The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2346

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan podcast, check it out!

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

00:00:12.000 Oh, really?

00:00:13.000 That was your closest male friend?

00:00:15.000 Unexpected.

00:00:16.000 Unexpected, but over a period of time, we just got closer and closer and closer and, you know, very brotherly.

00:00:25.000 And the last public appearance Emmanuel ever made was my wedding in September of 2012.

00:00:38.000 And that night, the wedding was at our house in Del Mar, California.

00:00:42.000 And that night his girlfriend came to me and said, we have to leave early.

00:00:45.000 Emmanuel's having stomach pains.

00:00:48.000 He was in oncology by the next week.

00:00:50.000 He was gone by three weeks later.

00:00:54.000 So very touching to me and, you know, deeply symbolic of my love for him and thus the cronk cat.

00:01:02.000 Yeah, what a classic Jim.

00:01:04.000 And he was one of the first guys to realize, like, if you crank the heat up, it actually gives guys better conditioning.

00:01:10.000 He realized a lot of things.

00:01:12.000 Emmanuel was a genius in a lot of ways.

00:01:16.000 And there were a lot of sort of time-honored rules and techniques in boxing that he quietly upended.

00:01:26.000 Yes.

00:01:27.000 Because he was more advanced in his point of view and thought process.

00:01:31.000 And then everybody else sort of followed his lead.

00:01:33.000 Once they understood what he was doing.

00:01:36.000 If you saw the McCrory's and Tommy and those guys, why wouldn't you imitate, right?

00:01:41.000 Right, right, exactly.

00:01:42.000 Yeah, no, he was.

00:01:43.000 And he did it at both the amateur and pro level, too.

00:01:47.000 And he was always fantastic, too, as a commentator because he would give insight that you're really not going to get from someone that's not with these fighters day in, day out through an entire camp.

00:01:57.000 He really understands.

00:01:58.000 But when you consider the privilege I had and the expert commentators I work with, starting with Ray.

00:02:06.000 Yes.

00:02:07.000 That's one perspective.

00:02:09.000 Then gravitating through George Foreman and Roy Jones.

00:02:17.000 Emmanuel's in there.

00:02:19.000 And to me, he was the best.

00:02:21.000 I agree with you.

00:02:22.000 The public responded more to Roy and Ray.

00:02:26.000 Of course.

00:02:26.000 You know, famous guys.

00:02:27.000 Because of their stardom, et cetera.

00:02:30.000 And they were really good, too.

00:02:31.000 And they were good.

00:02:32.000 But Emmanuel taught me more, you know, because he was totally well-rounded as a human being as well as as a boxing trainer.

00:02:42.000 I was very pleased to hear you back on the microphone for that Times Square event.

00:02:47.000 Thank you.

00:02:47.000 Because it had been so long.

00:02:49.000 Six plus years.

00:02:50.000 God, I was like, that's crazy.

00:02:52.000 It didn't make any sense.

00:02:53.000 You were the best in the business.

00:02:54.000 HBO was the best in the business.

00:02:56.000 And when they stepped away from boxing, I was really heartbroken.

00:03:02.000 If you look at what happened, we go from a situation where the television networks have the authority and the self-belief to choose the commentators the way they want to.

00:03:20.000 Then you get into a more subdivided and widely disparate marketplace.

00:03:27.000 And now the star promoters have a great deal more influence than you would have thought before.

00:03:33.000 And now the star promoters start getting involved in influencing who's on the air.

00:03:40.000 So PBC, Mayweather was never a fan.

00:03:49.000 We got along, but he made a lot of fun.

00:03:51.000 It was the famous thing with Larry.

00:03:53.000 Well, and I guess he associated me with Larry, which makes all the sense in the world.

00:03:58.000 Kind of, but you weren't nearly as critical.

00:04:01.000 I was just a blow-by-blow guy.

00:04:03.000 I'm not an expert commentator.

00:04:05.000 So I tried very hard, not always easy, but I tried very hard never to go over the line into doing what the experts were supposed to do.

00:04:15.000 Right.

00:04:15.000 No, you were excellent at that.

00:04:17.000 It didn't make any sense to me that, you know, and Kellerman, he's also excellent.

00:04:21.000 That's another guy we should have.

00:04:22.000 And now he's back.

00:04:23.000 Yes.

00:04:23.000 It's nice.

00:04:24.000 And Andre Ward is another excellent guy.

00:04:26.000 Totally.

00:04:27.000 It just the good thing about boxing was that HBO was completely independent from these promoters.

00:04:34.000 And the bad thing about boxing is that the fighters don't get paid as much on the undercard fights and don't get paid as much coming up as is the case in the more broadly organized UFC universe, right?

00:04:47.000 Yeah, there is a difference.

00:04:48.000 Yeah, there's a giant difference in the undercard pay.

00:04:51.000 I learned that from Joe Rogan.

00:04:54.000 Yeah.

00:04:54.000 Well, the UFC treats the entire card as an enormous event.

00:05:00.000 So they have elite fighters fight in the entire card.

00:05:04.000 It's not top-heavy.

00:05:05.000 Like one of the problems with boxing is you would just say, when's the main event?

00:05:09.000 When is Canelo fighting?

00:05:10.000 And you didn't, the other stuff is just nonsense.

00:05:13.000 Whereas the UFC, you look at like, oh, look who's fighting first fight of pay-per-view.

00:05:18.000 There's five fights on pay-per-view.

00:05:19.000 First fight of pay-per-view is a banger.

00:05:21.000 And the seats are packed and everybody's excited to see it.

00:05:24.000 Whereas everybody starts shuffling in about 20 minutes before Canelo fights in one of these big boxing events.

00:05:30.000 That, I think, is kind of unfortunate.

00:05:34.000 I totally agree.

00:05:34.000 I'm a little bit short-sighted.

00:05:35.000 And I accede to your point of view because, and I've made this point before, I'm not a UFC expert.

00:05:44.000 Any comment I make about UFC is atmospheric, but it's not expertly informed.

00:05:52.000 I didn't have the bandwidth for that.

00:05:54.000 I was trying to be knowledgeable about every single tributary and every single meaningless pocket in the boxing world.

00:06:02.000 That's a lot.

00:06:03.000 That's a lot.

00:06:03.000 It's a lot to find.

00:06:04.000 It took time.

00:06:06.000 And frankly, I decided it would be distracting to me to try to keep up with two combat sports at once.

00:06:13.000 This is the one where I make my living.

00:06:16.000 This is the one where the audience identifies me.

00:06:19.000 This is the one that's on HBO.

00:06:22.000 And I know that Dana, in particular, is said by some to have been quite upset that he had a deal with HBO and the deal with HBO went away.

00:06:36.000 If that's the case, and I don't know, I'm very sorry to hear it.

00:06:40.000 Because I think it would have been good for both if UFC had been on HBO.

00:06:45.000 I think so as well.

00:06:46.000 I mean, HBO at that time was the premier network for combat sports.

00:06:51.000 The work that you guys had done in boxing was the top of the food chain.

00:06:54.000 It was the best.

00:06:55.000 Well, Larry Merchant, Ray Leonard, George Foreman, Roy Jones.

00:06:59.000 It was also the production.

00:07:00.000 Everything was on point.

00:07:01.000 It was just so well-honed.

00:07:04.000 Good production.

00:07:04.000 Yes.

00:07:05.000 It was just a well-polished machine.

00:07:07.000 One of the issues is they wanted to replace the commentators.

00:07:10.000 HBO did.

00:07:11.000 Oh, they did?

00:07:12.000 Yeah, so if we came over there, I wouldn't go over there as well.

00:07:15.000 Oh, really?

00:07:15.000 Yeah, because HBO was always about their own producer autonomy.

00:07:19.000 Yes.

00:07:20.000 So they wanted to have a lot of people.

00:07:20.000 We don't want anybody telling us what to do.

00:07:23.000 Exactly.

00:07:24.000 The problem with that is in mixed martial arts, there's a very small pool of people who have a deep understanding of the entire history of the sport.

00:07:33.000 Yep.

00:07:34.000 And you can't just hire a regular sports guy to take that part.

00:07:38.000 They're not going to be able to get it.

00:07:40.000 Well, going back to the developmental stages, and I try very hard not to use the word unique.

00:07:48.000 It's massively overused in American society.

00:07:50.000 Sports media have beaten it to death.

00:07:53.000 It means only one like this on the whole planet.

00:07:56.000 But you were unique in those days because you had the full knowledge of UFC and you also knew some stuff about boxing.

00:08:05.000 So I think you were not just unusual, but unique.

00:08:10.000 Well, all I was doing was just following my interests.

00:08:13.000 and I've always been a huge boxing fan.

00:08:15.000 From the time I was a child, I was The first fight I watched, my parents watched it, which was crazy because my parents were hippies.

00:08:25.000 And they were really interested in Ali's rematch with Leon Spinks.

00:08:32.000 New Orleans.

00:08:33.000 Yep.

00:08:34.000 When Leon had beat Muhammad Ali.

00:08:36.000 Because Muhammad Ali was a cultural icon as much as he was a sports figure.

00:08:42.000 Oh, yeah.

00:08:43.000 I mean, like, multiply that by 100, you know, to get to where he was.

00:08:47.000 He was very, very unique.

00:08:49.000 And his opposition to the Vietnam War made him a hero to many Americans.

00:08:55.000 Well, I always say he was my childhood hero, and he was my childhood hero as Cassius Clay.

00:09:05.000 The very first live prize fight I ever attended was Cassius Clay versus Sonny Liston, February 25, 1964, in Miami Beach.

00:09:13.000 Oh, you were there for the first fight.

00:09:15.000 I saved lawn mowing and car washing money for months to buy a ticket that in my memory was $100, but I don't really know for sure what the cost of that ticket was.

00:09:26.000 I didn't save it.

00:09:27.000 It would be worth millions now.

00:09:30.000 And my mother took me over from our crappy southwest Miami tract house rental and dropped me off at the Miami Beach Convention Center and then came and picked me up afterward.

00:09:41.000 And I went in alone.

00:09:44.000 And that was the first live prize.

00:09:45.000 How old were you?

00:09:46.000 I was 14.

00:09:47.000 14.

00:09:48.000 It was the first live prize fight I had ever attended.

00:09:51.000 It was all about my hero worship for Cassius Clay.

00:09:55.000 Two days later, he stands on Brickle Avenue in Miami and tells two reporters that he's a follower of the nation of Islam, and now his name is Muhammad Ali.

00:10:06.000 And I'm in shock, okay?

00:10:09.000 What do you mean?

00:10:10.000 You're Cassius Clay.

00:10:11.000 You can't.

00:10:12.000 And so nowadays I say the lesson he taught me then was a man's identity is his own.

00:10:20.000 And it does not matter how much I love him or cherish him or feel connected to him.

00:10:26.000 He has the right to say who he is.

00:10:29.000 I mean, back in those days, Islam?

00:10:31.000 What is that?

00:10:32.000 I had no clue.

00:10:34.000 But, you know, he got over with me on that when I understood it was his right.

00:10:40.000 Then he taught me my stance on the Vietnam War.

00:10:44.000 My mother was double widow of two United States military heroes.

00:10:52.000 I grew up with a basement filled to the gills with memorabilia from their tours of duty as B-17, B-24, and B-29 pilots in World War II.

00:11:05.000 So there was nationalistic and patriotic material all over my household.

00:11:12.000 And when Ali said what he said about Vietnam, I mean, about Vietnam, that moved the meter for me in that regard.

00:11:22.000 And I understood.

00:11:23.000 And eventually my mother said, you'll go to Canada before I'll ever allow you to accede to being drafted into the Army and going to Vietnam.

00:11:34.000 Because her thought was that it was a pointless war.

00:11:38.000 Yeah, and she was correct.

00:11:40.000 Yeah.

00:11:40.000 She was right.

00:11:41.000 Yeah, and they took three years of his prime.

00:11:43.000 That's what's crazy.

00:11:44.000 I always point to the Cleveland Big Cat Williams fight.

00:11:47.000 That was his best.

00:11:48.000 Yes.

00:11:49.000 You're totally right.

00:11:50.000 That was his number one performance, and he was never 100% the same after that.

00:11:55.000 But he still had his mind training.

00:11:57.000 Yes, but he didn't train for three years.

00:11:59.000 That's part of the problem.

00:12:01.000 Of course.

00:12:01.000 And, you know, at 30 years old, in that day and age, it was just a different world.

00:12:05.000 Like, you don't train for three years.

00:12:08.000 Not as much knowledge of nutrition.

00:12:10.000 Not as much knowledge of training techniques.

00:12:12.000 You know, the old-fashioned stuff in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania, not the same as no hyperbaric chamber.

00:12:21.000 Right.

00:12:22.000 Et cetera, et cetera.

00:12:23.000 Yeah, it's just they just robbed him.

00:12:26.000 They robbed us, too, because he came back and he's a different fighter then.

00:12:29.000 He was much more easy to hit, and, you know, he became, you know, he relied on his chin more, and, you know, he didn't have the fleet of foot movement that he had before then.

00:12:38.000 But he found weight to rise to the top.

00:12:40.000 Yes, he did.

00:12:41.000 Wow.

00:12:42.000 The championship mind was always there.

00:12:44.000 That's 100% correct.

00:12:45.000 But as a fan of boxing, it drives me crazy.

00:12:47.000 Could you imagine what we could have seen in those three years if Ali had never been robbed, never took his title away, and allowed him to fight all those guys like Joe Frazier, George Foreman, all those guys with keeping the same skills that he had when he was younger.

00:13:05.000 and I think you're 100% correct, Joe.

00:13:07.000 But isn't it, in a perverse way, a part of his mystique?

00:13:11.000 Yes.

00:13:12.000 The fact that he was able to come back from those three and a half years off, the fact that he was able to rise to the top again, the fact that he was able to beat Foreman the way he beat Foreman and beat Frazier in the third fight in the kind of fight you would never have imagined him being in.

00:13:29.000 All these things combine to create the unique mystique of Muhammad Ali.

00:13:35.000 Oh, for sure.

00:13:36.000 Yeah.

00:13:37.000 And then also the tragic ending, you know, the staying in too long and too many beatings.

00:13:42.000 You know, just seeing him at the end of his life was just so horrible.

00:13:48.000 You know, and we all know that that was trauma-induced.

00:13:51.000 We all know that.

00:13:53.000 And it was just sad to see.

00:13:55.000 We haven't seen that yet in MMA, right?

00:13:57.000 No, not quite.

00:13:58.000 But you're seeing some damage.

00:14:01.000 You're seeing some guys that are really struggling.

00:14:04.000 They're not as public, so you're not seeing it from George St. Pierre or someone like that.

00:14:09.000 George is one of the very unique former champions who has all of his wits, his faculties, retired as champion, very healthy.

00:14:18.000 Roy Jones.

00:14:19.000 Roy Jones is a good example.

00:14:20.000 And Roy, you know, Roy famously, after Jerry McClellan was hurt when the Nigel Bend fight, he was really concerned because Gerald McClellan was the guy that a lot of people thought was a giant threat to Roy.

00:14:33.000 For a long period of time when Roy and I were working together, he was providing helpful financial support to McClellan's sisters who were caring for Gerald and, you know, keeping him alive on a daily basis.

00:14:50.000 I think in Illinois or Ohio, someplace like that.

00:14:54.000 But yeah, Roy loved all other fighters and he did what he could to help with McClellan.

00:15:03.000 I know that that loss that McClellan had and the subsequent medical issues, the stroke and the aneurysm, all that stuff really disturbed Roy and made him think, you know, about getting out early.

00:15:15.000 100%.

00:15:17.000 Yeah.

00:15:18.000 Because Roy was nothing if not smart.

00:15:21.000 Roy was brilliant.

00:15:22.000 Okay.

00:15:23.000 And Roy very assertively fought in a style that would limit harm.

00:15:29.000 He didn't want to get hurt.

00:15:30.000 His gifts.

00:15:32.000 I mean, what a guy.

00:15:33.000 Like, who else in recent memory?

00:15:36.000 There's heavyweight boxing and then there's weight class boxing.

00:15:39.000 Ali is the unique physical specimen in heavyweight boxing.

00:15:43.000 Roy is the unique physical specimen in weight class boxing.

00:15:48.000 So much so that he actually won the heavyweight title.

00:15:50.000 Well, exactly right.

00:15:52.000 Whatever he wanted to do, if he put his mind to it, he could do that.

00:15:57.000 And a part of the ongoing cliché was he could play any sport.

00:16:03.000 He could be great in football, basketball, baseball, et cetera, et cetera.

00:16:06.000 And of course, he did go through the theatrics of playing a basketball game on the same day that he fought a fight.

00:16:13.000 Which was so crazy.

00:16:14.000 It was.

00:16:15.000 It was insane.

00:16:15.000 It was so crazy.

00:16:16.000 But that was, his talent was insane.

00:16:18.000 But it was also like, he was just showing people, he was kind of playing with his food.

00:16:22.000 He's like, I'm going to play a basketball game and then go and easily win a fight same night.

00:16:28.000 It's interesting.

00:16:28.000 You used the phrase playing with his food.

00:16:31.000 Yeah.

00:16:31.000 And I like it.

00:16:32.000 Roy liked to play with his food.

00:16:36.000 Sometimes you do things because you can.

00:16:39.000 He knew what he could do.

00:16:40.000 Right.

00:16:42.000 Yeah.

00:16:42.000 I mean, his speed was so preposterous.

00:16:45.000 When he would forego the jab to lead with left hooks, which was just so crazy.

00:16:50.000 When he stood against the ropes in Miami against Glenn Kelly and put both hands behind his back and made Kelly miss, miss, and then hit him with one straight hand and knocked him out.

00:17:01.000 Yes.

00:17:01.000 That's Roy Jones.

00:17:02.000 Oh, it was incredible.

00:17:03.000 How about the Vinny Pazienza fight when he didn't get hit for the entire round?

00:17:08.000 The only round in CompuBox history where someone never got hit.

00:17:12.000 It was crazy.

00:17:13.000 And I was with Roy at the International Boxing Hall of Fame induction ceremony a few weeks ago, and we were talking about exactly that.

00:17:22.000 We were talking about Pazienza, and I said, is he the guy that you shut out for a round?

00:17:26.000 And he said, yeah.

00:17:27.000 And I did it just because I wanted to do it.

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00:18:04.000 Yeah, well, he was just so far above so many of the guys that he fought.

00:18:08.000 They just had no business being in there.

00:18:10.000 That he had to create competition by doing stuff like that.

00:18:13.000 He had to have fun.

00:18:14.000 He had to play with his food.

00:18:16.000 Well said.

00:18:18.000 Yeah, no, he was spectacular.

00:18:20.000 You know, he was one of those guys that's a unique once-in-a-lifetime talent.

00:18:25.000 Unfortunately, though, his mistake was going up to heavyweight and then trying to go down to 175, which is unbelievably grueling because he was, when he was 200 pounds at heavyweight, he was 200 lean, muscular, fast pounds.

00:18:42.000 That was not like fat to lose.

00:18:45.000 And so to starve himself to get down to 175, like he was diminished.

00:18:50.000 And you saw that in the Tarver fight.

00:18:52.000 I'm not here to feather your nest, but you're brilliant.

00:18:54.000 That's 100% correct.

00:18:58.000 And he lamented it afterward because he understood how he had penalized himself in that way.

00:19:03.000 25 pounds is so much weight to lose.

00:19:06.000 Lean muscle mass.

