In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the legendary former HBO Boxing analyst and former WBC welterweight champion Jim Eubank Jr. joins the show to discuss his life and career as a boxing trainer and commentator.
00:01:43.000And he did it at both the amateur and pro level, too.
00:01:47.000And 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.
00:02:56.000And when they stepped away from boxing, I was really heartbroken.
00:03:02.000If 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.
00:03:20.000Then you get into a more subdivided and widely disparate marketplace.
00:03:27.000And now the star promoters have a great deal more influence than you would have thought before.
00:03:33.000And now the star promoters start getting involved in influencing who's on the air.
00:04:27.000It just the good thing about boxing was that HBO was completely independent from these promoters.
00:04:34.000And 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?
00:07:24.000The 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.
00:08:49.000And his opposition to the Vietnam War made him a hero to many Americans.
00:08:55.000Well, I always say he was my childhood hero, and he was my childhood hero as Cassius Clay.
00:09:05.000The very first live prize fight I ever attended was Cassius Clay versus Sonny Liston, February 25, 1964, in Miami Beach.
00:09:13.000Oh, you were there for the first fight.
00:09:15.000I 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.
00:09:30.000And 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.
00:09:48.000It was the first live prize fight I had ever attended.
00:09:51.000It was all about my hero worship for Cassius Clay.
00:09:55.000Two 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.
00:11:23.000And 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.
00:11:34.000Because her thought was that it was a pointless war.
00:12:26.000They robbed us, too, because he came back and he's a different fighter then.
00:12:29.000He 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.
00:12:38.000But he found weight to rise to the top.
00:12:45.000But as a fan of boxing, it drives me crazy.
00:12:47.000Could 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.
00:13:12.000The 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.
00:13:29.000All these things combine to create the unique mystique of Muhammad Ali.
00:14:20.000And 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.
00:14:33.000For 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.
00:14:50.000I think in Illinois or Ohio, someplace like that.
00:14:54.000But yeah, Roy loved all other fighters and he did what he could to help with McClellan.
00:15:03.000I 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.
00:16:42.000I mean, his speed was so preposterous.
00:16:45.000When he would forego the jab to lead with left hooks, which was just so crazy.
00:16:50.000When 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.
00:18:20.000You know, he was one of those guys that's a unique once-in-a-lifetime talent.
00:18:25.000Unfortunately, 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.
00:19:23.000Well, 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.
00:20:42.000So he was the expert commentator in the weeks leading to his fight with Moore.
00:20:49.000He and I together had called Moore against Holyfield when Moore won the championship.
00:20:56.000And 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.
00:21:09.000Three, four times I asked him, George, how are you going to beat Moore?
00:23:45.000That'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.
00:23:59.000But, 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.
00:24:08.000He 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.
00:24:25.000So 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.
00:24:36.000And when George told me this story, I said, George, you, Bob Dylan?
00:24:43.000You know, how am I supposed to process all this?
00:25:00.000So 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.
00:25:15.000And George wanted, in his own way, for people to see, hey, I'm not that different than that.
00:25:22.000And I mean, one thing he said to me was, you can't win the heavyweight championship in the world without being smart.
00:26:32.000Cooney was a southpaw with punching power.
00:26:34.000It'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.
00:26:44.000Yeah, 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.
00:26:50.000And then all of a sudden everything's reversed and now you're thinking.
00:26:53.000And if you don't have a lot of southpaws that you train with on a regular basis, things aren't automatic anymore.
00:26:58.000And one of the things that George used to talk to me about all the time was angles.
00:27:02.000That, you know, you're standing in front of another man, you're confronting him, you're trying to deliver and stop delivery.
00:29:51.000When you don't appreciate the potential that your opponent has to do damage.
00:29:56.000Well, I used to say to people all the time, these are fine margins of competition.
00:30:01.000You 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?
00:30:10.000No, it means one fighter made a mistake.
00:30:13.00090% of the time, it means one fighter made a mistake.
00:30:16.000And if he thinks about it and trains against it, he won't make that mistake again.
00:30:20.000So like the perfect example is Juan Manuel Marquez versus Pacquio.
00:30:57.000This 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.
00:32:32.000And so much so, you know, in any matchup between the great counterpuncher and the great attacker, you know that the counterpuncher has the advantage.
00:32:40.000He's got more options, he's got more ways of winning.
