Question for older boxing fans

Ring magazine, KO magazine and World Boxing. Also the Wide world of sports , NBC and CBS usually had fights on every weekend. You really had to look for the news then.

 

Sometimes, a lot of highlights back then were still photos of the fights the next morning on news shows .

 

Yeah, I remember when I became aware of an Assassin called Carlos Zarate back in the 70's. When I brought up his name people said ,who? The magazines were practically the only source and I must have had hundreds.

 

Exactly 100% my man. That's how it was

 

Ring Magazine, Boxing Illustrated, World Boxing, International Boxing, Big Book of Boxing .. I remember waiting with tremendous excitement for these magazines to come out to my local newsstands each month .. I don't think I missed on issue of any of them over a twelve year period ..

 

Boxing magazines mainly, had a huge collection. Didn't see most of the great fights I'd read about until I discovered Youtube.

 

Perfect response. Beat me to it, man. Remember the lightheavies on tv on Saturdays and Sundays between 77 and 84, lol?

 

I started getting into boxing in 1976. They didn't have DVDs then. VHS (or beta) machines were starting to come out, but at over $500 they were not an option. I watched highlights of old fights on super 8 films (from Ring Classics or Castle) you could buy from ads in Ring. But even these were around $15, if I remember correctly, so I wasn't able to buy a lot. I had a collection of around fifteen.

ESPN didn't exist. Even after it did, our local cable system didn't have it until early 1982.

As others have said, magazines were king, but you had to wait three months for reports and to show up in a new issue. I remember as recently as 1991 I had to wait for the mags to find out who won the Tim Witherspoon - Carl Williams fight, and they were ranked #2 and #3 in the world at that time. Sometimes the local paper would have results for smaller fights, sometimes not. They did usually report on bigger fights. Somewhere around 1980 I discovered that Jack Fiske had a twice-weekly boxing column in the San Francisco Chronicle, so that helped. In 1982 USA Today newspaper debuted. That helped, too.

You saw fights on the weekend sports shows on the networks. We didn't have NBC, so I still missed a lot of fights until my grandparents got cable and they got the San Francisco station. Sometimes the other networks would report the results of an NBC fight, sometimes not.

 

Those magazines were world class in those days. Ring always had a flashback segment of an atg from the auld days.

 

First "Boxing Illustrated" then "Boxing News". I started buying "Ring Classics" Super 8 films. Then in 1998 I bought my first video tape recorder to tape the Greg Haugen v Gert Bo Jacobsen fight. (Yes, I am danish). The next 20 years I traded fight with other collectors all over the world. With VHS tapes losing quality, I converted the whole collection to DVD´s