00:19:07.000 And you made the point, when it's muscle.

00:19:09.000 Muscle.

00:19:10.000 If it's fat, you can go into the steam room and sweat it off.

00:19:14.000 But once it's muscle, it's there.

00:19:18.000 It's a part of the structure.

00:19:20.000 It's a part of the building.

00:19:21.000 Now how are you going to rip it out?

00:19:23.000 Well, not only that, it diminishes his endurance, it diminishes durability, gets compromised because you can't take a punch as well because you've cut so much weight.

00:19:31.000 It gets to his confidence.

00:19:33.000 And his confidence was unshakable.

00:19:35.000 Right.

00:19:35.000 It was everything.

00:19:36.000 Like when you go into the fight fatigued, you're feeling fatigued.

00:19:40.000 And then you've got a guy like Tarver who's infinitely talented and has legitimate knockout power and is talking shit to you.

00:19:46.000 Right.

00:19:47.000 Right before the fight.

00:19:48.000 Got any excuses tonight, Roy?

00:19:49.000 Remember that?

00:19:51.000 And then he knocks him out like, holy shit.

00:19:53.000 With the brilliant, straight left hand against the ropes, I can see it in my mind.

00:19:57.000 And the glow of the fire.

00:19:57.000 And you know, I just worked with Tarver a few weeks ago when you mentioned the Times Square card.

00:20:02.000 And Tarver was my expert commentator on the Times Square card.

00:20:06.000 So energetic.

00:20:07.000 Yeah, Tarver's great.

00:20:09.000 So lively.

00:20:10.000 Really good.

00:20:10.000 Yeah, I was thrilled.

00:20:13.000 He's another guy that with his boxing skill went all the way up to heavyweight because he was just so much better than everybody else.

00:20:18.000 How many South Paul heavyweights?

00:20:19.000 Right.

00:20:20.000 Very few.

00:20:21.000 Michael Moore.

00:20:22.000 Yep.

00:20:22.000 Yeah.

00:20:23.000 He was South Paul.

00:20:24.000 But again, he won the championship.

00:20:26.000 Another light heavyweight.

00:20:27.000 And lost it to my man.

00:20:28.000 George Foreman.

00:20:29.000 One punch.

00:20:30.000 Yeah, that was crazy.

00:20:31.000 Yeah, thus the title of my book.

00:20:34.000 Thank you so much, George.

00:20:35.000 You know the reason why my book is titled It Happened?

00:20:38.000 Why?

00:20:39.000 Or where I came up with It Happened?

00:20:42.000 So he was the expert commentator in the weeks leading to his fight with Moore.

00:20:49.000 He and I together had called Moore against Holyfield when Moore won the championship.

00:20:56.000 And in the weeks before he fought Moore, I would pull him aside at crew meals and fighter meetings and other occasions when I could get a minute with him.

00:21:09.000 Three, four times I asked him, George, how are you going to beat Moore?

00:21:14.000 He's a southpaw.

00:21:16.000 He's a mover.

00:21:17.000 He has great feet.

00:21:18.000 Holyfield couldn't find him, and Holyfield was much faster than you.

00:21:22.000 And every time I said it, George would fix me with that implacable George Foreman gaze and say, Jim, you watch.

00:21:31.000 There will come a moment late in the fight.

00:21:34.000 He will come and stand in front of me and let me knock him out.

00:21:39.000 Always the same words.

00:21:40.000 He will come and stand in front of me and let me knock him out.

00:21:45.000 Wow.

00:21:46.000 So now as Moore is on the canvas and Joe Cortez is six, seven, eight, and I'm thinking, what am I going to say about this?

00:21:56.000 How in the world do you establish this without being self-glorifying?

00:22:02.000 You know, I've got to say something that's meaningful, but I want it to be about him.

00:22:07.000 And I thought about what he had said to me.

00:22:09.000 And what came out spontaneously was, it happened.

00:22:13.000 It happened.

00:22:14.000 It's really me talking to George, saying to him, okay, I get it.

00:22:19.000 You told me it was going to happen.

00:22:20.000 And it happened.

00:22:21.000 Well, do you remember when George came back and he was 300 pounds and everybody was laughing at him?

00:22:26.000 And he was in his late 30s, I believe.

00:22:28.000 Was he 34 or 35?

00:22:30.000 Something like that.

00:22:31.000 When he made his comeback, he hadn't fought in 10 years.

00:22:34.000 Everyone dismissed him.

00:22:35.000 Like, what is he doing?

00:22:36.000 He was very overweight.

00:22:38.000 And he started the bum of the month tour.

00:22:40.000 You know what I mean?

00:22:41.000 And that's not a fair way to say it.

00:22:44.000 They weren't bums, but they were people that he knew he could beat to build a dossier toward what he really wanted.

00:22:51.000 And get in shape.

00:22:52.000 Yep.

00:22:52.000 And no one believed in him.

00:22:54.000 No one.

00:22:54.000 I remember me as a boxing fan watching that comeback being sad.

00:22:59.000 Like, oh, George Foreman's coming back, and he's all fat now.

00:23:03.000 This is sad.

00:23:04.000 Well, I'm sure you've known a lot of people like this, Joe.

00:23:07.000 You want to see George do something?

00:23:09.000 Tell him he can't do it.

00:23:10.000 Right.

00:23:11.000 Right.

00:23:12.000 Challenge his will, you know, because he's a self-constructed person.

00:23:16.000 You're talking about a guy who, as a teenager, 17 or 18 years old, says to himself, I want to get out of the Fifth Ward of Houston.

00:23:26.000 I don't want this life as a gangster or a laborer or whatever I'm going to get by living in the Fifth Ward of Houston.

00:23:34.000 I want something else.

00:23:35.000 So he goes to the Job Corps in Hayward, California and enrolls in the Job Corps.

00:23:42.000 And that's where he learned to box.

00:23:45.000 That's what set him up a year and a half later to win his Olympic gold medal in Mexico City and then go on to his storied professional boxing career.

00:23:59.000 But, you know, he was in his own mind proving he could do something that other people didn't think he could do even at that point.

00:24:08.000 He told me that when he first got to Hayward, he befriended one of the other people in the job corps, who was a white kid, and said, you know, they're talking about things that they like, and the guy talks about Bob Dylan, how much he likes Bob Dylan.

00:24:25.000 So George got the first two or three Bob Dylan albums and listened, wanted to hear what this is all about, and absorbed the lyrics and paid attention.

00:24:36.000 And when George told me this story, I said, George, you, Bob Dylan?

00:24:43.000 You know, how am I supposed to process all this?

00:24:47.000 And he began quoting lyrics for me.

00:24:50.000 Wow.

00:24:50.000 Okay.

00:24:51.000 From Blowin' in the Wind, from Don't Think Twice, It's All Right, et cetera, from early Bob Dylan songs.

00:24:57.000 Yes.

00:24:58.000 He knew about Hurricane.

00:24:59.000 Yes.

00:25:00.000 So he was just an amazing person, you know, so broad-based, you know, and that was, I think that was part of what burned in him was that everybody, myself included, gave Ali credit for all that.

00:25:15.000 And George wanted, in his own way, for people to see, hey, I'm not that different than that.

00:25:22.000 And I mean, one thing he said to me was, you can't win the heavyweight championship in the world without being smart.

00:25:27.000 Okay?

00:25:28.000 A stupid person couldn't do this.

00:25:30.000 That's true.

00:25:31.000 Yeah.

00:25:32.000 So he respected Moore's intelligence, but he also understood something that I didn't understand.

00:25:40.000 He'll come and stand in front of me late in the fight and let me knock him out.

00:25:43.000 Crazy that he predicted it that way because that's exactly how it played out.

00:25:46.000 Oh, yeah.

00:25:47.000 Go to YouTube.

00:25:49.000 If you haven't seen it, it's uncanny.

00:25:52.000 It really is.

00:25:53.000 I was a giant Michael Moore fan when he was a light heavyweight.

00:25:56.000 I think a lot of people forgot how dangerous he was at light heavyweight.

00:26:00.000 He was one of the great light heavyweights.

00:26:02.000 No question.

00:26:02.000 Terrorists.

00:26:02.000 Because of the southpaw punching power.

00:26:05.000 Southpower at light heavyweights.

00:26:06.000 I don't know if it's true in UFC as it is in boxing, but you don't see southpaw punchers very often.

00:26:11.000 Southpaws are technical, they box, they take advantage of their foot skills and their hand speed, and they beat you with boxing skills.

00:26:20.000 You're not often going to run into a southpaw who's going to knock you out.

00:26:23.000 But we've already talked about Tarver, and Wururo was another one who had punching power.

00:26:30.000 And it's, you know, kind of Cooney.

00:26:32.000 Cooney was a southpaw with punching power.

00:26:34.000 It's kind of doubly effective if you've got that because you're worried about the technical issues with a southpaw and now he brings a cannon.

00:26:43.000 Right, right.

00:26:44.000 Yeah, the southpaw thing was always so confusing to people because if you ever boxed before, you're so accustomed to that left hand being forward.

00:26:50.000 And then all of a sudden everything's reversed and now you're thinking.

00:26:53.000 And if you don't have a lot of southpaws that you train with on a regular basis, things aren't automatic anymore.

00:26:58.000 And one of the things that George used to talk to me about all the time was angles.

00:27:02.000 That, you know, you're standing in front of another man, you're confronting him, you're trying to deliver and stop delivery.

00:27:09.000 Angles.

00:27:10.000 It's all about where does it come from and where is it going and how can I deal with that.

00:27:15.000 Now, I was never a fighter, so I can't empathize, but I can sympathize when I listen to that guy.

00:27:21.000 Well, you can see it, right?

00:27:23.000 And I think the greatest at angles of all time is Lomachenko.

00:27:27.000 Nobody.

00:27:28.000 Nobody knows.

00:27:29.000 The greatest footwork.

00:27:30.000 Oh, my God.

00:27:31.000 The greatest hand skills.

00:27:33.000 The most effective training by his father.

00:27:36.000 Yeah, what a genius move to take him out of boxing for two years to study Ukrainian dance.

00:27:43.000 And brilliant.

00:27:44.000 Absolutely brilliant.

00:27:46.000 And by the way, he had an effect on the national team for several years.

00:27:52.000 And what culture in the world has had more accomplishments and surprising new stars in boxing other than Ukraine?

00:28:02.000 Right.

00:28:02.000 And Usuk, who basically moves like a giant Lomachenko, just not quite as effective.

00:28:07.000 That's a really great phrase that I had never conjured before this moment.

00:28:11.000 Thank you, Joe.

00:28:12.000 A giant Lomachenko.

00:28:13.000 That's exactly what he is.

00:28:14.000 You can't quite move that well when you're 220 pounds.

00:28:18.000 You're just dealing with gravity and mass.

00:28:20.000 But you're still creating unique angles.

00:28:22.000 You're coming at them from unique approaches, etc.

00:28:26.000 They're hard for your opponent to figure out.

00:28:28.000 And Usik is impossible for most of the heads.

00:28:31.000 Constant motion.

00:28:32.000 Constant motion, constantly cutting off the ring with his feet and hammers you to the body as often as he can.

00:28:39.000 Yep.

00:28:40.000 Yeah.

00:28:40.000 Lomachenko in his prime was just a magical thing to watch.

00:28:44.000 Brilliant.

00:28:45.000 It was like you were just watching poetry.

00:28:46.000 And I had the privilege of calling those fights.

00:28:49.000 It was an extreme privilege.

00:28:51.000 Yeah.

00:28:52.000 It was amazing watching him just do something where you'd seen so many different versions of boxers.

00:29:00.000 And you watch him do it and you're like, oh my God, he put a new thing on this.

00:29:04.000 That's why I can't understand at this moment, I can't really figure out what's up with Tefimo Lopez.

00:29:10.000 How do you beat Vasily Lomachenko and then wind up with somewhat indifferent results since that time?

00:29:19.000 Yeah, the Kambosos.

00:29:21.000 He fought better than the other guys in Times Square.

00:29:23.000 And I give him credit for upholding the card.

00:29:27.000 But still, there's nothing since the Lomachenko win.

00:29:30.000 I mean, you lose to George Cambosos?

00:29:32.000 I think the Cambosos fight was, I think he was just a little overconfident That really shocked him.

00:29:41.000 He got dropped early in the fight.

00:29:42.000 Remember that?

00:29:43.000 It's a bad sport to be overconfident in it.

00:29:46.000 It's the worst sport.

00:29:47.000 The worst sport.

00:29:48.000 Whether you're talking UFC or boxing.

00:29:50.000 Yeah, any combat sport.

00:29:51.000 When you don't appreciate the potential that your opponent has to do damage.

00:29:56.000 Well, I used to say to people all the time, these are fine margins of competition.

00:30:01.000 You think you see a lot of wipeouts in boxing because you see a second-round knockout or a third-round knockout and you think that means there's a huge talent gap between the two fighters?

00:30:10.000 No, it means one fighter made a mistake.

00:30:13.000 90% of the time, it means one fighter made a mistake.

00:30:16.000 And if he thinks about it and trains against it, he won't make that mistake again.

00:30:20.000 So like the perfect example is Juan Manuel Marquez versus Pacquio.

00:30:24.000 100%.

00:30:24.000 They have three insane fights that are very close.

00:30:28.000 Marquez lands one bomb and starches Pacquio.

00:30:33.000 This one error.

00:30:34.000 He got a little overconfident, a little too greatest counterpuncher of his era.

00:30:40.000 And power.

00:30:41.000 Yeah, and with power.

00:30:43.000 With the straight-ahead power from the shoulder.

00:30:45.000 Marquez was a gifted fighter.

00:30:47.000 Very gifted.

00:30:48.000 But just like that one moment, like if that had happened in the first fight, we would look at the whole thing very differently.

00:30:55.000 100%.

00:30:55.000 Yeah.

00:30:56.000 Yeah.

00:30:57.000 This is like the margins, as you were saying, are so small for victory that when you see like a spectacular result, you do automatically assume, oh, that person's just that much better.

00:31:08.000 But sometimes it's just one error.

00:31:10.000 It's a moment in time.

00:31:12.000 If it's a knockout, now if somebody gets knocked down six times, then you're talking about something different.

00:31:19.000 But one knockdown that leads to a 10 count, that was a momentary mistake.

00:31:26.000 And that's, again, that goes to the fine margins of competition.

00:31:30.000 You can't make the one mistake.

00:31:32.000 Right.

00:31:32.000 And then, you know, it's also how do you bounce back from that?

00:31:36.000 Like, some people, the one moment, even if just a knockdown, they don't have the capacity to correct and stay safe and then regroup.

00:31:45.000 Like, they get shook, and then now they're fighting from this position, this defensive position, where they're a little bit gun-shy.

00:31:53.000 So Mark has exposed the difficulties that Pacquiao could have against a great counterpuncher.

00:31:59.000 And now we get ready for Mayweather Pacquiao.

00:32:02.000 Right.

00:32:03.000 Mayweather just did such a smart thing, but also a devious thing.

00:32:06.000 waiting until Pacquiao was older, waiting until he slowed down, It's encouraged.

00:32:14.000 Yeah.

00:32:15.000 In any entrepreneurial sport, devious is not illegal.

00:32:19.000 Devious can be an asset.

00:32:20.000 That's how you retire with a few people.

00:32:22.000 I give Floyd credit for brilliance, okay?

00:32:25.000 Floyd wasn't just a smart fighter.

00:32:27.000 Floyd was a brilliant fighter.

00:32:29.000 He was On his own level.

00:32:32.000 And so much so, you know, in any matchup between the great counterpuncher and the great attacker, you know that the counterpuncher has the advantage.

00:32:40.000 He's got more options, he's got more ways of winning.

00:32:43.000 The attacker has to break through the wall, so to speak.

00:32:46.000 So, in the years before Mayweather Pacquiao, people would run up to me on the street, run up to me in the shopping center in Vegas, run up to me in a hotel.

00:32:56.000 When am I going to see Mayweather Pacquiao?

00:32:58.000 And I would say, well, we don't know, but what exactly is it you think you're going to see?

00:33:05.000 Oh, I can't wait.

00:33:06.000 It's going to be such a great fight.

00:33:07.000 No, it's not going to be a great fight.

00:33:10.000 It's going to be watching, like watching somebody pluck the legs off a spider.

00:33:16.000 All right?

00:33:17.000 You know, at a step-by-step method.

00:33:21.000 And you're going to watch Mayweather pluck the legs off the spider that is Pacquiao.

00:33:27.000 And it's going to be pretty easy for him.

00:33:29.000 And it's not going to be wildly entertaining.

00:33:31.000 But it is going to be a one-sided victory.

00:33:34.000 So why are you so excited about the Pacquiao?

00:33:36.000 Oh, no.

00:33:37.000 I don't think that's the case.

00:33:39.000 But if you knew Floyd, you know, Floyd was only about winning the fight.

00:33:44.000 He'll make fans other way on the web.

00:33:48.000 I call him the first great social media genius.

00:33:51.000 Yeah.

00:33:52.000 He was great at talking shit.

00:33:53.000 He got everybody upset at him so badly that they wanted to see him lose, and that would sell tons of pay-per-views.

00:33:59.000 He realized you could build an audience with negativity.

00:34:02.000 You didn't have to be an omnibus character.

00:34:04.000 You didn't have to be somebody everybody loved.

00:34:07.000 You could be totally negative.

00:34:08.000 And that would build a following, too.

00:34:10.000 Yeah, when he shifted from Pretty Boy Floyd to Money Mayweather, changed the whole thing.

00:34:16.000 He knew what he was doing.

00:34:17.000 He definitely did.

00:34:18.000 Look, it would have been an interesting fight had he fought Pacquiao when he was younger in his prime.

00:34:24.000 It would have been a very different fight.

00:34:25.000 It would have been a more interesting fight.

00:34:26.000 Much more different.

00:34:27.000 Because any go-forward physical warrior like Pacquiao is going to wear down.

00:34:32.000 Right, exactly.

00:34:33.000 And any brilliant counterpuncher like Floyd is going to retain more.

00:34:37.000 Yeah.

00:34:37.000 So he did.

00:34:38.000 Yeah, it would have been much more interesting when they were younger.

00:34:40.000 Also, the fact that Pacquiao fought him with a bum shoulder, that was a disaster, too.

00:34:45.000 Money talks.

00:34:46.000 Yeah.

00:34:46.000 I mean, look, I guess he was faced with this thing, Legacy, or, I mean, it was the biggest pay-per-view of all time in boxing, correct?

00:34:53.000 I believe so.

00:34:54.000 I believe so.

00:34:55.000 And I think it was like 4 million buys or something crazy like that.

00:34:58.000 It was huge.

00:34:58.000 So, like, what is it?

00:34:59.000 It was massive.

00:35:00.000 Yeah, it just lured Pacquiao into.

00:35:02.000 All those people who had run up to me on the street corners for years finally got the chance to see what they wanted to see.

00:35:07.000 Yeah, give them a cortisone shot, throw them out there.

00:35:10.000 Yeah, unfortunately.

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00:36:30.000 Unfortunately for us, I remember there was like a class action lawsuit.

00:36:33.000 It was a lot of people were upset that Pacquiao fought injured.

00:36:36.000 A lot of the gamblers.

00:36:38.000 I never talked to Freddie about that, but, you know, at the end of the day, the fighter makes the decision.

00:36:45.000 Well, the money.

00:36:46.000 Yeah.

00:36:46.000 And the money.

00:36:47.000 And the money.

