Question for older boxing fans

Hah! I remember the old Prodigy chat board! I don't think I ever contributed but did follow. I remember reading that Corrie Sanders was clouted by Nate Tubbs on there. Burst my Sanders bubble. Also, remember reading for the first time about two huge Ukrainian Bros. on there.

 

Great days indeed Did you ever see Randall Tex Cobb & his wife at the time on there. He was hilarious

 

It was like when I bet a classmate on the Joe Frazier vs George Foreman fight in 1973, I bet $10.00, my classmate laughed at me. But the next day, he was not laughing anymore. I collected my money with a smile.

 

That's right! I also occasionally read Boxing Illustrated and read Dick Young and Gene Ward's sports columns in the NY Daily News. Also Bill Gallo had good columns and his excellent sports cartoons.

 

In the late 60s and early 70s you could buy super 8mm films of boxing matches. They usually were highlights with captions as they were silent films. Some featured a particular fighter, like Gene Tunney or Jack Dempsey. You had to have the right kind of movie projector to watch the films. In the 70s and 80s I bought some VHS tapes of fights and fighters from certain collectors who had them for sale. Regarding certain TV channels, I remember about 10 years ago there was an ESPN Classic channel that for a time showed at least one old fight each day. I haven't seen that channel for a while, so I don't know if it's still out there somewhere. In the early days of HBO they had half hour specials on certain great fighters.

 

That is correct, you could find them in various sports magazine at the very end.

 

I don't know if you guys also remember this, but do you also recall the ads in World and Int'l Boxing for those goofy blow-up dolls? Oh, man, when I think back to that. Even though I was in my teens i recall actually being insulted by them. Insulted because I remember thinking, 'What, just because I'm a boxing fan, that also means I'm a degenerate?' LOL! Good times.

 

There were fights on nearly every weekend on the 3 channels. Boxing was much better promoted that way I believe, no PPV bs. Of course Ring mag was also instrumemtal.

 

Just looked it up: the first ESPN-televised fight I saw was on Wednesday, Nov. 14 in 1979.

Main event was George Chaplain (14-1-1) vs. Wendell Bailey (13-2) for the Maryland state heavyweight championship. Chaplin won a 12-round decision.

(How I remember seeing that fight I have no idea, but did a little research — we got ESPN added to our local cable the previous Saturday because they were showing Alabama football at LSU, so this definitely would have been the first fight I saw on the cable TV network.)

Looking at boxrec, I apparently also saw a 4-1-1 Dwight Braxton (later Qawi) win an 8-round decision in the chief undercard bout. I have zero memory of that.

In those earlier days ESPN wasn’t 24 hours a day and it didn’t have contracts to carry any pro sports and put together whatever kind of programming schedule it could — I remember seeing UConn play college baseball a couple of times: with the network situated in Connecticut I guess they just went down the road to the nearest college and maybe at most gave them a few hundred bucks to fill a 3-hour block ... they weren’t even good, but you never saw college baseball on TV in those days.

We’ve come a long way.

 

That’s another thing: my school’s library took some major newspapers and I would go find the New York Times and scour through pages looking for boxing stories and results. When Willie Classen died from injuries sustained in his fight with Wilford Scypion in late 1979 I read about it in the NYT.

And the local paper would carry wire reports from bigger fights and also often ran the fight schedule and fight results on the box score page.

USA Today would also have a weekly boxing notebook, coverage leading into and out of big fights and their briefs section was set up to carry one boxing item and one item from various world sports so if you plunked down a couple quarters you might get a brief about a flyweight title bout in Thailand or something, haha. They also carried rankings once a month.

 

I sure do remember those ads my friend, Ha Ha, Lol.

 

Such a rip-off. They look NOTHING like the ads.

 

A load of hot air?

 

NBC and CBS had world class boxing almost every weekend, ABC Wide World of Sports had most of the "bigger" fights but it wasn't weekly. Than came USA's Tuesday night fights that featured a lot of up and comers including M Tyson if I remember right. ESPN came along and had weekly world class boxing matches.

Boxing publications. World Boxing, Boxing Illustrated, The wonderful KO mags , the legendary Ring mags. (Personally, I may have spent a small fortune on those mags. I rarely missed a month of buying at least 3 of the above) The info was out their, just had to look harder to find it.
And it also was much more informative. Boxing fans had to watch fights in their entirety. Back then , a fan got a much better "feel" for fighters , a better understanding of "strength and weaknesses " from in generally excellent announcers who usually were fans themselves.
And the time it took to watch a entire fight.
There were no five minute highlight clips on You Tube that only showed the fighters at their absolute best. "No posters on web sites such as this one that take those "highlights " as the Bible and formulate opinions based off of that info.... I wonder how many of the posters on this site born and raised in the internet age actually have sat down and watched a fight in its entirety. Judging by some of their comments not many.

 

Boxing magazines primarily. There was boxing on network television every week, sometimes week nights. The main gripe people had then, before VCR became popular or available, was promoters often purposely scheduled their cards at the exact same time on different channels.

So, you had to choose which fight you were going to watch. Or, in between rounds, you'd flip over to the other fight. Sometimes, you picked the wrong fight and missed a classic (because there were no replays).

IT SUCKED!!!!

I grew up in the Midwest in the U.S. and the availability of cable television around 1979 changed everything. I believe there were only 12 cable channels - 2 thru 13 - but 11 channels were better than three or four (which we could get with an antenna).

Right after we got cable, I saw the Holmes-Weaver card on HBO with Duran-Palomino on the undercard. I never would've seen it - for nearly 20 years, when I began trading fight tapes - if we hadn't.

One channel used to televise cards from Madison Square Garden every week. That year they televised a lot of Golden Gloves cards. I saw fighters like Alex Ramos for the first time. I also recall seeing Archie Moore's son box on a Golden Gloves card and he looked exactly like Moore. But he lost. I've never seen a tape of that card ever since.

Cable changed the game, followed by VCRs. ESPN was available in 1980, so that added more boxing. The USA Network came along in the 1980s, and late in the decade they started showing boxing.

Fans today are so lucky. Seriously. You can watch anything from anywhere in the world the next day on some platform.