The Bill Simmons Podcast - Ep. 77: Jim Lampley

Episode Date: March 16, 2016

HBO and The Ringer's Bill Simmons welcomes fellow HBOer Jim Lampley to discuss his Mount Rushmore of boxing, Mike Tyson's self-awareness (24:00), the current top fighters (30:00), Floyd Mayweather's legacy (35:00), boxing vs. UFC (41:00), concussions in boxing (52:00), the burden of being the first sideline reporter (1:00:00), and all things Howard Cosell (1:06:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Over 4,500 words of Ringer newsletter material comes right to your email. It's free. Do it. And we're off. Yeah. Clear enough for you. Well, this is exciting. It is for me.

Can you picture us rolling? Mr. Jim Lampley, how are you? I'm good. How are you, Bill? We're teammates now. We are. We're met under a common watchword. We play for the same giant corporation.

Yeah. Well, you've been, you're one of the staples. How many years at HBO? It will be 30 in early 2018. So 28 years at this point. I think you and Barry Tompkins have announced every big boxing match that ever happened with one exception of Al Michaels doing Hagler-Hearns.

Well, and there were some big fights on Showtime. I mean, I think that Steve Albert would filter into the mix somewhere because of the number of fights that took place at Showtime. But I think, you know, Barry and I have been particularly privileged in terms of getting to call big fights. So, all right, let's go Mount Rushmore. Mount Rushmore of? The top four. Boxers or? No, no, for the best fights.

Oh, the best fights. Let me guess. Can I guess the top four? Sure, go ahead. Chavez-Taylor has to be top four. Great fight. Yeah, definitely. In fact, the Legendary knights episode regarding chavez taylor

is to me the best of all the legendary knights episodes tells you everything you need to know about boxing from a human standpoint uh and witheringly so i still feel like it was a good stoppage i don't know how the referee you know is going to know there's two seconds I mean, you guess you could say like he could have heard the tap at 10 seconds. But if he's watching the guy and trying to save the guy's life, I don't think he has a clock in his head at that point. Well, of course, there's a red light that comes on in the corner. And it would appear from his position that he could have seen that. But at the end of the day, it was a fascinating human situation because when Richard Steele stopped that fight, there was an instant debate that began. Okay, did he have the best to service it, given that the fighter in question, Meldrick Taylor, I think most people agreed with you that Richard had made a humane stoppage and had done what ultimately could be seen as the right thing.

And then not too long after that, the following year, Richard Steele stopped a fight between Mike Tyson and Razor Ruddock in Las Vegas. Oh, yeah. In which Ruddock was standing up, had not been down. Tyson had landed a couple of shots in the middle of the ring, but Ruddock did not appear to be in any big trouble. And everybody in the arena wondered, what a minute. Why in the world did he stop that fight? And the moment that Richard stopped the Tyson-Ruddock fight at what seemed to be the

wrong moment to do so, then that called back into question what he had done with Chavez-Taylor. And a whole lot of people in the ringside media core who had at one point said, oh, Richard did the right thing, then turned around and said, no, he was doing business. And the business, of course, was Richard's wife had at one point been employed by Don King. He was known to be personally close with Don King. Julio Cesar Chavez was a Don King commodity. So you had some questions now.

It raised a lot of questions. And it bedeviled Richard for the rest of his refereeing career. Now, this is a Hall of Fame referee. Yeah. But every single time that I was in Vegas and saw him introduced following the Tyson-Ruddock stoppage, he was booed. And ultimately, he stopped doing it, I think probably because he didn't want to hear the boos anymore. Foreman more? Definitely.

And there's a huge personal impact there because George was my friend and my expert commentator in addition to being who he was. But I always say to people that I think you have to look very far and wide in the sports world to find a greater accomplishment than to win the heavyweight championship twice, 20 years apart, as two different fighters and two different human beings. Because George was different in every way in 1994 from the guy who had been the champion in 1974. And he was particularly different in the way that he fought. In his first career, he was all intensity and all fire. In his second career, he could have fought in pajamas. You know, he shambled around the ring in this extremely relaxed style and seemed to throw punches only when he wanted to.

But it was, you know, it was something that worked very well for him. And he legitimately won the heavyweight championship twice. So yeah, that's definitely one of them. I always thought that there was a chance he might have been replaced by a different human being and that the 1970s George Foreman is still like in a basement somewhere. It is like a personality transplant. It truly is. It really does feel like two separate human beings. Right.

So when you're, you obviously love George Foreman, he's your friend, you did boxing with him and you're watching him win the title, but you're trying to be balanced as the play-by-play guy. Well, I mean. What was that like? The great story is that I had spoken with George about the fight for months, and the dialogue was always the same. George, how are you going to find Michael Moore? Vander Holyfield couldn't find him in the ring. He's a moving southpaw. He has a kind of mobility that you haven't had to deal with.

How are you going to make an impact here? And he would say, you watch. At some point late in the fight, he's going to come and stand in front of me and let me knock him out. And he said that to me at least a half dozen times before the fight. And I thought, well, that's a pipe dream. You know, that's his fantasy. And of course, you know, he couldn't be going through what he's going through and preparing for the fight if he didn't somehow believe that. And you would think that in preparation for calling that fight, I would at least give some credence to the notion that maybe this miracle could happen and that it would be useful to have something really meaningful to say about it, but no. I was so dismissive of George's chances that I did not think about it in any way. And, of course, for eight or nine rounds, Moore is batting him around the ring like a tennis ball. And then all of a sudden, things begin to change.

And sure enough, just as George predicted, Moore comes and stands in front of him and lets him knock him out. And as George is going to the neutral corner and Joe Cortez is picking up the count and Moore is lying on the canvas, I'm sitting there thinking, why didn't I prepare for this? How could I be so stupid that I didn't think of something, a capsule line, something that takes care of this moment? And I'm struggling for what to say. And the words just popped out. It happened. It happened. And what I was thinking when I was saying it happened, it happened. You think about what George said? What George had said to me. Exactly. What George had said to me all those months. It happened.

It happened. And in 30 years of calling fights, that's my most memorable call. That's the one that fans are most likely to mimic or repeat or remember as something that I said. That's awesome. It is. What about, I don't remember if you called this, but I would say there's an 80% chance you did Tyson Douglas. I did call Tyson Douglas. So you're in Japan. Yeah. That's got to be in the top four. Well, it's way up there. Yeah. And it's definitely, I mean, I think your three Rushmore selections so far, they're all there. They're very accurate. The thing about Tyson Douglas, of course, is that last year when I was preparing to call Mayweather Pacquiao, media people asked me over and over and over,

will this be the most important or the most significant fight that you've called? And over and over and over, I said, I don't know. I don't know until they get into the ring and do whatever it is they're going to do, because none of us really know. And the proof of that is that to this moment, the most significant prize fight I've ever called was an utterly perfunctory Mike Tyson title defense in Tokyo against a guy who didn't even have a breath of a chance, and to which most American newspapers, who still had boxing writers at the time, didn't bother to send anybody because of the cost of sending somebody to Tokyo for a fight, the outcome of which was never in doubt in any way, shape, and form. And I'll never forget the quiet in the arena.

You could hear the slapping of their shoes on the canvas in the first round and the degree to which Douglas was completely in control from the opening bell. Land the jab, land the jab. Let's drop in a right hand here. Oh yeah, that works too. And, you know, by the fifth round or so, Larry, Ray and I, our jaws were dropped. And because of the quiet crowd and the bizarre atmosphere, 11 o'clock on a Sunday that you would normally deliver for such an event here in the United States with a loud crowd. These people didn't make any noise at all. And I'll never forget, there was a great sports publication back in the day called The National. I was going to say, that's the only reason I knew about Buster Douglas was they had a huge profile of him before that fight. In the National.

Remember that? And I was like, oh, this seems like a sweet guy. I hope he doesn't get killed. And the guy who wrote television criticism for the National. Norman Chad wrote on Monday, greatest sports telecast of the modern era, professionals at work demonstrating that you don't have to oversell. You don't have to project all of this faux excitement. They simply sat back almost as though they were whispering to us and gave us a constantly understated, beautiful telecast.