00:36:48.000 Yeah.

00:36:48.000 That happens a lot in the UFC.

00:36:50.000 There's a lot of fighters that fight injured.

00:36:52.000 And, you know.

00:36:53.000 Yeah, I got to tell you this while we're talking about him.

00:36:55.000 All right.

00:36:56.000 I apologize for going off script here a little bit.

00:36:59.000 I was with Manny three weeks ago, less than a month ago, at the Hall of Fame inductions in Canistota, New York, where he was being inducted into the Hall of Fame.

00:37:09.000 And on the night before the induction ceremony, there's a big banquet in a banquet hall at the Turningstone Casino.

00:37:19.000 And I'm sitting up on the dais between Roy and Ross Greenberg, my former boss at HBO, and right across to the left of us behind the podium is Manny.

00:37:33.000 And several people spoke.

00:37:36.000 I didn't know that I was going to speak.

00:37:37.000 I was asked to get up and speak.

00:37:38.000 I did.

00:37:39.000 Roy did a speech, et cetera, et cetera.

00:37:42.000 Eventually, Manny got up and made a speech.

00:37:46.000 Now, I met Manny Pacquiao 24 years ago in a fighter meeting room in Las Vegas before his fight against Leschanola Ledwaba, which was his first appearance in the United States.

00:37:57.000 What weight class was that?

00:37:58.000 He was a kind of a throw-in opponent.

00:38:00.000 What weight class was that?

00:38:02.000 So that would have been 122.

00:38:06.000 Isn't that nuts?

00:38:07.000 And Larry and I were 100% convinced that Ledwaba was the best 122-pound fighter in the world.

00:38:12.000 We had seen him on the undercard of Louis Rockbonn in Johannesburg, South Africa.

00:38:18.000 There's nobody who could possibly be better than that.

00:38:22.000 Grace, style, hand skills, all the stuff.

00:38:26.000 And I meet Manny in that room.

00:38:29.000 He can't put three or four words of English together.

00:38:32.000 I learn his backstory, that he survived by selling stolen cigarettes on the streets of General Santos City in the Philippines.

00:38:40.000 I get and understand that his big activity outside of the gym is to go play pool.

00:38:47.000 He's a pool player in barrooms, exactly.

00:38:50.000 Yeah, he plays room.

00:38:51.000 Infestation level pool player, et cetera, all of that.

00:38:55.000 And then fast forward 24 years, and he's being inducted at the Hall of Fame.

00:39:01.000 And without warning, he's asked to speak that night.

00:39:04.000 And he stands up and makes a 15-minute speech, maybe 12 minutes, but it was more than 10, all in English, all perfect, all more or less off the top of his head, unedited.

00:39:20.000 It was brilliant.

00:39:21.000 And I went to him afterward, hugged him, told him how much I loved him, and I said, Manny, I first met you 24 years ago when you couldn't put three words of English together.

00:39:31.000 And I know that politics had something to do with this.

00:39:36.000 And he said, yes, but a lot of my political speeches were in Tagalog.

00:39:42.000 And I said, well, some of them were in English.

00:39:45.000 He said, yes, some.

00:39:47.000 And I said, I don't think there's any sport other than boxing where somebody could have achieved the kind of personal transformation that you have achieved.

00:39:59.000 This is the only one.

00:40:01.000 And he said, well, it sure helped me.

00:40:03.000 That's for sure.

00:40:04.000 Now, you probably know the story about Muhammad Ali and graduating from high school in Louisville.

00:40:10.000 Yes.

00:40:11.000 Okay, so just for our listeners and consumers, Ali had very bad grades.

00:40:20.000 And in his senior year, he was flunking a math course.

00:40:23.000 And in order to graduate, he had to pass the math course.

00:40:27.000 And he was nowhere near it.

00:40:28.000 And the math teacher went to the principal of the high school and said, I'm going to give him a passing grade, even though he has not performed on any of the tests and he doesn't do the homework and stuff like that.

00:40:40.000 And the principal is like, why would you do this for this kid?

00:40:44.000 Why would you give him a passing grade when he hasn't earned it?

00:40:48.000 And the teacher said, you have to understand, he's going to be the most famous man in the world.

00:40:55.000 And we cannot be the high school that denied a diploma to the most famous man in the world.

00:41:01.000 That's such a crazy statement.

00:41:03.000 I wonder if it's true.

00:41:05.000 I wonder if it's true, too, but it's a fun story to tell.

00:41:08.000 And of course, it's secondhand.

00:41:10.000 You're exactly right.

00:41:12.000 It is.

00:41:12.000 It's so funny.

00:41:13.000 I don't know the teacher and I don't know the principal.

00:41:15.000 I just know the story.

00:41:17.000 And I know Ali's primary biographer, Tom Hauser.

00:41:22.000 So maybe I got it from Tom.

00:41:24.000 Yeah, I'd like to believe that that's true.

00:41:27.000 I'd like to believe it's true, too.

00:41:28.000 It makes it more fun.

00:41:29.000 Let's make a Pacquiao.

00:41:31.000 The thing about Pacquiao that's so extraordinary is that he kept his power through eight weight classes.

00:41:36.000 That is just wild.

00:41:38.000 Like, what other fighter can you name that went through eight different weight classes as a world champion?

00:41:44.000 I can't.

00:41:45.000 None.

00:41:46.000 No, obviously.

00:41:49.000 What I did learn that may relate to that is Foreman was at great pains to explain to me and explained a couple of times that power punching is not a physical gift.

00:42:01.000 Power punching is a science.

00:42:03.000 Power punching is the product of real technical knowledge.

00:42:08.000 Power punching is about footwork, weight shift, the angle at which you deliver the punch, you know, all sorts of things not directly related to your strength or, quote, power.

00:42:22.000 And George was a disciplined and knowledgeable scientist about stuff like that.

00:42:29.000 And he explained it all to me one time.

00:42:32.000 And of course, if you watch the Moore knockout, he lands the first one too, right on the button.

00:42:38.000 And then, having Moore where he wants him, he puts a little more mustard on the second one, too.

00:42:44.000 And we're out of that.

00:42:45.000 But there are physical gifts that you are just, they're just God-given gifts of power.

00:42:51.000 Big hands.

00:42:52.000 Big hands.

00:42:52.000 Big hands are...

00:42:54.000 Yeah.

00:42:55.000 All that.

00:42:55.000 There's just certain guys, though, that just have extraordinary power.

00:42:59.000 Like you remember Julian Jackson in his prime.

00:43:01.000 Oh, my gosh.

00:43:02.000 Hawk.

00:43:02.000 Oh, my gosh.

00:43:04.000 Extraordinary power.

00:43:05.000 At some moment or another, he's going to get you.

00:43:07.000 Yeah, it was just disturbing how hard he hit.

00:43:10.000 It was just different than everybody else.

00:43:12.000 And it looked like he was doing the same thing, but the results were so much different.

00:43:15.000 How about Andy Lee?

00:43:17.000 Skinny, not somebody you would expect to have.

00:43:20.000 You know, heavy hands, knocking everybody out.

00:43:24.000 De Dante Wilder.

00:43:25.000 Yeah.

00:43:25.000 Another one.

00:43:26.000 A 209-pound heavyweight that's flattening people.

00:43:30.000 209 pounds when he fights Tyson Fury the first time.

00:43:33.000 Some of it is the bravery to commit.

00:43:36.000 Right.

00:43:36.000 You know, can you push your weight forward in a way that might leave you open to the counter and believe that you're going to get the better of that exchange?

00:43:47.000 If you believe you're going to get the better of the exchange, go ahead, go forward.

00:43:52.000 And that enhances your chance of knocking someone out.

00:43:55.000 But there's physical gifts that you are just God-given, and some people have them.

00:44:01.000 And these are the extraordinary outliers, the Deontay Wilders, the Julian Jacksons, the John Mugabe's.

00:44:08.000 Remember Mugabe?

00:44:09.000 John the Beast Mugabe.

00:44:11.000 Ooh, I re-watched that Mugabe-Hagler fight the other day.

00:44:14.000 What a great fight.

00:44:15.000 What a great fight.

00:44:18.000 What a fight.

00:44:19.000 What a fight.

00:44:19.000 Hagler was my hero when I was a kid.

00:44:22.000 And he was a fighter.

00:44:25.000 So I'm sure you're an advocate with regard to what I call the number one elevator fight of all time.

00:44:32.000 Hagler was the winner.

00:44:34.000 Which one?

00:44:35.000 The number one elevator fight of all time.

00:44:36.000 And an elevator fight is the fight where you're Jim Lampley or you're Joe Rogan or you're any combat sports expert, et cetera.

00:44:43.000 And you step onto an elevator with six people and somebody turns around and says, who won Leonard Hagler?

00:44:49.000 Okay.

00:44:51.000 The debate about the decision, you know?

00:44:53.000 Yes.

00:44:54.000 And, you know, I'm sure you say Hagler beat Ray.

00:44:58.000 Yes.

00:45:00.000 And of course, we all know that Ray partially won the judges and the crowd with showbiz with the way that he threw his arms up at the end of every round and called attention to himself.

00:45:13.000 And he was quite aware of what he was doing.

00:45:17.000 And he was quite aware also that it would get under Hagler's skin.

00:45:20.000 So there was an element of genius in Ray, as we talked about already that went to more than just his spectacular physical gifts.

00:45:30.000 Right.

00:45:30.000 Yeah, no, he gamed the system a little bit.

00:45:33.000 He figured out how to flurry at the end of the rounds and make a big impression in the judge's eyes.

00:45:38.000 That was a very close fight, but that fight always bothered me.

00:45:42.000 And one of the things that bothered me is I felt like there were moments where Hagler could have turned it up and didn't.

00:45:51.000 And then when he retired after that fight and went to Italy and became a giant movie star in Italy, the conspiratorial part of my brain was always like, was that like one of those deals where everybody assumed that Hagler was going to win?

00:46:05.000 Hagger was a destroyer.

00:46:07.000 Hagler had knocked out Tommy Hearns.

00:46:08.000 Hagler had beaten everybody in the division, knocked out Mugabe.

00:46:13.000 He was the man, you know?

00:46:15.000 You fought, right?

00:46:16.000 Yeah.

00:46:17.000 So you fought.

00:46:18.000 I didn't.

00:46:18.000 I mean, I've only talked.

00:46:20.000 But because you fought, you probably have an even stronger sense than I do of how difficult the sport is.

00:46:27.000 Yes.

00:46:28.000 The training is difficult.

00:46:30.000 The fear factor is certainly part of it.

00:46:34.000 The level of concentration and devotion that it takes, it's not easy.

00:46:42.000 Team sports are easier.

00:46:44.000 For sure.

00:46:46.000 And so, you know, I'm thinking that every fighter reaches a point where enough.

00:46:54.000 Yes.

00:46:54.000 And they might reach that point without really cognitively knowing that they've reached that point where it's enough.

00:47:01.000 Hagler went to Italy, as you say.

00:47:03.000 Maybe he had already reached something like enough before he fought Ray in that fight.

00:47:09.000 Well, you know, he had accomplished so much, and also his training camps were the stuff of legend.

00:47:15.000 I mean, he would spar 100 rounds a week sometimes, which is just insane.

00:47:22.000 Hagler was a monster.

00:47:23.000 I mean, his conditioning and his drive and his will and his discipline, he was a monster.

00:47:29.000 He would scare the shit out of everybody just from his work ethic.

00:47:32.000 I remember I told the story, there was a news piece when he was training on the Cape and it was in the middle of the winter and he was fighting Mustafa Hampshire.

00:47:41.000 And he was running down the sand dunes screaming war with combat boots on in the winter.

00:47:48.000 And I remember thinking, war, war.

00:47:52.000 Because you think you're disciplined.

00:47:54.000 You think you're driven.

00:47:55.000 You think, you know, you're special.

00:47:56.000 And then you see a guy like that.

00:47:57.000 He's like, he's what my friend David Goggins calls uncommon amongst uncommon men.

00:48:03.000 Great line.

00:48:04.000 So where does Hagler Hearns rank among your all-time favorites?

00:48:08.000 One of the greatest of all time.

00:48:09.000 One of the greatest fights of all time.

00:48:11.000 Because Hagler just threw caution to the wind.

00:48:14.000 Fuck all this boxing.

00:48:16.000 Just jumped out.

00:48:18.000 So did Tommy.

00:48:19.000 So did Tommy.

00:48:20.000 Tommy did.

00:48:20.000 Both of them did.

00:48:21.000 Tommy didn't go in with a self-protective approach.

00:48:23.000 He tried to box.

00:48:24.000 Remember after he broke his hand, he tried just throwing the jab out there.

00:48:28.000 You could tell early on in the first round when he broke his hand.

00:48:30.000 Yes.

00:48:31.000 Because from then on, he's moving.

00:48:33.000 But he's already endured so much damage.

00:48:35.000 I mean, they have just thrown each other into the wood chipper.

00:48:39.000 Both guys were just blasting away.

00:48:42.000 I hope a lot of people are going to listen to this and go watch Agler Hearns on their web attachment because it's as great as anything has ever been.

00:48:51.000 It was insane.

00:48:53.000 I remember being in my living room when Hearns went down and just going, wow.

00:49:00.000 And this was after Hearns had knocked out Duran.

00:49:02.000 And I thought nobody could knock out Duran.

00:49:04.000 When Hearns flatlined Duran, I was like, good Lord.

00:49:08.000 Good lord.

00:49:09.000 Like to see Duran face down the canvas is like, you have to check your eyes.

00:49:14.000 Like, is this real?

00:49:15.000 Well, did Tommy break his hand with that right hand in the first round against Hagler?

00:49:19.000 Yes.

00:49:20.000 Yeah.

00:49:21.000 There you go.

00:49:23.000 You've lost your primary weapon.

00:49:24.000 He has one knockdown attributed to him in his career, and it's bullshit.

00:49:28.000 The Juan Roll Dan fight.

00:49:30.000 Bullshit.

00:49:30.000 Not really a knockdown.

00:49:32.000 And now we deal with Canelo, who has had one knockdown attributed to him in his career, and in my view, it was bullshit.

00:49:39.000 Which fight was that?

00:49:40.000 So it was Miguel Coto's little brother, Jose Coto.

00:49:43.000 It was the first time we had Canelo on HBO.

00:49:47.000 I believe it was an undercard of a top-ranked pay-per-view.

00:49:50.000 I'm not 100% certain about that.

00:49:54.000 And Coto's little brother, Jose, caught Canelo with a right-hand body punch to the chest.

00:50:05.000 And Canelo hit the ropes behind him and bounced off the ropes, kind of unbalanced.

00:50:11.000 He didn't go down, but he came off the ropes, ungainly, unbalanced, etc.

00:50:16.000 And the referee, and I can't remember which referee, stepped in and very technically ruled that the ropes had held him up.

00:50:23.000 So that's the only official knockdown in Canelo's career, and he didn't touch the canvas.

00:50:29.000 That's crazy.

00:50:29.000 Nobody has ever put him on the canvas.

00:50:32.000 And this is part of what Terrence is facing as he gets ready to fight him in September, is you're fighting a guy who, up to this moment in his career, has been utterly knockout proof.

00:50:44.000 Knockdown proof.

00:50:46.000 Well, even against a guy like Bivol, who's huge.

00:50:49.000 Yeah.

00:50:49.000 Exactly.

00:50:50.000 A huge, light heavyweight.

00:50:51.000 Yeah, but Bivol is Bivol is, I'm going to say, at least 50-50 a backup counter-puncher.

00:51:00.000 And they don't muster exactly the same power as a go-forward attacker.

00:51:05.000 True.

00:51:06.000 You notice that he hasn't fought Better BF.

00:51:10.000 And I'm not sure that Better B Up would be the right matchup.

00:51:13.000 For Canelo.

00:51:15.000 I think that would be a nightmare matchup.

00:51:18.000 Even though he's almost 40 now, right?

00:51:20.000 Is he 40?

00:51:21.000 He might be 40.

00:51:22.000 But he's still in shape, and he still comes forward, and he's naturally heavy hands.

00:51:27.000 Big hit.

00:51:28.000 One of the scariest of all time at 175.

00:51:30.000 He's another one of those guys.

00:51:31.000 It's just like, but with him, it's volume.

00:51:34.000 It's not one shot, but it's this thudding volume that never ends, this constant attack has made his two fights with Bivol so spectacular to watch, you know, because Bivol is not a make-fire fighter.

00:51:50.000 He's a natural counter-puncher.

00:51:52.000 But if you insist on making the fire and you're strong enough to make the fire, then Bivol has to fight, which he's done twice against Betterbriev.

00:52:00.000 well, he made brilliant adjustments in the second fight.

00:52:02.000 Brilliant adjustments.

00:52:03.000 He's a brilliant guy.

00:52:04.000 Yeah, I mean, he really, really made the proper adjustments and the counter-strikes and the movement, and he was just much better in the second fight.

00:52:11.000 It's another country with very good boxing training.

00:52:13.000 Oh, phenomenal.

00:52:14.000 Do you think that are they having a rubber match?

00:52:17.000 I don't know.

00:52:18.000 I don't know.

00:52:19.000 Yeah, I'm not.

00:52:20.000 I don't talk to promoters anymore.

00:52:23.000 I'm not sure about that.

00:52:25.000 I hope they do.

00:52:26.000 I think it's a fantastic idea.

00:52:28.000 I think Riyadh Season was trying to put that together.

00:52:30.000 I think they're trying to put together a third fight, and I really hope they do make that fight.

00:52:33.000 Go Turkey.

00:52:34.000 Yeah, you kind of have to do it now before Better Be of is just, he's probably past his point of view.

00:52:41.000 41, 42, etc.

00:52:43.000 These numbers sound forbidding.

00:52:45.000 Yes.

00:52:45.000 But still, even as an old guy.

00:52:47.000 Remember, Foreman was 45.

00:52:49.000 What did he still have?

00:52:51.000 Power.

00:52:51.000 Right.

00:52:52.000 Okay.

00:52:53.000 And skill.

00:52:54.000 The skill thing.

00:52:55.000 Like, here's the best example of that, Bernard Hopkins.

00:52:58.000 Who has maintained their skill deep into their 40s?

00:53:02.000 In fact, at a world-class level at 49 years old, beating top contenders at 49 years old?

00:53:09.000 One of the smartest men I've ever met.

00:53:11.000 Okay.

00:53:12.000 Bernard Hopkins is smart beyond smart.

00:53:16.000 He has PhD-type intelligence.

00:53:19.000 He really does.

00:53:20.000 And he was also a very critical and thoughtful self-examiner.

00:53:26.000 So those two things helped Bernard to sustain long into, you know, antiquity and an extremely disciplined personal life.

00:53:37.000 Yes, that's a big one.

00:53:39.000 You know, he kept his prison tattoo on his arm.

00:53:44.000 And he kept that number on his arm to remind him that he was never going to go back.

00:53:51.000 And I asked him one time, I said, what's the hardest thing you've ever done?

00:53:56.000 And he said, well, the hardest thing I've ever done was to walk off nine in the neighborhood in which I grew up.

00:54:03.000 I said, what do you mean walk off nine?

00:54:06.000 Nine years of probation.

00:54:08.000 Nine years of living on and in the same streets where I was the king of the streets when I was on the other side of the law.

00:54:17.000 Nine years of reminding myself that I could never go back, that my behavior had to change completely.

00:54:24.000 That's what he called walking off nine.

00:54:27.000 Wow.

00:54:28.000 What a phrase, huh?

