Question for older boxing fans

Boxing Illustrated,Ring ,Boxing News every week, KO later ,&TV, we used to get the Friday night US fights on UK tv Saturday afternoons. Started buying films in my teens and attending fights regularly in my20's.My 1st live attendance fight was Cooper v Mildenberger at Wembley.

 

Ring Classics and Castle, 2 names from the past!

 

I used to buy VHS tapes in line and like everybody else on here I lived for Ring, Boxing News etc.

 

I had my own file of boxers where I updated their results. And the Ring Record Book was invaluable.

 

Did Mildenberger come to fight, always felt he should beat Cooper?

 

Ring Classics and Castle, 2 names from the past!

I don't think so he was overweight and began to maul almost from the start,he started being dangerous with his head early.I don't think he fancied the job.

 

In the back of a couple of the magazines there were ads for guys that sold copies of fights. You would contact them and they would send you a list of available fights.
I always bought from the same guy. It was $25, I think, for a 180 minute tape, and I would piece together the fights I wanted, trying to get as many as possible onto the tape. Over the years I bought at least 30 tapes from him.

 

This.

The monthly magazines, which I always looked forward to going to the store to get; KO, The Ring, World Boxing, Big Book of Boxing, Boxing Scene once in a while. That, and we were fortunate to have a lot of really high-quality fights on TV nearly every weekend.

That, and whatever books I could find though there weren't as many then. The pool of writing and the sheer number of books has increased exponentially, as has the ability to search and procure such things, via the internet. There are a lot more tools available to the young fan now.

 

Who you calling old, sonny boy? (G)

My experience was similar to a lot of what is described in this thread but I’ll try to get specific (and nostalgic):

Reading

I bought my first Ring magazine roughly 1978 or ‘79 at a grocery store (I’m 14 or 15 at the time) when we was on vacation at the beach. My father was always a fight fan and I watched a lot of the weekend fights on TV with him (will address this later). I was blown away — that was before they got slicker and more feature-oriented.

In the back of The Ring, you’d have pages of small-type accounts from cards from around the world, reader-submitted pretty much I think and edited. State by state and country by country outside the U.S. Some would have a few details and others just results. I’d pour through those and absorb everything.

Then I discovered other boxing mags. Over the next few years, especially when I got my driver’s license, it became a regular thing to scour the magazine section at convenience stores (which often carried one or two titles) and local bookstores and buy everything: KO, World Boxing, at some point it became Boxing 95 and Boxing 96, etc., and Boxing Illustrated and especially Hank Kaplan’s International Boxing Digest, which was low on features and high on detailed accounts of cards from around the world.

You’d notice a fighter get hot in Miami and be winning a bout every month or so and then you’d start to recognize opponents’ names and realize this guy was becoming someone to look out for. I remember seeing Marlon Starling’s name every month in write-ups (small type) in The Ring and damned he kept winning and beating semi-name fighters and you figure it’s just a matter of time before he breaks through.

I finally subscribed to The Ring. It would come every month in the mail and the first thing I’d do is go to the page in the back and see the results page, which was just a list of results (from three months ago) sorted by weight class and when you kept seeing someone’s name and he kept winning, hmmm, this Hearns guy might be pretty good (haha).

The Ring always advertised their annual boxing record book which had active fighters and former champs (much like boxrec today). At some point I started buying that every year and read it cover to cover.

Later, toward 1990 or 91 maybe, I subscribed the weekly British publication Boxing News, which arrived a few weeks late in the U.S. but was focused on the UK (and to a lesser degree Euro and world) scene. It was on newsprint and had black and white photos. But a great publication, probably my favorite other than the one that comes next:

Discovering treasure

So you’d see reference (ads mostly I think but occasionally the magazines might cite reporting) of this thing called Tonight’s Boxing Program out of New York by a guy named Flash Gordon. He went to all the NY fights and reported on those (often with a lot of snark) and he was exposing a lot of the dirty side of boxing (he is the one who broke the fixed-ratings scandal of the Ring/ABC/Don King U.S. tournament in the mid-1970s).

He called the WBC the WBKing and the WBA the WBArum, lol. And he also had this huge schedule of upcoming fights and when the opponent for the ‘house fighter’ (local guy who is being built up) wasn’t known, he’d use made-up names like, say, Duane Bobick vs. Dusty Trunks and I forget the others but it was pretty funny. His schedule was worldwide and had upcoming fights from Asia and the UK and the US and everywhere else.

This was subscription-only, printed in a very do-it-yourself way (like IIRC is was typewriter paper folded in half so one piece of paper was four pages, and it would be maybe four sheets so 16 pages chock-full of everything. All black and white, no pictures as I recall, but every inch of it packed with info and opinion from this mysterious character who no one knew much about — Malcolm “Flash” Gordon wrote every word himself.

Television
Back in the 1950s weekly televised boxing (on pretty much all the networks I think) became the norm (this is before my time, haha) and the lament was that it would destroy boxing as fight clubs couldn’t offer quite competitive purses and people stayed home to watch fights instead of going to see the local promotion, etc. Boxing writers thought it was the end.

Gillette (the shaving company) sponsored one of these. There’s a great quote from the writer AJ Liebling who asks a local matchmaker if the main event will be a good fight and he shrugs and says, ‘They think it will sell razor blades,’ haha.

Anyway, by the 1970s ABC was going strong with Wide World of Sports on Saturdays and Sundays (only football seemed to knock it off the schedule and ABC had the NFL on Monday nights so no big deal there but did carry a college game of the week on Saturdays so sometimes you’d get a shortened version of WWoS in the fall). It could be bowling or cliff diving from Acapulco or the Harlem Globetrotters or, quite often, boxing.