And I'm thinking, Norman, that was an accident. That was not planned. That just happened by nature of the chemistry of the event. That's funny because when I started doing the NBA show for ESPN, my biggest problem the first couple weeks or so, we're in that quiet stage, right? And then it's like, all right, guys, 10, 9, and then you're on. And it's just quiet. It's like silent. And watching like magic just be able to come to life and have this energy, I'm like, how do I do that? Is there a button you press?

And like you just kind of have to learn how to do it because the environment brings you down. So I can imagine like calling a boxing thing like that would be kind of unusual. It was quite unusual and one of a kind. I mean, I've never had another boxing telecast that was in any way atmospherically like Tyson Douglas. I mean, they must have been at least making noise when he got knocked down finally. It's not their nature. It's not the way they approach a sports event. They could have been at an opera.

They could have been at the ballet. They sat silently. And at one point during the telecast. They didn't yell or go, whoa. Larry speculated during the telecast. Are they being silent because they're shocked at what they're seeing? Are they being silent because they don't really understand what they're seeing? Or are they being silent just because it's their nature at an indoor event to be silent?

And I think really it was the latter, not the first two. I think it was just that's the way they are and that's the way they watch that event. That was either my sophomore or junior year in college. February 10, 1990. Sophomore year. Yeah. We were at a party that we were actually throwing the party in somebody's apartment off campus, and the TV was on with the fight.

But, you know, party, things going. By the fifth round, every guy was over where the TV was. By the seventh round, the music was off and we're listening to the audio. And that was one of those I remember where I was events, which I don't think happens a lot in sports. And it was also one of the all-time word-of-mouth events. I mean, you can only imagine how many telephone calls there were from one guy to another saying, are you watching this? You wouldn't believe what's going on. Because that was the best pay-per-view, it was HBO.

It was HBO, It was HBO. That's right. It was regular HBO. And it's kind of a blessing that it went to the 10th round because I think there were probably quite a number of people who tuned in in the 6th, 7th, 8th, or 9th having been told by somebody in their network of friends, you've got to see what's going on here. I remember at some point during the fight, I realized, like I was just watching his corner and it seemed so chaotic

and it was clear that he just had like his two buddies like basically at that point Aaron Snowell and Jay Bright and you could just feel his off the moment when they brought out the rubber glove filled with water to try to treat

the swelling on his eye and Ray Leonard was saying oh my gosh I've never filled with water to try to treat the swelling on his eye. You thought that was a bad sign? And Ray Leonard was saying, oh my gosh, I've never seen anything like this, you know? And I think Larry used the line, it's amateur hour in Mike's corner. Yeah, that was terrible. I mean, that played a big part of it. But Douglas was in awesome shape and everything came together for him. Well, that was, you know, the big night of Buster's life.

And everything came together for him. And of course, he proved in his next fight against Evander Holyfield that he was not, on a human level, capable of handling that responsibility over a long period of time. I still think that's the greatest upset of my lifetime. I'm only 46, but I don't think I've ever been more shocked by anything than Tyson losing. It just felt like he was never going to lose. I didn't have all the inside info of all the stuff that was going on with him personally. The way the Jets put the Colts away in Super Bowl III was shocking. Yes, I don't remember that.

But I don't believe it was as shocking an upset as Douglas over Tyson. I think that was the most extreme upset that you and I have been alive to see in sports. Like when Ronda Rousey lost, everyone kind of reacted, oh my God, this is, there was no way. Tyson was a 30 to one favorite. You know, it was inconceivable. Like you wouldn't have even bet the other side. Well, and Tyson had had a much longer period of time

and a far greater number of fights in which to build up that aura of invincibility. Ronda got her aura of invincibility from four or five appearances. Mike, you know, had cleaned out the heavyweight division to a certain degree and had won fights on ABC and HBO. And, you know, Mike had been around a while before that went down. So I'm going to say for the fourth one, and I'm not 100% sure you called this one either, but I assume you did.

The first Tyson-Holyfield fight. No, that was on Showtime. So I wanted to know that one. The first Tyson-Holyfield fight. So no, I did not call that. So I have to cut that down to 98% of you and Barrett Topkins. But it was a very meaningful fight. There's your Steve Albert call, as a matter of fact.

Steve Albert, shout out. Yep. Hello, Steve. How are you? But yeah, he called both of fact. Steve Albert, shout out. Yep. Hello, Steve. How are you? But yeah, he called the first. He called both of the Tyson-Holyfield encounters. All right. So then I'm going to go Corrales-Costillo.

Well, that was on Showtime also. All of them? Yeah, that was not. Now, I have the entire Gatti-Ward trilogy. All right, I'll go Ward-Gatti. The entire Barrera-Morales trilogy. There are quite a number of tremendous fights, but Max Kellerman, whom you and I both greatly respect, believes that Corrales-Castillo was the greatest fight of the last 20 years.

I actually agree with that. And if you watch it, it's pretty hard to go away from that. And again, there's a story about the referee in Chavez-Taylor, what Tony Weeks has to deal with in the 10th round of Corrales Castillo. I don't know if any referee has ever had to make so many critical decisions within such a short time frame as Tony had to make during that round. It built his reputation as a referee. And ultimately, it helps to make even more colorful the dramatic outcome of the fight so is that four did we leave somebody out yeah and that's a pretty good

mount rushmore and i don't think the guys at time warner slash hbo are going to be too terribly upset that we include corrales castillo i can't believe that wasn't hbo well uh i think retroactively we should make it you should just call think retroactively we should make it. You should just call it retroactively. We need you involved in that one. Kraus Castillo was amazing. I mean, that was like. I was sitting at home and watching it on TV just the way you were.

Just, oh my God. The Tyson thing. So you got, if you started HBO in 1988, you caught it kind of when it was starting to peter out a little bit, although we didn't realize yet. Well, actually, it starts before then because I first started calling fights in 1986 at ABC. Oh, you had a couple. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The reason that I was asked to call fights at ABC was that Cosell had stopped in 83.

Tex Cobb. They had cast about trying to find somebody to be the regular fight caller. Michaels did a brilliant job with Hagler Hearns, but his schedule was such that there was no way he was going to be able to do all the Saturday afternoon fights on Wide World of Sports. They brought down a guy named Don Chevrier from Canada for a while. Keith Jackson called some fights. I happened to be in an executive suite watching a closed circuit feed of Hagler Hearns talking to an ABC sports executive named Alex Wallow, who was in charge of the boxing telecast. He's a good guy. And I was standing and

talking to Alex and about midway through that, you know, unbelievable three round extravaganza, he turned to me and said, wow, you know a lot about boxing. And I said, well, when I was a kid, it was kind of my favorite sport. And he instantly said, how come you never told us? Why have you never said anything about this? And I just gave him a blank look, like, surely you know the answer to that. When Cosell was Cosell, he called all the fights. He didn't have an expert commentator.

Nobody else worked with him. And Howard was jealous enough of his turf that I always figured if I uttered the word boxing anywhere near the building, I would be erased. Yeah. That would be the end of that. You know, so, you know, I did all the things that I did in the first several years at ABC Sports and I never said a word about boxing. So wait, when did you start at ABC? 74. Oh, 74.

So I've been there almost a dozen years by the time Alex Waller says to me, you know, how come you didn't tell us about boxing? And they asked me to go down to call a fight into a can, call a fight into a tape machine in Atlantic City. And the reason for the urgency was we've just signed to a contract this 19-year-old heavyweight from upstate New York who is going to be the next sensation of the division, and his name is Mike Tyson. So the first fight I ever called on television was Mike Tyson versus Jesse interviewer, I was trying to drive his nose bone into his brain. Customato taught me that when you throw the uppercut, you should be trying to drive the other guy's nose bone into his brain.

And and so, you know, a star was born. The personality began to emerge. And I called his first, I think, five fights on ABC. I used to know this stuff, but I was going to guess with Alex. Alex was my favorite color commentator. Oh, Alex was brilliant. Alex was brilliant. He was so good.