00:54:29.000 Yeah, what a phrase.

00:54:30.000 What a guy.

00:54:31.000 Yeah.

00:54:31.000 Really, what a guy.

00:54:33.000 I remember when he was middleweight champion and he wasn't getting the credit that he felt like he deserved and he was, you know, squabbling with promoters and they kept him on the shelf.

00:54:41.000 I'm like, my God, he's like wasting away in the prime of his life.

00:54:45.000 And I felt like we're going to miss out on the prime of his life.

00:54:49.000 And then here he gets into the Felix Trinidad fight.

00:54:53.000 And I was like, this guy's, this is crazy watching this guy like completely outclass Tito Trinidad.

00:55:01.000 I'm like, this is nuts.

00:55:03.000 Of all the fighters I've ever known, if you were to ask me, who is the one most likely to still be holding every dollar he ever made, that's Bernard.

00:55:13.000 Right.

00:55:13.000 Okay.

00:55:14.000 He gives nothing away.

00:55:17.000 And he protects himself.

00:55:19.000 He protects his family.

00:55:20.000 He protects everything about his experience in an extremely devoted way.

00:55:25.000 Why?

00:55:26.000 Walking off nine.

00:55:27.000 Never wants to go back.

00:55:29.000 Wow.

00:55:29.000 Well, those are the stories that are so inspiring about boxing, right?

00:55:33.000 The people that have used boxing as a vehicle to get out of their circumstances.

00:55:38.000 Totally.

00:55:39.000 Yeah, and Bernard's one of the greatest examples imaginable.

00:55:42.000 I love him.

00:55:43.000 You know, I had him on my show, The Fight Game, on HBO.

00:55:47.000 I had him do technical pieces because he was better than anybody at explaining footwork, technique, etc.

00:55:56.000 Andre Ward could have done it too, but Andre was still fighting at that period of time.

00:56:02.000 Yeah, that was a great show, man.

00:56:04.000 That was another bummer when HBO stopped doing boxing.

00:56:07.000 Well, it was successful for them.

00:56:10.000 I like to say this.

00:56:11.000 It wasn't HBO, okay?

00:56:13.000 The minute that Time Warner was bought by a bunch of cell phone salesmen from Dallas, AT ⁇ T, the character of the operation changed.

00:56:23.000 And the first thing that went away was boxing.

00:56:27.000 It's in my book.

00:56:29.000 You'll read it.

00:56:30.000 There's an anecdote about me at a post-Emmy Awards or post-Golden Globe Awards event in Hollywood shortly after AT ⁇ T had purchased HBO.

00:56:44.000 And I was seated at the table of Richard Plepler, the longtime brilliant chairman of HBO, my beloved boss.

00:56:52.000 And Plepler said, see that guy over there in the gray suit?

00:56:55.000 And I said, yeah.

00:56:56.000 He said, that's your new boss.

00:56:58.000 That's John Stankey, the CEO of AT ⁇ T. I think you ought to go say hello.

00:57:05.000 I think you ought to go meet him and just spend a little time with him.

00:57:08.000 So I took his advice.

00:57:10.000 I went over and had a 10-minute discussion with Stanke.

00:57:13.000 Very nice, very cordial, fun.

00:57:19.000 And I walked back to Pleppler's table and he said, so what do you think?

00:57:22.000 I said, I think boxing is dead.

00:57:24.000 He said, I agree with you.

00:57:26.000 I just wanted to be sure that we were on the same page.

00:57:29.000 Oh, God.

00:57:30.000 Yeah.

00:57:30.000 So it was clear.

00:57:31.000 It was clear from that moment that they were not interested in going forward with something Why'd you say that?

00:57:39.000 Well, I could just tell from the way in which he spoke to me and the diffident replies to questions like, are we going to do this fight?

00:57:52.000 What do you think about that?

00:57:53.000 Stuff like that.

00:57:54.000 It was abundantly clear that they just saw it as a negative rather than a positive.

00:58:00.000 And public perception or profitability?

00:58:02.000 Profitability.

00:58:04.000 Really?

00:58:05.000 Many unpredictables.

00:58:06.000 Many unpredictables in boxing.

00:58:07.000 You schedule a show, somebody gets hurt, et cetera.

00:58:11.000 I think they didn't want that kind of real-life upheaval.

00:58:16.000 And also, they saw it as unsavory, or at least it felt that way to me.

00:58:26.000 This goes to the fact, and you know this as well as I do, or maybe better.

00:58:30.000 People from outside combat sports don't understand combat sports.

00:58:34.000 You're either in the culture and you get it, or you're not.

00:58:38.000 Right.

00:58:38.000 You know, and I, you know, when I first started calling fights, I was assigned to call boxing at ABC Sports by an incoming new president of the sports department who wanted to get rid of me and who thought that I would be such a misfit in boxing that if he assigned me to boxing, the audience would reject me.

00:59:03.000 Really?

00:59:03.000 They would see me as the successor to Kosel.

00:59:06.000 That would cut my throat.

00:59:08.000 And then I would walk away from my contract, which is what he wanted me to do.

00:59:12.000 He wanted me to, he thought my contract was absurd, too lucrative.

00:59:16.000 He didn't like the guarantees relative to exposure.

00:59:20.000 And he told my agent flat out, he said, I'm going to get rid of Jim.

00:59:24.000 I'm going to make him walk away.

00:59:25.000 And his first method for doing it was boxing.

00:59:28.000 So, of course, that means he didn't know that the very first sports event my mother ever sat me down to watch when I was six years old, after my father died when I was five, was Sugar Ray Robinson versus Bobo Olson for the Middleweight Championship on Gillette Friday Night Fights.

00:59:44.000 That I had grown up all through my childhood and teenage years watching Gillette Friday Night Fights.

00:59:50.000 And later, people would say to me, who's the voice in the back of your mind when you're calling fights?

00:59:55.000 Is it Kosell?

00:59:56.000 I said, oh, hell no.

00:59:58.000 I would never try to emulate that.

01:00:00.000 Don Dunfy, crisp, precise, factual, on point.

01:00:05.000 That's who I'm hearing in the back of my head when I call fights.

01:00:10.000 Interesting.

01:00:10.000 Yeah, so he thought he could get rid of me by assigning me to boxing.

01:00:14.000 And he also did not seem to be paying much attention to the fact that his division, with leadership of a guy named Alex Wallow, who was a boxing freak, had just signed a get-acquainted look-see contract with a 19-year-old heavyweight from upstate New York whose name was Mike Tyson.

01:00:33.000 So the first fight I ever called on TV was Mike Tyson versus Jesse Ferguson in Glens Falls, New York.

01:00:42.000 And this is the famous drive his nose bone into his brain fight.

01:00:46.000 Alex went to do post-fight interview after Tyson had obliterated Jesse's nose with an uppercut.

01:00:52.000 There was blood all over the ring.

01:00:56.000 And Alex said, you know, Mike, tell me about the uppercut.

01:01:00.000 And Mike said, Catamara taught me that the purpose of the uppercut is to drive the opponent's nosebone into his brain.

01:01:06.000 I was trying to drive his nosebone into his brain.

01:01:09.000 And I'm standing on the other side of the ring listening to this, headset on.

01:01:14.000 And I thought to myself, oh my God, look at what I've stumbled into here.

01:01:18.000 This kid is not only going to be the biggest attraction in boxing, he's going to be the biggest attraction in American culture if he can keep coming up with quotes like that.

01:01:27.000 And of course, within the next few weeks, they all started spilling out.

01:01:31.000 Boxing is a hurt business.

01:01:33.000 Everybody's got a plan until you hit them.

01:01:35.000 All the things that D'Amato had taught him, which he memorized and then reproduced in his media contacts.

01:01:45.000 One of my favorite TV fights was him versus Marvis Frazier because it was such a terrifying execution.

01:01:53.000 I'm giving away too much of the book, Joe.

01:01:56.000 My publisher would say, wait, don't tell him the whole book.

01:01:58.000 Come on, people are going to buy it anyway.

01:01:59.000 Don't worry about that.

01:02:01.000 So Alex Wallow and I lived five blocks apart on Upper Fifth Avenue in New York.

01:02:09.000 And when we went to upstate New York for the Tyson fights, of which there were several, we would always ride up in his green Jaguar, and he knew the route.

01:02:18.000 He would drive, play me his esoteric rock music.

01:02:22.000 You ever heard of Cockrobin?

01:02:24.000 Try him out sometime.

01:02:27.000 And so all the way up to Albany for the Marvis Frazier fight, Alex is saying to me, you know, I'm thinking of saying in the opening on camera that Mike will knock him out in the first round.

01:02:44.000 Do you think that's too audacious?

01:02:46.000 And I said, well, Alex, you're the expert.

01:02:48.000 You know, I'm just a throw-in blow-by-blow guy who's trying to get my feet wet here.

01:02:52.000 I'm the last person who's going to tell you what it is you should say.

01:02:56.000 So if you believe Mike is going to knock him out in the first round and you're confident saying that, first of all, no one's going to penalize you on Monday if you're wrong.

01:03:05.000 Nobody's going to print some big headline that says, Wallow was crazy or something like that.

01:03:10.000 It goes into the wash at that point.

01:03:12.000 And second of all, if you're right, you will get credit for it.

01:03:16.000 If you're right, Rudy Martzky will say so in USA Today.

01:03:22.000 And so that's our position for two-thirds of the trip to Albany.

01:03:26.000 And now in the last, oh, 40 or 50 miles, he starts saying, what if I said he's going to knock him out in the first minute?

01:03:35.000 Do you think that's too brave?

01:03:37.000 Same thing.

01:03:38.000 Alex, if you believe he's going to knock him out in the first minute, go ahead and say he's going to knock him out in the first minute.

01:03:44.000 I'm not here to control you or tell you what to say.

01:03:46.000 Say whatever you want to say.

01:03:48.000 I think I'm going to say that he's going to knock him out in the first minute.

01:03:51.000 So the following day, we do a rehearsal for the opening on camera, and he says he'll knock him out in the first minute.

01:03:57.000 Then when we do the live opening on camera for the show, he gets a little more cautious, and he pulls it back to, there you are.

01:04:06.000 Look at you.

01:04:06.000 That's hand lamps in the lamps.

01:04:08.000 Look at you.

01:04:10.000 Hairported on the right.

01:04:11.000 We'll get to that in a moment.

01:04:15.000 He pulls it back and when we do it live on camera, he says, Mike will knock him out in the first round.

01:04:21.000 Was it 33 seconds or 31 seconds?

01:04:24.000 I think it was 33 seconds.

01:04:26.000 And all the way back to New York.

01:04:30.000 He shoots in the moaning and groaning.

01:04:32.000 Why in God's name didn't I say what I really believe?

01:04:37.000 Alex, you said he'd knock him out in the first round.

01:04:39.000 And you were right.

01:04:40.000 You were going to get credit for that.

01:04:42.000 You were right.

01:04:42.000 Yeah, but I could have gotten more credit if I'd said what I really believe.

01:04:46.000 That's such a silly perspective.

01:04:48.000 We talk about fighters freezing.

01:04:50.000 Marvis froze on Saturday.

01:04:52.000 I mean, on Friday, the day before the fight.

01:04:55.000 Marvis was frozen.

01:04:56.000 Well, we knew.

01:04:56.000 We knew coming into that fight.

01:04:58.000 We knew.

01:04:59.000 It was a perfect Fight for Mike to showcase because Marvis had the giant name because he was Joe Frazier's son, and Joe Frazier had been trash-talking Mike.

01:05:08.000 It helped to create what ultimately became the myth of Mike Tyson.

01:05:14.000 The notion that he was going to knock everybody out in that way.

01:05:19.000 And partially because of stuff like that, that Douglas is a 42-1 underdog in Tokyo.

01:05:24.000 Yes.

01:05:25.000 When if you looked at the record for the preceding year, year and a half coming into Tokyo, Mike went the distance with James Bonecrusher Smith.

01:05:34.000 Mike went the distance with Tony Tucker.

01:05:36.000 Mike went the distance with James Quick Tillis.

01:05:39.000 There were scorers at Ringside in upstate New York who had Tillis as the winner in the fight.

01:05:44.000 He went to the last 10 seconds with Jose Ribalta.

01:05:46.000 He went the distance with Mitch Blood Green.

01:05:49.000 What did they all have in common?

01:05:51.000 They were all taller than Mike.

01:05:53.000 Some of them have a right hand that would come over the top where he would have difficulty seeing the delivery.

01:06:00.000 And when you get to Douglas, best athlete of the group, former college basketball player with good feet, had a big right hand.

01:06:10.000 I mean, looking back, pure logic, no way in the world Mike should be a 42-1 favorite against Buster Douglas.

01:06:17.000 But Buster Douglas had underperformed most of his career and had not been motivated.

01:06:21.000 Then his mother dies.

01:06:23.000 That's correct.

01:06:23.000 100% correct.

01:06:25.000 And you're right on point for saying it at this moment.

01:06:28.000 Yeah, his mother died.

01:06:30.000 And that lit him up.

01:06:32.000 Lit him up.

01:06:33.000 And never again.

01:06:34.000 And Mike was at the height of his differences with Robin Gibbons.

01:06:39.000 Right, right.

01:06:41.000 Constant turmoil and partying and feeling invincible.

01:06:47.000 Nothing that can do more damage to a good man than the wrong woman, right?

01:06:51.000 And she was the wrong woman.

01:06:53.000 She's the wrong woman, period.

01:06:55.000 Yeah, that was it.

01:06:59.000 There's certain women out there like that.

01:07:02.000 They can tank your life.

01:07:03.000 Yeah, and unfortunately.

01:07:05.000 O.J. used to say to me, if you want to know what the daughter's going to be like, look at the mother.

01:07:11.000 And if you looked at her mother and the background relative to Dave Winfield and all of that, maybe you could have predicted.

01:07:20.000 Or as Merchant said in our on-camera prior to the Tubbs-Tokyo fight, Tyson versus Tubbs in Tokyo, first fight I ever did on HBO.

01:07:30.000 Larry had a line before the fight where he said, this is the beginning of the Robin thing.

01:07:36.000 Cuss had died.

01:07:39.000 Jimmy Jacobs had died.

01:07:40.000 No, Cuss hadn't died.

01:07:41.000 Jimmy Jacobs had died.

01:07:43.000 At any rate, Larry Kemverooney was already out.

01:07:47.000 Yeah, right.

01:07:48.000 That's right.

01:07:49.000 Larry said, since the beginning of organized boxing, heavyweight champions have often consorted with actresses and never to their benefit.

01:08:02.000 laughter laughter laughter It's a classic merchant line.

01:08:09.000 Among many classic merchant lines.

01:08:11.000 I love them.

01:08:12.000 That was one of the best things about you and Merchant and just the entire commentary team at HBO was that you had these intelligent, articulate people involved in what many people think of as the most barbaric of all sports.

01:08:28.000 Yes.

01:08:29.000 So it defined it in a very different way.

01:08:32.000 That's the HBO way.

01:08:33.000 Yeah.

01:08:34.000 Elevate it.

01:08:34.000 Yes.

01:08:35.000 It certainly was elevated.

01:08:37.000 And HBO's executives were smart enough to see that you can treat it as an intellectual event.

01:08:43.000 Yeah.

01:08:43.000 And if you're doing it right, you'll be able to do it.

01:08:45.000 But in a way with the commentators, it frames everything.

01:08:50.000 The same exact event with crude commentators is not the same experience because you don't get that intelligent, articulate analysis.

01:08:58.000 And a guy like Larry Merchant, who'd been around boxing for his entire life and had a deep understanding of it, and you, and then it's even the funny back and forth banter between Larry and George Foreman when they would disagree on things.

01:09:11.000 It was brilliant.

01:09:12.000 Absolutely brilliant.

01:09:13.000 And I'm very proud to say, not blowing my own horn, but Larry and George in particular, there's a sports television columnist in the New York Daily News named Bob Raceman, R-A-I-S-S-M-A-N.

01:09:28.000 And at some point in that arc, Raceman wrote in his TV sports column in the Daily News, Lampley, Merchant, and Foreman are the greatest three-man broadcasting team in the history of sports television.

01:09:43.000 Now think about that.

01:09:44.000 That's amazing.

01:09:47.000 This is not Monday night football.

01:09:49.000 This is HBO boxing.

01:09:51.000 Right.

01:09:51.000 Yeah.

01:09:52.000 You know, I mean, and so he was saying, in effect, this is better than Gifford, Meredith, and Kosell.

01:09:58.000 Wow.

01:10:00.000 And, you know, I was very, very flattered by that, you know, which I should have been.

01:10:04.000 Yeah, that's incredible.

01:10:05.000 Yeah, having a great team like that.

01:10:08.000 And it was also, there was the flow where you guys had worked together so often.

01:10:14.000 And there was the between rounds show.

01:10:18.000 Yeah.

01:10:18.000 What?

01:10:19.000 Set Showtime and HBO apart from ABC, CBS, and NBC.

01:10:24.000 No commercials.

01:10:25.000 Right.

01:10:26.000 And no commercials means you get one of the most meaningful and communicative parts of the narrative, which is what goes on in the corner between rounds.

01:10:37.000 So you're watching Tyson Douglas, for instance, and you see these two novice trainers struggling with a condom filled with water to try to do something to ease the swelling in his eye.

01:10:51.000 No inswell.

01:10:52.000 Unbelievable.

01:10:54.000 I remember Ray nearly fell off his chair when he saw that.

01:10:58.000 This is so hard to believe that you could achieve the highest level of combat sports, the heavyweight champion of the world, and yet have this really rank amateur corner.

01:11:10.000 There was so much that was taken for granted about Mike during that stage of his career.

01:11:16.000 The only person in that camp, once D'Amato died, the only person, and Jimmy died, the only person in that camp who was really aware of how vulnerable he could be was Mike.

01:11:28.000 Mike was a boxing genius.

01:11:31.000 Mike knew much more than those guys about how to prepare for a fight, et cetera, et cetera.

01:11:36.000 But again, before Tokyo, he was distracted.

01:11:40.000 Yeah.

01:11:41.000 Thoroughly distracted.

01:11:42.000 And it comes with success, all the trappings.

01:11:45.000 I mean, he was just constantly, you know.

01:11:49.000 You know, Mike, right?

01:11:50.000 Yeah.

01:11:51.000 Yeah.

01:11:51.000 Have you had him in here?

01:11:52.000 Oh, a couple times.

01:11:53.000 Yeah.

01:11:53.000 One of the most lovable people in the world.

01:11:55.000 Yeah.

01:11:55.000 He's great.

01:11:56.000 You can't not love Mike if you know him.

01:11:59.000 No, if you know him.

01:12:00.000 The first time I met him, it's hard to believe he's really in the room.

01:12:03.000 You're like, I can't believe he's real.

01:12:05.000 Like, he's right there.

01:12:06.000 This is Mike Tyson.

01:12:07.000 Me as a child, I remember when I was a kid, I guess I wasn't a child.

01:12:12.000 I'm only a year younger than him, but when he lost to Buster Douglas, I didn't watch it until after the fight.

01:12:18.000 I watched a replay of it, and I still expected him to win.

01:12:24.000 You know how crazy that is?

01:12:26.000 That's the kind of aura.

01:12:28.000 So you've read in the paper and on the web that he's lost, but you're still expecting him to win.

01:12:32.000 I remember I heard about it in a gas station.

01:12:36.000 Someone told me in a gas station.

01:12:38.000 I can't believe this is true.

