Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Blow by Blow: How Jim Lampley Witnessed History

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

This week on Open Book, Anthony sits down with Jim Lampley. Jim is a Hall of Fame sportscaster with 50 years of on-site experience at numerous live sports events that include college and NFL football and ABC’s Wide World of Sports, inside NBA and MLB locker rooms, Wimbledon, Ryder Cup PGA Golf, and 14 Olympics. For 30 years, he was the face and voice of HBO World Championship boxing, including anecdotes and interactions with the most famous fighters of his era (Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson, Ray Leonard and George Foreman) and the biggest boxing matches up to and including the “Billion Dollar Bout” between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao. About The Host: Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. He is the host of the podcast Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci. A graduate of Tufts University and Harvard Law School, he lives in Manhasset, Long Island. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Conditions apply. Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk to some of the... the brightest minds about everything surrounding the written word. That's everything. That's from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, political activists, and, of course, Wall Street. Before we dive in, make sure to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And don't forget to leave a review.

Good or bad. I want to hear from you. I want to hear whether you're enjoying it or where we can improve. And I can take the hits. So let me know. If you don't like something, say it straight. Now let's get into it. Joining us now on Open Book is Jim Lampley.

He's a Hall of Fame sports gasser, and he's now an author. The title of the book is It Happened, a uniquely lucky life in sports television. But I have to say this from a distance around. I'm a huge fan. I'm a fan boy of yours because I love your broadcasting. I love your insights. And I learned so much in this book, not only about sports and things that I witness as a kid or witness even today, but I learned a lot about you. So you've been the voice

behind some of the most unforgettable moments in sports. And you can hear that voice in the book. So before we get into it, tell us about Jim Lampley. Why did you go into this career of yours? Why go into sports television? Forts television was sort of my birthright from the beginning. My father died when I was five years old. My wife loves to say, all of your stories. begin with the same set of words. Those words are, my father died when I was five years old. I was six when my mother sat me down very explicitly and concertedly to watch a sports event on television. It just happened that the sports event she chose for initiating me was Sugar Ray Robinson versus Boba Olson on Gillette Friday Night Fights for the Middleweight Championship of the world. And so she

kind of guided me and schooled me into becoming a boxing fan, and she pointed out that day, by the way, watched Sugar Ray Robinson carefully. He's my favorite fighter because he dances while he fights, and he did. And that was expressive to me. But I spent the bulk of my childhood either in my great-grandmother's kitchen, or my grandmother's kitchen, I should say, my grandmother's kitchen in Hendersonville, North Carolina, or in my mother's kitchen in Pompano Beach and then later Miami, Florida, where she had gone to sell life insurance after my father died. And both my grandmother and my mother were nonstop,

inveterate storytellers, and they endowed me with all of their storytelling. And that was the guiding sort of narrative theme of my childhood. And they competed for my attention by telling me stories. So I can still hear them in my head. I know that I made that point in the book that they are talking to me all the time, even to this day and both have been gone for quite some time, but they're not gone from me. They still speak to me every day. I mean, it's such a beautiful part of the book, but you also talk about belonging.

And you also talk about it because some of me, look, when I started my career, I was blue-collar kid, it got to Wall Street, it was very green, I was somewhat insecure. It took a while for me to gain my confidence. I mean, you did everything. College Football Olympics, Wimbledon, the Riter Cup, boxing. When did the light bulb go off to like, you know, I belong here? When did you think that? Well, you know, I began my network television sports career by winning a talent hunt.

And my winning the talent hunt was completely counterintuitive and flew in the face of everything that ABC sports had said they were looking for. The overall narrative is that in attempting to cover the captivity of 11 Israeli athletes at Munich in 1972 and attempting to satisfy the storytelling demands of two reporters, Howard Cosell and Peter Jennings, ABC had learned a great deal that they didn't know before about the capabilities of wireless cameras and microphones. And after Munich was over, they came back to New York and there was a meeting among the sports division, the news division, and the engineering division. And the question was, now that we know that these signals will jump over concrete walls or that they'll go around metal barriers, what can we do with all that? And the thing that was first decided upon was we could put a reporter on the sideline of a football game. So that became the sideline of college football.

That became a 432 candidate talent hunt for the first person to be named as a, quote, college age reporter. That began the process by which virtually every live sports event you now watch, especially in conventional sports like football and basketball and baseball, has an on the field or sideline reporter. All that began with me. and a Stanford graduate named Don Tullifson in 1974. And I wound up staying on the sideline of college football for three years, bitching and moaning the whole time because I didn't want to be there.