And I owe him everything with regard to my boxing commentary career. Because before I ever called a fight, before I went to Glens Falls, New York to call Mike Tyson and Jesse Ferguson, Alex would make me come to his apartment, which was five blocks away from my apartment in New York City. And I would have to go for three, four hours at a time over and over and over to watch boxing. And Alex instructed me on how to see a fight. And I mean, literally all the tiny details of,

okay, watch when the southpaw faces off against the conventional fighter, how their front feet touch. Watch the number of times that the front feet overlap and one guy steps on top of the other guy's foot. Watch how they grapple for the space and each guy tries to get his front foot outside of the other guy.

Watch how when they're on the inside against the ropes, a guy will hold on the side away from where the referee is standing. All sorts of details. You know, what corner men do, what cut men do, how they do it, etc., etc. He schooled me in every detail of seeing fights before I was allowed to actually call one on the air. So, you know, to this day, I can't call a fight without thinking of Alex because he mentored me in how to do it.

Wow. I'm 41 years in because I'm a child of the 70s and Ali was on World World of Sports and they would show either the replays of his fights or some crappy fight he would have. And that's when I started going all the way through. And Tyson, you know, to me, that's the I started and going all the way through and Tyson you know that to me that's the pinnacle of just well you know the Tyson era which ultimately becomes the Tyson Holyfield yes Lennox Lewis era right is one of the two richest most people call it the second richest era in the history of heavyweight boxing the richest era of heavyweight boxing of course

is Muhammad Ali Joe Frazierzier, George Foreman, all the other guys who surrounded them at that time. And if you're a baby boomer like me, you have this sort of instinctive belief that, oh, that's the way the division is always supposed to be. I mean, I can't tell you how many times people have come to me over the years and say, why doesn't the heavyweight division have the kind of glamour it did when I was a kid and I was watching Ali and Foreman and Frazier and all that, and I have to say to them, well, that was only one time in 125 years of gloved prize fighting. Most of the time, it's the way you've seen it recently, where there's one overwhelmingly dominant champion and a bunch of guys who are sort of satellites to him who don't have identity and none of them can actually beat him.

You know, Jack Dempsey went three years without defending the championship because there was nobody legitimate for him to fight. Joe Lewis fought what ultimately writers called the bum of the month club because none of them could compete with him. And, you know, that's how he racked up 25 consecutive title defenses in the heavyweight division. He didn't face the kind of competition that guys faced in either the Ali era or the Tyson Lewis Holyfield era. The Tyson, I think for me, was just—I've never been more excited to watch, you know, in the hour leading up to a fight for any other boxer since Ali than Tyson. Just like, oh, my God, we get another one. Well, there was that intensity. There was that palpable sense of menace.

It was so threatening. The studied simplicity of the guy who wore a towel with a hole in it around his neck and had no socks. Everybody loved that. It was was though Mike had come straight from the street to the ring. And what ultimately it leads to is, I think, one of the most misunderstood personalities of all time. No question. Because, you know, the machine around him ultimately creates the notion of the baddest man on the planet.

And Mike feels an instinctive need to live up to the title of the baddest man on the planet. And Mike feels an instinctive need to live up to the title of the baddest man on the planet, when really who he truly was and is now again is the shy kid on the roof with the pigeons. The kid who's a little bit afraid of social contact, a little bit afraid of public exposure, and to a certain degree just wants to be left alone and who has an innate gentility that would never have fit with the persona of the baddest man on the planet. And now Mike is able to be himself, but he had to fight a long battle. He had to give up a lot, and he had to lose several times to get to the point where people could accept the fact that he wasn't the person they thought he was. It's interesting because I always thought he was so much more self-aware than he got credit for, even as all that stuff was going on.

He kind of understood he was kind of stuck in the place that just the world had decided he's our big, bad, menacing boxer. So then he would kind of try to play it up sometimes because that's what people wanted from him. I always felt like he always understood what was going on. And that's what made him so interesting. I think he had enormous self-awareness, which to a certain degree he hid from the public because it wouldn't fit his situation.

And then when you get to the stage of his career where everybody focuses on the fact that he bit Evander Holyfield's ear. He actually bit Evander's ear twice in that fight. But it wasn't just that he bit Evander Holyfield's ear. He hit the referee in Scotland. He tested positive for marijuana in Michigan. He tried to break Franz Botta's arm. He ran across the stage and bit Lennox Lewis in the leg. I could cite various other incidents. Yeah.

He was trying to get out of boxing. He was trying to bring an end to his career because he didn't want to face the ultimate humiliation of actually having to go in the ring against Lennox and be embarrassed the way that he knew he would. And I used to say this on talk radio shows to people. I would say, Mike is trying to get himself banned from boxing. Mike doesn't really want to be the best heavyweight in the world anymore. You have to understand that what he's doing is not what you think it's about.

And people would say to me, how can you say that? And Mike would kill you if he heard you say that, et cetera. And I would say to them, no, no, Mike would pat me on the back for saying this because he knows this a lot better than you do. And, and several years went by during his showtime period when we didn't see each other and we didn't speak to each other. But one day I interviewed him for a television show that we were doing at HBO. It was the first time I'd seen him in a long time. And he turned to me just before we did the interview, and he said, you know, the guy that I used to be back in the day when you and I were together,

I don't even know who that guy is. And that validated everything that I had thought all those years about him. And yes, you're right. He had self-awareness that the public didn't see. You were talking about the ali era i think the more we get away from it it feels like a historical fluke because it wasn't just the guys everyone always mentions the same guys right it's like ali frazier foreman norton

but you also had this whole second level of dudes and that's the reason why i think ali is in the shape he's in now because from that foreman fight the frazier fight but then he fought all these other fights against guys like shavers ron lyle had him you know he was ahead on the cards in the 11th round and spinks twice and he had this all these other second generation guys who was actually a pretty good era for heavyweight boxing everyone's like holmes who did he fight? Like, John Tate was pretty good. Jerry Quarry was a real talent. Yeah.

Ernie Terrell was a real talent. You know, lots of these guys were very big punchers. Cleveland Williams was a legendary, you know, sort of jailhouse brawler puncher. Didn't he have a bullet in his, like, his ribs or something? He had a bullet hole in his belly. That's a problem for boxing, the body punches. Well, one of the things that the layman sometimes fails to get about boxing, you see the giant shot to the jaw and a guy goes down unconscious and you think,

okay, nothing hurts like head punches. Fighters will tell you nothing hurts like body punches. Body punches do way more damage to the fighter over the course of the fight in the ring than a few head shots here and there. They train themselves to take punches to the head. You can't train yourself to take a liver shot. You can't train yourself to be hit right on the kidney. You can't train yourself to take a shot right to the heart. And your internal organs suffer damage over a period of time.

Now, why is Ali the way he is right now? Well, first of all, all of us are born with a certain chemistry. All of us have a certain gene structure. A guy like George Foreman could have 80 fights, take tremendous punishment in the ring, didn't phase him one bit. You know, there's no slurring. There's no sign of any nervous disorder. There's nothing to show that George was in the ring for all of that havoc. Ali, different story.

Frazier, different story. Most of them are going to show the wear and tear. But my favorite body puncher who never gets mentioned ever in this discussion, and he didn't really last that long, but Jerry Cooney had a great liver punch. Jerry Cooney had a great left hook to the body. Was it me, Buckler? Tremendous. Listen. I love Jerry Cooney.

He just, bad time for him. I only saw him a couple times, but I think you would have to say Rocky Marciano was maybe the most effective body puncher ever in the heavyweight division. Because he won his fights with body punching. And, you know, he was a grinder who broke people up gradually over the course of the fight. Which guy scares you the most right now who's active and who's fighting? Well, I mean, I think, you know, there are two. I don't mean scare you personally, but just like when you watch, you're like, oh, God, he might kill somebody.

