Do you agree with the commentary style of Tyson Ruddock II?

The commentary was great from what i recall and I've seen the fight plenty of times, certainly better than the first fight with Lennox Lewis as a guest. Both fighters negated their boxing and just went toe-to-toe. Tyson did some great body work but his fluidity and footwork was not there anymore.

 

I’m not sure what conversation you are referring to. I think you might be mistakenly conflating two different conversations we had. In the old days live commentary such as Dunphy, Taub, etc. considered themselves journalists and as such they were very conscious of just presenting the facts and avoiding cheerleading or even trying to interpret too much of what they saw so as not to sway the viewer. There was even a policy to not call out perceived fouls unless the referee called them. Deviation from this style was the rule not the exception until Cosell came along. You don’t see the kind of cheerleading, shameless glorification, and opinionating we see today until Cosell.

Voiceover commentary like you see above is often wildly inaccurate for the simple reason that Jacobs often re-edited footage he found to make it more exciting or more “presentable” to the viewers of his and Caytons program in the 1960s. For example the scene that is often shown in Burns-Johnson as Burns being stopped and the commentator saying “at this point the police stopped the cameras” is totally false. That scene that gets frozen with Burns looking like he’s in mid fall is from a much earlier round, the 7th or the 8th if I recall, and in the unedited version Burns doesn’t even go down, he regains his footing and continues to move around the ring. Indeed the police never stopped the film, the fight was always shown in its entirety, stoppage included, when originally shown. It was edited as such because Jacobs only had one reel from the middle of the fight showing rounds 6 thru 10. It’s much more dramatic to show the first black champion being crowned rather than the film stopping at the end of the tenth so they got creative and edited it. In my opinion that does a disservice to the historical record and preservation. Particularly when you find that many times when Jacobs edited these old films or cut out segments to use in documentaries he never edited them back. Meaning a lot of what he was supposedly preserving is now really chopped up.

 

I wouldn’t care so much if the footage had been edited back into chronological order but the real disservice is that for preservation purposes those films are ****ed now. Jacobs and Clayton weren’t the only ones guilty of this though. Mike Jacobs was horrible for this and so were several others. In fact more often than not those films you watch from the late 30s thru the 50s have rounds out of order.

 

Pacheco was one of the absolute worst. Just crotchety miserable and rude. Didn't know nearly as much about boxing as the passionate boxing fan.