01:12:39.000 I was getting gas, and I heard, did you hear Mike Tyson got knocked out?

01:12:44.000 And I remember pumping gas going, what the fuck are you talking about?

01:12:47.000 Like, what?

01:12:48.000 Like, Buster Douglas knocked out Mike Tyson.

01:12:50.000 What?

01:12:51.000 For real?

01:12:52.000 So we talked about the call of Foreman Moore and where that call came from.

01:12:58.000 The other call that is on that same level in terms of, you know, people remembering and stuff like that is that call.

01:13:06.000 And you just came very close to identically articulating what my call was because, you know, I'm watching the rounds in Tokyo, and I've arrived in Tokyo with a firm opinion that Mike is going to knock this guy out in one, two, three rounds, something like that.

01:13:24.000 And as the rounds go on and you're watching the debacle unfold, the, you know, water in the rubber glove to try to stop the swelling and stuff like that, you realize that the preparation might not be all there.

01:13:37.000 And Douglas is getting more confident.

01:13:39.000 And Douglas is landing his jab, et cetera, et cetera.

01:13:42.000 And hooking off the jab.

01:13:43.000 And hooking off the jab.

01:13:44.000 And I mean, people think that he knocked him out with the right hand.

01:13:48.000 It was the left hook that did the damage.

01:13:51.000 The left hook was thunderous.

01:13:53.000 And Mike stumbled to his side.

01:13:56.000 But at any rate, I'm sitting there in Tokyo.

01:14:02.000 It's 10.30 or 11 o'clock in the morning.

01:14:06.000 There are 34,000 people seated around me, making no noise whatsoever.

01:14:11.000 Right.

01:14:12.000 The culture of a Japanese sports event.

01:14:14.000 It's as though they are at an opera, you know, and that's just cultural.

01:14:17.000 It's the way they are.

01:14:19.000 And as that count is rising, five, six, seven, and it's abundantly clear that Mike's not going to get up.

01:14:26.000 And I'm thinking, oh my God, what am I going to say about this?

01:14:30.000 The very first live fight I ever attended was the biggest upset in boxing history.

01:14:36.000 And now, here in front of me, 12, 14 feet away, is the result that's going to supplant that as the biggest upset in boxing history.

01:14:46.000 Wow.

01:14:47.000 So what do I say?

01:14:50.000 And I've told this story many times.

01:14:53.000 If you've heard it, I apologize for repeating.

01:14:56.000 But I was developing a golf relationship with the greatest actor of my generation, Jack Nicholson, who became a close friend and later saved my career.

01:15:05.000 But that's another story.

01:15:07.000 And I had asked Jack on the golf course about two or three weeks before Tokyo, I said, Jack, when you're going to the set to deliver the fulcrum line in the movie, when you're going to the set to do the one thing that everybody in the audience is going to remember, when you're getting ready to go deliver, you can't handle the truth, what is it you have on your mind?

01:15:31.000 What's your mantra?

01:15:32.000 And he said, Lamp, same thing I've been saying to myself ever since I first went to acting class, don't overact.

01:15:41.000 So I'm in Tokyo.

01:15:42.000 The count reaches four or five.

01:15:45.000 And I hear in the back of my mind Jack's voice, don't overact.

01:15:51.000 And that call became, Mike Tyson has been knocked out in about that tone of voice.

01:15:57.000 I wanted to make it as matter of fact as possible because there was nothing I could do to elevate it by screaming or shouting or delivering any kind of window dressing, etc.

01:16:09.000 It was what it was.

01:16:11.000 Mike Tyson has been knocked out.

01:16:13.000 That was that.

01:16:14.000 I remember that.

01:16:15.000 Now that you said it, I remember that.

01:16:17.000 Well, thank you.

01:16:19.000 I appreciate it.

01:16:19.000 Because you remember it was energetic, but matter of fact.

01:16:23.000 Well, there it is.

01:16:24.000 Three, two, five, two, five, eight.

01:16:31.000 He's...

01:16:33.000 It's over.

01:16:34.000 Mike Tyson has been knocked out.

01:16:37.000 All right, so I did shout a little bit.

01:16:39.000 I did shout it a little bit.

01:16:40.000 All right.

01:16:41.000 I give myself too much credit for the matter of fact.

01:16:44.000 But that, of course, was that's my younger voice.

01:16:46.000 It was a little bit higher.

01:16:48.000 That was.

01:16:49.000 Octavio Meiran was the name of the referee.

01:16:52.000 I just remember Buster Douglas winning that fight thinking, man, what happens to him now?

01:16:57.000 Now he's going to be a little bit more.

01:16:58.000 Well, what happens to him, of course, is that he goes on a celebration rampage.

01:17:03.000 He puts on, oh, I don't know, 40, 50 pounds, something like that.

01:17:08.000 He tries to train them off, but not effectively enough.

01:17:12.000 He goes into the ring against Holyfield, and Holyfield delivers one left hook.

01:17:16.000 One perfect counter left hook in the first round, and we're out of there.

01:17:20.000 Yeah.

01:17:20.000 That's what it was.

01:17:21.000 It was a left hook?

01:17:22.000 I thought it was a right hand.

01:17:23.000 Might have been a right hand.

01:17:24.000 I don't remember.

01:17:25.000 I could be wrong.

01:17:25.000 See if he can find it.

01:17:26.000 Might have been a right hand, but they'll find it.

01:17:28.000 Yeah, Jamie will find it.

01:17:30.000 But yeah, he just never reached those heights again.

01:17:34.000 That was it.

01:17:36.000 He just never had money.

01:17:38.000 Yeah, I mean, also, like, the food.

01:17:42.000 Food.

01:17:43.000 He got real fat.

01:17:44.000 He was an addictive eater.

01:17:45.000 Here it is.

01:17:46.000 Okay, let's see.

01:17:47.000 On the right.

01:17:47.000 Right hand, you're right.

01:17:50.000 Then there was a left hook following, but the right hand is the one that did it.

01:17:54.000 I think the left hook missed.

01:17:55.000 Yeah, the left hook missed.

01:17:56.000 You're right.

01:17:57.000 All right, so one for Rogan.

01:18:00.000 Zero for Lampling.

01:18:01.000 It's cemented in my mind because I remember...

01:18:06.000 89.

01:18:08.000 Well, it's 1990 when Buster knocks out Mike.

01:18:13.000 Was it?

01:18:13.000 Yeah.

01:18:15.000 90.

01:18:15.000 No.

01:18:16.000 Got to be earlier than that.

01:18:17.000 Huh?

01:18:18.000 No, it was.

01:18:19.000 It was 90.

01:18:20.000 It was February 10, 1990.

01:18:23.000 Wow.

01:18:24.000 February 10 in the United States, February 11 in Tokyo.

01:18:28.000 Okay, right.

01:18:28.000 And so this is probably 91 then?

01:18:32.000 It might have been 90.

01:18:33.000 Yeah.

01:18:35.000 I think it was later in 1990.

01:18:37.000 Yeah.

01:18:38.000 I just remember, you know, when someone does something extraordinary and rise to the occasion, I always root on them.

01:18:45.000 I always root for them.

01:18:46.000 Like, wow, he's going to turn his life around.

01:18:47.000 He's going to be great.

01:18:48.000 So now you're rooting for Buster to beat Holyfield.

01:18:50.000 Well, and also I was a giant Holyfield fan, too, so it was one of those conflicted fights.

01:18:54.000 And Holyfield, to me, was extraordinary because what he did with Mackie Shillstone in his training.

01:19:00.000 October 25, 1990.

01:19:02.000 There it is.

01:19:03.000 This time I was right.

01:19:04.000 Yeah.

01:19:05.000 It was one of those things where Holyfield was one of the first guys that really embraced weightlifting.

01:19:11.000 And I remember as a young fighter, I was always told, if you lift weights, it'll slow you down.

01:19:17.000 Weights will make you stiff.

01:19:18.000 Weights will slow you down.

01:19:19.000 You should never lift weights.

01:19:20.000 And so I listened to that, and I never lifted weights.

01:19:23.000 And then I remember watching Holyfield train for his heavyweight debut thinking, God, I remember his fight with Dwight Muhammad Kawi.

01:19:34.000 Remember that fight?

01:19:35.000 Incredible fight.

01:19:36.000 That was when he was a cruiserweight.

01:19:38.000 And I was thinking, how is this guy going to go up to heavyweight?

01:19:40.000 How is this going to work?

01:19:42.000 Strong mind.

01:19:44.000 Very strong mind.

01:19:46.000 Unquestionably.

01:19:46.000 You want to see a Vander do something?

01:19:48.000 Tell him he can't do it.

01:19:49.000 Oh, for sure.

01:19:50.000 Yeah.

01:19:50.000 But also, one of the first applications of real modern science in regards to strength and conditioning.

01:19:58.000 What Mackie Shillstone was doing was like very revolutionary.

01:20:01.000 And to see him do all these crazy strength and cardio routines and putting all that mass on and seeing all the doubters and naysayers.

01:20:09.000 So which other fighter looked at that and realized who Mackie was?

01:20:13.000 Bernard Hopkins.

01:20:14.000 Right.

01:20:16.000 Genius.

01:20:16.000 He worked with quite a few fighters, didn't he, Mackie?

01:20:19.000 I believe Mackie worked with quite a few fighters after everybody saw that the results were there.

01:20:25.000 So everybody kind of changed their opinion on the fighters.

01:20:28.000 Did he work with any MMA guys?

01:20:30.000 I don't know.

01:20:30.000 I don't, probably.

01:20:32.000 There's probably a few.

01:20:33.000 It makes sense.

01:20:33.000 Yeah, I mean, MMA guys are led.

01:20:35.000 I mean, with MMA, you have the grappling aspect of it.

01:20:39.000 Without strength and conditioning, you really can't compete.

01:20:42.000 It's not really possible at this day and age.

01:20:44.000 Everyone uses strength and conditioning.

01:20:46.000 There's very few fighters that just train using skill, just train skills.

01:20:52.000 Like George St. Pierre did that for a certain period of his career.

01:20:55.000 I wonder if there's anybody left in boxing who trains just using the gym skills.

01:21:00.000 There were a lot of them when I was first involved in the sport who would never have touched a weight.

01:21:05.000 Oh, yeah.

01:21:05.000 They subscribed totally to the notion that that was negative.

01:21:08.000 Right.

01:21:09.000 And the worst case, I mean, they definitely did calisthenics, but that was it.

01:21:13.000 It was just bodyweight exercises.

01:21:16.000 Which brings us to Crawford, which I think is really interesting, the Crawford-Canelo fight.

01:21:22.000 Beyond interesting.

01:21:24.000 Fascinating.

01:21:25.000 Fascinating.

01:21:26.000 Because how does Crawford compete with that size?

01:21:29.000 And we have to recognize, okay, well, when Canelo fought Floyd, it was 152 pounds, right?

01:21:36.000 So he had dropped down, which was a struggle for him, which is why Floyd was so brilliant in getting him to go down to 152 because he knew he would be drained.

01:21:43.000 52 or 54?

01:21:45.000 Well, the weight class, I believe, was 54, but I believe the clause in the contract for that fight was that he'd get down to 52.

01:21:51.000 You're ahead of me?

01:21:51.000 Let's see if that's true.

01:21:53.000 Find out if that's true.

01:21:53.000 I'm pretty sure that that's true that they had a fight at 12.

01:21:55.000 I love fact-checking on the fly.

01:21:57.000 Yeah, it's interesting.

01:21:59.000 That was a struggle.

01:22:01.000 The 54 was a struggle.

01:22:02.000 Now Canelo goes all the way up to 68 and then even to 75 and now back down to 68, whereas Crawford is leapfrogging.

01:22:11.000 He's going, he goes to super middle.

01:22:13.000 47 to 54 and now to 68.

01:22:16.000 And the Madruva fight in 54 is a difficult fight.

01:22:21.000 Yeah.

01:22:22.000 Difficult fight.

01:22:23.000 152.

01:22:24.000 52.

01:22:24.000 You were right.

01:22:25.000 Joe Rogan scores again.

01:22:27.000 Yeah, well, I have a goofy memory.

01:22:29.000 It works a lot of the time, but sometimes not.

01:22:34.000 Sometimes it's like fucking a fancy skin.

01:22:35.000 I don't think you can do this podcast without having a spectacular memory.

01:22:39.000 Sometimes it's super accurate, and sometimes it's just terrible.

01:22:41.000 I don't understand why.

01:22:43.000 But certain things I do remember.

01:22:45.000 And I do remember it because of the weight-cutting thing, because I remember thinking, like, what a brilliant move to get him to do that.

01:22:51.000 The same thing that Javante Davis did with Ryan Garcia.

01:22:55.000 Yes.

01:22:56.000 Like, you can't rehydrate.

01:22:57.000 Right.

01:22:57.000 Like, which is like a sucker bet.

01:23:01.000 That's such a sucker bet.

01:23:03.000 But it's like the same thing with Pacquiao taking the fight with a solution.

01:23:06.000 And some of them bothered.

01:23:07.000 Don't you think some of that is Tank reading Ryan's personality and playing him a little bit?

01:23:14.000 Oh, yeah.

01:23:14.000 Yeah, you're fucking with him.

01:23:16.000 Yeah, you're giving him other things.

01:23:17.000 Tank is a brilliant con artist.

01:23:19.000 Oh, he's so good.

01:23:20.000 He's so good.

01:23:21.000 And boy, the Lamont Roach fight.

01:23:23.000 Ooh.

01:23:24.000 Well, that was a knockdown.

01:23:25.000 Ooh, 100% was a knockdown.

01:23:27.000 And that's a dramatic mistake by the referee.

01:23:32.000 Without that, you have a decision victory for Roach, and he's a superstar.

01:23:35.000 Now you have this fucking draw that they have to fight again.

01:23:38.000 But now Javante knows what's coming.

01:23:41.000 They had fought in the amateurs, correct?

01:23:43.000 Well, they both have knowledge now.

01:23:44.000 Roach knows that his counterpunching can be effective against Tank, and Tank knows that he has to make an adjustment if he's going to land a power shot.

01:23:52.000 Well, it's also Tank is another guy that has experienced all the trappings of fame, all the success and the money and all the jewelry and all the craziness and the ladies.

01:24:06.000 And Roach hasn't.

01:24:07.000 And Roach has not.

01:24:08.000 And Roach is a hungry motherfucker who can really fight.

01:24:11.000 He can really fight.

01:24:12.000 And he should have got his flowers after that fight.

01:24:14.000 And, you know, a lot of the boxing people recognize that was a knockdown.

01:24:19.000 But forever in the history books, it's not a knockdown.

01:24:22.000 When you take a punch to the face and then you take a knee, that is a fucking knockdown.

01:24:26.000 Period.

01:24:26.000 End of story.

01:24:27.000 I don't care if you got your hair fucking perm straight up.

01:24:30.000 It's like a literary idiosyncrasy, okay?

01:24:34.000 And both of our sports, boxing and an MMA, are littered throughout their history with these things that are egregiously unfair at the moment, but also prompt us to remember the fight and remember both fighters.

01:24:50.000 If you're a fighter who has been victimized by a severe injustice in one of your fights, the audience is going to remember you sympathetically and be more interested in your next fight.

01:25:02.000 Absolutely.

01:25:03.000 So this is an entertainment enterprise.

01:25:06.000 And anything that contributes to your legend is ultimately going to pay you back somewhere down the road.

01:25:14.000 Yes, that's true.

01:25:16.000 There's definitely something to that.

01:25:17.000 And then, so Lamont will have a lot of fans on his side going through that space.

01:25:21.000 Oh, big time.

01:25:22.000 Yeah.

01:25:22.000 In fact, I would put the fight in D.C. Although I don't think Tank would want to do that.

01:25:28.000 Is that fight scheduled?

01:25:30.000 Not to my knowledge.

01:25:31.000 Not to my awareness.

01:25:32.000 Gervante Davis.

01:25:33.000 I'm totally focused on Canelo Alvarez and Terrence Crawford at this particular moment.

01:25:38.000 Are you calling that fight?

01:25:40.000 No.

01:25:40.000 All right, at least, wait a minute.

01:25:42.000 Let me say I don't know.

01:25:43.000 You don't know?

01:25:43.000 I don't know.

01:25:45.000 There was a news conference in New York yesterday, and they announced that Max Kelleman was part of the broadcast team.

01:25:51.000 Okay.

01:25:52.000 So that's only one person they've announced.

01:25:55.000 Obviously, I'd love to call the pike, but I don't know yet.

01:25:57.000 August 16th.

01:25:58.000 Scheduled.

01:25:59.000 Scheduled for August 16th in Las Vegas.

01:26:01.000 Wow, boy, I might go to that.

01:26:04.000 I might go to that.

01:26:05.000 Maybe I'll go with you.

01:26:08.000 Maybe we should.

01:26:09.000 That would be fun.

01:26:10.000 Hey, we're getting along really well here, aren't we?

01:26:12.000 Yeah, for sure.

01:26:12.000 Yeah.

01:26:13.000 So I enjoy the conversation.

01:26:15.000 It would be fun to go sit at a live fight, wouldn't it?

01:26:17.000 Oh, no.

01:26:18.000 Is that a UFC weekend?

01:26:20.000 God damn it.

01:26:21.000 Let me check real quick because it might be.

01:26:24.000 Yep.

01:26:25.000 Shit.

01:26:25.000 UFC in Chicago.

01:26:27.000 Shit.

01:26:28.000 All right.

01:26:28.000 I'll call you later that night and let you know.

01:26:30.000 I'll watch it.

01:26:31.000 I will have it on my phone.

01:26:32.000 I'll set my phone up and have it there while the fight's going on.

01:26:36.000 All right.

01:26:37.000 Looking forward to it.

01:26:38.000 So who do you like in Canelo versus Crawford?

01:26:40.000 Well, I'm a giant Crawford fan because I think he's the best Switch hitter since Marvin Agler.

01:26:44.000 I'm a giant Crawford fan because I called his coming out fight against Brady Sprescott and then various other stepping stones throughout his career.

01:26:52.000 I also think he's one of those guys that if you tell him he can't do something, he wants to show you and shock you.

01:26:57.000 1,000%.

01:26:58.000 Absolutely right.

01:26:59.000 I also think Canelo is slowing down and Canelo is a more of a one-punch fighter now than the combination fighter he was when he was younger.

01:27:08.000 We'll see.

01:27:10.000 Not yet ready to subscribe totally to that because again, you're talking about somebody who is stubborn who wants to prove everything he can prove.

01:27:20.000 100%.

01:27:20.000 I agree with that too.

01:27:22.000 But I think there's a, like, in boxing and certainly in MMA, there's a certain amount of years where a fighter can keep the RPMs up.

01:27:31.000 And, you know, when you're in the red line, and there's some people subscribe to the idea of nine years.

01:27:37.000 Nine years is the most that an elite fighter in MMA has performed at their prime.

01:27:43.000 I think that's a bullshit number because I think it's entirely dependent upon lifestyle, nutrition, discipline, physical attributes.

01:27:51.000 There's a lot of factors.

01:27:52.000 George Foreman won the heavyweight championship of the world in boxing at age 45.

01:27:56.000 True, but he took 10 years off.

01:27:58.000 Yes.

01:27:58.000 So it's great years off.

01:28:00.000 So you have to factor in.

01:28:01.000 But were the 10 years off good or bad?

01:28:03.000 Did they dull his reflexes or did they actually allow his body to recover in such a way that, I mean, you could debate that all night.

