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Exclusive: Jim Lampley on being the voice of Mike Tyson's career and 'luck' in sports broadcasting
Logging on to Zoom on a Monday evening in March, I was greeted by a multicoloured wall which appeared to consist of post-it notes. But these were not post-it notes, they were the boxing media credentials belonging to legendary commentator Jim Lampley who was sitting in front of said wall.
On this March evening, Lampley and I were about to speak about his time in boxing ahead of the release of his book It Happened!: A Uniquely Lucky Life in Sports Television on April 15.
Lampley’s luck
At the age of 76, Lampley still has the energy and authority which made him a mainstay on HBO World Championship Boxing, but one word stuck out to me in the book’s title, lucky.
Working in sports media is one which often requires a degree of luck and this is an opinion which Lampley agreed with when recalling how he landed his career as a sports broadcaster.
“I've been friendly with and supportive of most of the prominent sports television personalities in my business for the 40 or 50 years that I've spent doing it,” Lampley told DAZN News in an exclusive interview.
“All of them achieved what they achieved through hard work, ingenuity, and being in the right place at the right time.
“None of them have a story that more dramatically reflects that than I do because I was finishing graduate school in Mass Communications Program at the University of North Carolina in 1974, when ABC Sports, which was the dominant sports television purveyor in our culture at that time, developed the idea of putting a college-age or close to college-age announcer on the sideline of college football games.”
For Lampley, his shot at becoming a live sports broadcaster was one which spawned out of the coverage of an unfortunate event at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.
During the games, nine Israeli athletes were taken hostage by the Palestinian militant group Black September which saw American broadcaster ABC use radio signals to cover what was unfolding. This resulted in the broadcaster then looking to implement this new technology for their own programming which opened a door for Lampley.
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“When they came back to New York from Munich, they convened a meeting of the engineering and sports divisions and news divisions, all three of them, to sit down and say, OK, now that we know this about radio frequency signals, what could we do with it?
“The first thing they decided on was we could put a reporter on the sideline of a football game. It had never been done and there was a national talent hunt.
“They interviewed 432 college people. They wanted someone who was of undergraduate age between 18 and 22. I was 25.
“I was a graduate student. I was very experienced as a sports broadcaster already from radio work here in Chapel Hill. I was all of the things they said that they would not look for and were not going to choose from this talent hunt.
“I didn't even want to drive seven hours to Birmingham, Alabama to do those interviews. It seemed pointless to me. Through a long and circuitous set of circumstances, over the course of seven months, eventually I was the person who was chosen.”
Being selected out of 432 people to be the face of this new innovation in sports broadcasting confirmed to Lampley that ‘luck’ does indeed exist, especially in a profession which is only enjoyed by so few, but desired by so many.
“When you are chosen out of a 432 person field to do something at that time that had never been done and you don't fit any of the qualifications that the network who's doing this says they are going to use as criteria for choosing you, then you have to assume that you are blessed with some kind of bizarre luck.
“That's why the cover of the book says a uniquely lucky life in sports television because the way it all began was uniquely lucky.”
The attraction of boxing and becoming the ‘voice of Mike Tyson’s career’
For boxing fans, the name Jim Lampley will bring back fond memories. In the US it will be watching the biggest fights in primetime. Meanwhile in the UK and beyond, it will be staying up until the early hours fuelled by coffee or having to order VHS tapes to watch the big fights taking place stateside.
But before Lampley became a household name in boxing, he was hosting College Football and travelled to numerous Olympics for ABC, that was until a change in management saw him become a hated figure.
“In 1987, after my first 13 years at ABC Sports, there was a management change in the sports division and an incoming new president of sports arrived with one predilection about the division, which was who is Jim Lampley and how do I get rid of him?” Lampley said.
“He hated me, hated my work, he hated my salary, and he wanted to find a vehicle which would force me to leave the network.”
In an attempt to take Lampley away from the mainstream sports in the US, he replaced Howard Cosell on ABC’s boxing coverage. The aim was that replacing a personality such as Cosell would spark huge backlash and force Lampley to leave the broadcaster.
Unfortunately for those at ABC, it was a naive move. Boxing had been a major part of Lampley’s life since childhood.
“He did not know that the very first sports event my mother had ever sat me down to watch on television after my father died when I was five years old was Sugar Ray Robinson versus Bo Bo Olsen for the middleweight championship of the world on Gillette Friday Night Fights in 1955.
“That launched a long-devoted tenure of watching all of the Gillette Friday Night Fights, listening to the great Don Dunphy, who ultimately became my conscious model for doing blow-by-blow. This manager didn't know anything about that.”
The slip-ups kept coming with ABC Sports signing a contract to broadcast the fights of a 19-year-old Mike Tyson. This link-up with Tyson gave Lampley a unique position, he would become the voice which narrated the career of one of boxing’s greatest and most feared fighters.
“The very first fight I ever called on network television was Mike Tyson-Jesse Ferguson, Mike's first network television exposure and from that moment going forward, my voice was bonded with Tyson's experience.”
Tyson would beat Ferguson in February 1986 by a knockout in round six with Lampley’s the voice the soundtrack to a figure which became the face of boxing throughout the late 1980s and 1990s.
Then came the move to HBO. After the broadcaster signed a deal with Tyson, there was only one man who could be there to broadcast these fights to the world and that was Lampley. With ABC still trying to get Lampley off their books, it presented the perfect opportunity for HBO to sweep in and acquire the services of one of boxing’s great broadcasters and a voice which quickly became synonymous with Tyson’s career.
“I became, for a period of time, his ABC biographer, then he went to HBO. HBO reached out, knowing that the management of ABC wanted to get rid of me, and said, come here.
“What that man did by attempting to get rid of me was to wind up writing me a ticket to go to work for the most prestigious American television network ever doing the sport that I had first watched when I was five or six years old and covering a global phenomenon named Mike Tyson.”
A long-awaited return
Lampley would continue to be the face of HBO’s boxing coverage until the broadcaster’s final show on December 8, 2018.
Once the curtain came down, it felt like boxing fans would only be able to see Lampley’s expert coverage of boxing on replays and YouTube videos of classic fights which were shown by HBO.
However, on May 2, Lampley will finally return to the blow-by-blow commentary when he takes up the microphone for the historic Ring Magazine card in New York’s Times Square.
The whole event will be broadcast live on DAZN PPV, and will feature Ryan Garcia, Devin Haney and Teofimo Lopez who will defend his WBO and Ring Magazine super lightweight titles.
Watch three incredible fight nights in one week only on DAZN
Fight fans are in for a treat at the end of April / start of May, with three amazing fight cards within seven days - and DAZN PPV is the only place to watch them all.
- April 26: Chris Eubank Jr vs Conor Benn
- May 2: Ryan Garcia vs. Rolly Romero; Devin Haney vs Jose Ramirez; Teofimo Lopez vs Arnold Barboza Jr
- May 3: Canelo Alvarez vs. William Scull
Arch rivals Eubank Jr. and Benn finally go head-to-head to start the exhilarating week, with PPV prices at £21.99 in the UK; $24.99 in the US; €24.99 in Europe.
Garcia vs. Romero and Canelo vs. Scull fight nights follow, which will both be exclusively on DAZN. These two PPV's prices are yet to be confirmed.
