This content is protected The Voice of boxing for about 30 years is offcourse best known for his tenure with HBO and a few years before that at ABC. But here,in 1987 in a one off for the Holyfield/Ocasio and Qawi/Murphy double header in the summer of 1987 in St Tropez France Lampley worked for Showtime Championship Boxing. Quite a scene rewatching it back and knowing what happened in the future. Lampley signed with HBO in 1988,the next year.
Good find. By the way, he was directly responsible of HBO firing Barry Tompkins so he could take his place. I always preferred Tompkins' commentary.
How do you know? Anyway,on the subject,Lampley always was a boxing fan but he was working football on ABC.He was disliked by the higher ups at ABC including Cosell so when they had nobody to put on boxing they thought it would be a good idea to make him do the boxing telecasts as a way to force him to quit. Little did they know. But yeah Tompkins was grrat aswell.
https://www.sherdog.com/news/articles/One-Of-Boxings-Uncommon-Treasures-A-QA-with-Jim-Lampley-89579 You can check this link.
I always thought Barry Tompkins and Alex Wallau were two underrated, highly professional, well-spoken blow-by-blow guys.
If you guys want to have a bit of enjoyment and a good laugh, watch the second fight between Maurice Hope and Rocky Mattioli. The enjoyment is because it was a good fight and the laugh was because Cosell didn't know his mic was still on during the 1 minute intervals. During that minute - whomever he is talking to, maybe a producer - he is just clawing, insulting and being generally obnoxious about Alex Wallau at every given moment. Laughed my tail off.
I believe,and I hope I’m not mistaken,Wallau was also in an exec position at ABC outside of him doing on camera work and probably as a boss had to make decisions employs didnt like and as such he wasnt the most liked individual. Always seemed the guys he worked with were scared of him on air. I believe he is also the guy respinsible for Hagler changing his name to Marvelous because they wouldnt call him that on air.