The two most dangerous fighters in the world are Gennady Golovkin and Sergey Kovalev. I always say, in instances where one fighter dies as the result of the action in the ring, usually two careers die. Because it's extremely difficult once you've been in the ring with somebody and he died to go back in and have the same kind of menace and the same kind of reckless abandon that you had before. Two people have done it, to my knowledge. One was Sugar Ray Robinson. Sugar Ray Robinson threw a left hook that led to the death of a fighter named Jimmy Doyle and went right past it. It never affected his career. He was the same Sugar Ray Robinson after Doyle died as he was before Doyle died. What did he have, like 250 fights? More than 200. Yeah. Sergey Kovalev has already killed a man. What?

He's already killed a former Russian amateur teammate of his named Roman Simikov. Kovalev won't talk about it. He'll say nothing about it. It was about, I don't know, 10 fights, 8, 10 fights ago, something like that. And just as was the case with Ray Robinson, Kovalev has gone right past that. It did not diminish his ring violence in any way. He's still just as violent a fighter as he was before that. And he's as capable of hurting you as any man alive, as is Golovkin. They both have tremendous power. They both have craft. And they both know how to do what they do in the ring.

I don't think Canelo fights. I know HBO really wants that Canelo Golovkin fight. I know they really, really want it. I know you want it. I know I want it. I think it's at least another year before Canelo gets in there. It's interesting. It's just such a bad matchup for him.

We just taped the next episode of the fight game today it airs uh tomorrow night on hbo and i asked so that'll be wednesday night that'll be when people are listening this that night fight game that's right all right march 16 so um i asked max kellerman i said at what point does ggg canelo like Mayweather Pacquiao before it, become not a giant attraction to which we're looking forward, but a millstone around the neck of the sport that demonstrates boxing's inability to get out of its own way. And his answer was, if it has not happened by the first weekend in May next year, Cinco de Mayo weekend next year. 2017. 2017. 2017. Then at that point, the sell-by date has passed, and the public will begin to get disgusted with the whole notion of seeing GGG Canelo,

because you'll begin to come to the conclusion that maybe it's not going to happen. Canelo says to me that he wants the fight. I hope he's telling the truth. You know damn good and well Gennady wants the fight. He's the larger man. So yes, it's the hope of everybody in the sport that it will take place. It is the fight. There is no other fight on the table that matches that for majesty, although Andre Ward versus Sergey Kovalev comes pretty close. It's just that Ward doesn't have the same kind of crowd appeal that Canelo has. And can can you imagine if ward you know most people don't follow boxing just for the big fights and that can you imagine like if ward was an nba player like let's say he was i don't know russell westbrook and he's just not playing and you don't know i guess he chose to be a little bit he's an

nba player who chooses to play only 25 games a year or something like that. Is that what you're saying? And he's just like, no, I'm going to leave again. Where are you going? No, I'm going to come back. That's basically an Andre Ward. He's a total perfectionist. Now, Andre's going to fight when every condition lines up in such a way that it satisfies him

that he has a fair enough playing field that he wants to fight. And if it's anything short of that, he's not going to. He describes that as principle. Some people describe it as reluctance to go ahead and ply his trade. I think it's his right and his privilege to protect his body in any way that he wants, but everybody has to respond in some way. He's no longer on the top five pound-for-pound list on the fight game because my point of view is you have to be more active. You have to be more interested in proving that you're one of the five top fighters in the sport or else you don't belong on the list.

And he would be number one on the list if he were fighting regularly because he hadn't lost a fight since he's 12 years old, and he has pretty much incomparable skills. But until Andre decides that all those skills deserve to be shown to the public on a regular basis, I can't rank him among the top five pound for pound. It's not much different than how Floyd played the last 10 years. I mean, Floyd always was trying to be in the best situation for him with his fights, but the difference is he would actually fight. Yeah. Floyd took the fights. He fought more frequently. He fought in an even more self-protective style than Andre. Yes. You know, Andre's an inside fighter. He wants to get in your chest and develop offense with odd, abrupt angles on the inside. No other fighter can do it exactly

the way he does. But he's in the pocket, so he's in harm's way. Floyd didn't stay in the pocket all that much. You know, it was hard to find him, so he wasn't going to get tagged as often as Andre's going to get tagged. Nobody can tag Andre solidly. That hasn't happened. But he still takes more punishment during a fight than Floyd did. Do you think Mayweather had a fight that people will be talking about 50 years from now? No. Isn't that weird? He's the best fighter of the last 12 years.

I can't really remember a single fight he had that I was excited during that much. I guess if there were people in this discussion who were alive when Willie Pepp was fighting, they could point to one or two and say, well, Pepp had a great fight against X. As a person who called both of the Castillo fights, I'll always remember the first Jose Luis Castillo fight as the fight in which Floyd was most threatened, you know, seemed to be in the most trouble. But none of his fights against top name opponents are truly memorable fights because his whole game was to let the air out of the balloon. You know, Floyd won his fights by eliminating any damage, any mayhem, any of the kind of stuff that make you and me put a fight on the Mount Rushmore of boxing. Yeah, I think when every boxer, they go away, you end up remembering not just the fights, but one or two pieces about what it was like to watch them fight, right?

And for me, seeing Floyd, I was lucky to see him in person a couple of times. And by the third round, the other guy would just kind of – Discouraged. He just kind of knew. He was like, I'm not going to be able to hit this guy. And you could just see his body change. And I think that's, for me, over and over again, Floyd sucked the life out of the other guy in a way I don't really remember,

considering he wasn't beating the living shit out of the guy, right? But it was just, it was almost like, not only are you not going to hit me, but I'm just going to repeatedly hit you in the face in a way that you're not going to get knocked out, but you probably will in a couple rounds. But your destiny is coming. And it would just kill the guy. You can feel it. People, hundreds, maybe thousands of people stopped me in the street, on airplanes, in shopping centers before last year's Mayweather-Pacquiao fight to say, I'm so excited about the fight. And you're like, wow. And I would say. Don't get too excited.

Why? Yeah. Tell me why. Well, I think it's going to be a great fight. Really? How many Floyd Mayweather fights have you seen? Have you ever seen a great fight that Floyd Mayweather was in? Yeah, yeah, but this is Pacquiao.

Well, five years ago, I would have agreed with you. But this Manny Pacquiao hasn't knocked anybody out since 2009. Yeah, yeah, but this is Pacquiao. Well, five years ago, I would have agreed with you. But this Manny Pacquiao hasn't knocked anybody out since 2009. Well, Marquez ruined him, too. Exactly what is it you're thinking of? Well, you know, when you get knocked out cold like that for a minute, I just don't think you're the same. I really don't.

I don't think you're ever the same after that. I know the argument. I've seen guys who've come back from dramatic knockouts to fight well and fight at something near their peak again. Like 90%. But Manny was already diminished before Marquez knocked him out. So that's just it's further fuel for the fire.

Did we ever get a good test of Marquez's urine after that fight or no? Well, drug testing and boxing is, you know, let's face it. I think it melted the glass. Drug testing and boxing runs from the sublime to the ridiculous. The sublime is Margaret Goodman's organization called VADA, Voluntary Anti-Doping Association. The only legitimate drug testing service in the world which uses a carbon isotope ratio test

or a test for every single battery of tests. Now, world which uses a carbon isotope ratio test for every single battery of tests. Now, the significance of the carbon isotope ratio test is that it will catch synthetic testosterone creams, which disappear from the system in 24 hours for any and all other tests. You'll only catch that with the CIRT, and only VADA uses it. So when fighters are testing with VADA, I can legitimately say to my friends and colleagues from other sports that boxing has the best drug testing in the world. But when we're relying on a state commission to do a post-fight urine test, you know, within 24 hours after the fight, and that's the only thing that they're going to do, then it's utterly useless. You know, the performance-enhancing drug use is likely to

take place in training camp well before the fight takes place. And anybody who can't mask or eliminate the traces of performance-enhancing drugs, given the time frame that exists between a training camp for boxing and when the fight actually takes place, doesn't know what he's doing. Anybody ought to be able to do that. So by and large, I think boxing drug testing is impotent, except when VADA is involved, in which case it's very powerful. Is it even conceivable to fix boxing at this point? I've just given up mentally even thinking about it. What was Larry Merchant's great line?

