Epilogue: Coming Home

“Debra Helped Me Say Goodbye to HBO” (Courtesy of Jim Lampley)

Debra and I now live in Chapel Hill in a renovated farmhouse on six acres, which is large enough to entertain my growing family and special friends.

A couple of decades ago, a truly gifted American photographer named Howard Schatz developed (pun not intended) a deep interest in the world of boxing and the people who occupy it. The result was one of Howard’s many distinctive photography books, a kaleidoscopic collection of boxing scenes and people titled At the Fights. I had the privilege of writing the foreword, and eventually as a gesture of brotherhood and gratitude, Howard offered to enlarge and mount for me any of the photos that deeply moved me. I chose two, and now in what feels like a triumph of counter-intuition, they occupy the walls flanking the entry door to our peaceful Chapel Hill home.

One of them speaks to boxing’s powerful psychic relationship with human suffering and redemption, and the reality that fighters spend much of their lives perched on the emotional razor’s edge between victory and defeat. In 1984 Kassim Ouma was six years old in his tiny hometown in northern Uganda when a rebel militia truck rolled in and took all the first-grade boys away to fight. Like countless other child soldiers in the postcolonial Africa of that era, he endured and committed astonishing grisly atrocities over the next several years, first as a machete-slashing rebel insurgent, then, after being captured by the government army, a period of years chasing and murdering his former fellow rebels.

One day around age 20, Kassim saw a uniformed government soldier running outside the chain-link-fenced compound where he and his comrades were kept captive near the capital city of Kampala. He asked his commanding officer, “Hey, why does that guy get to run outside the fence?” The answer was, “Oh, he’s on the boxing team. He’s training.” And instantly Kassim replied, “Hey, I’m a boxer, too.”

Thus opened a new chapter in his challenged existence. Kassim began without skills, but given his deep immersion in suffering, opponents found it difficult to hurt or discourage him in the ring. Eventually on a team competition trip to the United States, he defected and wound up at a gym with aspiring professionals in West Palm Beach, Florida.

He went on a group excursion to a nightclub and was shot in the leg in a drive-by attack. Kassim Ouma had fought a war in Uganda for more than a dozen years but had to migrate to America to have the experience of being shot.

As a professional, he succeeded to a level far beyond where his skill set would have projected. Again, opponents found it hard to discourage him. He could go to war and subject himself to unwarranted punishment and sometimes wear down more gifted opponents. It was great television, and his premium pay-cable identity began.

Against all odds and devoid of world-class skills, Kassim Ouma won a recognized world title and fought for another one. By that often-misleading standard, his ring career can be seen as a success.

Thirteen years ago, in his 37th fight of a high-contact career, Kassim fought Kazakhstan’s Gennady Golovkin, the most thunderously hard-punching middleweight of the past three decades. Golovkin was in the early stages of a 23-fight knockout streak, but Ouma made it to round 10 before the fight was stopped and Golovkin awarded a TKO. The struggle was a microcosm of his life. Since that time, mostly fighting in Europe, he has won twice and lost 10.

But he is alive, which in its way makes him more fortunate than the bulk of his cohorts and enemies in Uganda’s endless civil war.

Not long after his loss to Golovkin, I spotted Kassim in Los Angeles, across the street from the Staples Center. Standing with Debra on the sidewalk a year and a half before we were married, I called out to Kassim, who instantly risked traffic havoc by racing to gleefully embrace me, whereupon I instantly introduced him to my newly beloved. Just as instantly, he pulled Debra into his arms for a sweet hello and spontaneously kissed her on the mouth. She was enthralled, and when he walked away she asked, of course, “Who was that?”

“Well, it’s a great story. But the first thing I should tell you is that he’s probably killed more people than either of us could count. And he killed them up close, with a machete.”

“Oh my God. But he is so sweet!”

“Yes, he is. And life is truly strange, isn’t it?”

He continues to live on our Chapel Hill wall.

The second photo in the hallway is there for familial reasons. Sergio Martínez was another junior middleweight I covered, a strikingly handsome and graceful Argentine southpaw who has lived much of his adult life in Spain. There were moments in his career when he was the best 154-pound fighter in the world, and I always loved covering him because of his facial resemblance to my older half-brother, Fred Trickey.

