What's your take on the shaming of fighters on HBO?

I remember the one guy claiming Tyson was a giant and the symbol of America.

 

Larry was entertainment he did good things in interviews when fighters would get off track or refuse to answer questions. His jousting with FMM was classic.

But yes his berating of fighters was too far IMO he had no ground to stand on. Fighters would be interviewed after a tough fight still suffering the effects of getting hit a few times and he would in effect bully a defenseless injured fighter. Anyone who has fought knows about the buzz or haziness after a tough fight you sometimes get. I had a few fights where to this day I can't remember half the fight and empathized with them. He sometimes was great and sometimes he lack class and insight. On the Tubbs fight where he took attention away from the fight really??.....he had to point that out?. Tubbs was a good heavyweight but had the look of a fat turd, unlike many fighters he was a good talent and could fight.

 

I've never really had an issue with Merchant up until the Mayweather Ortiz fight, you could see Merchants 'true colours' coming out when Floyd told him he needs to be replaced to which Merchant replied if he was 50 years younger he'd kick Floyds ass.

That to me showed, the man has always been full of malice.

 

I found the HBO crew "shaming" its fighters to be more theatrical than anything. These guys are HBO employees and the fighters were enabled by exclusive HBO contracts. HBO had an interest in guys like Roy Jones fighting hobos to keep them looking invincible. Fans werent stupid and realized that Jones, as an example, was cherry picking which led to the unprecedented Roy-Cott. All HBO's bought and paid for announcer's were doing was reading from the script. It was nothing more than melodrama for the brand. Pretend that you are outraged at the choices the fighter makes, create drama, and try to deflect criticism by pretending to shame the fighter publicly. It was a joke and the cherry picking continued and still does to this day. Back in the day guys like Dunphy, Keiter, Bromburg, Ryan, and even Cosell (to a much lesser degree) were broadcasters who typically stayed above of the fray and just reported the news of the fight/facts as they observed it. Very rarely did they give their own personal opinion. Because essentially these men were reporting news. It was sports news but it was still news and thats how they saw themselves. Today the announcers are simply company men reporting their employers company line. They are spin doctors and arent fit to be compared with the great announcers of the past. I mean jesus, who needs a ****ing team of announcers. HBO often had four or five guys between Lederman, Merchant, Foreman, and Lampley. Could any of these guys do what Don Dunphy and carry a broadcast either for radio or TV on their own and still make it classy, intelligent, and totally unbiased??? Not even remotely.

 

Cosell started the overly opiniated announcing style. Style over substance. Dunphy was substance with little style. Times change. I awlays thought the HBO team catered to casual fans. I liked Gil Glancy/Tim Ryan and Alex Wallau/Dierdorff. I never really liked Lampley.

 

Did you like Dierdorff?

Dumphy was good, I just did not care for his voice.

I still think Merchant called it as he saw it and wasn't an HBO cheerleader.

 

Tim Ryan/Gil Clancy may have been the best boxing announcing team ever. Ryan was an excellent broadcaster who understood the sport. Clancy was an excellent trainer who had been in gyms forever. They seemed like they really liked each other, too. They never stepped over each other. Just a great team. But Gil Clancy was the exception. His success seemed to give networks the idea that anyone who worked in a gym would be great on a boxing broadcast. Most aren't.

I grew up watching boxing with Howard Cosell, so I'll always defend him. He called nearly every fight alone ... which is incredibly difficult. Most broadcasts today have three, four even FIVE people chiming in during a fight. Cosell would talk to cornermen between rounds. During commercial breaks, he'd demand certain shots from the production crew and tell the director what topics he was going to focus on at the start of the rounds.

And he'd haul himself into the ring, and fight through the crowds after the matches to conduct the post-fight interviews. Usually, all by himself.

Cosell was a lawyer who gave up his practice to take up journalism and got into broadcasting by calling Little League games. He also lugged around a big tape recorder - when newspapers guys were drinking and yucking it up with guys they were interviewing - and made sure his quotes were accurate and people could hear what was going on. He also spoke out in the late 60s and throughout the 70s when former athletes would just be handed a microphone - without any background in journalism or broadcasting - and be given jobs calling fights over people who were trained to do the job.

And, today, the biggest gripe of fans during boxing telecasts are fighters who add nothing and tend to take away from broadcasts.

I also think Al Bernstein and Barry Tompkins - on ESPN's Top Rank Boxing in the 80s - were so underrated. Another great duo. Tompkins was HBO's main guy on boxing broadcasts in the early 80s. He was great. And then they kind of replaced him with a very young Jim Lampley. I don't think Lampley ever became as good as Tompkins was.

When Showtime signed both Al and Barry, I couldn't believe they'd put Barry on ShoBox or the Showtime undercard duty. And then they'd pair Al with four or five guys for the main broadcast. You only needed Al and Barry. They could've cut all the rest of them loose.