I don't know. Boxing, can't fix it, can't kill it. And I agree with Larry. Can't fix it, can't kill it. I mean, one thing that I say to anyone and everyone who denigrates the sport is, as long as human beings walk on this planet, men are going to fight men for money somehow or another. The only question is how is it administered, who administers it, and who are the guys who are allowed to fight against each other? But it's going to take place somewhere, somehow.

So you need legitimate governance. You need a responsible approach. Never happening. And it's never happened. That's exactly right. When you see how the UFC is run, and not that they're perfect, but it's at least closer to what I always had in my head of how boxing should work. Most UFC observers would tell you that performance-enhancing drug use runs rampant there as well. Well, I mean, just from the case of it feels like somebody's in charge.

Well, they make the top people fight against the top people. But of course, you know, they weigh the prize money. So the winner gets more and all that stuff. It's more like the NFL model in the sense that, you know, any given Sunday, top guys are going to fight top guys, et cetera, et cetera. But of course, what that eliminates for them is the pinnacle event. When everybody has four or five losses, you can't put together Mayweather Pacquiao because the public wants to see people rise up way above the normal universe and then get together in some kind of summit meeting. And that's where you get the, you know, the million by or the two

million by pay-per-view or in the case of Mayweather Pacquiao, the 4.4 million-buy pay-per-view. UFC will never be able to construct an event like that as long as they use the model they're using. I'm not saying it's wrong. I think there are intelligent reasons for them to do what they do, but we're always going to have the bigger showcase events when they happen. On the other hand, you could say UFC is going is going to have what 15 to 16 events a year that they're people the people who buy them always know it's a certain level of quality right and that's why they're boxing yeah and that's why they're doing well

they're trying to hit a ground rule double every time whereas boxing can have the occasional just grand slam 4.4 million paper and it's a lesser number of rounds and they are shorter rounds and it's more violent so it suits um cyber era attention spans better than the 12 round fight does there are a lot of reasons why for young people at this moment ufc is probably more popular than boxing but you know we're not we're not going away. We're not evaporating from the landscape. We still have a certain cachet, which goes with 125 years of glove prize fighting existence and all of the socio-political impact that our fighters have had. Oh, I agree with you. I don't think it ever goes away. I think the thing that worries me a little bit for the future of boxing,

as somebody who's always loved it, is just what happens if there's not enough stars? Like, even you saw it last year. What was the most memorable big fight of last year? It was Mayweather-Pacquiao, which was a terrible fight. Yeah, it was a terrible fight. We knew it was going to be terrible. Like, I had a chance to go, and I stayed to go to Spurs-Clippers Game 7. I just knew it was going to be a better sporting event.

Well, you know, at HBO, we capitalized on one pretty audacious experiment, which was to try to turn a Filipino prizefighter in the lower weight classes who barely spoke English when he first came to these shores into a crossover pay-per-view star. And it worked. And it worked. And it worked because he has a unique personality. It worked because he was willing to go on late-night talk shows and sing stupid, insipid

American songs. It worked for a lot of different reasons, but it worked. Now we're engaged in a very similar experiment, which may or may not work. And that is, can you take Eastern European stars with hard-bitten Eastern European backgrounds who barely speak English and turn them into giant pay-per-view stars in America? And I'm talking about Gennady Golovkin and Sergey Kovalev. And both of them understand that they can't let the language limitation hold them back. Unlike Canelo, who doesn't want to speak English in public until

he's absolutely certain that he's going to speak it fairly flawlessly, Golovkin and Kovalev, they just go ahead. And they realize that the way they mangle English is charming, not off-putting. I mean, fans love the things that Gennady says, whether they make any sense at all. And they adopt it, you know. Good boy nation. You know, all of the phrases he used that became a part of the mantra for his fans. And I hope that Canelo in particular will recognize what Gennady and Sergey are doing and go ahead. You don't have to speak perfect English, Canelo. You just have to get across to the audience what your personality is.

Gennady has done that brilliantly. The problem is Canelo's not even remotely in the class of those guys, I don't think. Probably not as good. No. Certainly doesn't have the kind of instant knockout power that both Golovkin and Kovalev have. No. I think those guys, I think as the decade goes on, I just think people need the one or two great boxers in their life at all times.

It's almost like how you need a great TV show to watch. You need fundamental things. I think people are always going to gravitate toward whoever the unbeatable boxer is, and it doesn't matter where they're from. And we're a cult sport. And my argument, I mean, you're better positioned to deal with this giant question. But my argument is that all sports are cult sports now in the United States, with the sole exception of National Football League football. And maybe for a few minutes, March Madness. But college basketball is a cult sport.

It's not a general audience sport. Major League Baseball is no longer, to me, a general audience sport. It's a cult sport. I think the NBA has a chance to get there just because of the under-25 people that grew up with the NBA being their favorite sport. And as those people become adults, I wonder if that's going to compound it. It might happen. Compound itself. But right now, I think you would agree that the NBA does not have the kind of broad audience appeal and marketing power that the NFL has. No.

And nothing else does. Only the NFL occupies that niche. Mass car racing is a cult sport, an extremely popular cult sport, but still a cult sport. And we are too. And what we thrive on is the repetition of our audience, the fact that our fans can't get it out of their blood. So they're going to keep coming back and they're going to watch Chocolatito Gonzalez, even though, you know, he's from Nicaragua. And they're going to watch Gennady Golovkin, even though he's from

Pakistan, I mean, Kazakhstan, and so on and so forth, all the way through the ranks of our fighters. And every once in a while, a top American is going to emerge, whether it's Keith Thurman or Danny Garcia on the other side of the political dividing line, or whether it's Terrence Crawford who's on our side of the political dividing line. One of those three guys is going to emerge as a very top American fighter, an inheritor to a certain degree to Floyd. And the public will latch on to them because they want to see an American star. I think as the years go by, I think Sugar Ray is becoming more and more, Sugar Ray Leonard, becoming more and more of an anomaly. You think like a guy who wasn't a heavyweight, American born,

who was as charismatic as he was, who fought really great. I mean, Sugar Ray is my guy i'm biased but um who fought you know a couple of the greatest fights we've had in the last 30 years well he was a tremendous talent and he had logical foils he had uh marvelous marvin had perfect storm had tommy he had he had all of the right kinds of guys to fight against and he emerged at a moment when the american amateur boxing program was still very strong. And American amateur fighters went to the Olympics with legitimate chances to win gold medals. The last American to win a gold medal at the Olympics was Andre Ward in 2004. And that's a severe deficit.

I mean, that's something that really hurts us because to this day, that's where talent development takes place. I mean, you watch a guy like Vasily Lomachenko, ultra sophisticated audience. People can understand who Lomachenko is and appreciate him, but he's from Ukraine. He doesn't yet speak English. He's maybe the most well-schooled fighter of all time. I mean, his skill level is so off the board. It just boggles the mind, but it's very hard to get the public to understand, hey, you need to watch Vasily Lomachenko because they don't know. They don't know him at all. And if he had fought against Americans in the Olympics, if we had had American amateur stars

who were fighting at the moment when Lomachenko won two gold medals, they would know him better. But they don't know him at all because there's no reason to watch American fighters fighting at the Olympics. They're not a part of the competition. Let's take a quick break to talk about Sling TV. College basketball is in full swing. You might be like Tate the producer. You're figuring out which one of your friends will invite you over to watch games because you don't have cable or you're saving up to spend a lot of cash on drinks so you can watch at a sports bar or worst of all, you're wasting hours looking for a shady live stream oh i hate those shady live streams there's a better cheaper option slink tv is the best way to watch games live just 20 a month you get more than 20

live channels including amc adult swim and more importantly this month tnt tbs and true tv they're all there you can watch live basketball you can watch march madness you can also add on channel packs like the sports extra package for just five dollars a month extra no installation no extra gear no annual contacts no bs all you need is an internet connection start your seven day free trial at sling.com slash Simmons for the best of live TV on your tablet, phone, laptop, Roku, fire TV, or Xbox. You might even see my old employer on that package restrictions. They apply sling.com slash Simmons. And since we're here, let's talk about our buddies at MailChimp if you're just getting started or if you're already building a growing business MailChimp makes it easier to connect with your

customers and sell more stuff totally free to get started no expiring trial no credit card required more sophisticated marketers can go with MailChimp Pro it's the only email platform with multivariate testing you can create and test up to eight different email campaigns with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface. Maybe this would have saved Marco Rubio's campaign. We're using MailChimp right now at The Ringer. We used it to launch our new newsletter for The Ringer. Thanks to MailChimp, we are

heading, I think we've passed it, 150,000 subscribers in less than a month. Unbelievable. Our first two newsletters were a roaring success. Great new content in there. We loved it. When we start sending you emails about our 20% off t-shirts with Tate's face on them, it will be MailChimp. Tate, are you ready for that? You don't have a microphone. Thanks to MailChimp for helping me and everyone at The Ringer build their audience. It's incredibly easy to use.

