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Jim Lampley has been the voice of boxing for a generation of Americans, which is remarkable because the assignment was only supposed to last one fight.
In the winter of 1986, Lampley had a new contract and a new boss who wanted him out. So Dennis Swanson, the head of the ABC’s sports division, ordered Lampley to cover Mike Tyson’s first fight on network TV in the hopes, Lampley said, he would embarrass himself and slink away.
Instead, Lampley nailed the assignment and a year later began what would be an unparalleled three-decade career calling fights for HBO.
“I knew from the moment I called that first fight I was home,” said Lampley, 76, whose work earned him induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. “I understood that was where I was supposed to be.”
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So 18 months later, on his agent’s advice, Lampley walked into Swanson’s office, signed the papers that separated him from ABC Sports, and never looked back. That’s one of several stories Lampley tells in “It Happened: A Uniquely Lucky Life in Sports Television,” an autobiography of an admittedly charmed 50-year career in broadcasting.
“My life story reads like a fictional narrative. That’s the reason for the title,” Lampley said. “It’s the only way you can respond to something as totally counterintuitive, unexpected and filled with blessings as my career is to say, ‘it happened.’
“I can’t talk about anything that ever happened to me with anything less than astonishment.”
The title of the book, written with journalist Art Chansky, is also a paean to Lampley’s most famous call — the narration of George Foreman’s stunning knockout of Michael Moorer, which allowed Foreman to become, at 45, the oldest heavyweight champion in history.
“Down goes Moorer on a right hand!. An unbelievably close-in right-hand shot! “It happened! It happened!”
In the book, Lampley takes readers inside locker rooms in every league and into the conference rooms of every network. He shares family stories of growing up in the South at the start of the civil rights movement and dishes celebrity gossip about some of the biggest names in sports and broadcasting.
But if the career he describes was marked by good fortune — he got his first break at 24 when, still in graduate school, he was chosen from a field of 432 candidates to serve as the first network sideline reporter on ABC’s college football broadcasts — he was also very good at what he did. Over his dozen years at ABC he called two Indy 500s, broadcast Major League Baseball, traveled the world reporting for “Wide World of Sports,” interviewed President Ronald Reagan at Daytona, presided over the trophy presentation after Super Bowl XIX and covered the first of 14 Olympics.
He interviewed Mike Eruzione and Jim Craig after the U.S. hockey team’s Miracle on Ice, worked with Billie Jean King at Wimbledon, saw Richard Petty’s final NASCAR victory and was close enough to smell the sweat at every significant title fight between 1988 and 2018.
“Given his long career across several networks, he probably has some juicy stories to tell,” said Daniel Durbin, a professor at the USC Annenberg Institute of Sports, Media and Society.
Yet it was a career that proved memorable as much for Lampley’s timing as for his talent.
“Jim was one of a group of 1970s college students who grew into sportscasters, that included Jim Nantz, Al Michaels, and Bob Costas,” Durbin continued. “They pursued careers in a sort of golden age of sportscasting when ‘Monday Night Football’ had shown the tremendous potential of prime-time sports and ESPN and, later, Fox Sports were just on the horizon.
“He was a consistently strong sportscaster. A very good, workmanlike boxing broadcaster; well-prepared, clear and effective in his calls.”
And every time his career seemed to reach a fork in the road, he inevitably chose the right path — one that has him returning to do blow by blow, this time on DAZN PPV, for a May 2 world championship card featuring Ryan Garcia, Teófimo López and Devin Haney, in separate bouts, live from Times Square. It will be his first fight call since HBO ended its boxing programming in 2018.
In between his start at ABC and his return to his ring-side seat this week, Lampley was the first program host listeners heard on WFAN, helping it grow into the biggest sports-talk station in the country; anchored coverage of the Olympics and the NFL on NBC; appeared regularly on “The CBS Morning Show” and had his own syndicated interview program, “One on One With Jim Lampley.”
“I was working all the time,” he said. “I was making piles of money, one paycheck on top of another.”
But he’s also remembered in Los Angeles for a life-changing five-year stint as co-anchor of the nightly news on Channel 2.
“When I was forced out of ABC Sports, my next gig, my landing spot, was at KCBS-TV,” Lampley said on an hourlong Zoom call from his home in Chapel Hill, N.C., where he sat before a wall covered with dozens of the media credentials he has gathered over the decades. “The first thing I said to my agent was ‘that’s a local station. That’s not a network gig’.”
It came with a big contract though. And when the station brought in Bree Walker to join him behind the anchor desk, Lampley’s personal life, as well as his career, took a turn.
“There was a giant promotional campaign and a lot of hoopla,” Lampley remembered in an interview long on detail and short on regret. “Yes, it probably boosted my image. [But] I found myself in a situation where I felt ill-equipped to compete with her particular studio skills on air.
“I decided that my best defense would be to get her to fall in love with me.”
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And she did, marrying Lampley and having a son with him before the couple divorced after nine years. It was “Anchorman” 14 years before the Will Ferrell movie made Ron Burgundy and Veronica Corningstone household names.
Months after moving to Los Angeles, Lampley also signed his first contract to call boxing on HBO, the job that would come to define his career. It was a job he was always meant to have since one of his earliest memories was of his widowed mother sitting him down in front of a television set perched on a TV dinner tray and putting on a Sugar Ray Robinson fight. He was 6.
Eight years later he was in the Miami Beach Convention Hall to watch his boyhood idol Cassius Clay knock out Sonny Liston, and more than a quarter-century after that, Lampley was ringside in Tokyo for HBO when Buster Douglas knocked out Mike Tyson, making him the only broadcaster to be present for the two greatest upsets in heavyweight boxing history.
So it has been a uniquely lucky life. And, as the title of the book says, it happened.
“This was the way it was supposed to go,” Lampley said with a smile. “It was preordained.”
Lampley will be in Los Angeles for a pair of book signings, on May 8 at 7 p.m. at the Barnes and Noble at The Grove and on May 10 at 2 p.m. at the Wild Card Boxing Club. The event at the Grove will feature a Q and A session moderated by KCBS-TV sports director Jim Hill.
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