26

The Last Round

“I Think About Emanuel Almost Every Day”

(Left: Courtesy of Jim Lampley. Right: Courtesy of Jeff Julian)

The cable host chair in the Sydney Olympics that summer of 2000 proved to be the loneliest experience of my career. Much of it was my own doing that I was trying to fix by including my family wherever and whenever I could. In 1999, my 12-year-old daughter, Victoria, made her first-ever trip with me on an assignment to England for a featherweight fight between British star Prince Naseem Hamed and a nondescript opponent named Paul Ingle. I picked up Victoria in London, where she lived with her mother, and we went on to Manchester for the HBO event.

Family folklore had the name Lampley as being endemic to northern England. The day before the fight, we went sightseeing around Manchester with several graveyards on our list. Sure enough, at the Episcopal cemetery in the middle of the city, there it was: a granite gravestone with the name “lampley” from the 14th century. We found a handful of them. Victoria saw it as a reason to be proud of her name. I saw it as another gift from boxing.

Arriving in Sydney, I was alone again. While the rest of the NBC troops bunked in a glamorous downtown hotel near the beautiful broadcast center with a constant view of the architecturally magnificent opera house that adorned the bay, I moved farther out of the city to a remote apartment complex where only a handful of us, the cable-channel group, were housed. My on-air hours were mostly overnight, and only infrequently did I see a visitor or a guest. After all, who wanted to celebrate a medal-winning performance by going to a sterile television studio at three or four o’clock in the morning?

The heart of my job was to be smooth, professional, familiar to viewers who had seen me at Olympics going back 24 years, and to effectively speak the language of television broadcasts Dick Ebersol had helped establish. That began when Ebersol was the ABC Olympics researcher working for Roone Arledge and Jim McKay in 1968. It wouldn’t necessarily have been easy for just anyone, but it was something that now came naturally to me.

I kept my head down and my mouth shut because I was still trying to polish my prominence on a new and prestigious network, HBO. I had already returned to the States, but HBO had such a strong humanitarian culture that after the 2001 Lennox Lewis-Hasim Rahman fight in South Africa the crew and brass visited with Nelson Mandela at his home in Johannesburg. I regretted missing that!

It was in no way surprising that I wound up with increasing studio roles in later Olympics. I was the daytime host and at night the cable-channel hockey host at Salt Lake City in 2002, and daytime host in Athens in 2004, Torino in 2006, and Beijing in 2008, where my son Aaron (with Bree Walker) was helping me through the awful darkness and smog that had engulfed the industrial city on his first business trip with me. I was distraught the conditions would seriously hamper our outside camera shots that were a big part of the opening ceremony. I went to the broadcast center, where there were no windows, while 17-year-old Aaron checked out Beijing.

In about an hour, my cell phone rang. It was Aaron, who said two words: “Step outside!” I was baffled by his order but the instant I pushed open the big metal door, I was in bright sunlight and a clear-blue sky. Aaron smiled ear to ear and hugged me. We learned that the Chinese government had ordered thousands of workers to go home and shut down their plants, clearing the soot and smog so they could fulfill their ambition of hosting the “greatest show on the planet.” Since then, and for the rest of my life, I will hear Aaron say “step outside.”

Beijing was my 14th and last Olympics assignment on six networks, counting over the air and cable. I have been told many times by various sources and authorities that it is a record for Olympics appearances by an American broadcaster. I take their word for it.

After 2008, new management at NBC Sports had other plans for my on-air hours. So Beijing marked my goodbye to the Olympic Games. The overall experience had lasted 32 years, and it was striking to realize the two most thrilling and memorable moments were Winter Olympics based: Franz Klammer’s 1976 downhill run in Innsbruck, the first Olympics I ever attended, and the Miracle on Ice four years later. In both cases, I was more or less thrown in at the last minute. It was impossible to imagine how, from a sports-lover perspective, I could ever have been luckier. And 44 years after Lake Placid that remains indelibly true.

