“It still lingers,” declares Jim Lampley, boxing’s best out-of-work play-by-play man about the hurt he feels when he talks about HBO Sports ending its 45-year coverage of the Sweet Science almost six years ago.
Lampley, the former HBO Boxing frontman, will be working from his ringside perch for the Devin Haney-Ryan Garcia WBC super welterweight championship bout at Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Saturday, April 20.
He’s not calling the bout for DAZN the streaming service, rather he’ll be doing his fifth live chat for PPV.COM during the fight alongside Lance Pugmire, Chris Algieri and Dan Canobbio.
“I thought, I have to have this guy,” says Dale Hopkins, president and CEO of iNDEMAND and PPV.COM. “I called him blind. We stuck up a conversation and here we are. His passion for the fighters is what I love most about him.
“Jim cares and wants the best for them as we do. A marriage made in pay-per-view heaven.”
Is this the future of boxing — watching the bout on TV while internet chatting simultaneously?
“I have been in network television level mass media for 50 years and for me to be presumptuous enough to say that I know the future of anything would be an overreach,” says Lampley shrugging on a Zoom call.
He is still flummoxed that HBO (2018) and rival Showtime (2023) both pulled the plug on the sport.
“I don’t know what it did that’s good for HBO to leave the sport behind and I don’t know what it does that’s good for Showtime to leave the sport behind,” says Lampley. “I don’t get it.”
There are two synonymous boxing calls that have been permanently etched into our memory banks.
“Down Goes Frazier! … Down Goes Frazier! … Down Goes Frazier!” from Howard Cosell as the soon to be former heavyweight champ Joe Frazier made the first of six trips to the canvas courtesy of George Foreman in Kingston, Jamaica in 1973.
And there was another Foreman moment two decades later when the challenger knocked the champ, Michael Moorer, out with a short, powerful right hand.
“It Happened! … It Happened!” came courtesy of Lampley from the MGM Grand in Las Vegas in 1994 as Foreman became heavyweight boss again.
Lampley never thought Foreman would make it happen.
“I would pull him aside and privately ask him, ‘George, how are you going to beat Moorer? He’s a southpaw. He’s a mover. Holyfield couldn’t find him,’” recalls Lampley, but Foreman was adamant. “Every single time George would say to me in a very measured tone, ‘There will come a moment late in the fight when he will come and stand in front of me and let me knock him out.’”
It happened in round ten as Foreman became the oldest heavyweight champion at age 45.
“I couldn’t think of a thing to say just like when Tyson goes down in Tokyo against Douglas,” says Lampley. “I’m sitting there for ten seconds to conjure how can I do justice. I think of what George said to me on those occasions. What came out of my mouth was, ‘It Happened! … It Happened!’”
After HBO ended its boxing run, Lampley made do by teaching at the University of North Carolina (his alma mater) for five semesters. He’s on hiatus now.
“The students wore me out,” he says, without a laugh.
He returned to boxing broadcasting as he has worked four fights for PPV.COM starting with the Canelo Alvarez-Jermell Charlo super-middleweight bout won by Canelo last September.
Inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2015, Lampley has always impressed his former HBO boss Seth Abraham.
“He feels the athletes,” says Abraham. “He feels what the nub of the story is. I don’t think that’s anything you can learn. It’s not like you take a course in storytelling 101 in high school or college. Jim has a remarkable knack for good storytelling.”
He was also a great traffic cop if that is the correct description when you have a three-man (ego) broadcast booth.
“The chemistry between Jim and Larry [Merchant] and George [Foreman] was fabulous,” says Abraham. “It was absolutely fabulous. They had if not the charisma, the chemistry of the Marx brothers.”
Is there another Lampley in the boxing announcing pipeline?
“Absolutely not,” declares the former HBO executive.
LAMPLEY’S MEMORIES AT A GLANCE
Lampley, who turned 75 on April 8, worked for HBO for 31 years and was ringside for some of the most memorable fights from this era. He also was a sideline college football reporter for ABC and has worked 14 Olympic Games and has garnered four Sports Emmy Awards. And he has memories.
Best fight he worked
I would go with Riddick Bowe beating Evander Holyfield by a whisker in their first heavyweight championship fight. Now, if you ask what about blood curdling violence, obviously that’s Gatti-Ward I.
Most energized arena
It’s a funny answer. Madison Square Garden after Bowe-Golota I. How energized do you want? You’ve got a full-scale riot, people hitting each other over the head with chairs. That was pretty energized.
Saddest moment
Because we were friends and I loved him, I felt sad for Mike Tyson the night that he was going to face Lennox Lewis. Any logical and prepared observer knew what we were going to see was a beat down.
Odd start in boxing
I would not have a career in boxing if it weren’t for Mike Tyson because the executive at ABC sports who originally assigned me to boxing was trying to get rid of me. [He] thought that he could embarrass me out of my network involvement at ABC by putting me on a sport where the public would never associate me or identify me with what was going on in the ring.
He didn’t realize that the very first sports event I had ever watched as a child was boxing and he probably didn’t realize that under his egis the sports division had just signed a contract with a 19-year old heavyweight from New York who was about to become the world’s biggest entertainment celebrity.
So, the very first fight I called was Mike Tyson versus Jesse Ferguson in upstate New York, the first of several fights of his that I called. Ironically, Dennis Swanson, the executive who wanted to get rid of me at ABC, gave me a pathway to HBO which was the most elevated platform of my career.
Upcoming Mike Tyson-Jake Paul “Fight”
If you want to call that a fight.
Haney vs. Garcia
Doesn’t it echo Shane Mosley and Oscar De La Hoya up to and including the fact that they have known each other since they were eight years old? Most of us believe, particularly based on his win over Lomachenko, that Haney is a more predictably, high quality and probably superior boxer to Garcia.
Greatest analyst to work with
Foreman had a wisdom and an insight that was very way above and beyond what you would think when you look at him as the clowning commercial pitchman. He’s the smartest analyst I ever worked with.
Working with Howard Cosell
It got me an office on the 12th floor about four or five doors down the hall from his. I would sit there and wait and within about an hour and a half he would step out of his office into the area where his three secretaries were seated and say, ‘It’s a travesty … hired … promoted … a sophomore with a six-figure salary. What is going on here?’ Then a few hours later, he would step out and say, ‘[Lampley] is the only one in the division, other than me, who can complete a competent sentence or put together a literary paragraph. That’s why I wanted him on [Sports Beat]’ which of course he didn’t. We had a fun relationship except when he didn’t want it to be a fun relationship.
