Jim Lampley has had a remarkable sports and broadcasting career, and it’s not over yet. Lampley will be ringside in Times Square Friday night calling the “Fatal Fury” pay-per-view card for DAZN. That card (which starts at 5 p.m. ET) is headlined by Ryan Garcia vs. Rolando “Rolly” Romero, Devin Haney vs. Jose Ramirez, and Teofimo Lopez Jr. vs. Arnold Barboza Jr.
Lampley recently spoke to Awful Announcing about this fight, as well as his decades in sports and news media and his new It Happened! A Uniquely Lucky Life In Sports Television autobiography (with Art Chansky) looking back at his career. To start with, he said the outdoor setting of Times Square makes this fight particularly intriguing.
“Some of the most unusual things that have ever happened in American boxing took place outdoors. Beginning with the very first heavyweight championship fight which was Jake Kilrain versus John L. Sullivan in the swamp in Mississippi, going through Jack Johnson versus Jess Willard in Havana, Cuba, the famous fight where Johnson lay on the campus and shielded his eyes from the sun as he was being counted out.
“You can go all the way through the last outdoor fight that I can recalling seeing in New York, which was Miguel Cotto versus Yuri Foreman at Yankee Stadium, live on HBO. …You see things in outdoor fights that you don’t see in other situations, and this will be one of the most unusual yet.”
Lampley’s decades of work in television have seen him work on a huge array of sports, from the Olympics (he’s covered 14 Games for U.S. television, a record) to college football to everything in ABC’s Wide World of Sports franchise, to say nothing of his long run as a Los Angeles news anchor. But boxing has been one of the sports he’s been most associated with, starting with ABC Sports and then through decades with HBO. He told AA boxing has always appealed to him because of the direct clashes it sets up between fighters.
“It’s the personal element of the sport. It is the most fundamentally confrontational sport. You go into a ring half-naked, in the eyes of the world, face off against another man, and try to show who’s best. There’s something so elementally compelling about all that it has a unique appeal.”
The many notable characters in boxing are also something Lampley enjoys, and he thinks that’s partly due to the self-promotion aspect necessary to the sport.
“Personalities come off the page a great deal more in boxing, partially because they have to. It is an entrepreneurial sport where if you are not involved in promoting your own identity and your own career, you don’t maximize.”
A running theme in Lampley’s book is how many of his career moves happened rather unexpectedly. Perhaps the key one is his HBO work, which covered boxing, tennis, Real Sports, and more. Lampley said even HBO’s initial interest in him once he was pushed out at ABC (which involved the ownership change to Capital Cities and major subsequent changes to the sports division) was surprising.
“I had no inclination to believe that I would get the chance to work at HBO. Because even though I was doing well with boxing at ABC, and then I was a free agent after I was thrown out of ABC and instantly was asked to call a fight on Showtime. I went to Saint-Tropez, and sat on the beach, and called the most beautiful boxing telecast ever on Showtime.
“At that moment, I had no idea that HBO would even consider offloading a tremendously high-quality boxing blow-by-blow guy, Barry Tompkins, somebody who I really respected, to make room for somebody who didn’t have all that much boxing experience, but was finding his way in.”
Lampley said the way his last slate of ABC fights featured the on-the-rise Mike Tyson was helpful for him, though.
“My advantage was that my identity was now somewhat tied to Tyson’s identity, because the first four or five fights I did on ABC were Mike Tyson knockouts. So I had that going for me. And I kind of thought to myself, ‘Well, I think I’m HBO style, I think I’m library rather than street corner.’ And then along came the offer to do it.”
Speaking of that HBO style, Lampley spent a lot of time working on Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel. In fact, he writes that he had been in discussions with execs about hosting it for years before Gumbel was tabbed for that role, and that initially had him reluctant to contribute to it. But he eventually opted to do that anyway, and he told AA he’s grateful he did considering how it worked out for him.
“It was a great show. I won, I think, two or maybe three Sports Emmys for best sports reporting for stories that I did on Real Sports. And the way contacts migrate through this business is really interesting. Just as a totally out of the crackerjack box coincidence, the Real Sports piece that I did on two commodities brokers here in America wound up being basically exiled to Antigua in the Caribbean because of their sports gambling initiative and the popularity that was enjoying.
