On the afternoon of October 3 it was our monthly lunch at Water Grill in Santa Monica with Larry Merchant. We gather to discuss boxing (mostly) for a couple of hours. This time around it was the aforementioned Merchant, Ring Magazine editor, Doug Fischer, manager, Gary Gittelsohn, and myself.
Generally, film producer, Alan Swyer is a regular member of the group but he was placed on the disabled list with an injury. Mark Kreigel of ESPN and author of a multitude of books was swamped with work this Friday and was not able to attend.
So it was us four this time around. Before I left, I tweeted out that since I was meeting Larry that if anyone had any questions for him. I've done this before and with the boxing schedule being relatively light, I thought it was time to back to the well. The public remains curious about what the old sage has to say about the sport, and Merchant still has a keen interest in the game.
Here's what he had to say..
"Well, the first big fight I ever covered was when I was sports editor for the Philadelphia Daily News, Sugar Ray Robinson and Carmen Basilio at Yankee Stadium (1958). And sitting directly across the ring from me were two guys you have have heard off: Ernest Hemingway and Joe DiMaggio.
"Ali-Frazier I was one of the biggest, fiercest fights we've ever known. Then Ali-Liston II which was a one-punch, first round knockout. Hagler-Hearns was one that was just imaginably fierce. I actually saw when I came out of the Army in the early 50's, I went to Madison Square Garden to see Willie Pep, who had I had read about for years and years and so on. He was knocked out in the second round by a Puerto Rican fighter. My favorite sports columnist was Dan Parker of the Daily Mirror, a Hearst newspaper, and he wrote for the next days column that it 'was a dump', a fix. A later investigation found that it was true."
(Fischer, who was sitting next to me thought that the fighter Pep faced was a Humberto Sierra. Upon looking it up, he was correct.)
"I still try to follow it but I have a hard time. But it's always gotten off the floor in the past when it's gone through these periods and maybe it's just being reconfigured in a way that we'll understand later that it's just an evolution of the game."
"Well, I was there for 'Fan Man', saw him coming out of the sky, landing in the ring. I don't think there's been another incident like that in boxing, which has had a lot of crazy moments. I was once at a fight at the Garden and there was a flashy fighter from Panama, whose name I can't remember. He was fighting a local favorite and beating him, and wine bottles were being thrown out for the upper deck. I remember walking around, looking around before I settled in. But that was an early incident for me letting me know that anything might happen when you're in an arena filled with people with conflicting ideas.
Also, here's something that I remember, Shane Mosley was fighting and were getting prepared for the opening of the show. A guy who's working out behind us came over and said, 'Y'know, you do good things, but you're too long, you gotta cut back.' Now, no producer had ever said that to me, but immediately I recognized that he was right, and all I had to do was take a few things I said in the walk-in and save them for the fight because they were usable.
"But that guy had an influence on me."
"If North America means Canada, I think (Christian) Mbilli has a chance to be a star. A star is someone who is bigger than any titles, people want to see him fight."
"If I was 50 years younger and Mayweather was 60 or 70, I might have a chance -- but not really." (Merchant uttered this with a chuckle)
''I liked Barry Tompkins."
''Chavez is 𝘵𝘩𝘦 Mexican warrior, like (Manny Pacquiao) in the Philippines. He was a star, and even after he lost to (Oscar) De La Hoya he remained a star. Hagler-Hearns was eight minutes of 'I-can't-believe-what-I'm-seeing' kind of fight. Eight minutes where you didn't breathe because it was so intense. That's high on my memory list."
