Obviously nowadays fans have so many things they can access. We can watch thousands upon thousands of fights on youtube, and there are at least a dozen good online sites that sell boxing dvds. But I know there was virtually no internet before the 90s, and few dvds either. When you older guys watched fights from the 50s-70s, were you only able to watch them on TV? or were there other ways of seeing fights as well? When did boxing tapes start becoming available to buy?
I watched a lot of the 70s fights when they happened lol. The VCR was a big deal. A friend of mine told me he paid $1500 when they first came out specifically to record fights from television and to acquire tapes of old fights. Myself, I started recording fights in 1990, every fight that was on TV. Most of them are now on YouTube but there are a lot of them- notably the James Pipps vs Carmelo Negron fight and a bunch of Buddy McGirt stay busy fights- that I would like to see again. I started buying fights in the mid 90s. I am sure that guys were buying and selling reel to reel tapes or whatever existed before that. Correction. I bought the Pipps v Negron fight, I did not record it.
In the 50s there were a lot of fights broadcast live on TV. There were Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday Night Fights every week. Often in movie theatres before the main attraction they would show newsreels of big fights. That was how I firx'[pppppppppp*st saw the first Patterson-Johansson fight. Watching those seven knockdowns in the third round on that huge outdoor drive-in movie screen was painful to watch! The TV fights continued on into the 60s although not as often. Wide World of Sports would broadcast the big championship fights, and other boxing shows of importance would be telecast on special occasions. By the 70s 8mm boxing films became available for purchase. I bought some Dempsey-Tunney highlights, same for Joe Louis, Marciano, and highlights of FOTC. In the 80s VCRs allowed for taping of the many boxing shows on HBO and other cable stations. I bought some tapes from collectors who advertised tapes for sale in the many boxing magazines. I must have spent a small fortune on the many boxing magazines available in the 80s and 90s (nearly all of them are gone by now). I bought Ring Magazine from the mid-60s into the '90s.
Your father and Carmelo Negron put on a great fight. He got up from a very hard body punch and, despite clearly being in pain, he fought his way through it and came back strong.
I was buying some crazy good Latin American career sets on VHS back in the 90's... Duran, Monzon, Zarate, Julio... Some of this stuff has never sniffed YouTube.
I saw the Robinson-Graziano fight film in a game arcade in Times Square, New York City. This was late-'50s or early '60s. The Library of Congress used to have a collection of fight films. I saw eight Sonny Liston fights there, late 1980s.
I started really following boxing in the early 90s. PPV was easy to steal with the illegal scramblers. I used to tape so many fights before converting them to DVD. In the 00s, I used to buy a lot of DVDs of fights from sellers online. Some VHS tapes too. The guy with the best collection was Brian Cooper, he had all this rare stuff, but he passed away a few years ago.
My first memory of boxing was watching Gillette Friday night fights in my father’s lap in the early fifties. Boxing was mainstream back in the day and had good bouts televised often.
Started collecting tapes around 1993 or 1994. Most of the boxing I watched before that was on ITV and the high quality domestic ‘world title’ UK fights (Benn-Eubank-Watson). Reading The Ring and other world boxing mags got me into more of the history and the global scene and then I started picking up classic fights like Saad-Lopez 2 and other late 70s and early 80s classics.
