.

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.

Yeah.

Canelo has such unique skills.

And one of the weird things that he does that very few people since Rocky Marciano does is he punches your arms.

Yes.

He brutalizes your arms.

He's another brilliant guy.

He has the greatest punch resistance in the sport.

You know, we talked about it earlier.

One knockout in the whole career.

Knock down.

And it wasn't a knockdown.

And it wasn't really a knockdown in my personal view.

So because he didn't touch the canvas.

He's never been on 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 Chepo, 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.

Hunter jumper riding?

What is that?

Hunter jumper is where you go over jumps and you...

On the horse?

Yeah.

On the horse.

Yeah.

Why the fuck would you do that when you're training for a fight?

What if the horse was?

Because

he was riding horses since he was a little kid.

He was skilled enough to do it.

You control the height of the jumps.

You say, set the jumps at 36 inches or 40 inches.

You know what the horse can do.

It's all about staying on the horse.

And

I asked him, you know, how can you do that?

And he said, everything I do in boxing is upper body, and everything I do on the horse is lower body.

And

on that basis, I am the one who theorizes that the reason you can't knock him down is not because of his chin.

It's because of his legs.

His base.

You can't get him off balance.

He's too strong from the waist down.

And, you know, if other fighters would pay attention to what Canelo does, they might go do a little horseback riding.

I wasn't even aware of that until you brought that up.

That's extraordinary.

That's

incredible.

There he is with his horses.

Wow.

That completely makes sense if you think about it.

Squeezing with the lower legs, the core strength.

100% correct.

The balance.

The balance.

Exactly.

The timing.

All of it.

Yeah.

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, etc., etc.

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.

Whoa.

Wild, right?

Did you listen to him?

I quit.

I went home and thought about it, and I thought, he's right.

But wouldn't positive, constructive advice being, if you enjoy this, there's some other stuff that you need to do.

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.

Wow.

Because, of course, if you fall off, and I saw this one a couple times, if you fall off, the horse can stomp you.

You get a hoof on the chest or a hoof on the neck.

Oh.

And you're in the hospital and you're in big trouble.

If you're lucky.

I saw it happen to a woman in the ring, a really good rider.

So at the end of the day, you can't do that

yeah there he is look at canelo wow now that is that's that's a skill he has charried since his early childhood that's crazy

you can't knock him down that makes so much sense also he's got a square head yeah he's he's got and again and it's not a small head no he's got

he's he's also got a brilliant mind yeah all right clearly give credit where credit is due no doubt no doubt I mean, just the evolution in the three fights with Triple G.

Triple G, who's one of my all-time favorites.

If you can fight Triple G

and never be badly hurt.

Right.

That's a great point.

That's astonishing.

Triple G never badly hurt him.

Yeah.

And he was destroying everybody else you put in his pack.

Everybody.

Yeah.

Everybody.

One of the heaviest punchers I ever saw.

And he would do weird stuff, like throw a left hook over the top and hit the top of your head.

He would throw a left hook like that.

Like a looping

overhand left.

By the way, it's very much like the shot that Douglas landed against Tyson in the 10th round, over the top with the left hand.

But the way Triple G would do it, it would be going down on you.

Right.

Down on you.

It was a weird punch.

And he would hit you in the forehead, which is like, or the tempo, which is where a lot of people lose their equilibrium.

Well, whatever they do in Kazakhstan, it might be different from what they do in the United States.

No, he was special.

He was very special.

Another guy, we got to talk about Julio Cesar Chavez, who's also one of my all-time favorites.

Julio Cesar Chavez, in his prime, he would just systematically break people down.

And the volume,

like

constant attack and volume.

His volume ⁇ volume was the real key because his power shots did not look like hellacious power shots.

His left hook didn't look all that devastating.

He wasn't a one-punch guy.

But it would hurt you.

You know, over time, he would break you down.

Like some

Taylor fight.

fight.

And then we go to the Taylor fight.

What is it, two seconds before the final bell that the fight gets stopped?

Yes.

Larry Hazard stops it, and everybody wants to go.

Not Larry Hazard.

It wasn't?

No, it was Richard Steele.

That's right, Richard Steele.

That's right.

Okay, so you corrected me on one earlier, and now I got you.

That's right.

That was Richard Steele.

And he took a tremendous amount of grief for that.

And I think he deserved the grief.

I thought it was a very bad stoppage.

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.

All right?

Giving Chavez a victory that he did not deserve.

Right.

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.

What if that had been in the eighth round?

Would you be

away with it?

Fight goes on.

No, I mean, I'd

well, if that had been the eighth round, no, I still wouldn't be okay.

So it's

the first knockdown.