00:32:43.000The attacker has to break through the wall, so to speak.
00:32:46.000So, 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.
00:32:56.000When am I going to see Mayweather Pacquiao?
00:32:58.000And I would say, well, we don't know, but what exactly is it you think you're going to see?
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00:36:30.000Unfortunately for us, I remember there was like a class action lawsuit.
00:36:33.000It was a lot of people were upset that Pacquiao fought injured.
00:36:56.000I apologize for going off script here a little bit.
00:36:59.000I 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.
00:37:09.000And on the night before the induction ceremony, there's a big banquet in a banquet hall at the Turningstone Casino.
00:37:19.000And 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.
00:37:39.000Roy did a speech, et cetera, et cetera.
00:37:42.000Eventually, Manny got up and made a speech.
00:37:46.000Now, 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.
00:38:51.000Infestation level pool player, et cetera, all of that.
00:38:55.000And then fast forward 24 years, and he's being inducted at the Hall of Fame.
00:39:01.000And without warning, he's asked to speak that night.
00:39:04.000And 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.
00:39:21.000And 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.
00:39:31.000And I know that politics had something to do with this.
00:39:36.000And he said, yes, but a lot of my political speeches were in Tagalog.
00:39:42.000And I said, well, some of them were in English.
00:39:47.000And 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.
00:40:28.000And 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.
00:40:40.000And the principal is like, why would you do this for this kid?
00:40:44.000Why would you give him a passing grade when he hasn't earned it?
00:40:48.000And the teacher said, you have to understand, he's going to be the most famous man in the world.
00:40:55.000And we cannot be the high school that denied a diploma to the most famous man in the world.
00:41:49.000What 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.
00:42:03.000Power punching is the product of real technical knowledge.
00:42:08.000Power 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.
00:42:22.000And George was a disciplined and knowledgeable scientist about stuff like that.
00:42:29.000And he explained it all to me one time.
00:42:32.000And of course, if you watch the Moore knockout, he lands the first one too, right on the button.
00:42:38.000And then, having Moore where he wants him, he puts a little more mustard on the second one, too.
00:43:36.000You 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?
00:43:47.000If you believe you're going to get the better of the exchange, go ahead, go forward.
00:43:52.000And that enhances your chance of knocking someone out.
00:43:55.000But there's physical gifts that you are just God-given, and some people have them.
00:44:01.000And these are the extraordinary outliers, the Deontay Wilders, the Julian Jacksons, the John Mugabe's.
00:45:00.000And 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.
00:45:13.000And he was quite aware of what he was doing.
00:45:17.000And he was quite aware also that it would get under Hagler's skin.
00:45:20.000So there was an element of genius in Ray, as we talked about already that went to more than just his spectacular physical gifts.
00:45:30.000Yeah, no, he gamed the system a little bit.
00:45:33.000He figured out how to flurry at the end of the rounds and make a big impression in the judge's eyes.
00:45:38.000That was a very close fight, but that fight always bothered me.
00:45:42.000And one of the things that bothered me is I felt like there were moments where Hagler could have turned it up and didn't.
00:45:51.000And 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?
00:47:23.000I mean, his conditioning and his drive and his will and his discipline, he was a monster.
00:47:29.000He would scare the shit out of everybody just from his work ethic.
00:47:32.000I 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.
00:47:41.000And he was running down the sand dunes screaming war with combat boots on in the winter.
00:48:42.000I 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.
00:50:29.000Nobody has ever put him on the canvas.
00:50:32.000And 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.
00:51:31.000It's just like, but with him, it's volume.
00:51:34.000It'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.
00:51:52.000But 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.
00:52:00.000well, he made brilliant adjustments in the second fight.
00:52:04.000Yeah, 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.
00:52:11.000It's another country with very good boxing training.
00:54:33.000I 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.
00:54:41.000I'm like, my God, he's like wasting away in the prime of his life.
00:54:45.000And I felt like we're going to miss out on the prime of his life.
00:54:49.000And then here he gets into the Felix Trinidad fight.
00:54:53.000And I was like, this guy's, this is crazy watching this guy like completely outclass Tito Trinidad.
00:55:03.000Of 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.
00:58:38.000You 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.
00:59:25.000And his first method for doing it was boxing.
00:59:28.000So, 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.
