Your favourite boxers growing up

Hope you educated them lol.

 

Michael Spinks was the first boxer I knew existed at a young age after he had won the gold. His home town of St Louis just being about 90 minutes away from where we called home. My dad talked up the famed “Spinks Brothers”. Dad also loved Hagler and Duran so I knew them early too.

I was obsessed by the time the 84 Olympics came around and loved that team. Holyfield, Biggs, Breland, Taylor, Whitaker and so on.

When Tyson hit the scene I was already full on obsessed with boxing and He blew me away. So Tyson was huge too. By the time he entered the pro ranks I was already recording any and everything boxing on the VCR. All my friends were equally obsessed. We bought all the Mags. The 80’s were a pretty good time to get in.

 

Despite my online moniker here the first real boxing hero I had was Marvelous Marvin. He just exuded all the things I'd read voraciously about in boxing magazines I'd buy, or books I could get ahold of. I used to buy back issues out of the offers in the magazines they'd have like a dozen at a time, whatever I could afford as a broke teenager. God, the fun I could have had with something like youtube at my disposal then. It was the 90's before I knew what Sanchez looked like on film. He was gone a year before I got into the sport.

Anyway, Hagler was the modern-day embodiment of those tough guys throughout history. That's why I didn't like Hearns. He was part of a "stable," with gold trunks and robes, a friggin' uniform for chrissakes……….I just hated the idea of boxing being sullied as a team sport. Hagler was the individualist's individual. He shunned all hype (or so it seemed), locked himself away in a prison for training, ate live goats in camp, all that cool stuff. HE was the real McCoy. HE was what boxing was supposed to be. He was how they were in all those black and white photos I saw and all the stories I'd read, when all I could do was read about them, there was no film of people like Dick Tiger or Jose Napoles or Ezzard Charles or any of that readily available to people back then. You saw the odd thing like an old Duran or Ali or Saad Muhammad fight on ESPN Classic but that was about it, they didn't dive too deep.

I think it's fair to say Hagler felt like my link back to those guys I was only able to read about. Like listening to Keb Mo' might be someone's modern connection to Robert Johnson, that kind of thing.

 

Talking about buying old back issues of the magazines, we did the same thing. Then we got to the point where we were ordering fights from the guys that had older fights listed on tape for sale or trade. We would literally drop $60 for 60 rounds a month and we were in junior high. One tape recorded on LP mode equaled four hours of boxing action. It was like Christmas when we got to the mailbox and our new 60 rounds of unseen fighters (sometimes) and fights had arrived. I bet we ordered easily 100 tapes over about a five-year period. Living in an Era without The Internet or YouTube literally all you would see on some of the fights was the pictures you saw in the magazines. So we went back and diligently collected any and everything we wanted to see. Many years later after having about 10 +years of recording fights myself under my belt I then had a large enough collection to then do the same. I was actually dealing my flights online for a while. This New generation has no idea, I can’t even wrap my mind around the thought of having YouTube in the early 80s when I was discovering boxing.

 

Oh God, I know...…..remember how we used to know the release dates more or less for all the mags they had then? There were a lot of them, KO, The Ring, Big Book of Boxing, Boxing Scene, Boxing Illustrated...….how much joy a little thing like that would give you. And yeah, youtube would have been amazing to have. Now we tend to get hard to please and a little jaded because it's all right there at our fingertips any time we want it, but back then it was portioned out to just a little bit every month. And even then it was only magazines. I had no connections for tapes, that would have been great.

 

Being a 90s kid growing up it was ODLH, Mike Tyson, Gatti, and RJJ.

 

Totally!! We had a book/magazine shop on Broadway which back then was the main drag in our town. There was this place called Metro bookstore. And the older man that ran it was called Whitey, i’m not sure if that’s because he was an older man with a beautiful head of flowing gray hair but that’s what he told us to call him. We would call there every week to see which new ones came out and he would hold them for us. It would’ve been amazing to have access to all that we have today back then. But there was also something kind of magical about discovering fights back then, and ordering fights, or turning the TV on on a Saturday afternoon and seeing that they were going to be re-showing Ali -Frazier 1 let’s say and then hurrying to find a blank tape so that you could record it!

 

Saad
Boza

 

I remember I used to buy tapes every month with my pocket money and have my parents subscribe to all the magazines - Ring, KO, World Boxing, Boxing, Boxing Monthly and always. If I wanted to check a fighter out I’d often have to look in the IBHOF register. After I got enough fights then I would trade VHS.

I sort of liked that because I notice a lazy trend these days of people defining a a fighter based on a quick look on boxrec.

 

Roy Jones was like a superhero in the 90s. Definitely him.

 

The answer depends on how old I was at the time. But some of the more memorable ones included:

- Ray Leonard
- Marlon Starling
- Simon Brown
- Hector Camacho
- Ray Mancini
- Donald Curry
- Mike Tyson
- Evander Holyfield ( later )

 

Started watching boxing in the early Tyson era

Mike Tyson
JCC
RJJ
Terry Norris.

 

Little Red
Duran
Michael Spinks
Mancini
Arguello
Boza Edwards
Hagler (took a little while though)
Saad
Marvin Johnson

 

Great memories.

I came up watching boxing in the early 90s so it was the same thing for me - just magazines and the occasional tape. Me and a mate would divide up what we wanted to watch and then order separate tapes and swap them or watch them at each others' houses. Not being able to see these famous fighters often or at all meant that what you read about them became gospel and the photos in the magazines became one of the main connections you had to them. So when I think about my favourite fighters back then, I might have had favourites who I'd never seen fight. Once I started seeing certain fighters in action, it either reinforced my favouritism or put me off them and I moved on to another fighter.

YouTube is amazing because of what you immediately have at your disposal - I've currently got about 40 fights on my to-watch list and have watched about 40 fights in the last month. I'd be lucky to see that many in a year back then because you could only fit so many fights on a tape and I could only afford so many tapes.

 

As a child of the 80s it was Duran and Hearns for me.