I remember always being fired-up on my commute home whenever USA had a Tuesday Night Fight that interested me.
I was in PR in like 1997 or so for a college basketball tournament. Had a great time. The place was gorgeous and everyone we encountered was super cool. All I really got to see was the ‘casino district’ in San Juan where we stayed, Old San Juan and Bayamon, where the games were played (at American University of Puerto Rico IIRC). I remember one of the days was Thanksgiving and a lot of stuff was closed for the holiday and we walked around for a long time outside the casino district and found a more ‘native’ restaurant that was open (as opposed to an American chain) and had a great meal (they even had turkey, haha). No boxing on that trip, unfortunately, but it was a nice taste of the island experience.
agreed. funny incident for me regarding vcr. wife and i went with out h.b.o. for a while in the late 90s to save some money. asked mother in law (a VERY catholic old woman) to tape a big fight for me. week later, she brought it over. day or two later, sat down to watch it. mother in law accidentally had taped cinemax "after dark" instead! those two girls who appeared to be "wrestling" were fun to watch, but it wasn't the fight! LOL!
I had about ten tapes myself. We didnt have cable because it wasnt allowed where we lived at in 1985, but it didn't matter because 1. we had excellent video stores where new releases were 2 dollars each and 2. we had 6 or 7 channels in Puerto Rico showing all the fights for free at the time! Also, one of the channels, Canal 7, offered old fights on Saturday evenings while Canal 4 did so on Sunday afternoons. We are talking anything from footage of Jack Johnson vs Stanley Ketchel to the then-recent historical fight of Jose Napoles vs John Stracey. In my case I went to rent a movie or two the night of Jose Luis Ramirez-Hector Camacho and Trevor Berbick-Mitch Green. We saw at the video store that Kodak tapes were like 5 dollars so my dad said "hey why not?" and so Berbick-Green became my first fight on record and Ramirez-Camacho my first main event. Eventually I had probably 200 fightsc on ten tapes, from Johnson-Ketchel to, I kid you not, Gervacio-Morel, with Tyson-Berbick and Hagler-Leonard included. What happened was that when I was 15, I suddenly became interested in arts, and our neighbor who was moving, let us keep her VCR as a parting gift, so, us not having cable-tv and all that, I decided it would be a great idea for my family to reuse those tapes to record movies. I took all the great fights and put them into two "condensed" versions of my old tapes, so I could still watch the great fights whenever I wanted to. Then I rented, and I remember in this order, "Cobra", "Invasion U.S.A.", "Dirty Dancing", "Mannequin", "Rad", "Karate Kid I and II" and "Flashdance" and recorded them by connecting both VCR's we had with a cable ...lol I rewatched both those boxing classics and the movies for decades until the vcr broke and I had cable-tv now., And, thank God for You Tube these days!
USA-TNF and ESPN weekly fight shows started shortly after I first became a hardcore boxing fan, so I watched them religiously throughout the 80s and 90s. So many great fight. Freddie Roach was a regular on those shows, among many others of note.
I remember those fights. Camacho got dropped for the first time. Foreman got rocked in the 1st against Carlos Hernandez before stopping him in 4.
YES!!!! I miss Tuesday night fights, and the Thursday night fights, and ABC Wide World of Sports, and NBC and CBS Fights that were a staple of those networks Weekend showcases.
Yes! I miss them! And I still miss Friday night fights. Heck, I still miss the fights on the radio. Very over the top and descriptive, whether exaggerated, with sound effects, or not, they were fun to listen to. And what Flash24 said.
DJ used to ‘watch’ the fights on telegraph ticker tape when the reports came over the wire. Then Marconi came along and invented the radio. Some of my father’s fondest memories were listening to Floyd Patterson’s fights on the radio, I think they’d go out to the car and crank it up in the driveway to listen. He said the night Sonny Liston beat Floyd (his favorite fighter) the first time they barely turned it on before it was over, haha.
I miss coming home & there being boxing on in the middle of the week. Not just big hyped fights but …. Boxing. I miss it being a sport I could follow. I used to love when the main event ended earlier on Top Rank Boxing & you’d get 4 rounders. Al Bernstein & Barry Tompkins awkward made those entertaining.