“When I won an Emmy for that story, ‘Fugitives In Paradise,’ it caught the eye of a publicist at Rubenstein who watched my work, paid attention to me. He listened to see what was going on over the years. I never met him. And then then more than 30 years go by, and I’m here in Chapel Hill, and I have done the autobiography project, and we’re shopping for a publisher.
“And that guy, whose name is Stefan Prelog, caught wind of the fact that we were shopping for a publisher. He put us in touch with BenBella Books, and that’s part of how my book has been published. There are long extended connective tissues that run through this business constantly, and part of what the book is about is how all of those connective tissues have positively benefited me over the years.”
Back to Real Sports, that show’s end in Lampley said he has noticed recent apparent shifts away from in-depth feature storytelling of the kind that show used to do. He said those happen in news as well as sports, and he thinks that’s due to a media landscape emphasizing reality TV and social media.
“The same thing has happened to sports reporting that happened to news reporting. How did we get the political situation that we currently have in this country? I’m going to speculate just off the top of my head that the two driving forces for what we now have are quote, reality television, unquote, and I put that in quotes because nothing is more unreal. Everything about it is contrived.
“And the other one is social media. Social media platforms are an inherent perversion slash distortion source of the information transmission process, because there are no content controls in social media. Obviously, the people who are delivering the information are not professionals. And that affects the content and the effect of the content on the audience.”
Speaking of content changes over time, Lampley was also involved in an early ABC college football studio show, working with Beano Cook beginning in 1979. He said while the idea of big studio shows was still in its infancy then, and was a long way from the current prominence of the likes of College GameDay and Big Noon Kickoff, it was already clear even then studio shows would take more importance.
“Content was evolving in that direction,” Lampley said “Television broadcasts like, for instance, the space launches and the Kennedy assassination, all of those things oriented the audience to the idea that you could have a central presence somewhere. That central presence was a nerve center where information would be brought in, gathered, disseminated by a single brilliant talking head on camera.
“People got more and more comfortable with that following news programming through the 50s and into the 60s. And that ultimately is what made it seem comfortable and acceptable for a single host or a pair of hosts sitting in a television studio thousands of miles away from the action, commenting on what was going on. It took a little while for the audience to sort of get that and feel the validity of all that, and that evolution took place through the 60s to the 70s.”
Lampley has done a lot of thinking and research about the history of media. Indeed, he created and taught a “Evolution of storytelling in American electronic news media” course at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In the end, he said that course didn’t ultimately connect with students the way he hoped, but it was still a valuable endeavor, and it wound up leading to his book project.
“I taught that course for five semesters, and it was a very fateful attempt in my view, to help students understand how Morse code signals were translated into radio content, led to radio news, radio news led to war reporting in World War II, the emergence of Edward R. Murrow and his colleagues in that regard that led to the beginnings of television news.
“[Walter] Cronkite was a cub reporter in Europe, wound up being the centerpiece of CBS News, et cetera, et cetera. All of these things evolved over time, and I was trying to get my students to understand how that evolution affected content. And at the end of the day, I couldn’t get them to listen.”
“At that point, I decided there’s too much of a disconnect here, and I’m not going to achieve anything from continuing to try to teach this. So what happened next? Next, I ran into my great friend Art Chanksy, who has done 10 or 11 books, and he says ‘When are you going to do your autobiography?’ And I said, ‘Well, I guess now it’s time.’ And I began writing the autobiography with him at that point.”
Lampley’s book covers a wide range of topics from his career. For him, though, the most important part in it is the influence his mother had on his life.
“If I wanted a reader to report back anything about what they took from the book, it would be how much I love and credit my mother with everything that has ever happened to me. My mother was a colossus of resilience, endurance, commitment, devotion to her two sons, courage: I could go on and on all day. And I never told her that enough when she was alive, and when she suddenly died, I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, I don’t think I said the things I wanted to say enough.’”
He said the way his mother taught him to work against racism from an early age was critical to his career.
“This book is dedicated to my mother and my grandmother, but it’s really a tribute to my mother. She is the person who shaped me and directed me toward ultimately what happened to me in television sports.
“Because this is a southern white woman from a poor Memphis household, born in 1918, and the one lesson that she most overwhelmingly asserted and impressed upon me over and over is ‘You will be an advocate for equal relations between races. You will not see anything in terms of Black and white, other than to be positive for those who are being oppressed.’ And if she had not endowed me with all of that, I don’t think my sports television career would have been exactly what it was.”