It's not not as if we knocked him down three or four times.

Right.

Meltrick had won the fight.

Yeah, no, it's all, it's interesting, right, the subjective calls of stoppages by referees.

Yeah.

Things get very tough.

It's one of the toughest things.

It's one of the toughest.

Good stoppage, bad stoppage, et cetera, et cetera.

It's one of the toughest things.

And I disciplined myself to be very, very careful about ever

criticizing a referee in the moment.

I'm not sure that I criticized Richard that night.

But I'll tell you one thing.

This is in some ways part of the the proof of the pudding.

Las Vegas boxing fans and Las Vegas boxing crowds are knowledgeable, right?

They've seen more of the sport than other people.

They know what they're watching.

Richard was never again introduced in Las Vegas before a fight without the crowd booing.

Wow.

He was subjected to boos

every time he was introduced.

Wow.

Which shows you that a majority of the fans in that particular boxing capital agree with me that it was a bad stoppage.

Imagine what that did to his psyche.

Like, every time you go out there, you have the whole crowd.

I think he wound up committing suicide.

Steele?

Yes.

Those booze might have had something to do with that.

That's what I was going to say.

Did Richard Steele commit suicide?

I think he did.

That's a great fact to check because I don't know.

I think he did.

And you got to imagine the kind of depression that would come just knowing that you altered the course of boxing history.

With that one momentary decision.

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah.

So Chavez,

Chavez is avenged in certain ways.

Del Oya beat him twice.

Yes.

There's one where he didn't, where he won, but he shouldn't have won, Purnell Whitaker.

Yeah.

That's right.

Who's another genius.

Yes.

One of the greatest defensive boxers of all time.

Certainly in the top five.

Genius.

Certainly in the top five.

Yes.

Genius.

And I remember that decision being called and I was like, what the fuck is this?

That one was nuts.

Oscar was Oscar, you know, and he had a glamour image that was difficult to deal with at that time.

You know, so

that kind of thing was part of the reason that my dear friend Fernando Vargas was in some ways jealous of Oscar.

You know, what other fighter would get a decision over Prinnell Whitaker in that circumstance?

But wasn't it Chavez?

Didn't Chavez have a decision win over Prinnell Whitaker as well?

Sure.

That's the one that I'm talking about.

That's the one that you're talking about.

I thought you were talking about Delaware.

So is that one similar as well?

No, I don't really recall that one.

Oscar gets a decision win over Whitaker on a night when Larry and a lot of other experts thought that Whitaker deserved the decision.

Well, Whitaker was like underappreciated because it was so defensively brilliant.

Well, sure.

I mean,

a lot of guys under the ball.

The great defenders never get as much credit as the, I mean, Hopkins.

Right.

Hopkins had to become a media star late in his career to really get credit for what he had done.

Yeah.

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.

Oh, yeah.

It really is.

But

part 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.

What is a talent hunt?

How does that work?

So first of all,

this emerges from the Munich massacre.

All right.

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 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, Ruin 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

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 ten 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 poor A's.

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 Arledge 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.

Never, ever reveal that to anyone.

So, of course, now it can be revealed.

Why would you want that revealed?

That they had chosen out of 432 candidates, the one who grew up around the street from his parents?

Oh, he didn't know.

Well, but yeah, he could say he didn't know, and somebody might kick back.

At any rate,

his first instinct was to say, don't ever tell anybody that.

A long time has passed.

Rune has passed.

There are sideline reporters everywhere now.

So, you know, I can very easily reveal and let you know that they accidentally chose.

The other accident was

they had already installed a guy from Stanford named Don Tollefson.

And they knew that Tollefson was going to be chosen.

He was in the first batch of 16 people they talked to.

His credentials were unbelievable.

And so they were dead set in their minds on choosing Don Tollefson all along.

And now they were two, three weeks away from the first game.

Four weeks away from the first game.

It was August 8th, and the first game was September 7th.

And August 8th,

1974, I'm at a rented beach house in Swan Corner, North Carolina, with a friend of mine named Buck Goldstein and his wife.

My wife, Linda, and I are there.

And the phone on the wall rings.

And to this day, I don't know how Ebersoll got that phone number because the house was rented in the name of Buck Goldstein.

So Buck picks up the phone.

Hello.

Yeah, he's right here.

Jim, it's Dick Ebersole.

And I said,

huh?

What is this?

Hello.

And Dick says, you know, know, I'm so glad I found you.

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 Falcon 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 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 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 Tollofson 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.

Wow.

What are the odds that they're not the player?

The odds are astronomical.

So correct.

The odds are beyond all belief.

They could choose any story in the world they wanted me to do as an audition.

They choose my childhood hero.