I wanted to be moving on in my career. I wanted to be doing wide world of sports segments and going to the Olympics and doing the other things that I thought would be my right at ABC Sports. And eventually that's what happened. Eventually, I did do all of it. those things. And I got the opportunities that I craved. And one thing led to another. And ultimately, I spent more than 40 years traveling the planet, going to sports events, covering them for various networks, 14 Olympics, ABC, NBC, CBS, Turner, boxing eventually on HBO,

although the first person to assign me to boxing was a new incoming division president. at ABC Sports, the successor to Rune Arledge, who wanted to get rid of me and thought that that I would be such a stylistic misfit in boxing that he could easily get rid of me by making me embarrassed by putting me on the sport. And also that the audience would see me as CoSell's successor on boxing. And that would also ruin me. But the bottom line, as I survived the experience, and ultimately he wrote me a ticket to HBO, the most prestigious television network in the world, and I wound up calling fights on HBO for 31 years. So some of my friends have pushed back against the inclusion of the word lucky in the title. But I say, you know, when you,

when you're the one person eventually chosen from a 432 person talent hunt and you don't fit any of the credentials that they said they were looking for, you have to regard yourself as lucky. And I was. You know, there's a guy by the name a Rune Arlidge. And I know you remember Rune Arlish. Okay. He loved you, Jim. He loved you. And you worked along some of these giants, McKay, Jim McKay, Howard Coasell.

My first memory of Jim McKay was the 72 Munich Olympics where we had the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Do you remember this? Well, well, of course. And, you know, again, that what they learned from engineering during the that period of time led to my genesis on the network. But yes, I watched the captivity coverage and everything up until McKay's most poignant moment in a career filled with unforgettable poignant lines and moments. But they're all gone. They're all dead. Was the single most dramatic thing that Jim ever said on the air. And he delivered it with such matter of fact.

simplicity that it became iconic. And I deeply, deeply admired him. I admired him both from watching him on television and then from watching him at close range when we worked with each other. I don't think he deeply admired me. I don't think he liked the idea of my genesis at ABC Sports, but I couldn't blame him for that. I was ultimately going to be poaching on his territory. Well, you know, that's what, you know, the, that's what I, you know, the, it's very Shakespearean. You know this. You know, the younger man coming in, the older guy doesn't want to move. This is why, you know, you know, we, we have the older guys in Shakespeare eating the lunch of the younger people. But I know this because I was an English literature major in college, not a communications major, though I did ultimately go to graduate school in radio, television and motion pictures. But yes, I have an English literature background. And the most influential, professor I had in college was my Shakespeare professor, a guy named Peter McNamara.

Well, I mean, we both know human nature, which is so evident in your book. Talk about CoSell. So Howard CoSell, to me, reading about him, you know, I feel bad about saying this. I haven't really read the words Howard CoSell until Jim Lampley brings him back into my life, and it happened because CoSell was my upbringing. CoSell was Monday night football. CoSel was Saturday fights. CoSel was rocking and rolling with Muhammad Ali, who, you know, have you ever come to my office, Jim, there's a huge painting of Muhammad Ali in my office that I made the champ sign because I used to go to his charity outing out in Arizona.

I used to help raise money for Parkinson's research, and I loved the champ. But talk as it was about Cocell. This is a Jewish lawyer from New York, awkward. guy, incredible accent that is not your accent, by the way, or not a Jim McKay accent, yet he becomes one of the more famous sportscasters. I'll also little about him. So, Brun Arledge, before he moved to ABC and became president of ABC Sports, and eventually president of ABC Sports and ABC News, before all of that, Rune Arledge's executive position in television was that he was head of children's programming at NBC.

And when he was head of children's programming at NBC, Rune would take a limousine into Manhattan from Westchester County on Saturday mornings to go and stand in the studio and supervise the feeds of children's shows. And when he was taking that ride into the limousine on Saturday mornings, he became acquainted. with a Little League Baseball Radio Show that was being conducted on a, I think, a Scarsdale radio station by an attorney named Howard Kose. And Kosell literally had a Little League Baseball show.

In fact, there was a later on executive at HBO, Steve Schaeffer, a big-time executive at HBO, who was one of the ballplayers that Koselle covered, and Schaeffer would do a great invitation. Little Stevie Sheffer playing for Yeshiva, et cetera, et cetera. But that was where Arledge heard the voice. And when he heard the voice and the unique delivery and the unique cadence of all that, somewhere he's stashed in his mind, I can do something with that. Maybe I can do something.

