FanHouse JimLampley

HBO boxing announcer Jim Lampley has a real gift for brevity: He can tell you everything you need to know about a boxer in just a couple of sentences. And I think a comment he made before Saturday night's Chad Dawson-Antonio Tarver fight demonstrates that beautifully.

"Zsolt Erdei has held a title belt for quite some time," Lampley said. "At 30-0, he is probably the least respected, most ignored unbeaten longtime title holder in the history of the sport."

The recently retired boxing world champion Floyd Mayweather made tens of millions of dollars from his contracts with HBO. But in an interview with his hometown newspaper, the Grand Rapids Press, he ripped HBO for the way it covered his fights.

Mayweather was particularly critical of HBO's lead boxing announcer, Jim Lampley, who, according to Mayweather, criticizes Mayweather's personal behavior while engaging in the same behavior himself:

"Jim Lampley, Larry Merchant, Emanuel Steward, they're always talking about the negative things in my life," Mayweather said. "But I've seen Jim Lampley in the same strip club as me before. They always want to talk about me going to strip clubs, but they don't want to talk about that."

Mayweather noted that he was criticized on HBO after pleading no contest to assault, even though Lampley himself is currently on probation for violating a restraining order brought by his ex-girlfriend:

"He caught a court case himself, too. But when they catch a case, all they do is take them off the air a couple weeks, then it's over.

Although he doesn't come out and say so, Mayweather sounds like a man who could be convinced to return to the ring if he had a more favorable relationship with a television partner. I hope that happens.

During last night's Samuel Peter-Oleg Maskaev fight, HBO play-by-play man Jim Lampley mentioned that Lennox Lewis and Rocky Marciano are, in Lampley's words, "the only two heavyweight champions who have defeated every man with whom they were ever in the ring."

Lewis avenged both of his losses, to Oliver McCall and Hasim Rahman, and also won the rematch after his draw with Evander Holyfield. Marciano, of course, is the only heavyweight champ to retire with a perfect record.

But then Lampley's broadcast partner, Max Kellerman, told Lampley that he was forgetting someone: Gene Tunney. Kellerman pointed out that the only man to defeat Tunney was Harry Greb in 1922, and that Tunney had subsequently defeated Greb, so Tunney actually belonged in that class alongside Lewis and Marciano.

Lampley then acceded to Kellerman's superior knowledge of boxing history. And, as anyone who has watched Kellerman knows, everyone should accede to Kellerman's superior knowledge of boxing history. Kellerman's knowledge of boxing history is staggering -- even when it comes to boxers who fought half a century or more before the 34-year-old Kellerman was born.

But there's a problem: In this case, Kellerman was wrong.

When Samuel Peter fought Oleg Maskaev last night in Cancun, something highly unusual happened: The bout used "open scoring," meaning that between rounds, the ring announcer would tell everyone in the crowd how the judges had scored the fight up to that point.

That's very rare in boxing: The judges' scores are always kept secret until they've been tallied at the end of the fight. That's just the way things work.

And the HBO announcers working the fight think that's how the way things have to work. Jim Lampley said during the fight, "open scoring is a dreadful idea," and Max Kellerman added, "It's a terrible idea in practice if not in theory."

But the strange thing is, neither announcer could provide any example at all of how this dreadful, terrible idea was affecting the fight.

This video from 1992 is just odd on so many levels:

First, there's seeing O.J. Simpson as a studio analyst. Then there's Bob Costas telling the viewers at home that Brett Favre is a "second-year man from Southern Mississippi," and explaining the correct pronunciation of his last name, because viewers wouldn't have known who he was.

There's also the fact that Jim Lampley is the play-by-play man during the game, the fact that Favre has a much thicker Southern accent than he does now, and the fact that the TV analysts are talking about the Packers losing Don Majkowski and having to replace him with Favre like it's a going to be bad news in Green Bay.

But my favorite part is when Simpson starts talking about how he played against Mike Holmgren in high school. Who knew?