Fred was the first of my mother’s two fatherless sons. Before he died of cancer, my father adopted Fred, who succumbed to AIDS around the time of our coincidental LA encounter with Kassim Ouma. But the familial connection to Sergio Martínez was due to his facial resemblance to Fred.

Martínez vs. Alex Bunema in Temecula, California, in 2008 was the second prizefight Debra attended with me. I wanted her to see that boxing could portray artistry and beauty, and Sergio, with gliding speed and magical hand skills, was the right example for that. I also wanted her to see his courage, another trait he shared with my brother, but for varied reasons.

Fred had come out as gay in the early 1960s in Hendersonville, North Carolina, when he was in his middle teens and remains the bravest person I ever knew. I could not look at Sergio Martínez, who was elegant and beautiful every moment amid the danger of prizefighting, without thinking of my brother. And at that moment as I watched Sergio, Fred was alive.

In 2015, Debra and I went to Canastota, New York, for my induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. It had indeed been something of a wait, given that I had now been calling fights at the highest levels of the sport for almost 30 years, but the wait was well worth it.

Aware that my career had often overshadowed my family, I was now overjoyed at the plan Debra had put together. For the first time since Grandma Mid’s 100th birthday 25 years ago, all six surviving Lampley cousins from Hendersonville, along with my 90-plus-year-old aunt Mary Ann and uncle Bill, were in the same place at the same time.

The Hall of Fame had its annual vintage car parade around the town that produced lightweight and middleweight champion Carmen Basilio, and the inductees rode around in old convertibles, all of us waving and showing gratitude to Canastota for its love of boxing.

I shared induction that day with a proud assortment of deserving names, among them former welterweight champion and later actor Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini; journalist Nigel Collins, who had helped break me in, back in the ’80s; Prince Naseem Hamed, who had introduced Victoria to boxing from the front row; and Riddick “Big Daddy” Bowe, whose heavyweight championship trilogy with Evander Holyfield was one of the greatest in the history of the sport, and a memorable part of my blow-by-blow legacy.

I kept calling fights, but in 2018 a seismic earthquake took place at HBO when the giant phone company AT&T decided a useful purpose for their cash might be to buy Time Warner, the historic entertainment conglomerate that decades before had developed and still owned HBO. That year I was at a post-Emmy party in Los Angeles, seated as had been the custom for a few years at the table of Richard Plepler, our beloved chairman. He tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to a business-suited figure a couple of tables away.

“See that man, the one in the gray suit and tie?”

“Yes, who is he?”

“That’s John Stankey, your soon-to-be new boss. Once they take over [meaning AT&T], the sports department reports to him. You should go over and introduce yourself, see what you think.”

To be clear, if Richard at that point in my life had told me to get a bucket of cow dung and pour it on the dance floor, I would have been out looking for a bucket of cow dung. Over four decades in television, I had never loved or respected an authority figure more. So I got up and walked over to the AT&T brass table and said hello, and Stankey invited me to sit down.

No more than 15 minutes later I walked back to the seat next to Plepler. “So how did that go?”

“I think boxing is over with. I don’t think this network is going to be involved in it anymore.”

“That is my impression, too. I just wanted to be sure we agree.”

On December 8, 2018, in Carson, California, I called my last fight card for HBO Boxing.

The feature fight was a showcase for Cecilia Braekhus, the Norwegian fighter who was universally regarded as the best female boxer in the world. When it was over, Roy Jones, Max Kellerman, and I all made our personal goodbye comments from ringside, and with that, closing credits rolled and the most acclaimed telecast franchise in the 70-year history of boxing on television said goodbye.

I walked away from the eye of a network television camera for what could be the last time, forty-four years, three months, and a day after the first time.

In my more than 50 years as a network television sports broadcaster, I watched at close range the evolution of all this and how it affected the games people play all around the world. I covered college football, pro football, professional golf, Major League Baseball, 14 Olympic Games—seven summer and seven winter—a dozen Wimbledon tennis championships, the esoterica of Wide World of Sports’ “around the world, the constant variety of sport,” the growth to maturity of extreme endurance sports, and some I can barely bring back to mind. The highs, memories, and thrills far outweigh the lows.

Like my life as a sportscaster, it was complicated. But “It Happened.”