Check them out at MailChimp.com. And now back to me and Jim Lampley. How often do people mention concussions to you? Because in football, it's now the constant theme of you're thinking about it during games, it's a thing off the game, CT, all this stuff. In boxing, which your goal is to punch the other guy, potentially, until he falls down. And it's kind of just, oh, that's boxing.

That's how it works. And the same thing with UFC and all these other sports. Does that even, is it a topic that comes up to you at dinner parties or wherever? Absolutely. Where I live in San Diego, I have two very good friends who are attorneys who are both involved in the giant collective class action suit against the NFL. So they talk about it with me all the time. And radio talk show hosts will ask about it too. And the point that I always make is, you know, you have to understand we're talking about two different things because when you go

into a boxing gym to learn how to fight, first thing that a trainer is going to teach you is how to throw a left jab and a right cross. And then once you've learned how to throw a one-two, pretty shortly after that, they're going to start teaching you how to move your head. And they're going to start teaching you how to avoid getting hit. Nobody in football or hockey is trying to avoid getting hit. They're out there operating under the illusion that the hard helmet is going to help them. And they are flying around using their heads as weapons. They are inviting CTE. A lot of fighters are going to wind up with those symptoms,

but it isn't because they asked for it. It isn't because they went into the ring and sought to get hit. Fighters go from the opposite perspective. If I can get through 12 rounds and nobody lands a big shot on my head, that's better. A hockey player, he's out there, you know, flying at people. And football players are the same way. And somebody has deluded them into believing that the helmet protects them. When you know as well as I do that a brain splash is a brain splash, whether you're wearing a helmet or not. I don't believe the helmet is of any protection whatsoever. In fact, when I was hosting college football at ABC back in the early 80s, 1982 or 1983, I did a feature piece for my studio football show at ABC about lawsuits in the helmet business and the difficulty that Riddell and Bike and other helmet makers were having because of civil litigation at that time. And I remember sitting in the studio and saying that the solution to the problem

was to go back to the soft leather helmets that we used to see at Ohio State and Michigan back in the early 50s, which had a soft leather pad in the middle of the top of the crown of the helmet, and that if you went back to using those kinds of helmets, people would tackle with their shoulders and the problem wouldn't exist to the degree that it does. Nobody ever paid any attention to that, of course. They're still flying around using hard helmets. And the concussion problem appears to me to be getting worse and worse. Do you ever see a future of boxing, professional boxing, having headgear? No. Professional boxing. I don't either.

Professional boxing couldn't possibly thrive and wouldn't exist without headgear. And I'll say this. It's brutal. It's dehumanizing in a certain way. But I've covered hundreds, maybe thousands of prize fighters. And I am 100% certain that I've never met one who didn't know the risk, who did not understand what he was doing. You know, they're like people who climb the sides of tall buildings and wash the windows for a living or go down into coal mines and earn their living that way. They're giving up their bodies to feed their families. That's a blue-collar ethic that we in the white-collar world don't really accept or understand. But if you live in the blue-collar world, you understand what that is.

Every day, you give up your body to feed your family. That's what fighters do. And that's the thing with Floyd Mayweather. When he gets criticized about it, he doesn't take a punt. He doesn't want to mix it up. And he's going to get out of boxing with more brain cells than he started with than just about any superstar ever, right?

And that's completely his right and his privilege. And I admire the artistry that he projected in the ring. But as a fan of competition, I wanted to see better competition. Yeah, I think all of us that love boxing have never totally reconciled the whole, like, Pacquiao got knocked out for a minute, you know? And you think, like, when he's 70, he's going to be feeling that. You know, that's the equivalent of just if he crashed his car to a telephone pole at 50 miles an hour, you know?

And that's one of those things where it's like, all right, I've been watching this for 40 years. I know what it's about. I'm going to put that aside. I'm still going to enjoy this. But, like, 10% of me feels like a hypocrite, right? Well, yes. And, and, and by the way, you know, you're watching the fight. Yeah. I'm calling it and I'm earning a living from it. Yeah. So I've, I've dealt with that feeling of,

um, I don't want to say guilt. That's, that's too big a term that, yeah, there's a different word, that sense of disquiet that, that goes with the fact that I earn my living covering and glorifying something where people risk their lives and give up their bodies piece by piece. So that's why we have to respect them. That's why we have to honor them for what we do or for what they do. And that's why we have to do everything we can within the limitations that exist in the sport to try to make it as safe and as productive and as humane over the long term as it can possibly be. Boxers need a retirement program. Boxers need medical insurance. There are lots of things that should be done. You know, I've gone back and forth

over and over in my head about the notion of a federal commission. But at the end of the day, it's a responsibility. If we're going to allow people to go into the ring and do this for our entertainment, we really should do a better job of protecting them. All right. I have two random questions. And then what time is it? We've been going for a while. Favorite boxing movie ever? Favorite boxing movie ever. Well, that's interesting. I, you know, Body and Soul.

Oh, you're going way back. The Professional, The Setup. Those are great movies that I could watch over and over and over. More recently, Rocky I, Rocky IV, Creed is very good. Why don't you go Rocky IV over Rocky III? I could be confusing them. Which one? Rocky IV was Drago.

Rocky III was Mr. T and Hulk Hogan. I go Rocky IV. I love Rocky IV. I like that. I love Rocky IV. I like that international flavor and, you know, it was prescient in the sense that the Klitschko's hadn't come along at the moment when Dolph Lundgren was playing

Yvonne Drago. It was. It was a little prescient. Right. It was. And Clubber Lang was basically Mike Tyson. You know, like a less, a more loquacious, but the same kind of mentality behind him. Sweet like Mike, but yeah, it was the same kind of thing. How many movies have you been in for boxing? I've been in about, I don't know.

You've been in a couple of Rockies. Six or eight. Yeah. I've been in two of the Rocky ones, and I was in two this year, Southpaw and Creed. And I must tell you, I was so fascinated and pleased. There's a guy named Andrew O'Hare who writes politics and film criticism for Salon. He's one of my favorite opinion columnists, brilliant writer. And when the Oscar nominations came out, he was writing his critique of the Oscar nominations.

And O'Hare wrote, he said, I have a lot of friends who think that Creed should have been nominated. He said, to be honest with you, I think both Creed and Southpaw were worthy of Best Picture nominations. That's pretty stunning. Wow. You know, and I was thinking to myself, wow, what if I had been in two movies in the same year and both of them were nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award? Of course, of course they're not. But, you know, as I go through the list of my favorite boxing movies, I think both Creed and softball would be on a best 10 list for sure. I thought the boxing scenes in Creed were incredibly well done. And I thought they were I thought it was really well directed. And I thought it should have been nominated.