00:59:44.000That I had grown up all through my childhood and teenage years watching Gillette Friday Night Fights.
00:59:50.000And later, people would say to me, who's the voice in the back of your mind when you're calling fights?
01:00:10.000Yeah, so he thought he could get rid of me by assigning me to boxing.
01:00:14.000And 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.
01:00:33.000So the first fight I ever called on TV was Mike Tyson versus Jesse Ferguson in Glens Falls, New York.
01:00:42.000And this is the famous drive his nose bone into his brain fight.
01:00:46.000Alex went to do post-fight interview after Tyson had obliterated Jesse's nose with an uppercut.
01:00:56.000And Alex said, you know, Mike, tell me about the uppercut.
01:01:00.000And Mike said, Catamara taught me that the purpose of the uppercut is to drive the opponent's nosebone into his brain.
01:01:06.000I was trying to drive his nosebone into his brain.
01:01:09.000And I'm standing on the other side of the ring listening to this, headset on.
01:01:14.000And I thought to myself, oh my God, look at what I've stumbled into here.
01:01:18.000This 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.
01:01:27.000And of course, within the next few weeks, they all started spilling out.
01:02:01.000So Alex Wallow and I lived five blocks apart on Upper Fifth Avenue in New York.
01:02:09.000And 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.
01:02:18.000He would drive, play me his esoteric rock music.
01:02:27.000And 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.
01:02:46.000And I said, well, Alex, you're the expert.
01:02:48.000You know, I'm just a throw-in blow-by-blow guy who's trying to get my feet wet here.
01:02:52.000I'm the last person who's going to tell you what it is you should say.
01:02:56.000So 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.
01:03:05.000Nobody's going to print some big headline that says, Wallow was crazy or something like that.
01:04:59.000It 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.
01:05:08.000It helped to create what ultimately became the myth of Mike Tyson.
01:05:14.000The notion that he was going to knock everybody out in that way.
01:05:19.000And partially because of stuff like that, that Douglas is a 42-1 underdog in Tokyo.
01:05:25.000When 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.
01:05:34.000Mike went the distance with Tony Tucker.
01:05:36.000Mike went the distance with James Quick Tillis.
01:05:39.000There were scorers at Ringside in upstate New York who had Tillis as the winner in the fight.
01:05:44.000He went to the last 10 seconds with Jose Ribalta.
01:05:46.000He went the distance with Mitch Blood Green.
01:08:12.000That 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.
01:08:43.000And if you're doing it right, you'll be able to do it.
01:08:45.000But in a way with the commentators, it frames everything.
01:08:50.000The same exact event with crude commentators is not the same experience because you don't get that intelligent, articulate analysis.
01:08:58.000And 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.
01:09:13.000And 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.
01:09:28.000And 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.
01:10:26.000And 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.
01:10:37.000So 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.
01:10:54.000I remember Ray nearly fell off his chair when he saw that.
01:10:58.000This 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.
01:11:10.000There was so much that was taken for granted about Mike during that stage of his career.
01:11:16.000The 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.
01:12:52.000So we talked about the call of Foreman Moore and where that call came from.
01:12:58.000The other call that is on that same level in terms of, you know, people remembering and stuff like that is that call.
01:13:06.000And 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.
01:13:24.000And 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.
01:13:37.000And Douglas is getting more confident.
01:13:39.000And Douglas is landing his jab, et cetera, et cetera.
01:14:53.000If you've heard it, I apologize for repeating.
01:14:56.000But 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.
01:15:07.000And 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?
01:15:45.000And I hear in the back of my mind Jack's voice, don't overact.
01:15:51.000And that call became, Mike Tyson has been knocked out in about that tone of voice.
01:15:57.000I 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.
01:21:26.000Because how does Crawford compete with that size?
01:21:29.000And we have to recognize, okay, well, when Canelo fought Floyd, it was 152 pounds, right?
01:21:36.000So 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.
01:23:44.000Roach 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.
01:23:52.000Well, 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.
01:24:27.000I don't care if you got your hair fucking perm straight up.
01:24:30.000It's like a literary idiosyncrasy, okay?
01:24:34.000And 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.
01:24:50.000If 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.
01:26:38.000So who do you like in Canelo versus Crawford?
01:26:40.000Well, I'm a giant Crawford fan because I think he's the best Switch hitter since Marvin Agler.