:good

 

Bernstein was great. Top Rank Boxing on ESPN in the mid '80's was good stuff.

 

I pretty much agree with all of this. I dont hate Cosell as much as some. I recognize his faults. He was often ridiculously biased and tended to interject himself into broadcasts too much as a means of self promotion but I still think he was fun. My favorite is Dunphy though. I dont get the claim above that he had no style. Dunphy is the end word as far as boxing announcers are concerned. His TV broadcasts were minimalist which is great. He wasnt redundant, didnt repeat the action you can already see going on before you (which is THE ONLY THING modern announcers do) he was always prepared, professional, and didnt miss a beat. JHis radio broadcasts were perfect. So perfect in fact he often caught things that you would only catch watching the film if you played it in slow motion and I have never heard him mis-call a punch or combo. Sam Taub who was great and fun also constantly missed punches or would get tripped up and call a right that landed a left or vice versa. Many announcers do. Ive listed to dozens if not hundreds of Dunphy's calls and havent found a mistake like that yet. He was incredible. You dont get to do this job for over forty years during an era when it really meant something without having style and his ability was so far and away above everyone before and after that there really isnt a comparison.

 

I was never a fan of Dierdorff. For the first couple years he worked, he'd relate every fight he called to Football and always seemed to bring up the "St. Louis Football Cardinals" ... because he played for them. Clearly, having an old NFL player calling fights was worse than having an old fighter call them. But I did like how excited he got when a fight was good. He was probably at his best during the Morrison-Hipp fight.

As for Larry Merchant, I think he was rough when he first started on HBO. I think he really came into his own in the late 80s and early 90s.

Unfortunately, when he got older, it just seemed like he didn't want to put in the work.

Most fans would follow fighters for years before they fought on HBO. And on some occasions, in the late 90s and beyond, you'd get the impression Merchant never saw a fighter until that boxer fought on HBO. Or Larry would just come out and say that it was the first time he was seeing a fighter. And it was kind of shocking, because some of those guys had fought on other networks for years. It's like he was totally unaware of anything going on in boxing as a whole unless it happened a few feet in front of him.

But, for a time, in the late 80s and early 90s, he was on his game and very entertaining.

 

I agree. I also liked Dunphy a ton. He was just a straight shooter. You learned more during a fight about the fighters in the ring than you learn in most pre-fight video clips they show now. And, coming from radio, he'd call a fight as it was happening.

As I'm sure you remember, in the late 80s/early 90s, when fights were on PPV, if you didn't order them, you could still listen to the broadcast - the cable companies just scrambled the picture. And when a fight was on HBO, most of the time you had no idea what was actually going on in the ring because Jim Lampley was waxing poetic about something, and every 30 seconds or so, you'd hear the crowd yell, and Lampley would say someone landed a right ... and then he'd go back to talking about whatever he was rambling about.

When Dunphy was calling fights in the days before cable, he'd explain what was happening in the ring and tell you about the fighters simultaneously, because people would lose the picture on their TVs then, too. And they'd want to still be able to listen to what was taking place.

Like Cosell, Dunphy also primarily worked alone. I don't know of any broadcaster calling boxing right now who I think could do that. The play-by-play guys and the color guys tend to have trouble shifting roles.

And I'm sure Dunphy had a sense of humor about his straight reporting style, or he never would've appeared in the movie "Bananas." When that movie is on, I always have to watch the opening and closing scenes with Dunphy and Cosell - calling the political assassination and Woody Allen's wedding night. Both still crack me up.

 

Classic clip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1QVthvDhPo

 

"The whale got harpooned" has to have been the most brutal boxing commentary of the past 20 years

 

The cool thing about Dunphy doing both radio and TV was that you really got to compare and see just how prepared and professional he was and just how different the two disciplines were. When calling a radio broadcast he would call it blow by blow exactly as it happened and put you ringside. When calling a TV broadcast he would let the picture do the talking and only add insight to things that you wouldnt catch if you werent right there in the arena. He would talk about what was going on in the corner, or say things like "for those of you watching in black and white so and so has an angry red welt above his left eye" things like that, that you couldnt really pick up on those old tvs. I remember one time during a tv fight the crowd stood up in excitement. Without Dunphy you would have thought they were excited about the action. Instead Dunphy said something like "The audience has just taken note of a fight taking place in the stands behind me and apparently its a whale of a fight to destract from our feature tonight." LOL. He would often give you context like "that punch may have looked harder to our viewers at home than it really was." etc. He rarely ever insulted the intelligence of the viewer by repeating what they could already see. Nowadays they just rattle off "a hard left! a hard right! Two more rights to the mid section!" No **** Jim Lampley, Im watching the same thing you are. Or even worse "BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM" Good god. I want to puke just thinking about that. I wont even get into Max Kellerman (who has been pointless since day one both in the studio and worse at ringside) constantly shouting, quoting "facts" that are just horribly incorrect, butchering pronounciations, and drooling over his favorites.