George Foreman's Commentary In Hopkins/Trinadad

He was rooting for Trinidad and made it so obvious.

There was also a situation earlier when Hopkins had fought Holmes. Foreman has been talking a lot about Hopkins being a dirty fighter. We all know he's dirty, but Bernard didn't like it and said he needed to close George's big hamburger mouth.

Foreman was a huge cheerleader for De La Hoya. He was humorously bad during the De La Hoya-Quartey fight.

"Not much is a lot for Oscar De La Hoya. Not much is a lot."

 

It's up there for sure, Foreman's head was so far up Tito's ass it was embarrassing.

 

I watched the highlights yesterday because they popped up on my facebook feed. Foreman was cheerleading but I was surprisdd at how much heart Tito showed. He was really trying to land a fight-changing hook until the very end; the knockdown in the 12th was litterally off a counter Hopkins threw after Tito tried to get a hard left hook through.

 

Terrible commentator in general. Had his preconceived theories about the fights and held on to them no matter what was going on in the ring. Listen to him in Toney-Barkley. Toney is absolutely schooling and pummeling Barkley and Foreman keeps rambling about how Toney's falling into Barkley's trap and getting weakened by being leaned on.

 

I remember a moment in DLH - Trinidad, when Foreman claimed that Tito was intimidated by the size of Oscar's shoulders. So many nonsensical moments in his career as a commentator.

 

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George is a poor commentator but Larry Merchant and Jim Lampley were 10 times worse and as biased. Even Roy Jones Jr years ago told one of them off. He was basically saying you were never in the ring so you have no clue to what you are talking about. Which is true. Getting paid to watch sports doesn't make you a expert.

 

So only ex fighters should be fight commentators? Lol, some fighters can hardly string two sentences together without overtaxing their beat up brain.

Btw comic book man, you don't happen to be an ex fighter by any chance?

 

Foreman was far, far worse than either of them, though Lampley was a more shameless cheerleader of HBO fighters.

Merchant was mostly fine but he was biased against certain individual fighters, especially when they weren't as active or aggressive as he wanted, or when they complained about things. Oscar, Mayweather, Byrd, and Quartey come to mind.

You're probably talking about the back and forth between Roy and Merchant in the first Pacquiao - Morales fight. They disagreed about whether Morales was humiliating Pacquiao at a certain point in the fight and Jones pulled rank by saying that if Merchant had fought he'd agree with Roy's take. Not sure if either of them really got the best of that one.

 

Yeah, Roy pulled rank a couple times on Merchant. He also did at the end of the boring Taylor-Hopkins rematch.

But Roy is the best of the fighter commentators they've had on HBO. Despite his tendency to talk about how great he is/was, he actually provided insight about things that were going on the ring. Foreman was just out there with his commentary, like he just wanted to be the contrarian because Lampley and Merchant weren't boxers. I wonder if his tendency to get overexcited over bodywork is him still trying to excuse his awful gameplan in Zaire.

Lennox was pretty terrible, he provided little insight in addition to hilariously screwing up the pronounciation of words.

They may know a lot about boxing from experience but it's still not easy to articulate it in words on a mic in front of a huge audience.

 

I love George, but he may have been the worst announcer ever, in any sport

 

This is what I mean when I talk about the rediculous and obscure expectations 80's/90's Boxiana had.

So many times during a good fight, Merchant would go "What is he doing? Why isn't he punching?? This is strange."

This was a common stigma of the day. Nobody was ever good enough, no performance was good enough.

So many unwarranted criticisms and expectations for the fighters. Kellerman, for all his follies, is a breath of fresh air.

 

The most biased boxing commentary i've ever heard by far was Chavez/Taylor I, listening to Lampley, Merchant and Leonard you'd think that Chavez litrally didn't land a glove on Taylor till the very end despite Taylor's bloody better face and him slowing down from bodyshots show a different story. In fact i seem to remember Leonard saying it was a complete shut out till the final seconds, laughable.