01:28:10.000 All night.

01:28:11.000 And George is biologically very unusual.

01:28:13.000 I mean, he had canned hams for fists.

01:28:16.000 They were gigantic fists.

01:28:18.000 And intellectually unusual, as we discussed before.

01:28:21.000 Yes.

01:28:21.000 And boy, you know, one of my favorite all-time heavyweight wars was him and Ron Lyle.

01:28:26.000 That was one of his all-time favorite heavyweight wars.

01:28:30.000 Yeah, he loved to reminisce about the Lyle fight.

01:28:34.000 Oh, that fight was crazy.

01:28:36.000 Every fighter loves drama, and they love having been a part of drama.

01:28:40.000 So George loved that.

01:28:41.000 That was an insane fight.

01:28:43.000 Insane.

01:28:44.000 All the knockdowns, both guys rocked and hurt.

01:28:48.000 And Ron Lyle's another one of those guys who just kind of lost in the history books.

01:28:53.000 People sort of forgot, except for that fight.

01:28:56.000 There's a few of those guys that people just kind of have forgotten.

01:28:59.000 They attached them to one fight because they didn't ever have that shining moment again in their career.

01:29:04.000 Yeah.

01:29:04.000 What a cruel game.

01:29:06.000 What a cruel game.

01:29:08.000 Ali and Cleveland Williams.

01:29:10.000 Sure.

01:29:10.000 Same thing.

01:29:11.000 Right, right.

01:29:12.000 Cleveland Williams is a murderer.

01:29:13.000 He was.

01:29:14.000 He was nasty knockout puncher.

01:29:16.000 Absolutely.

01:29:16.000 But Ali just boxed his face off and put him away.

01:29:19.000 That's exactly right.

01:29:20.000 Big cat.

01:29:21.000 That was the one that caused a lot of people to realize, oh, Cassius Clay is a really legitimate, meaningful talent.

01:29:30.000 Yeah.

01:29:31.000 And that's on the way to the first Liston fight.

01:29:33.000 Mm-hmm.

01:29:34.000 Yeah.

01:29:35.000 Special.

01:29:36.000 There was a special fight.

01:29:37.000 The first Liston fight was crazy.

01:29:40.000 It was crazy.

01:29:41.000 And also, the crazy thing was there was something probably on Listen's gloves, right?

01:29:47.000 Yes.

01:29:47.000 God in Cassius' gloves.

01:29:48.000 There was unquestionably something on Liston's gloves.

01:29:50.000 And Cassius, at one point, asked Dundee to cut his gloves off.

01:29:55.000 That's right.

01:29:56.000 That's right.

01:29:56.000 Because he was blinded.

01:29:58.000 So I think it's the fifth round where he ran and had to stay away because he was waiting for his eyes to clear.

01:30:06.000 Yeah.

01:30:07.000 And then by the seventh round, he knocks Liston down.

01:30:11.000 Yeah.

01:30:12.000 And Liston effectively quits.

01:30:14.000 What a dirty business to put something on your gloves to get in someone's eyes when you punch them.

01:30:19.000 So crazy.

01:30:20.000 What a dirty business to load someone's gloves with what amounts to cement and send him in to fight Miguel Coto in a pay-per-view in Las Vegas.

01:30:29.000 Yes, yes, yes.

01:30:30.000 Yeah, they put holes in the gloves, removed some of the stuffing, and watered it down.

01:30:37.000 And then he also did something to his hand wraps as well, right?

01:30:40.000 He was hitting Coto with bricks.

01:30:42.000 That's all I know for sure.

01:30:44.000 And he could have killed him.

01:30:46.000 Cotto went through a life-threatening experience.

01:30:49.000 And I always, you know, don't fall in love with a fighter.

01:30:52.000 You could not know Miguel without falling in love with him.

01:30:55.000 He was a wonderful, sweet, great person.

01:30:59.000 So I was very, very deeply disturbed and upset and sentimental calling that fight that night.

01:31:09.000 Not because I knew that Margarita's gloves were loaded.

01:31:12.000 I didn't.

01:31:12.000 I just knew that.

01:31:13.000 We didn't know until Miguel was getting beat.

01:31:15.000 We didn't know until the Shane Mosley fight.

01:31:17.000 That's exactly right.

01:31:18.000 Right.

01:31:18.000 Shane Mosley's.

01:31:20.000 And I remember walking away from Vegas with a bad feeling after the Coto fight.

01:31:24.000 How could that happen to Miguel, et cetera, et cetera?

01:31:26.000 And then it's, I don't know, several weeks later, maybe three months later, when we're in L.A. getting ready for the Mosley versus Margarito fight.

01:31:39.000 And I hear in my headset, there's a disturbance in Margarito's dressing room.

01:31:44.000 They're making him take his gloves off and da-da-da-da-da.

01:31:47.000 And at that moment, it all comes together.

01:31:49.000 Yeah, that was a hand-wrap thing.

01:31:51.000 I'm conflating these two stories in my mind with Louis Resto and Billy Collins.

01:31:57.000 Plaster Paris.

01:31:58.000 Yes.

01:31:59.000 So Louis Resto was with Panama Lewis.

01:32:04.000 Yes.

01:32:04.000 With Panama Lewis, who famously gave that drink to Aaron Pryor.

01:32:08.000 Yes.

01:32:09.000 Yes.

01:32:09.000 Get me the one that I fixed.

01:32:11.000 And then Aaron Pryor goes out and knocks out Alexis Arguello, which is alleged to have been cocaine.

01:32:16.000 A lot of people think it was cocaine because Aaron then went to famously have a cocaine problem.

01:32:21.000 Right.

01:32:22.000 But the Louis Resto.

01:32:24.000 I don't see how cocaine could help you in a fight.

01:32:26.000 I really.

01:32:27.000 It's a stimulant.

01:32:28.000 It's a stimulant.

01:32:29.000 Yeah, I guess you're right.

01:32:30.000 It's a stimulant.

01:32:30.000 Yeah, if you're exhausted and all of a sudden you get a bump and you fire it up and you go out there and fuck him up, he could help you.

01:32:36.000 Certainly if you're tired.

01:32:37.000 Yeah, 100% it would help.

01:32:40.000 I've never done cocaine, but I'm just guessing.

01:32:42.000 It ruins a lot of other things.

01:32:43.000 That's all.

01:32:44.000 Oh, yeah, it does.

01:32:45.000 But in that moment, I guess, you know, in that moment, especially if you're a person who imbibes and you've had a history of cocaine, and then, you know, what does it do?

01:32:55.000 It boosts up confidence and it's a stimulant.

01:32:57.000 I would imagine that Alexis Arguello fight.

01:33:00.000 Woo!

01:33:01.000 Phenomenal.

01:33:02.000 Oh, my goodness.

01:33:03.000 Phenomenal.

01:33:03.000 And he was, you know, again, another great person, another really, I didn't know Aaron all that well, but Alexis was lovable in every way.

01:33:12.000 Wasn't he murdered?

01:33:13.000 He was a politician in Nicaragua, right?

01:33:16.000 Was he murdered?

01:33:16.000 Yeah.

01:33:17.000 Yeah.

01:33:18.000 Nicaragua.

01:33:19.000 Yeah, man.

01:33:21.000 So I was conflating those.

01:33:24.000 So with Margarito, I think it was just the raps, where they had put plastered Paris in his wraps.

01:33:30.000 But Billy Collins Jr. and Louis Resto was a fight where Billy Collins was this up-and-coming fighter, and he fought Louis Resto, and Louis Resto was like breaking his face open with every punch.

01:33:42.000 And there are photos that you can find on the web of Collins that show that.

01:33:46.000 Yes.

01:33:46.000 And so Resto then, when the fight was over, Billy Collins' dad grabs Resto's gloves and realizes there's no padding in the gloves.

01:33:55.000 Right.

01:33:56.000 And then Billy Collins' career is over, and he winds up drinking himself to death.

01:34:00.000 He actually drove into a tree.

01:34:04.000 Yeah.

01:34:05.000 So we don't know whether that was suicide or not.

01:34:08.000 We don't know.

01:34:09.000 No.

01:34:09.000 You know, the guys, he couldn't see after that fight.

01:34:12.000 It's a great story.

01:34:12.000 The guys were fucked.

01:34:13.000 I hope everybody who is listening to this will go to the web and pick up some of these things because you are touching on a lot of the most meaningful and poignant stories.

01:34:23.000 Yeah.

01:34:24.000 Yeah.

01:34:24.000 There's the photo right there.

01:34:26.000 Billy, and there's his dad in the photo.

01:34:28.000 Crazy.

01:34:29.000 Just crazy.

01:34:30.000 I mean, his vision was fucked for the rest of his life, for as long as he lived after that.

01:34:35.000 Never fought again.

01:34:37.000 And everyone was so confused because they couldn't believe that this guy, Louis Rusto, was not known as being this big puncher, was just busting him up with every shot he landed.

01:34:46.000 It was confusing.

01:34:49.000 It's a dirty business, man.

01:34:50.000 And Panama Lewis was, he did some corner work with Mike Tyson as well.

01:34:55.000 Remember?

01:34:56.000 Like later in Mike's career when everything was kind of chaotic and he had all those wackadoos in his corner?

01:35:01.000 Panama Lewis was like on the sidelines there, but wasn't able to be officially a part of it because he was still banned.

01:35:08.000 Well, you know, Mike, by late in his career, had a very clear understanding of his vulnerabilities.

01:35:17.000 You know, Mike was a boxing scientist, and he knew better than anybody that styles make fights and that there were certain stylistic matchups which for him would be difficult.

01:35:29.000 He had spent a week training with Lennox Lewis when they were 14 years old because Lewis's Arnie Bem, his amateur trainer, had brought Lennox from the Toronto area to Canistota, I mean, not to Canistota, but to upstate New York to the Catskills.

01:35:48.000 And Mike and Lennox spent much of a week, maybe all of a week, watching old black and white bike films on the wall, sleeping in the same room, training and sometimes sparring every day.

01:36:02.000 Wow.

01:36:03.000 And so Mike had known Lennox for a long, long time by the time they met, June 8, 2002, in Memphis.

01:36:13.000 And I don't know that he would subscribe exactly to me saying he knew what was coming, but I think he had a pretty good idea.

01:36:24.000 And you'll recall that at the first news conference, he ran across the stage and bit Lennox on the leg.

01:36:31.000 Yeah, he went crazy.

01:36:32.000 Lennox claimed that he drew blood through the pants ledge.

01:36:38.000 And my interpretation of that at the time was he wants to get the fight canceled.

01:36:44.000 He wants to get this fight wiped away.

01:36:46.000 Well, you've got to think, this is also 12 years after the Buster Douglas loss.

01:36:51.000 Yes.

01:36:51.000 It's a long time in boxing.

01:36:53.000 Long time and a lot of trials and tribulations.

01:36:57.000 Prison.

01:36:58.000 Yep.

01:37:00.000 I mean, you might, maybe you get a little chance to train in prison, but not the way you train in a boxing gym.

01:37:06.000 No.

01:37:07.000 So he paid a lot of prices for a lot of experiences.

01:37:11.000 Here it is.

01:37:14.000 I didn't know this happened with this.

01:37:15.000 Lennox throws a right hand.

01:37:17.000 I'm not sure he landed that right hand.

01:37:19.000 Might have broken his hand if he'd landed it on Tyson's jaw.

01:37:22.000 Crazy.

01:37:23.000 That's the hard part about bare knuckles boxing, right?

01:37:26.000 Oh, yeah.

01:37:26.000 They break their hands all the time.

01:37:29.000 You know why gloves Emerged.

01:37:31.000 Gloves emerged because John L. Sullivan got tired of breaking his hands.

01:37:35.000 Really?

01:37:36.000 Yeah.

01:37:37.000 He was a big proponent of, behind the scenes, of going to gloves.

01:37:42.000 And then, of course, in the first gloved prize-fighting heavyweight championship fight, he loses to Corbett.

01:37:48.000 Ah.

01:37:49.000 Because Corbett was a boxing scientist.

01:37:52.000 And back then, they probably had terrible medical treatment for broken hands.

01:37:56.000 Like, what did they do?

01:37:58.000 I don't know.

01:37:59.000 I mean, they didn't have the kind of surgery that they had.

01:38:01.000 Certainly not the sophisticated surgeries that take place now.

01:38:04.000 Yeah.

01:38:04.000 If there were any surgeries at all.

01:38:06.000 Yeah, they probably had.

01:38:07.000 He got tired of breaking his hands.

01:38:09.000 Along comes this idea, this phenomenon of gloves.

01:38:12.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:38:13.000 Let's do that.

01:38:14.000 Wow.

01:38:14.000 And then he loses to Corbett.

01:38:16.000 Wow.

01:38:18.000 I was watching a piece yesterday about, it was a YouTube video on Sugar A. Robinson and his training and the type of training that Sugar Ray would do and how phenomenal his dedication was.

01:38:34.000 And if you think about a guy that, like, when he had his first loss, how many fights had he won?

01:38:40.000 120.

01:38:42.000 You know how crazy that is?

01:38:43.000 Yeah.

01:38:44.000 Stop and think.

01:38:45.000 I sort of have a sense of it.

01:38:46.000 Stop and think about how insane that is.

01:38:49.000 Did you ever drink in Jimmy Glenn's bar in New York?

01:38:52.000 No.

01:38:52.000 Jimmy's Corner?

01:38:54.000 Oh, that's too bad.

01:38:54.000 Jimmy Glenn was a really great, well-known corner man who worked with Robinson, worked with Joe Lewis, worked with a lot of really big-name fighters.

01:39:05.000 And he had a bar on 44th between 6th and 7th.

01:39:08.000 It's the, still to this day, I think his son is running it now.

01:39:12.000 I hope he still is.

01:39:14.000 The ultimate boxing bar.

01:39:16.000 The photographs on the wall.

01:39:17.000 The atmosphere.

01:39:18.000 Oh, there we are.

01:39:19.000 Oh, what a cool little horse.

01:39:21.000 Jimmy's corner.

01:39:21.000 Yeah.

01:39:22.000 44th between 6th and 7th.

01:39:24.000 Is it gone?

01:39:25.000 There's Jimmy down to the left.

01:39:27.000 Is it still there?

01:39:28.000 Is it gone?

01:39:28.000 The bar, I think, is still there.

01:39:30.000 Jimmy's gone.

01:39:32.000 What a wonderful, wonderful, loving man.

01:39:35.000 He was like an uncle to me because I spent so much time in the bar.

01:39:40.000 And just his stories were fantastic because of the people with whom he worked.

01:39:46.000 Wow.

01:39:47.000 That's awesome.

01:39:48.000 You got to go sometime.

01:39:50.000 I would love to.

01:39:50.000 I'd love to go sometime.

01:39:52.000 Sugar Ray Robinson was one of the first guys also that showed how effective being a great dancer.

01:39:58.000 My mother's favorite fighter.

01:40:00.000 Really?

01:40:00.000 And yeah, and I told you that the first fight she ever sat me down to watch was Sugar A. Robinson versus Bob Oliver.

01:40:05.000 That's right.

01:40:06.000 And the last thing she said before she left the room and left me in front of a little TV set on a TV dinner tray was, Sugar A. Robinson's my favorite fighter because he dances while he fights.

01:40:19.000 Wow.

01:40:20.000 And he did.

01:40:21.000 And he did.

01:40:21.000 He did.

01:40:22.000 He, you know, it was the thing about his training, you know, this video that I was watching was so interesting to watch someone who's really just ahead of the curve, like above everybody.

01:40:35.000 Like no one really understood how to move like that.

01:40:38.000 And then, of course, Cassius Clay, his favorite fighter, Sugar Ray Robinson.

01:40:42.000 100%.

01:40:43.000 So he's like a heavyweight version of Sugar Ray Robinson.

01:40:46.000 So what's the greatest asset for any fighter?

01:40:48.000 Is it his punching powers?

01:40:50.000 Is it his hand speed?

01:40:50.000 Is it his footwork?

01:40:52.000 Or is it his intelligence?

01:40:54.000 It's the mind.

01:40:55.000 It's the mind.

01:40:56.000 It's the willingness to accept what you need to accept and to see what you can do.

01:41:02.000 Right.

01:41:02.000 That's what makes for great fighters.

01:41:03.000 And also the ability to objectively analyze your skills and recognize where you need to advance and what you need to do differently.

01:41:10.000 Because you have a trainer to help you with that.

01:41:12.000 Yeah.

01:41:13.000 Yeah.

01:41:13.000 But you don't have coaches per se the way you do in organized team sports and stuff like that.

01:41:18.000 At the end of the day, you're the one.

01:41:20.000 You've got to figure this out.

01:41:22.000 And you can have an idea of what's effective, but until you see someone come along and do something totally different, that's where the innovators come in, where the real groundbreakers come in.

01:41:34.000 Like I bet before Sugar A. Robinson, nobody, like you had Willie Pep.

01:41:39.000 Well, you've mentioned what I think of as the modern supreme innovator earlier.

01:41:46.000 Yeah.

01:41:47.000 He recreated our approach to the sport.

01:41:51.000 Well, you see a lot of that now in MMA.

01:41:53.000 You see a lot of footwork and movement and switching stances.

01:41:58.000 It's like a fighter that can't switch stances in MMA.

01:42:00.000 It's kind of archaic because you— I think we'll reach that point in boxing, too.

01:42:06.000 I think eventually as time goes by.

01:42:09.000 Well, Hagler was an example of one of the first guys that'd be a switch hitter that people sort of dismissed.

01:42:14.000 So you just earlier we talked about Canelo versus Crawford.

01:42:18.000 Yes.

01:42:18.000 Do you think Terrence Crawford can beat Canelo Alvarez?

01:42:21.000 Yeah, I think he can win.

01:42:22.000 Okay.

01:42:22.000 I don't know if he's going to win, but I think he can win.

01:42:27.000 He's going to have to box a brilliant fight.

01:42:30.000 Okay, what kind of a fight?

01:42:32.000 I'm going to get to that.

01:42:34.000 I asked the great Larry Merchant, 94 years old, living on Ocean Boulevard in Santa Monica, looking out at the ocean, reflecting on all the amazing things he did.

01:42:45.000 And I asked Larry, I said, do you think Terrence Crawford has a chance to beat Canelo Alvarez?

01:42:52.000 And Larry said, Jim, did Ray Leonard get an official decision victory over Marvelous Marvin Hagler?

01:43:00.000 And I said, yes, he did.

01:43:01.000 He said, well, if Ray Leonard could beat Marvelous Marvin Hagler, then Terrence Crawford can beat Canelo Alvarez.

01:43:09.000 And I said, why do you say that?

01:43:12.000 He said, same equation.

01:43:14.000 Get in, get out.

01:43:15.000 Get in, get out.

01:43:17.000 Over and over and over.

01:43:18.000 He's got to figure the angles and the approaches that will allow him to step in, land to the body, or occasionally upstairs, and then get out before he's facing any damage.

01:43:31.000 That's what Ray did so effectively against Hagler.

01:43:34.000 And it frustrated Hagler.

01:43:36.000 And the more you frustrate the opponent, the better off you are.

01:43:39.000 Yeah.

01:43:40.000 Canelo has such unique skills.

01:43:42.000 And one of the weird things that he does that very few people since Rocky Marciano does is he punches your arms.

01:43:48.000 Yes.

01:43:49.000 He brutalizes your arms.

01:43:50.000 He's another brilliant guy.

01:43:52.000 He has the greatest punch resistance in the sport.

