EP: 724- Jim Lampley Interview

football game with a camera and a microphone. And you are the one person among the four hundred and thirty two who is not undergraduate age, who is in graduate school, who is not eighteen to twenty two, who is twenty five, who is not completely fresh with no experience in broadcasting. I had done a great deal of stuff in Chapel Hill at the University of North Carolina. All of those things about me, my age, my educational credential, my background

as a broadcaster. That was supposed to disqualify me. The way they build the whole search, they were supposed to be looking for somebody completely different from me. And at the last minute, before they chose the person who was going to go on the sideline, the boss of the organization, the famous runa Arledge had of ABC Sports, had a last minute sort of cautionary thought, Wait a minute, we're about to put somebody on who's never been in front

of a camera before, never held a microphone before. Did we actually interview somebody who has done those things? Well, yeah, there was one guy, and I was that guy. And the evaluation form for my interview. My screening interview was four words, and those words were arrogant, antagonistic, abrasive, might as well have been an asshole. I don't I don't

really know. They were called the fora's and and so I was definitely not supposed to get that gig, but I did, and that was the beginning of my network television career. I spent three years on the sideline. That was another thing. It was supposed to be won, and then they were going to go find somebody else. But the best laid plans always go haywire somehow, and I wound up not just continuing on the sideline of college football, but doing an apprenticeship under which I went out to

all of the crazy wide worlds. All of the older Hall of Fame type announcers on the ABC sports staff at that time hated the idea of me at first, and then eventually loved the idea of me because they realized that I was a person who was going to, at least for a period of time, have to go back to the wrist wrestling and the log rolling and the barrel jumping and the demolition derby and the motorcycles on ice every year until I was finished paying my

dues and they wouldn't have to do those things anymore. So it's all an unlikely path. And then there are many other lucky breaks that take place, all leading up to in nineteen eighty seven, the ultimate lucky break, when a new incoming president of ABC Sports who had replaced roent Knowledge, wanted to get rid of me and decided that the best way to get rid of me would be to assign me to boxing, and I became the

boxing commentator on the staff of ABC Sports. And the other thing he didn't realize, besides that I knew a lot about boxing and cared about it, was that they had just signed a get Acquainted Looxie contract with a nineteen year old heavyweight from upstate New York whose name was Mike Tyson. So the first five or six television

network boxing events I called were Mike Tyson fights. During that period of time, he was well on his way to becoming not just the biggest public figure in boxing, but the biggest public figure on the planet, and I was, in effect the curator of his story. So all of those, and there are many many more, but all of those are the characteristics and the events by which I say lucky. It was highly concidental, it was intuitive, It was great for me, and I got a big career out of it.

named Oprah Winfrey. Pretty good credential, Okay, so he had some juice and was supposed to be able to evaluate talent, and he, you know, went to the wall to try to embarrass me, destroy me, and get rid of me. And know the instant that he chose as his vehicle for that, to assign me to boxing. I just couldn't

believe my good fortune. The very first sports event that my mother ever sat me down to watch on television after my father died when I was five years old, The first sports event she ever sat me down to watch while saying to me, this is what your father would be doing with you if he were still alive, with Sugar Ray Robinson versus Bobolsen for the Middleway Championship. So let Friday Night Fights in nineteen fifty five. I

watched the Friday Night Fights on Jellette. Listen to Don Dunfied teach me about boxing all the way through the nineteen fifties into the nineteen sixties, and then at the nineteen sixty Rome Olympics, I saw my hero, and my hero was Cassius Clay, And eventually I was at my very first live prize fight, which was Cassius Clay versus Sonny liston Miami Beach, February twenty five, nineteen sixty four. And the rest of the story just flows on from there.

So Lucky is inescapable, and I'm not diminishing myself when I say it. Just a fact unusual is written all over this. It was very counterintuitive. It shouldn't have happened exactly the way it did. Uh, but it did. And and on I went until eventually HBO and the heart of my identity now as a sports broadcaster, we got.

years ago. So a sort of micro examination of what life with Parkinson's is really all about and how you get through it hour by hour, day by day. His courage, his perseverance, his amazing skill and devotion as a boxing trainer. I always found him to be a remarkably attractive and meaningful human being. And it'll be great to be back side by side and shoulder to shoulder with Freddy. You know, Jim, we're.

And it's it's two hundred and seventy two pages. Took it took a while to read, but it was It was fun because I liked the writing. I was, you know, I was reading day after day and thinking to myself, this guy's pretty good.

can't do it. He is one of those people who is absolutely determined to prove that he can do what you tell him he can't do. Going back to his very first television appearance, which was on the undercart of a top ranked pay per view in Las Vegas, where he was thrown in more or less as a last minute opponent against a rising prospect from South America named Bratis Prescott, and the feeling was, who is Terrence Crawford. Nobody really knows him, and Prescott is a thrilling talent.

This is going to be a perfunctory undercard fight. I believe it was on a packout pay per view, and it was Tim Bradley who had told the top ranked people when he knew they were fishing around for an opponent for Prescott. Bradley had sparred with Crawford, said put Terrence Crawford in against him, I think you'll be surprised at what you get. And Crawford won every round against Bratis Prescott. And that was the very first time I had seen him, so I bonded with him from that

moment forward. He is a deeply intense competitor he is. I will prove it to you from the core out. And he comes from a river city in the United States, which is a long and storage tradition in American boxing. Guys from Detroit, guys from Saint Louis, guys from Gary, Indiana, all of those are river cities. Ezer Charles was a river city fighter, And so you could go on and on. But at the end of the day, I have managed to wake up in the past few weeks and realize

this is not a mismatch. This is Terrence Crawford. And this is Terrence Crawford coming up in wait with competent training and adequate preparation, and he's as smart as any fighter alive. And I just hope for Canelo's sake, I mean Canelo's neighborhood right now, by the way, I'm probably no more than a half mile from his house. I just hope for Canelo's sake that he is taking Terrence as seriously as he needs to take him. Because he takes him lightly. I think he's going to be shocked.

