Jim Lampley has covered just about every popular and obscure sporting event imaginable, including 14 Olympics. Yet the 76-year-old North Carolina native is most synonymous with boxing, as he was the TV witness of moments from the sport’s biggest stars—Mike Tyson, Oscar de la Hoya, Floyd Mayweather Jr., Manny Pacquiao and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez.
After ending a seven-year hiatus as a ringside announcer last month when he called Ring Magazine’s historic but much-maligned event in New York’s Times Square, Lampley noted much how the business of televised boxing has changed since his career began in 1974.
When asked if there could be another broadcast face of the sport like himself, Lampley didn’t hesitate to say no, owing to how fragmented sports media has become.
“Because of the broad proliferation and because now every meaningful fight is an individual purchase,” Lampley said in an interview at Sportico’s offices. “Every meaningful fight is a transaction you have to determine in your own mind: ‘Am I really ready to pay 50 bucks to see two fighters I don’t know all that well? No.’ Maybe [media] will continue to evolve in such a way that another similar institution will arrive.”
The institution he’s talking about is HBO, where he spent 30 years calling fights as the lead anchor and host of HBO World Championship Boxing and its pay-per-view events from 1988 until 2018. Lampley worked with legendary fighters like Lennox Lewis and Roy Jones Jr., commentators in Larry Merchant and Max Kellerman, and the late trainer Emanuel Steward.
Lampley also worked with and became close friends with George Foreman, who passed away in March. One of his most famous calls—Foreman’s stunning heavyweight title win at the age of 45 over Michael Moorer back in 1995—inspired the title of the announcer’s recently released memoir, It Happened! A Uniquely Lucky Life in Sports Television.
Though he called fights for ABC, boxing was just one part of a sports buffet for the over-the-air broadcaster. Through the 1980s and early 1990s, HBO was building its subscription base around movies, R-rated original shows and the sweet science, building much of boxing franchise around stars like Tyson.
“Every day that I ever worked at HBO, I was utterly conscious of the fact that this is a singular institution,” he said of his time there. “This is not like any other communications institution in the world. And oh, by the way, if it ever goes away, I’m not sure it will be replaced.”
AT&T’s ill-fated purchase of Time Warner, however, played a role in loosening HBO’s hold over the sport. Lampley recalled meeting his new boss, WarnerMedia CEO John Stankey, at a network gathering after the merger closed. It was then he knew boxing was on the ropes.
“I went over, and I had a 10- or 15-minute conversation with John Stankey and his wife. (HBO chairman Richard) Plepler said, ‘Well, what do you think?’ And I said, ‘I think boxing is gone.’
“That was a heartbreaking night for me. Why in the world would anybody buy HBO and decide to get rid of boxing, given what it meant to our legacy and our heritage?”
These days, it’s harder for boxing fans to find a single and widely available destination to watch the sport. HBO officially walked away from the fight game in 2018 while Showtime, its premium cable competitor from Paramount, ended its televised coverage of the sport in 2021. ESPN’s exclusive rights deal with Top Rank Promotions is set to expire in August.
Streaming services such as DAZN have tried to fill the void created by declining cable subscriptions, but their own paywalls have winnowed audiences.
Yet every so often, as shown by the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson event last summer, boxing still has its moments in the zeitgeist.
Alvarez, the Mexican superstar, will fight Terence Crawford on Sept. 13 in Las Vegas, with Netflix announcing it will stream the fight globally. That card will be co-promoted by Turki Alalshikh, Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority chairman. (The fight is not promoted under the new TKO Boxing banner he formed with Dana White in March.)
Alalshikh organized the Times Square event in May and hired Lampley to call the fights on DAZN. The three-fight card was roundly criticized, however, for its restricted access to the public and underwhelming performances from Ryan Garcia, Devin Haney and Teofimo Lopez.
“I love that the sheikh (Alalshikh) wanted me to call fights,” Lampley said. “I hope the sheikh can retain the power within the current structure of boxing to keep influencing that. I hope I get more chances to call fights. I wish that the fights in Times Square had been better, but that’s not something that I control. My job was to call it the way I saw it, and now we’ll see what happens next.”
With assistance from Eric Jackson.