That's really interesting that this guy is making it that way. And so when he became president of BBC sports, he reached out and made CoSell a figure in his sports division so that he could have that voice, that very distinctive delivery and cadence and accent and voice that CoSell had. I hear the voice. I see my mother's shag rug Lampley. I see the bell bottoms. You know, I see the walnut paneling of my youth. Carol Brady has called Jim Lampley and as for the walnut paneling back when I hear CoSalle's voice. I was eventually chosen at ABC to be the Cub reporter on his magazine show. And it was a Saturday afternoon magazine show called Sports Beat. The fundamental content of Sportsbeat was that every week Howard would do an in-studio interview with Bowie Kuhn. Al Davis, a couple of other guys who were his close compadres in sports.

And somebody had to go out and do a feature piece. Somebody had to travel for the show to have legs, as it were. And I was the person who did that. So we had offices very close to each other on the 12th floor. And I would go to the office two or three days a week and sit and wait and listen for the moment when Cocell would step out of his office to where the secretary sat and say, hired, promoted, paid a six-figure salary, it's insane. No talent whatsoever.

This is a travesty. What is Roon thinking about? That was one version of Cocell's take on Jim Lampley. Then there was another version, which was, you know, the kid down the hall, is the only one here who's capable of completing a coherent sentence. None of those other morons, not little Jimmy, our host only shorter, or Frank Gifford, the Golden Boy, none of those people can actually speak English, but Lampley can. So it depended on what day it was and what I was doing and what he was doing, which of those two versions would be delivered.

but I heard them both on a pretty regular basis from down the hall. Martha listens to her favorite band all the time. Jim. Even sleeping. So when they finally went on tour, Martha bundled her flight and hotel on Expedia to see them live. She saved so much she got to see close enough to actually see and hear them. Sort of. You were made to scream from the front row.

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I'm waiting patiently for Sports Illustrated. I'm getting a bowl of cereal in the morning gym and I'm opening up the back of the daily news so I can look at Bill Gallo's cartoons. I'm shoveling in the Apple Jacks. And I'm watching you guys and loving you guys and living vicariously through these great athletes. Let's go to HBO boxing, by the way, which is another thing that my brother and I pestered my father, who was a crane operator. We had to get HBO in the house. Oh, gosh. HBO and a pain and a bird of seller.

Yeah. It's too bad. Yeah, but I mean, we were addicted to HBO boxing. So tell us a little bit of that HBO boxing and interacting with guys like Ali and Tyson and Foreman and May. whether. Well, I was assigned to boxing at ABC Sports by Arledge's successor in the sports division when Arledge became president of news and eventually a new ownership. Capital City's broadcasting decided it's crazy for somebody to be president of both sports and news. Rune, which one do you choose? Of course, he chose news. They took another guy from the stations division, Dennis Swanson,

first person who had, by the way, given Oprah Winfrey a talk show at WLS in Chicago. That was his identity and cachet at the network. But they put him in charge of the sports division. And he arrived at the sports division with one basic predilection, which is, who is Jim Lampley and how do I get rid of him? So he began setting about trying to assign me to the things that he thought would most make me uncomfortable. and that way he was going to get rid of me. And he assigned me to boxing right away. A, I would be seen as Cocell's successor.

B, I was a kind of semi-preppy, spit and polished kid from University of North Carolina. What in the world was I going to know about boxing? I certainly wasn't urban like Howard. And nobody understood or realized that my mother had assigned me to watch boxing and that the first event she had ever sat me down to watch was a boxing match. So I began to be schooled by a network executive named Alex Wallow, a Greenwich, Connecticut product who was like you in love with boxing. And he began to groom me to be a blow-by-blower announcer. And I think he did a pretty good job of grooming me to be a blow-by-blown announcer, because after a few months of that, and

Benna Swanson was at wits end because he was not succeeding in getting me to leave the network. And in fact, I was getting some good reviews as the boxing blow-by-blow guy. Then I finally did walk away from my ABC contract. I went to work for CBS-owned and operated stations, K-CBS TV, in Los Angeles, and I had a window within the contract under which I could do boxing for somebody. And lo and behold, HBO came along. So I received an offer to call boxing matches on the most prestigious boxing television network, HBO, as an unexpected consolation prize for basically getting canned at ABC. And my first several fights at ABC were Tyson's first several television network appearances.