It kind of almost makes you feel like it's meant to be.

Correct.

There's no other way to describe it other than this was supposed to happen.

Yeah.

Well, I think you're the best ever.

So if that's how it had to play out, that's how it had to play out.

And that's...

The Richard Steele thing?

Did he commit suicide?

I was going to bring that up later.

Oh, Jesus.

I'm sorry, Richard.

Somebody else committed suicide.

Well, I mean, did Larry Hazard commit suicide?

Richard's dead.

Larry Hazard's still around, I'm pretty sure.

Yeah, Larry Hazard is an athletic commissioner right now.

New York State.

Mitch Halpern.

Mitch Halpern.

Or New Jersey.

Excuse me.

New Jersey, not New York.

Oh, Mitch Halpern committed suicide.

Mitch Halpern committed suicide.

Oh, that's right.

All right.

So

what is Mitch Halpern's marker?

Oh, I, you know, I covered it.

There was a fight.

Yeah, I covered it.

It was one of mine.

I can't remember right off the top of my head, but yes.

There was a very controversial fight, right?

Yeah.

A similar type situation.

Similar type thing.

Something that stains your reputation going forward.

My apologies to Richard Steele.

I'm sorry.

Halperin is, I believe, H-A-L-P-R-I-N.

Or H-A-L-P-E-R-I-N.

What was the big controversial fight?

Garcia Green.

Can't remember right now.

I saw Rich Alpern referee a number of fights.

You're right.

He did kill himself.

Yeah,

I'm connecting to it now.

And as soon as we find out exactly what the fight was, I'll remember what

the circumstances.

I told you, my memory sucks sometimes.

Joe, Joe, I'm 76 years old.

My wife worries about whether I'm going to remember to put socks on in the morning.

Really?

Oh, Gabe Willis.

Gabe Willis and Jimmy Garcia.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, my God.

So one of the oldest dictums in the sport is that when one fighter dies, the other career dies too.

Gabe was absolutely never the same.

And he allowed that fight to go on way longer than it should have.

May 6th, 1995.

Never forget it.

Hot day outside and back of Caesar's Palace.

My wife was sitting with Jack Nicholson.

Can't Can't resist the name drop.

You know, there were a lot of things going on.

But

Gabe was never, ever the same after that.

And he,

you know, Gabe went to

Colombia or Venezuela, I forget exactly where,

for the funeral.

Oh, God, look at this.

And also Richard Greene committed suicide after the Mancini-Kim fight.

Similar situation.

Yeah.

Similar situation with Duck Koo Kim when he dies famously on national television, Ray Boom Boom Mancini.

And then that referee wants to committing suicide as well.

You know, it's a haunting thing because it's so intimate.

You're in the ring.

You're four or five feet away from these guys.

You're watching somebody land shot after shot after shot.

You're trying to gauge in your mind what is fair to the guy who's taking the beating.

Right.

Because he could always land one big comeback counterpunch right and win the fight and there's been so many instances over time many of guys recovering and coming back to win the fight many absolutely so many fights that could have been stopped and if they were who knows what we've gotten what over and over and over so you know

I

was always

disciplined and restrained about criticizing referees live because what they do is an extremely important and critical job.

And sometimes

they're the only safety barrier between life and death.

I was just thinking of the Diego Corrales fight.

Diego Corrales, with that crazy fight where he's knocked down multiple times and comes back to win by knockout.

Arguably the greatest fight of all time.

Who was it again?

Corrales versus.

Name is right on the tip of my tongue.

Corrales.

I would say Luis Castillo.

Is that not it?

That might have been it.

Castillo.

It was it.

Corrales Castillo.

That was it.

Jose Luis Castillo.

Arguably the greatest fight of all time.

It was a Showtime fight, by the way.

I was watching it on TV.

Easily could have been stopped.

Huh?

Easily could have been stopped.

100%.

And Corrales comes back and wins.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And I believe he died in a motorcycle accident.

Corrales died in a motorcycle accident.

Yes, he did.

Yeah.

After a lot of salacious revelations regarding his troubles with women.

But he was a sweet guy.

You could not know Chico without loving him.

Okay.

And that's true of many very violent fighters.

You couldn't know Chico without loving him.

You couldn't know Mike in the early days without loving him.

So

the sport is filled with ironies.

I'm sure MMA is exactly the same thing.

It is.

It really is.

Listen, I'm glad we had a chance to talk.

I really appreciate it.

It was really fun.

Two hours just flew by.

Great.

Yeah.

I think I had fun.

I think I've had a fantastic time with you.

And I really enjoyed every moment.

And yes, thank you.

I'm glad we had a chance to talk.

And your book is available.

It happened.