I was on the doorstep of 60 years old. As a television sports commentator I had been around the world and back several times, difficult even for the most learned fans to conjure a sport or an event I had never touched. I was confident about calling boxing matches, which had emerged now as my central on-air job, for as long as HBO wanted me in that role. I was developing a business and personal friendship with the executive who ran the entertainment side of HBO, a Los Angeles–based brainiac named Mike Lombardo, and his superior, copresident Richard Plepler.

My cherished longtime agent Art Kaminsky died in 2013 after he was incapacitated by an extended illness. With the help of my new agent in Los Angeles, Nick Khan, I produced an independent feature film, a satirical spoof named Welcome to Hollywood, which debuted and aired on Cinemax, the wholly owned subsidiary network to HBO. Then came the documentary On Freddie Roach, about the esteemed boxing trainer, a cinema verité directed by the award-winning Peter Berg.

Khan was dynamic, indomitable, and busy. When I hooked up with him around the time of the Athens Olympics, he insisted I hire a manager named Michael Price because my ambitions as a producer would require day-to-day attention, and Nick would not have time for that. It meant paying two commissions, but Nick was right, and with the clock running now on a career that had begun when I was 25, I didn’t want to miss any chances.

By May 2012 I had a semimonthly magazine series, The Fight Game, airing in prime time on HBO. TFG, as the staff called it, was a thrilling outlet for my content hunger, my writing capacity, and my ongoing relationships with fighters and trainers. It aired for seven seasons and did a lot to strengthen my footprint and legacy in boxing.

When Muhammad Ali died in 2016, TFG was the base camp from which we produced, more or less overnight, a eulogy/memorial show that included tributes from George Foreman, LL Cool J, and Jack Nicholson, among others. Considering how my love affair with Cassius Clay had begun all the way back in the summer of 1960, an eventful 56 years before, I felt gifted to be in that position.

But years before Ali died, I had experienced a graphic demonstration of how we are all whipsawed by life’s ups and downs. After some self-damaging misjudgments in my love life—specifically, the final grinding dissolution of my third marriage to my former news anchor partner Bree Walker, then a terribly mistaken liaison to a beauty-pageant type who had approached me with the expressed goal of becoming a boxing commentator—I felt I had bottomed out as a person. To make myself feel better, I joined a group that was cold-calling voters in Ohio and explaining why they should vote for Barack Obama.

At this time in 2008 I had been living in Del Mar in north San Diego County for about a decade, ever since my hip difficulties had made it pointless to live on a ski mountain in Park City. It was ill-advised to keep living alone because postsurgical trauma following a hip replacement had left me with a dislocation syndrome. Over a 10-year period the ball of my right hip exited the socket 17 times, always leaving me immobilized because the pain from any movement whatsoever was excruciating beyond description. In all 17 instances I was lucky enough to be with someone or able to reach my cell phone, and thankfully I never went into shock, eventually to dehydrate and die. I was lucky beyond logic and reason.

There were two key steps to my eventual salvation. The most important step had been to seek and find the right love interest and life partner to finally find permanence and emotional stability in a life which had for too long been a crapshoot.

So the hip fix could wait. I needed a valuable companion who could help my four children feel proud of their father. For the first time ever, and in my mind just for fun, I filled out the identity page for the online dating service Match.com. My profile description was couched in the lyrics of Jackson Browne, which I judged to be more literary than the classic songs I might otherwise have used. I specified that I was looking for someone dark-haired, dark-eyed, over 50 and willing to admit it, and I finished by establishing where I stood politically because the preferences my mother instilled in me are strong enough to affect face-to-face relationships.

I could write another book on the degree to which I hit the jackpot. Suffice to say from the first one-hour, get-acquainted conversation at a Mexican restaurant in Encinitas, Debra Schuss Clemens reinvented my existence, and she continues to do so to this day. I was under the false impression I had loved several women in my adult years. But I learned from Debra that true love and devotion were joyful disciplines I had never embraced with energetic commitment and responsibility, and 16 years later, she is still, hour by hour, teaching me and our seven adult children and 11 grandchildren how to love. And without her I suspect I would not still be alive.