Pretty soon rival networks cranked up similar, competing shows for weekend afternoons: CBS Sports Spectacular and NBC’s Sportsworld. These were called anthologies because it could be any sport on any given week and you got exposed to all kinds of things. Which meant they needed programming. Which meant they needed boxing.

So any given weekend you might get boxing on two of these shows on Saturday and all three on Sunday or whatever. There was no DVR so you had to choose. Maybe Leon Spinks is fighting Eddie “The Animal” Lopez on one channel while Hugo Corro is defending the middleweight crown on another. There was, of course, a somewhat heavy U.S. concentration of fights and fighters but they also carried fights of importance from around the world — some live, some tape delayed. And really big fights that were closed circuit (precursor to PPV), they’d bid on the replay rights and show it a week later, often with the fighters on hand in the studio to comment between rounds (this also happened when HBO began to break in and bid for some title fights and eventually the bigger fights).

So boxing was on TV all the time. As cable became more prolific. USA Network had their terrific Tuesday Night Fights series where they got some really quality fights and helped build guys — Oba Carr was a house fighter for them for a long time, but you’d also get Foreman’s early comeback fights and aging Duran or Camacho against a meh opponent but on the undercards especially you’d see some rising contenders. And before that, ESPN began its Top Rank Boxing show (in its earlier days ESPN toyed with boxing and used different promoters and not just Arum — they’d usually go once a month to Ice World in Totowa, N.J., where these Duva folks were bringing up Bobby Czyz and some others).

So on cable you’d get Tuesday (USA) and Friday (ESPN) action and before that you’d often have boxing all weekend and have to choose which fights you wanted.

Oh yeah, ABC especially would also do these big prime-time cards, like Larry Holmes vs. Earnie Shavers or Sugar Ray Leonard-Wilfred Benitez. Sometimes they’d shift to two or even three locations so you’re getting a Holmes fight and a Leonard fight and maybe a Victor Galindez light heavyweight fight. I know they also carried a lot of Ali’s fights in prime time in the 1970s.

So what happened?
Boxing went from prolific and popular to an almost underground niche sport. How did it happen?

Well when you watch Ray Leonard and Thomas Hearns come up through the ranks on network television fighting on TV basically every month or six weeks, and you’ve also seen this Duran guy and Cuevas, once they get to the top you know them and you’re anxious to see them fight each other. So you’re willing to pay to see it (on closed circuit, where you’d go to a theater or arena and pay admission and sit in a seat with other fight fans, or later on PPV in your own home).

One thing that happened was HBO stepped in and their first home-built guy was Marvin Hagler — he’d been on network TV but was not considered flashy or a fun watch at that time so HBO became his home. That’s a smaller audience, but a loyal one and over time as Hagler kept winning they made him into something. Then they began throwing more money at fighters and instead of seeing Leonard on prime time network TV you’d get him on HBO, so you had to subscribe.

But for a long while you still had new names like Hector Camacho and Alexis Arguello and Aaron Pryor and such building followings on network TV so they were kind of ready-made stars. After the networks began to get out of boxing for a variety of reasons — ring deaths, the fact that it was somewhat unreliable programming (a football game is going to start at a certain time and basically end at a certain time, give or take, while a fight can end in the first round and you’ve got to fill the rest of the hour) and unsavory characters pawning off bad fights on clueless network executives, etc., they stopped building stars.

Eventually, the guys you’d see on PPV had only been seen on HBO or Showtime. Smaller audiences but loyal and willing to pay. But it’s hard to build stars in three or four pay-cable fights in the same way as when SRL was in your living room every month or so for a couple years on his way to the top.

They cut off the legs and eventually it couldn’t stand up on its own.

 

Magazines and I remember listening to fights on the radio.

You pretty much had to take what was written as gospel as it was much harder to watch fights back then.

 

I was in England in the spring of 1992 and there was a WBO flyweight title fight on the BBC radio. I found a bookies joint and placed ‘a few bob’ on the outcome as the Mexican champ seemed to be the better fighter and the Scot who was challenging seemed green but was favored.

I think it was Jim Watt doing color commentary. The whole fight the Mexican is having the better of it and Jim is lamenting that the local kid just doesn’t have it, he’s losing exchanges and the champ is putting round after round in his back pocket. I’m counting the few coins I’m going to make.

Then they announce the decision and it’s a hometown robbery for the Scott — and all of a sudden Jim is talking about the brilliant fight the young lad fought, how he cagily outperformed the plucky, not-quite-good-enough Mexican champ ... I just laughed.

EDIT: Only fight I ever listened to on the radio. But I remember big fights (before ESPN) they would often break in on the radio (sports talk radio wasn’t really a thing yet, at least not widely) after the fight and tell you the result and give you a brief account.

Plus, Howard Cosell had a weekly syndicated radio spot, like 5 or 10 minutes on sports every day, that ran in late afternoon after I got home from school. And if there was a big fight, he’d talk about it all week to build it up. I remember him doing a segment on ‘watch out for this Andy Price, he’s a live underdog against Leonard,’ haha. It was just so much more mainstream then.

 

Boxing magazines, especially The Ring.

 

Wow. Cooper v Mildenberger at Wembley. Great stuff, Mac. Brilliant

 

The magazines, of course. Also the small print in the newspapers if you were lucky. Used to be this show "Greatest fights of the Century" that they would put on as a time filler on my local station if the Phillies game ended with time to spare until the top of the hour. What a treat that was

 

More recent, but there was a period in the mid- to late-1990s when an obscure cable channel that mostly ran a stock report scroll called Financial News Network carried odd international fights — from Europe, South Africa, wherever.

On holidays and sometimes weekends they’d just run a marathon of fight after fight after fight. It was definitely VCR heaven.