Did you do the voiceover?

Please tell me you did.

I did.

Thank you.

I did record the audiobook.

Especially when

people who heard the audiobook recommend it.

You have to do it.

With you, it has to be.

Can you imagine if somebody else, if they forced somebody else to write it on the board?

Do you know the boxing writer Tom Hauser?

Yes.

So Hauser is one of my dearest friends and a great man.

Ali's primary biographer.

Hauser has written a book about his mother.

And he knows about my relationship with my mother.

And by the way, I read that you were raised by a single mother.

Is that correct?

Well, I have a stepfather.

Stepfather.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah.

I was raised by a double widow who never married again.

Hauser has deep and great affection for his mother, so he wrote a book about his mother.

And I'm thrilled to tell you that he called me and said, would you record the audio version of my book?

So now I am going to record, when I get back to Chapel Hill,

Hauser's book about his mother.

And that's awesome.

If you like hearing my book, then you'll probably enjoy reading or hearing my book about Hauser Smother, too.

Well, I'm going to listen to your book because that's how I absorb most of my book.

Well, I've given away a lot of it, too.

No, I don't give a fuck.

I'm listening to the whole damn thing.

And I really hope that Netflix chooses you for the Canelo fight, the Canelo Crawford fight.

That would be fantastic.

Like I said, it made me so happy to hear you on

the Times Square card.

Too bad the fights weren't.

Yeah, that was true.

But what do you think that is about?

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.

Far be it from me to say anything about Turkey, okay?

Yes.

He,

anything negative, he put me back at ringside.

All right.

So I'm very happy with that.

On a personal parochial level, I am a huge Turkey fan.

Yes.

I think that

more attention has to be paid to what real matchmaking is.

If you put two counterpunchers in front of each other, that's not going to to make a fire.

Two attackers, guaranteed fire.

An attacker versus a counterpuncher, that can also be really good.

Some of the greatest fights ever have been attacker against counterpuncher.

Do you think it's a matchmaking issue?

I believe it was.

That night you had too many instances where two counterpunchers were standing in front of each other and waiting for the other guy to move.

I also think that Rolly Romero

very intelligently beefed up, put on strength, and and went into the fight with Garcia with a defensive frame of mind.

I'm going to take the air out of this balloon.

I'm going to slow the punch rate down.

I'm going to land selectively when I want to.

And I'm not going to allow him to ever land a left hook.

He did a good job of that.

He also landed that left hook of his own.

Exactly.

Rocked him and dropped him.

And I think that changed the entire fight.

Absolutely.

Mentally changed the fight.

You know, Garcia's in there trying to land his left hook, and all of a sudden he gets dropped by one.

That's got to affect your mentality.

What did you think about Devin Haney's performance?

Because I felt like that was an example of a guy coming off of the Ryan Garcia fight where he got dropped multiple times.

He needed to put on a show and he didn't.

He just looked different.

Yeah.

If you go back to him versus Loma Channel.

Of course, there's a lot of months in between.

Right.

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.

Well, you definitely can draw a line between a guy getting rocked and dropped on multiple occasions from a person that he was supposed to beat easily.

Right.

If you look at his boxing skill, you look at what he had done to Kombosis.

Yes.

I mean, he just...

boxed his face off.

He looked fantastic in that fight.

But

you get the benefit of being able to say to yourself, if you want to, okay, he tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug.

That's the reason he knocked me down three times.

You know, if you can convince yourself of that.

The problem is, once you start saying that, people start saying, fuck you, and then the booze get louder.

I'm talking about saying it to yourself.

You can't.

I'm not talking about saying it, but no one says,

you are 100% correct about this.

No one says anything to themselves anymore.

If you say something publicly, the whole world responds now.

It's not like a guy living in 1976.

This is the different world we're living in.

Tell me about it.

I'm sitting here on the Joe Rogan experience with the possibility that 19 million people are talking,

are listening to me.

I'm sure I've made a mistake or two.

Well, we both did.

Yeah, it's part of the fun.

Just don't read the comments.

That's the key.

Jim Lampley, I appreciate you very much, and I'm a giant fan, and I'm really glad you're back in boxing.

It means a lot to me.

And your book, It Happened, A Uniquely Lucky Life in Sports Sports Television, is available now.

Thank you, sir.

Forward by Taylor Sheridan.

Oh, oh, I love that guy.

I have to take care of my friend.

Has he been on the show?

Yes, yes.

I love him.

Okay, Beth.

He's a good friend of mine.

Friend of mine, too.

I love him.

All right.

So we have a mutual friend.

Yes, sir.

All right.

This was a lot of fun.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

My pleasure.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

All right.

That was good, everybody.

All right,