01:26:44.000I'm a giant Crawford fan because I called his coming out fight against Brady Sprescott and then various other stepping stones throughout his career.
01:26:52.000I 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.
01:26:59.000I 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.
01:27:10.000Not 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.
01:30:20.000What 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.
01:31:20.000And I remember walking away from Vegas with a bad feeling after the Coto fight.
01:31:24.000How could that happen to Miguel, et cetera, et cetera?
01:31:26.000And 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.
01:31:39.000And I hear in my headset, there's a disturbance in Margarito's dressing room.
01:31:44.000They're making him take his gloves off and da-da-da-da-da.
01:31:47.000And at that moment, it all comes together.
01:32:45.000But 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?
01:32:55.000It boosts up confidence and it's a stimulant.
01:32:57.000I would imagine that Alexis Arguello fight.
01:33:24.000So with Margarito, I think it was just the raps, where they had put plastered Paris in his wraps.
01:33:30.000But 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.
01:33:42.000And there are photos that you can find on the web of Collins that show that.
01:34:13.000I 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.
01:34:37.000And 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.
01:34:56.000Like later in Mike's career when everything was kind of chaotic and he had all those wackadoos in his corner?
01:35:01.000Panama Lewis was like on the sidelines there, but wasn't able to be officially a part of it because he was still banned.
01:35:08.000Well, you know, Mike, by late in his career, had a very clear understanding of his vulnerabilities.
01:35:17.000You 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.
01:35:29.000He 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.
01:35:48.000And 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.
01:38:18.000I 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.
01:38:34.000And if you think about a guy that, like, when he had his first loss, how many fights had he won?
01:38:54.000Jimmy 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.
01:39:05.000And he had a bar on 44th between 6th and 7th.
01:39:08.000It's the, still to this day, I think his son is running it now.
01:40:06.000And 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.
01:40:22.000He, 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.
01:40:35.000Like no one really understood how to move like that.
01:40:38.000And then, of course, Cassius Clay, his favorite fighter, Sugar Ray Robinson.
01:41:22.000And 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.
01:41:34.000Like I bet before Sugar A. Robinson, nobody, like you had Willie Pep.
01:41:39.000Well, you've mentioned what I think of as the modern supreme innovator earlier.
01:42:34.000I 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.
01:42:45.000And I asked Larry, I said, do you think Terrence Crawford has a chance to beat Canelo Alvarez?
01:42:52.000And Larry said, Jim, did Ray Leonard get an official decision victory over Marvelous Marvin Hagler?
01:43:18.000He'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.
01:43:31.000That's what Ray did so effectively against Hagler.
01:44:08.000He'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.
01:44:19.000I used to run into Cheppo, his senior trainer at the grocery store.
01:44:23.000I'd look into the cart and say, oh, he's eating tuna.
01:44:27.000And he said, yes, and he's eating chicken, da-da-da.
01:44:31.000And 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.
01:47:03.000And 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.
01:47:15.000And Jonathan came in and said, how do you feel about your riding?
01:47:18.000I said, I think I'm doing pretty well, don't you?
01:47:22.000He said, I think you're doing really well.
01:47:24.000He said, but I think that this would probably be a great day for you to quit.
01:48:19.000Potong went home and thought about it, and I thought he's right.
01:48:22.000But wouldn't positive, constructive advice being, if you enjoy this, there's some other stuff that you need to do.
01:48:28.000Well, 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.
01:48:41.000But 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.
01:51:35.000You had an unbeaten American Olympic star who's on the verge of his career-defining victory.
01:51:43.000There's no question at this moment that he has won the fight.
01:51:47.000When 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.
01:52:07.000If 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.
01:52:25.000What if that had been in the eighth round?
01:55:34.000I mean, he named a lot of guys out there.
01:55:36.000The great defenders never get as much credit as the Hopkins.
01:55:41.000Hopkins had to become a media star late in his career to really get credit for what he had done.
01:55:47.000When 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.
01:56:08.000But 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.
01:56:25.000That was not the first time that that kind of thing had happened to me.
01:56:32.000My 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.
01:56:46.000So first of all, this emerges from the Munich massacre.
01:56:51.000This emerges from the 9, 10, 11 days of captivity of the American athletes, excuse me, the Israeli athletes By black September terrorists in Munich.
