“The best boxing commentary I ever heard didn’t come from a professional boxing commentator.”
Jim Lampley, longtime voice of HBO Boxing and currently a contributor to PPV.com’s live commentary with BoxingScene’s Lance Pugmire, is sitting in the media room at the MGM Grand, contemplating Saturday’s super middleweight fight between Canelo Alvarez and Edgar Berlanga, when he begins to reminisce about what he’s going to illustrate.
“Have I told you this story before? It’s in the book.” Lampley, now 75 and with just over five decades in the ring and on the sidelines, has written a book — titled, perhaps after his most renowned comment, (and titled “A Uniquely Lucky Life in Sports Television”) – set to premiere in April; perhaps as a result of reliving his life in his mind for publication, the author finds many memories readily available.
Still, this particular memory quickly takes an unexpected turn. The best boxing commentary he ever heard came, he says, “from Mick Jagger.”
OK, I didn’t expect that. Please continue.
“I was in a conference room in the ABC building in Recent York in 1980 as part of the crowd that Roone Arledge had gathered to watch the closed-circuit broadcast of Muhammad Ali versus Larry Holmes,” he explains. “And if you’re a intelligent critic of the sport, you know that this is going to be a gradual and ultimately excruciating beating. So about the eighth or ninth round of this gradual and excruciating beating, I was standing there looking at the screen when I felt a little stab in my chest. I looked to my right and it was Mick. I met him at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, so he knew me. He looked at me and said, ‘Lamps, do you know what we’re watching here?’ And he said, ‘No, Mick, what are we watching?’ He said, ‘This is the end of our youth.’ Nothing Larry Merchant ever said was more profound than that. And I’m sure I’ll go to my grave and say that the best boxing commentary ever came from Mick Jagger.
The heart of the story, he continues, is that too often our favorite fighters—those we may have grown up watching and admiring, or whose careers we’ve followed from the beginning—stay on the field too long, and our once-great rivals end up humiliated and hurt by opponents who might not have caused them even the slightest inconvenience. And one day, he notes—maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but probably soon—that could happen to Canelo Alvarez. Indeed, with 65 professional fights and no knockout wins in nearly three years, it seems clear that Alvarez is, depending on the analogy used, on the home stretch, the ninth hole, or entering the final rounds of a long and successful career.
“One day it might happen, and Mexican fans will have to accept it,” he says. “Like Oscar De la Hoya getting taken apart against Manny Pacquiao on a night when a lot of people really believed that Oscar was too huge, Oscar was too powerful, Oscar could handle Manny’s momentum and speed, etc., etc. At the end of the day, he walked into the ring and had nothing.”
Should that day come, if it does, there will be plenty of critics complaining from the sidelines that Alvarez was never really good, that he picked his opponents or waited for them to get ancient. As Canelo nears the finish line of his career, where will he ultimately rank when he hangs up the gloves for good?
In response, Lampley tells a different story.
“What’s really compelling to me is that I was recently at the International Boxing Hall of Fame induction ceremony. And I spent the whole weekend hanging out with Marco Antonio Barrera and Erik Morales,” he begins. “You wouldn’t have said, ‘I spent the whole weekend hanging out with Marco Antonio Barrera and Erik Morales,’ but that’s what happened. They were more or less arm in arm the whole weekend, just confirming and confirming something that I always say, which is that this sport is ultimately about falling in love. It looks like brutality. It looks like life and death. It looks like two guys trying to kill each other, but they’re actually falling in love. The classic example: Mickey Ward and Arturo Gatti. But anyway, I asked them about Canelo. And Erik said — and Marco agreed — that Canelo has a logical reason to present himself as the greatest Mexican fighter of all time. ‘Better than Salvador Sanchez?’ They said that Canelo has a longer and more diverse resume. “Bigger than Ruben Olivares?” More dimensions, more different things he can do in the ring. You know, they had a point. And again, he has a case to make.”
But if the wheels fall off one day, when might that be? Could it be Saturday against Berlanga at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas?
“In my opinion, the only way Berlanga would win the fight is if Canelo aged overnight, and we’ve seen that happen,” he says. “But I don’t think that’s going to happen.” In fact, he says, Canelo’s control over his career and his environment is so great that he may be one of the few, like Lampley’s former teammate Lennox Lewis, who bucks the trend and retires while he’s still at his peak.
The fact that Lampley — and he’s not alone — is struggling to figure out a path for the unbeaten Berlanga to beat Canelo inevitably raises a point that the Mexican’s critics, and even some of his fans, have been making with greater frequency and intensity: that Alvarez has seemingly decided that his legacy is secure, and that he’s perfectly content to wear down the chain against non-threatening opponents, while the likes of David Benavidez are forced to turn elsewhere. That frustration only grows every time Alvarez simply shrugs off such criticism with the dismissive contempt with which you’d pick a piece of crap off a sweater.
“I don’t think he pays much attention or invests much emotion into what I say about him, what you say about him, what people in boxing say about him,” Lampley says. “When someone stands on the podium and criticizes him, and other fighters are talking about why he’s overrated and how they can beat him, etc., etc., then he listens. he keeps it in some safe and sound box inside of him. But you never see an external response that says, “You got me.” That’s not him.”
As anyone who has faced Canelo in any professional capacity can attest, Alvarez is one of the most composed and self-aware individuals, embracing life on his own terms and acutely aware of his strengths and weaknesses. That’s one reason Lampley suspects the Mexican can avoid the devastating end to his career that has plagued so many — but also, he believes, why Alvarez will have no one but himself to blame when and if that time comes.
“Someone was intelligent enough, and I would say artistic enough, to convince him as a adolescent man that everything in life was going to be his responsibility, that he was going to rise and fall according to the judgments that he made and the decisions that he made about what he was going to do,” Lampley suggests. “And that was the only way he could, especially in a profession like that, go to bed at night knowing that whether it was all the glorious victories or the two defeats that are on the books, he chose to step into that ring. And he, more than any other fighter I know, is entitled to that level of self-satisfaction. And it helps me to know that when he gets somewhere at the end, and it’s almost inevitable in this sport, the apple cart is going to fall apart, all the apples are going to roll out into the street, and the next day people are going to say, ‘Oh yeah, he was awful,’ when all that stuff happens, he’s going to have no one to blame but himself. And I think he likes that.”
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