Did you find those boxing scenes to be more graphic and violent than you've seen before in movie boxing scenes? It wasn't, it was just how they did the camera and how they did it with one shot for three minutes, almost like they were doing a play. I just, watching it, I saw it in the theater. Well, first I watched it on my iPad because I was interviewing Michael B. Jordan. Then I saw it in the theater and I was trying to figure out how they cut it. I was like, there's no way they did that in one. Well, here's what, here's what I was told. And this is, this is a fascinating story and, uh, you'd have to get it from the principles

to be certain, but this is what I was told by people around those movies. Jake Gyllenhaal fell in love with boxing when he went into the gym. It seems like most actors do when they do the boxing. They all love it. They just, they all get into it. They identify with the fighters. They identify with the, uh, with the identify with the uphill fight, the struggle, et cetera, et cetera. So Gyllenhaal predictably fell in love with boxing when he went into the gym. And when he and Antoine Fuqua, the director of Southpaw, were getting ready to shoot the scenes,

Gyllenhaal came to Fuqua and said, you know what? He said, I want to get hit. I want to allow myself to be hit in the ring. And the beauty of that, of course, is that if Gyllenhaal is going to allow himself to be hit, then the other guys with whom he's in the ring have to allow themselves to be hit. So lo and behold, the boxing scenes for Southpaw were remarkably graphic, remarkably violent, and the reason was that Gyllenhaal allowed himself to be hit. So what I was told was that on about the second or third day of the Creed shoot, Sylvester went to Michael B. and said, Michael B. Oh, this is true. He told this story on my podcast.

We're the second movie in the theaters this year. You gotta take one. And the other guy allowed himself to get hit. So kid, here you go. You've got no choice. You've got to give us a chance to compete, et cetera. So Jordan allowed himself to be hit, and he hit the other guys. And therefore, you've got two boxing movies with unusually graphic, violent, colorful, unforgettable to me, boxing scenes. I think in Rocky IV, Lundgren was hitting Stallone and actually hurt him, and they had to postpone it. I think he broke his ribs or something. Well, I don't know about that one i do know that when they were doing rocky balboa stallone developed a uh an

intense dislike for antonio tarver oh yeah yeah i heard about that and wanted to hit him and and one day uh sylvester went ahead and cut loose and uh and fired a hot shot uh and i believe hit tarver in the body and tarver immediately pivoted and turned and knocked him down with a shot to the jaw. Just out of instinct. That's what I was told. Yeah. And I was also told that Sly loved it. You know, that he just, he was in his glory because finally he got hit with a clean shot from a real fighter.

And he went down, but he took it, you know, and all that. And he was very happy with it. All right. Last question. Because this isn't the only time we're ever doing a podcast. You're having a good time. I'm having a blast. This is fun, right?

It's great fun. All right, last question. It's a Bill Simmons podcast. Everybody wants to do this. You're to blame for sideline reporters. We just got to get it out there. You were the first sideline reporter. You're the first one.

Hey, I was just the guinea pig. You created this monster. I was the guinea pig, not the scientist. You can't blame me. Somebody told me to do it. I'm going to partly blame you. Yeah. You were the first one. I was. You wereinea pig. You created this monster. I was the guinea pig, not the scientist. You can't blame me. Somebody told me to do it. I'm going to partly blame you. Yeah. You were the first one.

I was. You were the first sideline reporter. Exactly. And now? Along with another guy named Don Tollefson. There were two of us in 1974. Okay. For college football.

Do you know how it evolved? Do you know how it happened? Wasn't it a Dick Ebersole idea? It was. It was a Terry O'Neill idea that Terry O'Neill sold to his buddy Dick Ebersole, that Ebersole sold to Arledge. But what really got the ball rolling was the coverage of the hostage crisis at the 72 Olympics in Munich, that radio frequency microphones and radio frequency camera signals would penetrate much farther away from the transmission truck and penetrate more effectively into remote areas and, you know, behind walls, behind buildings, etc., etc.

Then they had thought would be the case. So when they came back from the Munich Olympics in 72, Arledge convened a meeting of the top production people in sports with the people from engineering to say, okay, what did we learn at Munich that we can use in some other area? And the biggest thing was the way these RF microphones and cameras work, we could put somebody on the sidelines of a football game. Well, they chose college football because you're going to put somebody on the sidelines of a football game. Well, they chose

college football because you're going to put somebody on the sidelines of college football who ultimately helps to portray the difference between college football and pro football, the color, the pageantry, all that kind of stuff. And that's when they put together this national talent hunt idea. And they went out and interviewed 432 people around the country. And there's a long and involved story that goes into how I was ultimately chosen. Were you in college or out of college? I was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina. The original idea was to find him.

Oh, you mean Tate? See Tate nodding? Tate went to North Carolina. Oh, Tate loves you now. Don't hug Lampley. Don't touch Lampley. We're not done with the podcast yet. The hug is subliminal. It's a telepathic hug. If God is not a Tar Heel, why is this guy Carolina Blue? But at any rate, no, I was a graduate student. The original idea

had been to hire someone between 18 and 22. I mean, the way they built it was, we're going to give you somebody who is the face and voice of the American college student. And I didn't fit the profile. I was 24, 25 years old. I was in graduate school. I wasn't exactly what they were looking for. I was originally screened out of the process early on. Eversole didn't like me.

And they used that stack of resumes, the 432 resumes, as a talent pool for various other jobs that they wanted to fill. So I wound up interviewing as a production assistant. Didn't get that job. Interviewed for Olympic research. Didn't get that job. Then finally, the last job I interviewed for was in program planning. I was going to get paid $150 a week to sit in a cubicle and learn from two guys named Jim Spence and John Martin how to negotiate for and buy the rights to sports events. I was a broadcast management graduate student. That was the ideal job for me. I was so excited. So you weren't even thinking of announcing at this point?

Didn't have any interest in it. I had been announcing little things in Chapel Hill during graduate school, and the guy who ran the University of North Carolina football and basketball radio networks had already pulled me aside and said, look, do yourself a favor. Don't get seduced into this on air thing. You could wind up carrying equipment in New Bern when you're 48 years old. You want to be in management. You should maybe try radio sales. There are all these other things you should do besides being on the air. So Ebersole calls me the night of August 9, 1974, the day that Nixon resigned from office. And he reaches me on the air. So Ebersole calls me the night of August 9, 1974, the day that Nixon resigned

from office. And he reaches me on the phone and he's kind of hemming and hawing. And I'm like, you know, why is Dick Ebersole calling me? And finally, he says, look, you know, we're running to a little bit of a log jam on the college football thing. And Rune wants you to do an audition. And I'm immediately into my Dick. I've taken a job in program planning. I'm not even interested in this thing anymore. I'm coming to work 1st of September for John Martin and Jim Spence, etc., etc., etc., and Dick says, you didn't hear me. Rune wants you to do an audition, and by the way, if you wind up doing the college football thing, we'll hold that other gig for you, and you can go to work there in January because we're going to have somebody else on the sidelines next year. So of course I wound up doing three plus

years on the sidelines. They hired another guy from Chapel Hill named Bob Greenway to work in program planning. It all went away, but they, you know, they told me late in the college football season, this is going to go well for you. And I'm still talking for money 41 years later. It's the job has changed. You know, it changed within six weeks. I mean, we started out trying to do all of the features and the wraparound material that they had originally intended for us to do. So you're way more involved in the broadcast. Yeah. And we had time in the pregame, had time

in the halftime, you know, tried to do a lot of stuff from the sidelines during the game, but Keith Jackson was getting more and more disgruntled about throwing down to the sideline. And eventually it got to the point where, okay, if we're going to throw to the sideline, you have to be able to take it, do something and get it back before the start of the next play. That became a cocktail party game. Jim, give us the history of the world in 24 seconds. Yeah. You know, World War II in 24 seconds, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I learned how to edit myself and be very concise.

And after a while, I figured out that the only way to get on the air comfortably and get off the air without thoroughly disgruntling Keith was to do injury reports. And sideline reporting became injury reports. Uh, and you know, by the second or third year, I was popping up three or four times a game. And, uh, and, and I was thinking to myself, this is meaningless. It's all going to go away. We're not going to see sideline reporters in another 15 or 20 years. This thing is going to die. If only you had been right. I wasn't. I was wrong. It's really easy to call that injury report up to the booth. Hey, Russell Westbrook sprained his ankle. Say that coming out

of the next break and then we're done. I don't have to deal with the sideline reporter. The very last game I ever did, I did the most meaningful thing I had ever done as a sideline reporter. And maybe that's why it continued the last game I did early in that fourth season was a Notre Dame Pitt game Pitt had won the national championship the preceding year in 76 now as they began the 77 season Pitt with Hugh Green and Matt Cavanaugh quarterback is ranked preseason number one and they they're playing Notre Dame, which was also a top five team. And second quarter of the game, Cavanaugh went down under a host of Notre Dame tacklers, and he got up holding his wrist. And he instantly went toward the sideline, and a trainer came out and met him, and together they ran toward the tunnel to the dressing room.