Terrence Crawford is a spectacular competitor.

all day. Tom Hauser had just published his definitive biography of Muhammad Ali, and there was a moment when I needed to go out and run some errands in Manhattan traffic, and I knew that I would be taking a lot longer to run those errands if Brook were going to go with me. So I turned around in the media room and looked around and said, I need somebody to watch Brook while I go out and run these errands.

And Ali instantly stuck his arm up and said leave her with me, And he wound up spending hours with her magic tricks card tricks, just talking and all day and that night he looked out into the audience at the dinner and saw her getting a little tired, flagging, and he motioned her and brought her up onto the dais and sat her down between him and me. And I have a photo of the two of them together and me with them, and it's unforgettable. And that's my

single most treasured Beasts of Boxing memorabilia by far. By the way, she's forty four years old now, she's arguably the number one most important art dealer in the entire world. From that day onward, she has always known that she was special. And I'll never forget riding home to drop her at her mother's apartment that night, when she turned me in the car and said, Dad, who was that guy? And well, they're going to grow up and read about him. You're going to grow up and know all about that.

You know, there's a lot to tell, and I couldn't possibly tell you all of it right here and now, but I'll just give you this to take to bed tonight. He's the most famous man in the world, and no one can deny that he's the most famous man in the world. It's not even an argument. She said, you mean, I just spent most of the day with the most famous man in the world. I said, yes, you did, and even more to the point, he spent most of the day with you. Wow, the story, whoa, it's in

the book. By the I just gave something away, of course, But you know the book is filled with things of that nature. That but you ask what's the best that's number one?

head even today. I heard them the whole time I was writing the book. And so there's a poignancy in that. My mother raised me selling insurance in Florida, my father died when I was five years old. I would go spend the summers with my grandmother, so all year long, I would listen to my mother in the kitchen in Florida telling me her stories. Then I would go to North Carolina and listen to my grandmother telling me her stories. And both of them shaped me. Had tremendous influence on me.

And the storytelling that you read and experience in the book is directly influenced by those two women. That's amazing.

one there. Two o'clock Wildcard, Jim. I want to ask you one last question, because I know you got to go of all the people that could have written your forward. I mean, there's you could have Jim had your choice. Why Taylor Sheridan.

didn't recognize, and that was Taylor's share. So I sat down and he proceeded to interview me for two and a half hours. It was a NonStop conversation and it was all boxing. Tell me about this fight, Tell me about this fight, tell me about this fight. He has encyclopedic knowledge of boxing. And it was a stunning conversation. And I went back to North Carolina. He went back to Fort Worth and he started calling me late at night.

I reached a point where every time the phone would ring past eleven o'clock at night, my wife would say, that's your boyfriend, and it was my boyfriend, and we were talking boxing NonStop. So then the second time I saw him face to face again after a fight in Las Vegas, walked into a restaurant, same general group, the Hollywood group, although Taylor doesn't go to Hollywood. He's not Hollywood. He is fort Worth and I walked in saw him and he said, so, what you been doing. I said, well,

I'm writing my autobiography. He said, well, I hope I'm writing the forward. I said, Taylor, I was going to ask you for a blurb. I know how busy you are. He said, no, I don't want to write a blurb. I want to write the forward. And I went back to Chapel Hill and told my as told to author, Taylor Sheridan's going to write the forward. Oh, how could you fall for that kind of Hollywood bs. He's the busiest writer in the world. Everybody knows. He's writing three

different series right now. He's not going to have time to write the forward for the book. I said, I don't know what you want me to do. He told me he was going to write the forward. I'm certainly not going to call him and tell him that he's not, et cetera. So the forward showed up on the day of the deadline, perfectly written forward by Taylor Sheridan. What

a gift. That's That's one amazing gift. I did a bookstore appearance in Chapel Hill last week with my neighbor John Grisham, who is the number one fiction selling author in the United States. We sold a hundred books at that bookstore appearance. Why because Grisham was sitting with me and saying, you know, you've got to read this book, and he's another one. When I told a friend of mine I was going to ask Grisham to write a blurb, he said, oh no, no, don't even bother. You're just

going to embarrass yourself. Grisham doesn't write blurbs for other people's books. So then a week after that, I was out of lunch with him and I said, well, I was going to ask you for a blurb, but somebody who knows a lot, seems to know everything, told me that you don't write blurbs. Who the hell said that? Where did you get that? I write blurbs all the time. I'm eager to write a blurb for your book. So

I got that. And then the other thing that happened, which is ironic beyond ironic, is that George Foreman died two weeks before the publication date. The title comes from my call of Foreman's win over Michael Moorer. The blurb he wrote for the back cover was one of his last public acts. There are the prologue. The first thing you read in the book is the nineteen year old me watching the nineteen year old hymn win his Olympic

gold medal in Mexico City. There are all sorts of different ways in which George connects directly to the book. So for him to die, I mean, I couldn't stop crying for two days because of the shock and the unbelievable resonance of it that he would die at that moment, just as my book was about to come out, and it's so much about him.