That was why HBO wanted me. I now had an affiliation with Tyson on the air. I had been covering his fights. see that the relationship was positive and good. And so I moved to HBO at that point to call boxing matches in 1988. And of course, early 1990 is when Mike was knocked out by Buster Douglas in Tokyo. And that was the first time when I was really stuck for an answer on the air. What am I going to say about this? The second time was when George Foreman knocked out Michael Moore to become a 45-year-old heavyweight champion. And that is the moment when I said,

it happened. It happened. And that was because Foreman had told me exactly how it was going to happen. And what he did in the ring mimicked everything he had said. It's so many great, amazing stories in here. 14 Olympics had to be surreal. What's the Olympic memory that still gives you chills? Well, two. And they're both in the book. The very first Olympic event that I ever attended live was Franz Klammer's downhill in Innsbruck, Austria in 1976, which I think is probably still the greatest and most charismatic alpine ski race one. I watched that on a 13-inch Sony Triniton in my bedroom, and I was supposed to be in bed. I was 12 years old, and my brother and I shared a bedroom. We had a 13-inch Sony

Trin de Jong that I bought with the money from my paper out. And I watched Franz Klamer do that and the call on that. Well, let's tell your followers that they have to now buy my book to understand the graphic details of how that run looked the way it looked and the decision that Klamer made going into the starting shack as to how he could conceivably win the race. And one of the things I learned that day, which I still chuckle about this day, is that you think you're going to watch a ski race on the mountain. You don't. You feel it. You hear it. You respond to all of the atmospherics, but you certainly don't see it other than maybe a moment when somebody goes racing by. And that's something I learned that day watching Clummer win that downhill. But that was one. And then the other, of course, is the miracle on ice. I was not supposed to be at the miracle on ice. I had other responses. I was in a tape room editing a story about all of the political and organizational

of peoples that had gone on in Lake Placid. And the phone rang what was called the red phone. The red phone was the Arledge phone. I'd been at ABC six years at that point. I had never seen a red phone ring. And the red phone rang and it was Arledge and he said, what are you doing? And I told him. and he said, drop that, leave that with the editor, get over to the arena.

I think something unusual is going to go on in this hockey game between the United States and the Soviet Union. Now, millions of Americans think that they watched the hockey game live. They did not. They saw it on tape because it was scheduled for 5 o'clock Eastern Time. And it had been scheduled for 5 o'clock Eastern Time all along. when it was essentially a nameless game. Nobody knew which two teams would be appearing.

It was a stepping stone toward the metal round. But eventually it came down to the United States versus the Soviet Union for what amounted to a semi-final because the winner of this game was going to go into the final on Sunday morning. This was Friday evening. And when Arledge and the United States Olympic Committee went to the Hockey Federation to ask that the game be moved from 5 o'clock to 8 o'clock so that the American audience could see it in prime time, the Russians exercise their right to say, uh-oh, no way. Game has been on the schedule for 5 o'clock ever since the beginning of the games. game is going to be played at five o'clock. So I'm in a tape room editing a piece.

My associate director and I are working, et cetera. We've got a little monitor on top of the tape bay where we're watching the hockey game as it takes place. And at the end of the first period, Mark Johnson, who is the hottest goal score in the world for two weeks, got loose in the Russian goal, or in the Russian end, I should say. and and slipped the puck under Bladislot Tretiak's glove to make the score two to two. Tie the game. Unexpected tie at the end of the first period.

And at that moment, Victor Tickanov, the Russian coach, pulled Tretiak, yanking from goal, the greatest goalie in the history of the sport, arguably, who had carried them to every world championship and gold medal for the preceding 10 or 12 years. He yanked Tretiak and put in the backup goalie, Anatoly Mishkin. And the game went on. And the red phone rang. And I picked up the red phone because both the tape editor and the associate director pointed to me like, you know, that's got to be for you. And it was Arledge.

And he said, what are you doing? And I told him, he said, let that wait, put that to rest, go to the hockey arena and get in. Because I have a hunch something strange is going to happen in this game tonight. And we need an interview to take us off the air. And the last thing I said to him was, Rune, I don't have the right credential to get into the hockey game. Now, this is only eight years after Munich. We were still in the situation where if you didn't have the right credential to get into an Olympics event, you weren't going to get in. And the last thing Rune said to me was, you'll get in, clump hung up the phone.