So I chased them. I ran with my microphone backpack and all that stuff on. I ran down the tunnel and I couldn't get close enough to talk to them. But as they turned and went into the door of the dressing room, I saw blood around Kavanaugh's wrist. And instantly I came back i went on camera i took a shot i said matt cavanaugh has a compound fracture of his wrist it turned out to be correct it changed the national championship race instantly it was the best thing i had ever done on the sidelines and you guessed it pretty much the last thing i'd and it was a guess yeah it was a guess i mean i can remember the producer chuck howard saying to me are you sure he has a compound fracture of the wrist and i'm thinking in my head i saw blood i don't know

any other reason it would be there and i said yes and it turned out he had a compound fracture of the wrist did cosell ever talk to you or acknowledge you um i i was howard's cub reporter on a show called um sports beat oh i watched sports sports sports sports beat sports beat. Oh, I watched sports. Sports beat. Sports beat. Sports beat. Consistent. TV critics love sports beat. Tackled some serious issues. Sports beat consisted of Howard sitting in the studio every weekend, interviewing Bowie Kuhn, Sonny Werblin, um, George Steinbrenner, uh, all of his close friends. I was the one who would have to go out, get on a plane and do a feature

piece so that the show would have some content other than Howard sitting in the studio talking to his buddies. And so for a couple of years there, I had an office on his floor and it was an amazing experience because I would sit in my office and I would listen to Howard come out into the front reception area and talk to the secretaries about me. And it was always either the kid is the only other one here who can complete a competent sentence. The rest of them are morons, but I have him on the show because he actually has the potential to someday do something in this business. Or the opposite was he's a sophomore, hired, promoted, has a six-figure salary.

I have no idea what in the hell they're doing with him, et cetera, et cetera. So I was either up or down. But many, many times he would go to 21, two blocks away, and have his three-martini lunch with Sonny Werblin. Three? And then he would come back to the office, and after he'd been in the office about 15 minutes, I would get a call from the secretary. Please come over and talk to Howard.

Howard has something very important to talk to you about. And what was very important was that he would open the drawer to his desk and would pull out the galleys for his latest book, whichever it was. And he would say, sit still. You have to hear this. You're the only other person who can conceivably understand what I'm getting at here. And he would read me chapters from his books. And my job was to say, Howard, that's amazing. That's fantastic.

There's nothing else like that, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, and it worked out. I was his cub reporter on Sportsbeat for a couple of years. The book that should have happened was the Howard Cosell oral history. Just people telling stories about their interactions with Howard Cosell. Well, I think there are things out there like that. Everybody has seven stories. Kindred wrote a great book about Howard and Ali.

That's good reading material. And he was an amazing character. But I've always said, maybe the unhappiest man I've ever met. Howard would drink a quart of vodka at night, wake up sweating, spitting, coughing at 5.30 in the morning, desperately afraid that somebody else was going to read the New York Times before he did. He had to be first at everything. Wow.

Were you at the 30th anniversary of Wide World of Sports? I was at some anniversary Wide World of Sports things. The one, or maybe 25th? it was i was there it was in the waldorf astoria uh ballroom in new york when ollie came out standing ovation jim mckay they did the whole ollie yeah i i think i'm the only person who ever saw this it's not on youtube it drives me. Everything is now on YouTube except for this one 25th anniversary. They did this 10. It ended with a Bob Dylan song, Forever Young. And then Ali came out with Jim McKay.

And it's like a real moment. And Ali's hands trembling. And you can tell it's... Howard had an obsession with Forever Young. I wonder if he was involved with that. His daughter, Hillary, introduced him to Forever Young. And he fell in love with the lyrics. And if you go back and watch the rematch of Ali versus Leon Spinks, the second fight in New Orleans, fall of 1970, October of 1978,

you will find that in the 12th round of that fight, as Ali is just sort of mopping up on his way to what's obviously going to be a clear, unanimous decision over Spinks, Cosell is reciting the lyrics to Forever Young. Wow. May your heart always be joyful. May your wishes all come true. May you always do for others and let others do for you. So that must be why they use that then. During a boxing match. Yeah, that's amazing.

Yeah. He was amazing. Jim's memory might be better than mine. I'm looking at Joe. I mean, you're rattling off dates. I'm not good at dates anymore. Tate's in disbelief. Your memory's amazing.

How do you do it? I'm accused of having a photographic memory. You're accused of it or you actually have one? Well, I think I have a very good memory. I would say it's better than very good. I have a specific reason. My father died when I was five years old. And I can very clearly remember thinking to myself that if you did not remember things, you lost them.

So it was very important to remember everything that you ever did. And after my father died, for several years, I can remember lying awake, making sure that I could remember everybody who'd ever been in a classroom with me and where they sat, that I could remember all the lyrics to every Kingston Trio album in the order in which the songs appeared on the album. Later, it became every starting lineup for every Carolina basketball team for, you know, 25 or 30 years. Cause my first broadcasting gig was the Dean Smith show, uh, pregame and postgame shows, uh, on the radio at, uh, at UNC. I did Bill Dooley also. Was he smoking cigarettes all over you in the postgame or no? Well, he didn't smoke cigarettes in front of me or in front of the players. You know, you never saw Dean. He was always smoke cigarettes in front of me or in front of the players. You never saw Dean

smoking a cigarette. He was a sneaky smoker. He was hiding it all the time. Tate, you know that? Sneaky smoker Dean Smith. For you audience people, Tate is nodding that he knew about Dean cupping the cigarettes and hiding the cigarettes and stuff like that. That's amazing. So you trained

yourself to remember everything. Because I thought if I lost, if I didn't remember things, if I forgot them, that they were lost forever. Yeah. And I didn't want to lose anything else. So that was it. So yeah, I mean, I can tell you the dates of a lot of the boxing matches. I mean, you were talking about George Foreman before.

I mean, I couldn't even remember what was on HBO or Showtime. How did I not remember Corrales Castillo was on Showtime? Jim Lampley, this was a pleasure. We could do this again, right? We'll do it before big fights? Absolutely. Could we do a three-man with you, me, and Max? That would be wonderful.

That'd be great. I didn't even ask you about Larry Merchant, so we'll have to save that for next time. I love Larry Merchant. Have you ever had Larry on the podcast? No. You think he'd come on? I can get him for you. Larry Merchant and Bud Collins are not

replicable for what they did for sporting events. Like, I love both of them for the same reason. They were just these wild cards that would come in and they were almost like having a sports columnist in a telecast. Larry Merchant's one of the greatest men I've ever met. And I could have told you an hour and a half worth of Larry Merchant stories

today. Well, that'll be the second. He's an unbelievable person in a lot of ways. So Fight Game is premiering March 16th, and then you can get that on HBO Now. And then we have a fight on March 26th with a fighter whose name I'm not going to pronounce. And then we have Manny.

I think you can pronounce Sullivan Barrera. Against Andre Boyd. I might have trouble with Barrera. And then Pacquiao. Pacquiao versus Bradley on April 9. Gennady Golovkin, April 23. And Canelo Alvarez against Amir Khan on May 7, which is a very interesting fight. Usually that Cinco de Mayo weekend fight is usually the fight of the year.

That's not the blockbuster. Uh-oh. You have to go. All right. Now your thing's going off. Jim Lampley, thank you. All righty. Thank you very much, Bill.

I really enjoyed it. That was fun. All right. Thanks to Jim Lampley. That was awesome. That guy's an icon. Thanks to Sling TV. It's the best way to watch games live for just $20 a month.

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the presenting sponsor of the BS Podcast and Channel 33. and we are done. We will be back later this week. Go Holy cross. We about this bitch. Anytime y'all want to see me again, rewind this track right here. Close your eyes. Pitching me rolling.