Question for older boxing fans

Boxing was a far bigger sport coverage wise in the 1980"s...and there were more fighters here in Britain and America...and the scene was better covered...magazines were a joy back than ...you had 8-9 American magazines...and boxing news followed by boxing monthly..teletext gave u quite rapid news of fight results...nothing comprehensive but world and regional titles were covered ....there were was a more well covered domestic and european scene with tv shows like Grandstand and ITV world of sport on saturday afternoons from midday to 5pm showing live domestic bills and the american fights....u also had wednesday nights Sportsnight on BBC1 where i saw live fights like herol graham-mike mccallum and sumbu kalambay v Graham...biggs v mason....bruno-tillis..all in all the sport was easier to follow back than

 

My first introduction to boxing was watching it on network TV. I really only knew the names of the top HWs. This was when Ali was in his second reign. Then I watched the coverage of the '76 Olympic boxing and the US team did very well and got a lot of airplay. Then Rocky came out and further stoked my interest. I was more into the NFL, NBA and MLB though. I watched network boxing for the next 5 plus years but only sporadically. I was not a hardcore fan. Then I watched Boza- Chacon Ii and became hooked on boxing. Months later I saw an issue of KO at a news stand. It was the June 1984 issue but hit the news stand in April. The fight coverage ended in February. They covered the Willie Edwards-Matthew Saad Muhammad fight. I had seen highlights of Saad Muhammad's loss to Eric Winbush on the local news Sports report. I decided I had to learn what had happened to this former champ so I began to order back issues of KO. , World Boxing, International Boxing and Big Book of Boxing. At the same time, I bought KO each month from the news stand. And, I watched network boxing religiously. I became extremely well versed with recent boxing history and the current scene in a short period of time. I began to write Letters to the Editors of KO and World Boxing. World Boxing printed one I wrote about Boza Edwards in the summer of 1985 when I was 16 years old. One memory that stands out is the high feeling of anticipation waiting for back issues to arrive. The order form said three to four weeks for delivery or something like that. But it was usually around two weeks. One time I was walking in my neighborhood and saw the mail truck parked on my street with the carrier nowhere in sight. It was about time for my back issue to arrive so I looked at he bundles of mail lined up in the truck. I saw the familiar manila envelope and reached in and grabbed it. Bingo. It was my back issue. I guess I broke a federal law that day. Lol.

 

It was AGONIZING waiting for back issues to come. Or anything you ordered through the mail. My first back issue order was in 1977. I ordered two World Boxing issues: one covering Norton-Ali I and one covering Ali-Foreman. I was so amazed that I could get magazines that were three and four whole years old! For a ten year old, four years is a very long period of time. At that age you're in grade 5. Four years ago was first grade! Forever!

 

Wow you started earlier than I did. I was 15 when I started ordering back issues in 1984. I wish I could remember the first back issue I ordered. It may have been the Jan. 1980 issue of Big Book of Boxing which had a Color cover photo of Saad and Conteh. I still have that mag. In storage. The oldest back issue I ordered was from 1977. I got one with Ali and Shavers on the cover. The back issues ere always in pristine condition upon arrival. I remember KO cost $2.25 at the news stand in 1984. Back issues were $4.00, I think

 

It was just different. I knew all the contenders- saw most of them fight on USA,ESPN,MSG,CBS etc.
Then I could get details about boxers from the magazines.
So you really took an interest in the boxers.
The Olympics were the Holy Grail- win the gold and you instantly get attention. And better paydays.
Had boxers guest star on Whose the Boss. The Taxi sitcom. Martin Lawerence Show.
The USBA and NABF titles were a big deal.
And the boxers were different. Sure they wanted the money but they also wanted to prove who the best was.
Kronk gym was churning out champions left and right.
Duva had their stable. Futch working with young boxers.
It went Espn/Usa- then CBS/ABC- then HBO - and then Pay Per View and that was for only superfights like Hearns vsHagler,or Leonard vs Hagler.
And HBO would always do a special segment on the superfights.

 

Cool. Mine are mostly all gone, though in the last few years I scanned them before selling them on eBay. I think by the time you got to collecting I was going through the Ring Swap & Sell classifieds, as they were less expensive through regular people than from the publisher.

But when I was still ordering them from the publisher I remember I ordered the first issue of World Boxing, from 1968. Sonny Liston was on the cover. I didn't understand the context at the time - that he'd just beaten Henry Clark on TV and was suddenly seen as a viable challenger again. I just wanted issue #1. I also ordered some 1964 or 1965 issues of Boxing International, before it was International Boxing, with Ali and Liston on the cover.

What the Victory Sports Series (World Boxing, International Boxing, Big Book of Boxing, and later KO) folks did that I caught on to after awhile was they'd fill space by recycling old articles about historic boxers or events from past issues. They did this fairly often. So you'd see an article about, say, Jake LaMotta or the Zale-Graziano series that had run some years before. Same layout, same fonts, just copied from an older issue. No harm, no foul, though. Most people didn't collect the mags, so they saw it as a good article rather than something recycled from several years back. I don't think Ring ever did this. Instead they'd put out "Best of The Ring" books with reprints there.

 

After I caught the boxing bug, my grandfather who worked at a library and would take this book "John Durant’s The Heavyweight Champions" out for me multiple times. I remembered that it had all the champion's records on the inside cover. In recent years I was looking to find it and actually picked up "Heavyweight Champions by Stanley Weston" it hopes that was it. I recently did some research and tracked a copy down and purchased it from Amazon - great memories!

I started reading about boxing in the newspapers, encyclopedias and Sports Illustrated. When I was 10, I was in a drug store with my mother and saw that they actually had magazines devoted to boxing. She bought it for me for 60 cents, it was the September 1972 issue of Ring Magazine. I lost that copy somewhere along the line but repurchased it on E-bay a few years back. After that first purchase, I bought everything, Ring, World Boxing, International, Big Book of boxing that I could afford with my allowance. I would read them over and over again. I still continued to purchase them for many years after until they all but disappeared from the stands. I still occasionally buy a current day issue of the Ring but it isn't the same.

I also remember watching boxing on ABC Wide World of Sports, CBS Sports Spectacular and later NBC SportsWorld, I also remember sometimes they would occasionally show a fight on a week night.

In recent years I have also read many boxing books and enjoy watching those old fights on YouTube or ESPN+ when I can.

 

Ring classics films were among the most coveted things i ever owned

 

Awesome post.

The Ring had an article from 1991 about PPV. The cover showed a hand reaching out of the set grabbing a hand full of cash. The caption read "Now youll pay." It pretty much predicted that ppv would destroy boxings overall popularity. That was the first year I remember seeing TVKO. They had fights that would have been on network tv a few years earlier.

 

FNN/SCORE started showing fights in 1987. Artie Rosenthal was a big shot at FNN and he loved boxing so he peruaded the channel to show boxing. He even commentated with Hugh Millet ((sp?). They shoed a lot of championship fights from Europe while they commentated from a studio in NYC.

 

I liked the structure of TVKO, thought. You’d get two or three really good featured fights and it was like $20 for each monthly PPV instead of the big price tag you’d get with the major fights (and usually no undercard worth remembering). Better value and affordable.