As a native Long Islander and a lifelong fan of baseball and football, Debra was from the beginning no stranger to sports. She didn’t have a lot of exposure to boxing, but she caught on fast to the intensely personal nature of the sport. And five times in the first few years of traveling together, I dislocated my hip. So she grew accustomed to getting me quickly into the hands of emergency medicine and watching me walk out of hospitals. She knew I wouldn’t last forever that way, and she helped me keep pushing to find a permanent solution.

Eventually an orthopedic surgeon at Torrey Pines Orthopedic Clinic located a Swiss surgeon who had created a preventive implement, a small cage, which could be surgically attached to the hip socket to prevent the ball from escaping its nook. On March 26, 2012, with no firm knowledge or expectation but in the face of Debra’s command that to keep going without trying was personal malpractice, I underwent surgery for the installation of the cage in San Diego. After 17 dislocations in the preceding 12 years, I have had none since.

Again, I would not be alive without her.

Four and a half years after we met, Debra and I assembled 72 of our closest friends and relatives in the backyard of our house overlooking the historic Del Mar racetrack and the Pacific Ocean for a wonderful wedding of her own planning and design, then danced in our large living room and all around the pool deck to my own carefully assembled rhythm-and-blues collection. My dear friend, the famous “Ready to Rumble” ring announcer Michael Buffer, conducted particulars of the nuptials.

The gathering was a who’s who of boxing, including among others Larry Merchant, Max Kellerman, and Emanuel Steward, who had become one of my best friends. Later in the evening, after the sun had set over the Pacific, Emanuel’s girlfriend Anita Ruiz told Debra he was having fierce and unrecognizable stomach pains, and they would have to leave early. I went to find him at the front door and hugged and kissed him goodbye.

By the following weekend Emanuel had disappeared into oncology in a Detroit hospital.

By October 25 he was dead. I was five when my father died, so that was not a mature enough experience of grief for me to evaluate. When my mother died in 1985, I was so accustomed to recognizing her heart’s vulnerability that I had prepared for it many times. I had grieved over my half-brother’s death a few years before this, but to be honest his lifestyle at the end invited the worst and it came as no surprise, his suffering so immense that my first emotion was relief. I can honestly say I had never dealt with such a heart-wrenching loss as that of Emanuel Steward. It was 12 years ago, and I think about him almost every day.

The 1971 giant-dollar bonanza of the first Ali-Frazier match ushered in the ultimate Holy Grail for the promoters and television executives who run boxing: two boxers of similar weight and identity who, over a period of time, become star attractions. The public waits for them to fight so the hunger for their moment of truth drives the audience demand and the price consumers are willing to pay to higher and higher levels.

It happened over and over for several years before the event finally began to coalesce: In a shopping center near my home in north San Diego County, in the lobby or the hallway of a casino hotel in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, in the airports I made my way through more than half the weekends of the year, sometimes at a social gathering with friends, or sometimes just randomly on the street, someone would ask me a question that became a repetitious mantra: “When are Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao going to fight each other?”

The question reflected a variety of conditions that are endemic to boxing and in some ways unique to boxing: that the sport is underorganized and appealingly or maddeningly entrepreneurial. There are governing bodies that issue rankings and distribute championship belts, which have a representative appeal for some fully inoculated fans and for the competitors who rise high enough in the hierarchy to seek them. Fans who have followed boxing for years grow accustomed to the vagaries that bring star fighters together far more scarcely than, say, the Celtics playing the 76ers or the Yankees playing the Red Sox. They get frustrated with waiting, and most of them grow impatient with the reality that captivatingly competitive matchups are dangled speculatively, sometimes interminably, until by some alchemy they have ripened to the point of inevitability. Sometimes they rot instead.

The so-called “governing bodies” in reality have precious little ability to “govern” boxers who have significant followings and can generate audiences at the gate and on television. The managers and promoters who advise the athletes generally insist they play their cards close to the vest. Genuine risk is more often avoided than embraced, at least until the money piles up so high it can no longer be resisted. Fans can do little other than wait for the perverse nature of an entrepreneurial sport to take its course.

For years there was seemingly an all-too-real possibility that the two greatest active boxers in the world might never wind up in the ring together.