01:43:55.000 You know, we talked about it earlier.

01:43:56.000 One knockout in the whole career.

01:43:58.000 Knock down.

01:43:59.000 And it wasn't knockdown.

01:44:00.000 And it wasn't really a knockdown in my personal view.

01:44:07.000 He didn't touch the canvas.

01:44:08.000 He's never been on the canvas and we call it chin and I think that we kind of missed the point by calling it chin because I used to be Canelo's neighbor in Del Mar, California.

01:44:19.000 I used to run into Cheppo, his senior trainer at the grocery store.

01:44:23.000 I'd look into the cart and say, oh, he's eating tuna.

01:44:27.000 And he said, yes, and he's eating chicken, da-da-da.

01:44:31.000 And so I also used to go down the hill from my house off of Via della Balle in Del Mar and watch him train at the equestrian center, where he would go to the equestrian center in the morning and do two and a half hours of hunter jumper riding before going to his gym in the afternoon to do three and a half hours of boxing training.

01:44:57.000 Hunter jumper riding?

01:44:58.000 What is that?

01:44:59.000 Hunter jumper is where you go over jumps and you on the horse.

01:45:05.000 Yeah.

01:45:06.000 Why the fuck would you do that when you're training for a fight?

01:45:08.000 What if the horse was?

01:45:08.000 Because he was riding horses since he was a little kid.

01:45:12.000 He was skilled enough to do it.

01:45:14.000 You control the height of the jumps.

01:45:16.000 You say, set the jumps at 36 inches or 40 inches.

01:45:19.000 You know what the horse can do.

01:45:21.000 It's all about staying on the horse.

01:45:25.000 And I asked him, you know, how can you do that?

01:45:27.000 And he said, everything I do in boxing is upper body, and everything I do on the horse is lower body.

01:45:35.000 And on that basis, I am the one who theorizes that the reason you can't knock him down is not because of his chin.

01:45:44.000 It's because of his legs.

01:45:45.000 His base.

01:45:46.000 You can't get him off balance.

01:45:48.000 He's too strong from the waist down.

01:45:52.000 And, you know, if other fighters would pay attention to what Canelo does, they might go do a little horseback riding.

01:45:58.000 I wasn't even aware of that until you brought that up.

01:46:00.000 That's extra.

01:46:01.000 That's incredible.

01:46:03.000 There he is with his horses.

01:46:04.000 Wow.

01:46:06.000 That completely makes sense if you think about it.

01:46:09.000 Squeezing with the lower legs, the core strength.

01:46:12.000 100% correct.

01:46:14.000 The balance.

01:46:15.000 The balance.

01:46:16.000 Exactly.

01:46:16.000 The timing.

01:46:18.000 All of it.

01:46:18.000 Yeah.

01:46:20.000 I trained Hunter Jumper for a couple of years in the early 90s trying to please a wife who was a horse freak.

01:46:29.000 Okay.

01:46:30.000 And I had a really great trainer at the stables over next to Griffith Park in Los Angeles.

01:46:39.000 Fabulous trainer named Jonathan Seraci.

01:46:41.000 Hey, John, if you hear me.

01:46:45.000 And I trained for, I don't know, I want to say three quarters of a year riding Hunter Jumper.

01:46:53.000 And I got to the point where I was jumping 36, 38 inch jumps.

01:46:58.000 And I was riding quality horses.

01:47:01.000 And I was doing pretty well.

01:47:03.000 And one day after my training session, I was in the stall combing the horse down, brushing to do the things, the busy work that you're supposed to do to be a part of it.

01:47:15.000 And Jonathan came in and said, how do you feel about your riding?

01:47:18.000 I said, I think I'm doing pretty well, don't you?

01:47:22.000 He said, I think you're doing really well.

01:47:24.000 He said, but I think that this would probably be a great day for you to quit.

01:47:29.000 I said, quit?

01:47:31.000 What are you talking about?

01:47:32.000 You just said, I'm doing pretty well.

01:47:34.000 He said, well, you're doing pretty well because you love to do the fun stuff.

01:47:39.000 You love the jumping and you love the riding around the ring fast, et cetera, et cetera.

01:47:44.000 But you don't want to do the busy work.

01:47:46.000 You don't want to do what we call sitting trot and the other things that help you to build your awareness and your command of what you do.

01:47:59.000 And the result is that you're getting closer and closer to the stage at which something negative is going to happen.

01:48:05.000 And the first time something negative happens, you're not going to be able to respond to it.

01:48:08.000 So I think today would be a great day for you to quit.

01:48:13.000 Whoa.

01:48:14.000 Wild, right?

01:48:15.000 Did you listen to him?

01:48:16.000 I quit.

01:48:19.000 Potong went home and thought about it, and I thought he's right.

01:48:22.000 But wouldn't positive, constructive advice being, if you enjoy this, there's some other stuff that you need to do.

01:48:28.000 Well, I mean, he did say, look, I'm perfectly happy to keep training you if you will come and do the busy work that I need you to do to 20 to 30 minutes before you go out and jump.

01:48:41.000 But if you just want to come here, sit on the saddle and run and jump, you're asking for trouble, and I'm not going to be part of it.

01:48:47.000 Wow.

01:48:48.000 Because, of course, if you fall off, and I saw this one a couple times, if you fall off, the horse can stomp you.

01:48:55.000 You get a hoof on the chest or a hoof on the neck.

01:48:58.000 Oh.

01:48:59.000 And you're in the hospital and you're in big trouble.

01:49:02.000 If you're lucky.

01:49:03.000 I saw it happen to a woman in the ring, a really good rider.

01:49:07.000 So at the end of the day, you can't do that.

01:49:12.000 Yeah, there he is.

01:49:13.000 Look at Canelo.

01:49:15.000 Wow.

01:49:15.000 Now, that's a skill he has charried since his early childhood.

01:49:21.000 That's crazy.

01:49:23.000 You can't knock him down.

01:49:24.000 That makes so much sense.

01:49:27.000 Also, he's got a square head.

01:49:28.000 Yeah.

01:49:30.000 And it's not a small head.

01:49:33.000 But he's also got a brilliant mind.

01:49:36.000 Yeah, clearly.

01:49:37.000 Give credit where credit is due.

01:49:38.000 No doubt.

01:49:39.000 No doubt.

01:49:40.000 I mean, just the evolution in the three fights with Triple G. Triple G was one of my all-time favors.

01:49:46.000 If you can fight Triple G and never be badly hurt.

01:49:49.000 Right.

01:49:50.000 That's a great point.

01:49:51.000 That's astonishing.

01:49:52.000 Triple G never badly hurt him.

01:49:55.000 And he was destroying everybody else you put in his pack.

01:49:58.000 Everybody.

01:49:58.000 Yeah, everybody.

01:49:59.000 One of the heaviest punchers I ever saw.

01:50:02.000 And he would do weird stuff, like throw a left hook over the top and hit the top of your head.

01:50:07.000 He would throw a left hook like that, like a looping overhand slap.

01:50:11.000 By the way, it's very much like the shot that Douglas landed against Tyson in the 10th round, over the top with the left hand.

01:50:18.000 But the way Triple G would do it, it would be going down on you.

01:50:21.000 Right.

01:50:21.000 Down on you.

01:50:22.000 It's weird.

01:50:23.000 It was a weird punch.

01:50:24.000 And he would hit you in the forehead, which is like, or the tempo, which is where a lot of people lose their equilibrium.

01:50:30.000 Well, whatever they do in Kazakhstan, it might be different from what they do in the United States.

01:50:34.000 No, he was special.

01:50:35.000 He was very special.

01:50:37.000 Another guy, we got to talk about Julio Cesar Chavez, who's also one of my all-time favorites.

01:50:42.000 Julio Cesar Chavez, in his prime, he would just systematically break people down.

01:50:48.000 And the volume, constant attack and volume.

01:50:54.000 His volume was the real key because his power shots did not look like hellacious power shots.

01:51:02.000 His left hook didn't look all that devastating.

01:51:04.000 It wasn't a one-punch guy.

01:51:05.000 But it would hurt you.

01:51:07.000 Over time, he would break you down.

01:51:08.000 That's a good thing.

01:51:09.000 That's the Taylor fight.

01:51:10.000 And then we go to the Taylor fight.

01:51:11.000 What is it, two seconds before the final bell that the fight gets stopped?

01:51:16.000 Yes.

01:51:17.000 Larry Hazard stops it, and everybody wants to.

01:51:19.000 Not Larry Hazard.

01:51:19.000 It wasn't?

01:51:20.000 No, it was Richard Steele.

01:51:22.000 That's right, Richard Steele.

01:51:23.000 That's right.

01:51:24.000 Okay, so you corrected me on one earlier, and now I got you.

01:51:27.000 That's right.

01:51:27.000 That was Richard Steele.

01:51:29.000 And he took a tremendous amount of grief for that.

01:51:32.000 And I think he deserved the grief.

01:51:33.000 I thought it was a very bad stoppage.

01:51:35.000 You had an unbeaten American Olympic star who's on the verge of his career-defining victory.

01:51:43.000 There's no question at this moment that he has won the fight.

01:51:47.000 When he stands up and Steele is counting, watch how he gets distracted when Lou Duva steps up on the ring apron and when he looks away from Steele, Steele uses that as his pretext to stop the fight with two seconds left.

01:52:02.000 All right?

01:52:03.000 Giving Chavez a victory that he did not deserve.

01:52:06.000 Right.

01:52:07.000 If Duva had not stepped up on the apron and distracted Meldrick in such a way that Meldrick looked away from Steele, then I think that Steele would have caught a lot more heat and wouldn't have had any valid pretext for stopping the fight.

01:52:25.000 What if that had been in the eighth round?

01:52:29.000 Would you be okay with it?

01:52:31.000 Fight goes on.

01:52:32.000 No, I mean, well, if that had been the eighth round, no, I still wouldn't be okay.

01:52:37.000 So it's the first knockdown.

01:52:39.000 It's not as if we knocked him down three or four times.

01:52:42.000 Right.

01:52:42.000 Meltrick could won the fight.

01:52:44.000 Yeah, no, it's all it's interesting, right?

01:52:46.000 The subjective calls of stoppages by referees.

01:52:49.000 Yeah.

01:52:49.000 Things get very good stoppage, bad stoppage, et cetera, et cetera.

01:52:54.000 It's one of the toughest things.

01:52:55.000 And I disciplined myself to be very, very careful about ever criticizing a referee in the moment.

01:53:03.000 I'm not sure that I criticized Richard that night.

01:53:06.000 But I'll tell you one thing.

01:53:07.000 This is, in some ways, part of the proof of the pudding.

01:53:11.000 Las Vegas boxing fans and Las Vegas boxing crowds are knowledgeable, right?

01:53:16.000 They've seen more of the sport than other people.

01:53:18.000 They know what they're watching.

01:53:19.000 Richard was never again introduced in Las Vegas before a fight without the crowd booing.

01:53:26.000 Wow.

01:53:27.000 He was subjected to boos every time he was introduced.

01:53:32.000 Wow.

01:53:32.000 Which shows you that a majority of the fans in that particular boxing capital agree with me that it was a bad stoppage.

01:53:40.000 Imagine what that did to his psyche.

01:53:42.000 Like, every time you go out there, you have the whole crowd.

01:53:45.000 I think he wound up committing suicide.

01:53:48.000 Steele?

01:53:49.000 Yes.

01:53:50.000 Those booze might have had something to do with that.

01:53:52.000 That's what I was going to say.

01:53:52.000 Did Richard Steele commit suicide?

01:53:55.000 I think he did.

01:53:56.000 That's a great fact to check because I don't know.

01:53:58.000 I think he did.

01:54:00.000 And you got to imagine the kind of depression that would come just knowing that you altered the course of boxing history.

01:54:09.000 With that one momentary decision.

01:54:12.000 Yes.

01:54:13.000 Yes.

01:54:14.000 Yeah.

01:54:15.000 So Chavez.

01:54:17.000 Chavez is avenged in certain ways.

01:54:20.000 Del Oya beat him twice.

01:54:22.000 Yes.

01:54:23.000 There's one where he didn't, where he won, but he shouldn't have won, Purnell Whitaker.

01:54:28.000 Yeah.

01:54:29.000 That's right.

01:54:29.000 Who's another genius?

01:54:31.000 Yes.

01:54:32.000 One of the greatest defensive boxers of all time.

01:54:35.000 Certainly in the top.

01:54:36.000 Genius.

01:54:37.000 Certainly in the top five.

01:54:38.000 Yes.

01:54:38.000 Genius.

01:54:39.000 And I remember that decision being called, and I was like, what the fuck is this?

01:54:44.000 That one was nuts.

01:54:46.000 Oscar was Oscar, you know, and he had a glamour image that was difficult to deal with at that time, you know?

01:54:54.000 So that kind of thing was part of the reason that my dear friend Fernando Vargas was in some ways jealous of Oscar.

01:55:04.000 What other fighter would get a decision over Purnell Whitaker in that circumstance?

01:55:08.000 But wasn't it Chavez?

01:55:09.000 Didn't Chavez have a decision win over Prinnell Whitaker as well?

01:55:13.000 Sure.

01:55:14.000 That's the one that I'm talking about.

01:55:15.000 That's the one you're talking about.

01:55:17.000 I thought you were talking about Dela Oye everyone.

01:55:18.000 So is that one similar as well?

01:55:20.000 No, I don't really recall that one.

01:55:22.000 Oscar gets a decision win over Whitaker on a night when Larry and a lot of other experts thought that Whitaker deserved the decision.

01:55:29.000 Well, Whitaker was like underappreciated because it was so defensively brilliant.

01:55:33.000 Well, sure.

01:55:34.000 I mean, he named a lot of guys out there.

01:55:36.000 The great defenders never get as much credit as the Hopkins.

01:55:41.000 Hopkins had to become a media star late in his career to really get credit for what he had done.

01:55:47.000 When you look back at your career and all the fights that you called and think about the beginnings and think about when they were trying to just get you out of the business and by giving you boxing, it's almost like it's very much a storybook tale.

01:56:06.000 Oh, yeah.

01:56:06.000 It really is.

01:56:08.000 But part of the reason for using It Happened as the title of the book is that there are so many circumstances in my career which are like that, counterintuitive, somebody wanted to do something with me that turns in the other direction, et cetera, et cetera.

01:56:25.000 That was not the first time that that kind of thing had happened to me.

01:56:32.000 My whole career begins when I win a talent hunt in 1974 to become one of the first two people ever to stand on the sideline of a college football game with a camera and a microphone.

01:56:44.000 What is a talent hunt?

01:56:45.000 How does that work?

01:56:46.000 So first of all, this emerges from the Munich massacre.

01:56:51.000 This emerges from the 9, 10, 11 days of captivity of the American athletes, excuse me, the Israeli athletes By black September terrorists in Munich.

01:57:03.000 And during that period of time, ABC is of course the broadcast organizer for the United States.

01:57:12.000 And during that time, two reporters, Howard Kosell and Peter Jennings, are pushing the control room.

01:57:19.000 How can we get more information?

01:57:22.000 How can we get sound out of the dorm room?

01:57:25.000 How can we get pictures from some adjoining building through the windows, etc., etc.?

01:57:31.000 And in trying to service the needs of those two reporters, Jennings and Kosell, ABC Sports learned things about radio frequency cameras and microphones, wireless cameras and microphones, that they had not known before.

01:57:49.000 So they came back to New York and they convened a meeting.

01:57:52.000 This is after the 72 Olympics.

01:57:54.000 They convene a meeting among the sports division, the news division, and the engineering division to figure out, okay, now that we know these things, now that we've learned what we learned in Munich, what can we do with it?

01:58:06.000 And one of the first ideas that gets adopted is we can put a reporter on the sideline of a football game.

01:58:13.000 So in 1974, Rune Arledge's chief administrative assistant, a guy named Dick Ebersoll, who later became a constant and meaningful factor in my career, Dick Ebersoll takes two lieutenants out to conduct a search at 16 different college campuses, and they talk to a total of 432 college-age or extremely close to college-age candidates for this job.

01:58:42.000 I am at first harvested out because I'm number 34 out of 36 on a 97-degree day in Birmingham, Alabama.

01:58:55.000 I have driven overnight from Chapel Hill to get there.

01:58:59.000 I'm wearing my best discount plaid suit.

01:59:03.000 I look ridiculous in a pair of shoes I bought with two and a half inch heels, so they'll make me look taller.

01:59:11.000 And I go into the room and have the screening interview.

01:59:14.000 And the screening interview is 12 minutes.

01:59:17.000 And before, and when we all have to draw numbers out of a fishbowl to determine in what order the interviews are going to take place, and I'm number 34 out of 36.

01:59:26.000 So I know I'm going to have to sit around in the Parliament House Hotel lobby for hours in Birmingham waiting to go in.

01:59:35.000 And by the time I go in, I'm grinding my teeth.

01:59:38.000 And the first thing one of the other guys in the room, Terry Jastro, says to me is, well, what do you think of our idea here?

01:59:47.000 What do you think of what we're trying to do?

01:59:51.000 And I couldn't resist.

01:59:52.000 I said, I think it's the biggest crock of crap I ever heard in my life.

01:59:55.000 And he said, what do you mean?

01:59:57.000 I said, well, you tell us that you're going around the country to interview 432 people for eight to 10 minutes each.

02:00:05.000 And on that basis, you're going to choose what you describe as the face and voice of the American college student.

02:00:13.000 He said, yeah?

02:00:14.000 I said, I rest my case.

02:00:15.000 I think this is ridiculous load of crap.

02:00:18.000 And I'm embarrassed that I drove from Chapel Hill overnight to be a part of this.

02:00:25.000 Later, much later, I was shown the evaluation form on which Eversol had written, arrogant, abrasive, alienated, antagonistic.

02:00:38.000 When I was finally chosen as one of the two people, that became known in the college football production truck as the forays.

02:00:47.000 Every time I would bitch about something, every time I would get obstreperous about something and raise my voice a little bit, there it is, the forays, arrogant, abrasive, alienated, antagonistic.

02:00:58.000 But the bottom line was, through a long and highly unusual process, I was the person who was chosen.

02:01:07.000 Now, what was ridiculous about it?

02:01:11.000 The most ridiculous thing about it, which I've never really revealed until this year, the book, Media Appearances, this, the most prominent media appearance with your 19 million followers, was that Rune Elich was still the dictatorial and canonized president of ABC Sports.

02:01:34.000 And I, when I was under 11 years old, maybe 10 or 11, 12, living in Hendersonville, North Carolina, had asked my mother while watching Wide World of Sports one day, is this guy, Rune Arledge, is he related to the Arledges who live around the corner from us?

02:01:52.000 Yes, he's their son.

02:01:54.000 So I grew up around the corner from Arledge's parents.

02:01:58.000 I caddied for both his mother and father at the Hendersonville Golf and Country Club.

02:02:04.000 And when I was finally the person chosen, counterintuitively because I was 25 instead of 22, and because I had already done a lot of sports broadcasting, this person was supposed to be completely fresh, when I get chosen, I meet Rune in the restroom at 1336th Avenue in New York.

02:02:26.000 And hi, Rune, I'm Jim Lampley.

02:02:28.000 Oh, great to meet you, et cetera, et cetera.

02:02:30.000 And as he's going out of the restroom, I say, by the way, how's your dad?

02:02:34.000 And he turns around, quizzical expression, says, why would you ask a question like that?