01:57:03.000And during that period of time, ABC is of course the broadcast organizer for the United States.
01:57:12.000And during that time, two reporters, Howard Kosell and Peter Jennings, are pushing the control room.
01:57:22.000How can we get sound out of the dorm room?
01:57:25.000How can we get pictures from some adjoining building through the windows, etc., etc.?
01:57:31.000And 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.
01:57:49.000So they came back to New York and they convened a meeting.
01:57:54.000They 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?
01:58:06.000And one of the first ideas that gets adopted is we can put a reporter on the sideline of a football game.
01:58:13.000So 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.
01:58:42.000I am at first harvested out because I'm number 34 out of 36 on a 97-degree day in Birmingham, Alabama.
01:58:55.000I have driven overnight from Chapel Hill to get there.
01:58:59.000I'm wearing my best discount plaid suit.
01:59:03.000I look ridiculous in a pair of shoes I bought with two and a half inch heels, so they'll make me look taller.
01:59:11.000And I go into the room and have the screening interview.
01:59:14.000And the screening interview is 12 minutes.
01:59:17.000And 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.
01:59:26.000So I know I'm going to have to sit around in the Parliament House Hotel lobby for hours in Birmingham waiting to go in.
01:59:35.000And by the time I go in, I'm grinding my teeth.
01:59:38.000And 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?
01:59:47.000What do you think of what we're trying to do?
02:00:15.000I think this is ridiculous load of crap.
02:00:18.000And I'm embarrassed that I drove from Chapel Hill overnight to be a part of this.
02:00:25.000Later, much later, I was shown the evaluation form on which Eversol had written, arrogant, abrasive, alienated, antagonistic.
02:00:38.000When I was finally chosen as one of the two people, that became known in the college football production truck as the forays.
02:00:47.000Every 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.
02:00:58.000But the bottom line was, through a long and highly unusual process, I was the person who was chosen.
02:01:11.000The 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.
02:01:34.000And 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?
02:01:54.000So I grew up around the corner from Arledge's parents.
02:01:58.000I caddied for both his mother and father at the Hendersonville Golf and Country Club.
02:02:04.000And 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.
02:02:28.000Oh, great to meet you, et cetera, et cetera.
02:02:30.000And as he's going out of the restroom, I say, by the way, how's your dad?
02:02:34.000And he turns around, quizzical expression, says, why would you ask a question like that?
02:02:39.000I 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.
02:02:48.000In fact, my mother's in the same bridge club with your mother.
02:02:51.000The famous red face turned white, and he said, don't ever tell anybody that.
02:04:38.000And Dick says, you know, I'm so glad I found you.
02:04:41.000We 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.
02:04:57.000And within that discussion, that brought us back to you.
02:05:01.000Would you be willing to go to Birmingham, Alabama, and do a film, in those days, 16 millimeter film, do a film audition for us?
02:05:13.000And I said, what do you want me to do in Birmingham?
02:05:16.000He said, well, there's a quarterback there named George Myra.
02:05:20.000He's now with the Birmingham Americans of, I think it was the World Football League.
02:05:26.000He's already been busted out of the NFL, the AFL, Canada.
02:05:33.000This is his last shot as a pro football quarterback.
02:05:37.000And we think it's an interesting story, and we want you to go interview him.
02:05:42.000So, 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.
02:10:56.000So, you know, I was always disciplined and restrained about criticizing reperes live because what they do is an extremely important and critical job.
02:11:12.000And sometimes they're the only safety barrier between life and death.
02:11:18.000I was just thinking of the Diego Corrales fight.
02:11:21.000Diego Corrales, with that crazy fight where he's knocked down multiple times and comes back to win by knockout.
02:11:27.000Arguably the greatest fight of all time.
02:14:36.000You 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.
02:14:46.000Far be it from me to say anything about Turkey, okay?
02:15:25.000That night, you had too many instances where two counterpunchers were standing in front of each other and waiting for the other guy to move.
02:15:32.000I 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.
02:15:45.000I'm going to take the air out of this balloon.
02:15:48.000I'm going to slow the punch rate down.
02:15:50.000I'm going to land selectively when I want to.
02:15:54.000And I'm not going to allow him to ever land a left hook.
02:16:32.000So 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.
02:16:46.000But it was definitely a disappointing performance.
02:16:49.000Well, 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.