One of them was an American raised in the sport by a father and an uncle who had meaningful professional ring careers of their own, the other a product of the wretchedly impoverished streets of a mostly unobserved metropolis in the Philippines. And this despite the plain fact that in a sport whose most vital verity is “styles make fights,” they were visibly and compellingly made for each other. Pacquiao was a savage attacker with speed, skill, and knockout power in both hands. Mayweather was a consummate boxer with impenetrable defense and artistic offense. Devoted fans of either could make a case to friends and rivals as to why their man would win.

So when in 2007 Mayweather won an entertaining war of skills with the most well-known and popular American star of the sport, Oscar De La Hoya, the buzz began in earnest. It seemed clear Pretty Boy Floyd was close to unbeatable for any other fighter at or near that matchup’s weight level of 154 pounds. He had gradually and systematically cleared out all opposition at 135, 140, and 147 on the way to the larger De La Hoya. The only remaining globally recognizable target in his universe was Pacquiao, who had begun his professional career at age 16 weighing less than 100 pounds before eventually being invited to America in 2001 and winning a 122-pound title against a heavily favored South African star in Las Vegas.

If Mayweather has a pretty good story, Pacquiao’s is epic, one of the most colorful and compelling legends in the entire history of the sport. Unequipped with an American pedigree and a successful amateur career, two factors that had helped facilitate Mayweather’s still-unbeaten record, Pacquiao had fought a who’s who of mostly Asian and Mexican boxers on his way to the top. But general sports fans were still learning about him when more than a year after Mayweather defeated De La Hoya, Pacquiao entered the same ring in Las Vegas to take on the same naturally larger American Olympian and matinee idol.

The point of the fight was clear. The Pride of the Philippines needed to compete effectively with his American opponent to prove he was big enough and good enough to be a threat to Mayweather. Many ring experts doubted he could pull it off. And the result was staggering. Though De La Hoya had fought well against Mayweather before fading in the late rounds and losing a close-enough decision the year before, the smaller Pacquaio annihilated the once-magnificent Golden Boy. The fight was a start-to-finish beatdown before De La Hoya’s corner mercifully threw in the towel to stop it after eight rounds.

Manny Pacquaio, who in childhood had sold stolen cigarettes on the streets of General Santos city to survive, earned a reported $30 million from the pay-per-view receipts and the live gate. He had now, with Oscar’s assistance, jumped into an income league occupied in the sport only by heavyweights and Mayweather. If general sports fans had been slow to place him before, they totally got the picture now. And though there were still capable opponents on the horizon for boxing’s biggest little stars at that moment in December 2008, for the boxing public all around the globe, the evocative cosmic question was the one I faced over and over going forward. Because as the ringside blow-by-blow voice of what was at that time the sport’s most prominent television stage, HBO, I had called almost all the meaningful fights that had served as the steps along the path to the inevitable and necessary confrontation.

So when were Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao going to fight each other?

The maddening answer was that it would take another six and a half years, until May 2, 2015, for their fight to finally occur. Why?

The answer ties together a variety of observations about what has happened to the modern world of sports, and how those interpretations affect athletes, their fans, the organizations that administer them, the teams and leagues, the massive financial forces that support them and feed off them, their media organizations that serve as middlemen to generate and count and distribute the money, the social media that are increasingly their proxy parties, and the hypesters and promoters of all kinds who focus their lenses on them.

Eventually, after years of parrying the unanswerable question, I called the largest single economic event in the history of what are now called “combat sports”: Mayweather vs. Pacquiao—dubbed the Billion Dollar Bout for its unprecedented pay-per-view, advertising, merchandising, and ticket revenue.

You might have thought, based on years of nearly breathless anticipation, that would have been an unforgettably exciting moment. You would have been wrong. Seldom in my lengthy career was I more certain of the outcome of a competitive event I was narrating. Seldom have all the assembled media observers and experts surrounding me in that endeavor been more unified in their clear understanding of what they were about to see. Pacquiao was a shell of his former self and fought with an injured shoulder.

Remember, styles also make fights, and this was, as a style matchup, an open-and-shut case for Mayweather. But as the result of the extraordinary buildup, it was as “must see” as “must see” can get, and that is another observation, like all the ones listed above, on the inexorably interlocking dynamics of big-time sports in the 21st century.