02:02:39.000 I said, well, I guess nobody told you because probably nobody could have known, but I'm from Hendersonville originally, and I've caddied for both your mom and dad.

02:02:48.000 In fact, my mother's in the same bridge club with your mother.

02:02:51.000 The famous red face turned white, and he said, don't ever tell anybody that.

02:02:57.000 Never, ever reveal that to anyone.

02:03:00.000 So, of course, now it can be revealed.

02:03:02.000 Why would you want that revealed?

02:03:05.000 That they had chosen out of 432 candidates, the one who grew up around the street from his parents?

02:03:11.000 Oh, he didn't know.

02:03:12.000 Well, but yeah, he could say he didn't know, and somebody might kick back.

02:03:16.000 At any rate, his first instinct was to say, don't ever tell anybody that.

02:03:23.000 A long time has passed.

02:03:24.000 Rune has passed.

02:03:26.000 There are sideline reporters everywhere now.

02:03:29.000 So, you know, I can very easily reveal and let you know that they accidentally chose.

02:03:35.000 The other accident was they had already installed a guy from Stanford named Don Tollifson.

02:03:42.000 And they knew that Tollefson was going to be chosen.

02:03:45.000 He was in the first batch of 16 people they talked to.

02:03:47.000 His credentials were unbelievable.

02:03:50.000 And so they were dead set in their minds on choosing Don Tollefson all along.

02:03:54.000 And now they were two, three weeks away from the first game.

02:04:00.000 Four weeks away from the first game.

02:04:02.000 It was August 8, and the first game was September 7th.

02:04:05.000 And August 8, 1974, I'm at a rented beach house in Swan Corner, North Carolina with a friend of mine named Buck Goldstein and his wife.

02:04:16.000 My wife, Linda, and I are there.

02:04:18.000 And the phone on the wall rings.

02:04:21.000 And to this day, I don't know how Ebersole got that phone number because the house was rented in the name of Buck Goldstein.

02:04:28.000 So Buck picks up the phone.

02:04:30.000 Hello.

02:04:32.000 Yeah, he's right here.

02:04:33.000 Jim, it's Dick Ebersole.

02:04:36.000 Huh?

02:04:37.000 What is this?

02:04:37.000 Hello.

02:04:38.000 And Dick says, you know, I'm so glad I found you.

02:04:41.000 We are getting ready to announce the college-age reporter thing, and we think we've settled on one person, but Rune is a little concerned about putting on the air somebody who has never had any on-air experience at all.

02:04:57.000 And within that discussion, that brought us back to you.

02:05:01.000 Would you be willing to go to Birmingham, Alabama, and do a film, in those days, 16 millimeter film, do a film audition for us?

02:05:13.000 And I said, what do you want me to do in Birmingham?

02:05:16.000 He said, well, there's a quarterback there named George Myra.

02:05:20.000 He's now with the Birmingham Americans of, I think it was the World Football League.

02:05:26.000 He's already been busted out of the NFL, the AFL, Canada.

02:05:33.000 This is his last shot as a pro football quarterback.

02:05:37.000 And we think it's an interesting story, and we want you to go interview him.

02:05:42.000 So, of course, they didn't know that I had watched George Myra play all three years of his college career at the University of Miami.

02:05:51.000 He was a huge childhood hero of mine.

02:05:53.000 I had once hitched a ride in his very dull, beige Ford Balcon going to pick up basketball on the campus of the University of Miami.

02:06:04.000 I knew more about George Myra than probably some members of his family did.

02:06:08.000 I still had a number 10 green and orange George Myra jersey in my closet in Chapel Hill.

02:06:17.000 So they think they're putting me on the spot here to send me to interview George Myra.

02:06:24.000 And I'm going to have to do a quick research job with no web in those days to find out what I need to ask this guy.

02:06:30.000 And I know more about George Myra than people in his family.

02:06:33.000 So I go down to Birmingham.

02:06:35.000 I'm laughing about it.

02:06:36.000 I do the interview.

02:06:37.000 I go through all these things in his college career and stuff like that, his 49ers experience, and send the film off to New York.

02:06:46.000 And about a week before the first game, I get a call and he said, you're going to be on the sideline.

02:06:52.000 You're going to be, we're going to have two college football reporters.

02:06:55.000 You're going to be on one sideline.

02:06:56.000 Don Tollefson will be on the other.

02:06:59.000 Rune feels a lot better about this because he can see that you have on-camera performance skills and understand what you're doing.

02:07:07.000 Wow.

02:07:08.000 What are the odds that they're playing?

02:07:10.000 And that means that the odds are astronomical.

02:07:13.000 The odds are beyond all belief.

02:07:15.000 They could choose any story in the world they wanted me to do as an audition.

02:07:19.000 They choose my childhood hero.

02:07:21.000 It kind of almost makes you feel like it's meant to be.

02:07:23.000 Correct.

02:07:25.000 There's no other way to describe it other than this was supposed to happen.

02:07:31.000 Yeah.

02:07:31.000 Well, I think you're the best ever.

02:07:33.000 So if that's how it had to play out, that's how it had to play out.

02:07:38.000 And that's how you played the steel thing?

02:07:40.000 Did he commit suicide?

02:07:41.000 I was going to bring that up later.

02:07:43.000 Oh, Jesus.

02:07:44.000 I'm sorry, Richard.

02:07:44.000 Somebody else committed suicide.

02:07:46.000 Well, I mean, did Larry Hazard commit suicide?

02:07:48.000 Richard's dead.

02:07:49.000 Larry Hazard's still around, I'm pretty sure.

02:07:51.000 Yeah, Larry Hazard is an athletic commissioner right now.

02:07:53.000 New York State.

02:07:54.000 Mitch Halpern.

02:07:55.000 Mitch Halpern.

02:07:55.000 Or New Jersey.

02:07:56.000 Excuse me.

02:07:56.000 New Jersey, not New York.

02:07:57.000 Oh, Mitch Halpern committed suicide.

02:07:59.000 Mitch Halpern committed suicide.

02:08:03.000 Oh, that's right.

02:08:04.000 All right.

02:08:05.000 So what is Mitch Halpern's marker?

02:08:08.000 Oh, I, you know, I covered it.

02:08:11.000 There was a fight.

02:08:12.000 Yeah, I covered it.

02:08:13.000 It was one of mine.

02:08:14.000 I can't remember right off the top of my head, but yes.

02:08:17.000 There was a very controversial fight.

02:08:19.000 Right.

02:08:19.000 Yeah.

02:08:20.000 A similar type situation.

02:08:22.000 Similar type thing.

02:08:22.000 Something that stains your reputation going forward.

02:08:26.000 My apologies to Richard Steele.

02:08:28.000 I'm sorry.

02:08:29.000 Halperin is, I believe, H-A-L-P-R-I-N.

02:08:34.000 Or H-A-L-P-E-R-I-N.

02:08:36.000 E-R-N.

02:08:38.000 What was the big controversial fight?

02:08:40.000 RCO Green.

02:08:44.000 Can't remember right now.

02:08:45.000 I saw Rich Halperin referee a number of fights.

02:08:49.000 You're right.

02:08:50.000 He did kill himself.

02:08:51.000 Yeah, I'm connecting to it now.

02:08:54.000 And as soon as we find out exactly what the fight was, I'll remember what's the problem with the circumstances.

02:08:59.000 Again, I told you, my memory sucks sometimes.

02:09:02.000 Joe, Joe, I'm 76 years old.

02:09:06.000 My wife worries about whether I'm going to remember to put socks on in the morning.

02:09:10.000 Really?

02:09:11.000 Oh, Gabe Willis.

02:09:12.000 Gabe Willis and Jimmy Garcia.

02:09:14.000 Oh, yeah.

02:09:14.000 Oh, my God.

02:09:16.000 So one of the oldest dictums in the sport is that when one fighter dies, the other career dies too.

02:09:23.000 Gabe was absolutely never the same.

02:09:27.000 And he allowed that fight to go on way longer than it should have.

02:09:31.000 May 6, 1995.

02:09:33.000 Never forget it.

02:09:34.000 Hot day outside and back of Caesar's Palace.

02:09:37.000 My wife was sitting with Jack Nicholson.

02:09:39.000 Can't resist the name drop.

02:09:42.000 You know, there were a lot of things going on.

02:09:44.000 But Gabe was never, ever the same after that.

02:09:50.000 And he, you know, Gabe went to Colombia or Venezuela, I forget exactly where, for the funeral.

02:10:01.000 Oh, God, look at this.

02:10:03.000 And also Richard Greene committed suicide after the Mancini-Kim fight.

02:10:09.000 Similar situation.

02:10:10.000 Yeah.

02:10:11.000 Similar situation with Duck Koo Kim when he dies famously on national television.

02:10:15.000 Ray Boom Boom Mancini.

02:10:17.000 And then that referee wants to committing suicide as well.

02:10:21.000 You know, it's a haunting thing because it's so intimate.

02:10:26.000 You're in the ring.

02:10:28.000 You're four or five feet away from these guys.

02:10:30.000 You're watching somebody land shot after shot after shot.

02:10:33.000 You're trying to gauge in your mind what is fair to the guy who's taking the beating.

02:10:38.000 Right.

02:10:39.000 Because he could always land one big comeback counterpunch and win the fight.

02:10:43.000 And there's been so many instances over time of guys recovering and coming back to win the fight.

02:10:49.000 Many.

02:10:49.000 Absolutely.

02:10:50.000 So many fights that could have been stopped, and if they were, who knows what we've gotten within the fight?

02:10:55.000 Over and over and over.

02:10:56.000 So, you know, I was always disciplined and restrained about criticizing reperes live because what they do is an extremely important and critical job.

02:11:12.000 And sometimes they're the only safety barrier between life and death.

02:11:18.000 I was just thinking of the Diego Corrales fight.

02:11:21.000 Diego Corrales, with that crazy fight where he's knocked down multiple times and comes back to win by knockout.

02:11:27.000 Arguably the greatest fight of all time.

02:11:30.000 Who was it against?

02:11:31.000 Corrales versus.

02:11:35.000 Name is right on the tip of my tongue.

02:11:36.000 Corrales.

02:11:37.000 Jose Luis Castillo.

02:11:39.000 Is that not it?

02:11:40.000 That might have been it.

02:11:42.000 Castillo.

02:11:42.000 It was it.

02:11:43.000 Corrales Castillo.

02:11:45.000 That was it.

02:11:45.000 Jose Luis Castillo.

02:11:47.000 Arguably the greatest fight of all time.

02:11:49.000 It was a Showtime fight, by the way.

02:11:50.000 I was watching it on TV.

02:11:53.000 Easily could have been stopped.

02:11:54.000 Huh?

02:11:54.000 Easily could have been stopped.

02:11:56.000 100%.

02:11:56.000 And Corrales comes back and wins.

02:11:58.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:11:59.000 And I believe he died in a motorcycle accident.

02:12:01.000 Corrales died in a motorcycle accident.

02:12:03.000 Yes, he did.

02:12:04.000 Yeah.

02:12:07.000 After a lot of salacious revelations regarding his troubles with women.

02:12:15.000 But he was a sweet guy.

02:12:17.000 You could not know Chico without loving him.

02:12:20.000 Okay?

02:12:21.000 And that's true of many very violent fighters.

02:12:24.000 You couldn't know Chico without loving him.

02:12:26.000 You couldn't know Mike in the early days without loving him.

02:12:29.000 So the sport is filled with ironies.

02:12:33.000 I'm sure MMA is exactly the same thing.

02:12:36.000 It is.

02:12:36.000 It really is.

02:12:38.000 Listen, I'm glad we had a chance to talk.

02:12:39.000 I really appreciate it.

02:12:40.000 It was really fun.

02:12:41.000 Two hours just flew by.

02:12:44.000 Great.

02:12:45.000 Yeah.

02:12:46.000 I think I've had a fantastic time with you.

02:12:49.000 And I really enjoyed every moment.

02:12:52.000 And yes, thank you.

02:12:53.000 I'm glad we had a chance to talk.

02:12:54.000 And your book is available.

02:12:57.000 It happened.

02:12:57.000 Did you do the voiceover?

02:12:59.000 Please tell me you did.

02:13:00.000 I did.

02:13:00.000 Thank you.

02:13:01.000 I did record the audio book.

02:13:03.000 Especially when people who've heard the audiobook recommend it.

02:13:06.000 You have to do it.

02:13:08.000 With you, it has to be.

02:13:10.000 Can you imagine if somebody else, if they forced somebody else to record it?

02:13:13.000 Do you know the boxing writer Tom Hauser?

02:13:15.000 Yes.

02:13:16.000 So Hauser is one of my dearest friends and a great man.

02:13:21.000 Ali's primary biographer.

02:13:23.000 Hauser has written a book about his mother.

02:13:26.000 And he knows about my relationship with my mother.

02:13:29.000 And by the way, I read that you were raised by a single mother.

02:13:33.000 Is that correct?

02:13:34.000 Well, I have a stepfather.

02:13:35.000 Stepfather.

02:13:36.000 Yeah, okay.

02:13:37.000 I was raised by a double widow who never married again.

02:13:43.000 Hauser has deep and great affection for his mother, so he wrote a book about his mother.

02:13:49.000 And I'm thrilled to tell you that he called me and said, would you record the audio version of my book?

02:13:56.000 So now I am going to record, when I get back to Chapel Hill, Hauser's book about his mother.

02:14:04.000 That's awesome.

02:14:05.000 If you like hearing my book, then you'll probably enjoy reading or hearing my book about Hauser's mother, too.

02:14:11.000 Well, I'm going to listen to your book because that's how I absorb most of my book.

02:14:14.000 Well, I've given away a lot of it too.

02:14:16.000 No, I don't give a fuck.

02:14:17.000 I'm listening to the whole damn thing.

02:14:19.000 And I really hope that Netflix chooses you for the Canelo fight, the Canelo Crawford fight.

02:14:24.000 That would be fantastic.

02:14:25.000 Like I said, it made me so happy to hear you on the Madison Square, the Times Square card.

02:14:30.000 Too bad the fights weren't.

02:14:32.000 Yeah, that was true.

02:14:34.000 But what do you think that is about?

02:14:36.000 You know, because there's a lot of people that have said that Turkey is spending so much money, that he's spoiling these guys and they're afraid to lose and that they're fighting safe.

02:14:46.000 Far be it from me to say anything about Turkey, okay?

02:14:49.000 Yes.

02:14:50.000 Anything negative.

02:14:51.000 He put me back at ringside.

02:14:53.000 So I'm very happy with that.

02:14:55.000 On a personal parochial level, I am a huge Turkey fan.

02:14:59.000 I think that more attention has to be paid to what real matchmaking is.

02:15:05.000 If you put two counterpunchers in front of each other, that's not going to make a fire.

02:15:11.000 Two attackers, guaranteed fire.

02:15:14.000 An attacker versus a counterpuncher, that can also be really good.

02:15:18.000 Some of the greatest fights ever have been attacker against counterpuncher.

02:15:22.000 Do you think it's a matchmaking issue?

02:15:24.000 I believe it was.

02:15:25.000 That night, you had too many instances where two counterpunchers were standing in front of each other and waiting for the other guy to move.

02:15:32.000 I also think that Rolly Romero very intelligently beefed up, put on strength, and went into the fight with Garcia with a defensive frame of mind.

02:15:45.000 I'm going to take the air out of this balloon.

02:15:48.000 I'm going to slow the punch rate down.

02:15:50.000 I'm going to land selectively when I want to.

02:15:54.000 And I'm not going to allow him to ever land a left hook.

02:15:58.000 He did a good job of that.

02:15:59.000 He also landed that left hook of his own.

02:16:01.000 Exactly.

02:16:02.000 Rocked him and dropped him.

02:16:03.000 And I think that changed the entire fight.

02:16:05.000 Absolutely.

02:16:05.000 Mentally changed the fight.

02:16:07.000 You know, Garcia's in there trying to land his left hook, and all of a sudden he gets dropped by one.

02:16:12.000 That's got to affect your mentality.

02:16:15.000 What did you think about Devin Haney's performance?

02:16:17.000 Because I felt like that was an example of a guy coming off of the Ryan Garcia fight where he got dropped multiple times.

02:16:24.000 He needed to put on a show and he didn't.

02:16:26.000 He just looked different.

02:16:27.000 Yeah.

02:16:28.000 If you go back to him versus Loma Channel.

02:16:29.000 Of course, there's a lot of months in between.

02:16:32.000 Right.

02:16:32.000 So It's not as if he's coming back two months later and you can draw a straight line from the mentality of his Garcia fight to what he's doing in the ring that night.

02:16:44.000 That doesn't happen to be the case.

02:16:46.000 But it was definitely a disappointing performance.

02:16:49.000 Well, you definitely can draw a line between a guy getting rocked and dropped on multiple occasions from a person that he was supposed to beat easily.

02:16:58.000 Right.

02:16:58.000 If you look at his boxing skill, you look at what he had done to Kombosis.

02:17:02.000 Yes.

02:17:03.000 I mean, he just boxed his face off.

02:17:05.000 He looked fantastic in that fight.

02:17:06.000 But you get the benefit of being able to say to yourself, if you want to, okay, he tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug.

02:17:16.000 That's the reason he knocked me down three times.

02:17:18.000 You know, if you can convince yourself of that.

02:17:21.000 The problem is once you start saying that, people start saying, fuck you, and then the booze get louder.

02:17:27.000 I'm talking about saying it to yourself.

02:17:29.000 You can't.

02:17:30.000 I'm not talking about saying it, but here's the thing.

02:17:32.000 You are 100% correct about this.

02:17:34.000 No one says anything to themselves anymore.

02:17:37.000 If you say something publicly, the whole world responds now.

02:17:41.000 It's not like a guy living in 1976.

02:17:44.000 This is the different world we're living in.

02:17:46.000 Tell me about it.

02:17:46.000 I'm sitting here on the Joe Rogan experience with the possibility that 19 million people are talking, are listening to me.

02:17:53.000 I'm sure I've made a mistake or two.

02:17:55.000 Well, we both did.

02:17:56.000 It's part of the fun.

02:17:57.000 Just don't read the comments.

02:17:59.000 That's the key.

02:18:00.000 Jim Lampley, I appreciate you very much, and I'm a giant fan, and I'm really glad you're back in boxing.

02:18:05.000 It means a lot to me.

02:18:06.000 And your book, It Happened, A Uniquely Lucky Life in Sports Television, is available now.

02:18:12.000 Thank you, sir.

02:18:12.000 I really love it.

02:18:13.000 Forward by Taylor Sheridan.

02:18:14.000 Oh, I love that guy.

02:18:15.000 I have to take care of my friend.

02:18:17.000 Has he been on the show?

02:18:18.000 Yes, yes.

02:18:18.000 I love him.

02:18:19.000 Okay, Death.

02:18:19.000 He's a good friend of mine.

02:18:21.000 Friend of mine, too.

02:18:22.000 I love him.

02:18:22.000 All right.

02:18:23.000 So we have a mutual friend.

02:18:24.000 Yes, sir.

02:18:25.000 All right.

02:18:25.000 This was a lot of fun.

02:18:26.000 Thank you very much.

02:18:27.000 Thank you very much.

02:18:27.000 My pleasure.

02:18:28.000 Thank you.

02:18:28.000 I appreciate it.

02:18:29.000 Thank you.

02:18:30.000 All right.

02:18:30.000 Bye bye, everybody.

02:18:31.000 Nice talk.

The Joe Rogan Experience - July 08, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2346 - Jim Lampley

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