And I went over to the hockey arena, and I found the high school hockey coach whose job it was to supervise the arena. And I had met him a few days before because my agent was. a hockey agent and he let me in. And I wound up watching the last two periods of the game there and then eventually doing an interview that night to take us off the air with Jim Craig and Mike Arrucioni outside of a restaurant in Lake Placib. After the biggest upset in the history of team sports. Never going to be reading it. I love rereading it in the book. And Mike Arruzioni to us Italian Americans out here on Long Island, he was he was the man. You know, we had, we were, we were We're wearing his jersey, and I remember having such anxiety watching that, you know.

And, of course, Al Michaels famous cadence, do you believe in miracles? So, you know, I could do a two-hour podcast of you because it's just amazing, but we, unfortunately, we, a little time constrained. So I'm down to the five words. And so in my podcast, Jim, me and my producers, we pick out five words. We want our author to say a sentence about the word, just to get their reaction. So if I say the word broadcasting, you say... Broad audience, signals being sent out over electronic waves. And it first began with the transformation of Morse code signals into radio news in the 19-teens before 1919.

Yeah. It's, it's great. You know, I hear broadcasting, I think personalities. And I think of people like you. I think about an electronic process. Yeah. It's a great broadcaster. That was what I taught in evolution of storytelling and American electronic news media here at the University of North Carolina.

I taught for five semesters after I came here to Chapel Hill. And whenever you say broadcasting, my mind goes back to day one. And what I was teaching to those students. Yeah. I say the word sport. You say what? From the beginning of mankind, going back to the days of ancient Egypt and eventually Greece and Rome, there have been organized contests of physical prowess, physical skill. And ultimately, they came to be known as sports. I don't know how they became known as sports, but I know that they weren't called that at the beginning because whatever they were called, it was. in Roman or Greek or Phoenician or some other language that preceded the preeminence of English,

but in English, it sports. How about the word boxing? The purest sport, the most honest sport, as my great friend Tom Houser has titled a recent book. The sport that tells us the most about who we are, what we can endure, what we can endure what we are like when confronted with danger and potential damage at the hands of another human being. All of that we learn from boxing. And it's my favorite sport. Legacy. Legacy. So I don't think of that in terms of me other than to say, my father died when I was five years old. My mother raised me.

My grandmother taught me how to tell stories. I am their legacy. And I attempt through the things that I do to honor all three of them for everything they gave to me and talked to me when I was growing up. Last word. I'm going to give you the last words, sir. Jim Lampley. One of the luckiest people who has ever lived. on this particular planet.

A person who, because of the choices of others, not his own choice, was given all the opportunities he would most have dreamed of, up to an including calling boxing matches, up to an including going to 14 Olympics, up to an including that my then-eight-year-old daughter was babysat for an intense,

entire day at the United States Boxing Writers Association dinner in New York by Muhammad Ali. That Muhammad Ali was my absolutely incomparable lifetime hero. He had been my hero when his name was Cassius Clay. That the very first live prize fight I ever attended was Cassius Clay versus Sunny Liston, February 25, 1964 in Miami Beach. My life reads like a fictional story. then, you know, I wouldn't blame anybody for buying my book and reading the book and thinking to themselves at some point. Oh my gosh, did he make this up? Or is this really true? It's really true.

You know, when Stefan said to me that you want to come on my show, I was very flattered. So I consider myself lucky as well. But I lived it with you. So I was so excited to have you come on the show because I know that you have a lot. I mean, I know you feel blessed and you should and God bless you. And you've been a great contributor to our zeitguests and our culture. But I lived it with you. You made it part of our life stories.

And you need to know that. And you need to know that you have very grateful fans out there, Jim. And I'm one of them. A few years ago, I would never have thought that I would say, Anthony Scaramucci, I love you. But I love you for saying that. And I love you for. I love you back. Your response to my book.

Yeah, I love you back. I really appreciate you joining us. Hall of Fame Sports Guester, now author, Jim Lampley. Title of the book, It Happened. A Uniquely Lucky Life in Sports Television. And let me tell you, we are going to promote this. We have 200,000 followers on our YouTube channel, and I've got over a million and other sites.

We're going to push this book very hard for you, sir. And I really appreciate you joining us today. Thank you so much, Anthony. I appreciate it. You know, I've really enjoyed this and we'll look forward to coming back anytime. I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was Open Book. Thank you so much for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends and make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast.

While you're there, please leave us a rating or review. If you want to connect with me or chat more about the discussions, it's at Scaramucci on X or Instagram. I'd love to hear from you. I'll see you back here next week.