#2346 - Jim Lampley

Jim Lampley is a sports broadcaster and commentator best known for his 30-year run on HBO World Championship Boxing. His new book "It Happened! A Uniquely Lucky Life in Sports Broadcasting," is available now. https://jimlampley.com Visit https://blackriflecoffee.com/joe-rogan and use code ROGAN for 30% Off This video is sponsored by BetterHelp. Visit https://BetterHelp.com/JRE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:10Joe Rogan?

  Wow, really? That was your closest male friend?

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Unexpected, unexpected, but over a period of time, we just got closer and closer and closer and, you know, very brotherly. And the last public appearance Emmanuel ever made was my wedding in September of 2012. And that night, the wedding was at our house in Del Mar, California, and that night, he, his girlfriend came to me and said, "We have to leave early Emmanuel's having stomach pains." He was in oncology by the next week. He was gone by three weeks later.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  So, very touching to me and, you know, deeply symbolic of my love for him and thus the Cronkite.

• 1:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, what a classic gem. And he was one of the first guys to realize, like, if you crank the heat up, it actually gives guys better conditioning.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  He realized a lot of things. Emmanuel was a genius in a lot of ways. And there were a lot of, um, sort of time-ordered rules and techniques in boxing that he quietly upended.

• 1:26Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Because he was more advanced in his point of view and thought process.

• 1:31Joe Rogan?

  And then everybody else sort of followed his lead.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Once they understood what he was doing. Once if you saw the McCrorys and Tommy and those guys, why wouldn't you imitate, right?

• 1:41Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, exactly. Yeah, no, he was a...

• 1:43Speaker 01

  And he did it at both the amateur and pro level, too.

• 1:46Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  You know, so...

• 1:48Joe Rogan?

  And he was always fantastic, too, as a commentator, because he would give insight that you're really not going to get from someone that's not, like, with these fighters day in, day out, through an entire camp. He really understood things.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Well, when you consider the privilege I had. The expert commentators I work with, starting with Ray.

• 2:06Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  That's one perspective. Then gravitating through George Foreman and Roy Jones. Emmanuel's in there. And to me, he was the best. I agree with you. The public responded more to Roy and Ray.

• 2:25Joe Rogan?

  Of course, famous guys.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Because of their stardom, et cetera.

• 2:29Joe Rogan?

  And they were really good, too.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  And they were good, but Emmanuel taught me more, you know, because he was totally well-rounded.

• 2:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  As a human being, as well as as a boxing trainer.

• 2:42Joe Rogan?

  I was very pleased to hear you back on the microphone for that Times Square event.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:47Joe Rogan?

  Because it had been so long.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Six plus years.

• 2:50Joe Rogan?

  God, I was like, that's crazy. It didn't make any sense. You were the best in the business. HBO was the best in the business, and when they stepped away from boxing, I was really heartbroken.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Well, if you look at what happened, we go from a situation where

• 3:10Speaker 01

  the television networks have the authority and the self-belief to choose the commentators the way they want to.

• 3:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Then you get into a more subdivided and widely disparate marketplace. And now the star promoters have a great deal more influence than you would have thought before. And now the star promoters start getting involved in influencing who's on the air. So PBC, Mayweather was never a fan.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  We got along, but you know, he was absolutely...

• 3:51Joe Rogan?

  What was the famous thing with Larry?

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Well, and I guess he associated me with Larry, which makes all the sense in the world.

• 3:58Joe Rogan?

  Kind of, but you weren't nearly as critical.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  I was just the blow-by-blow guy.

• 4:03Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  I'm not an expert commentator.

• 4:05Joe Rogan?

  Right, right.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  So, I tried very hard, not always easy, but I tried very hard never to go over the line into doing what the experts were supposed to do.

• 4:14Joe Rogan?

  Right. No, you were excellent at that. It just, it didn't make any sense to me that, you know, and Kellerman, he's also excellent. That's another guy we should...

• 4:22Speaker 01

  And now he's back.

• 4:22Joe Rogan?

  Yes. It's nice. And Andre Ward is another excellent guy.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 4:26Joe Rogan?

  It just, uh, the, the good thing about boxing was that HBO was completely independent from these promoters.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  And the bad thing about boxing is that the fighters don't get paid as much on the undercard fights and don't get paid as much coming up, as is the case in the more broadly organized UFC universe, right?

• 4:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that is a difference. Yeah, there's a giant difference in the undercard pay, but then...

• 4:51Speaker 01

  I learned that from Joe Rogan.

• 4:52Joe Rogan?

  Ha ha. Yeah. Well, the UFC treats the entire, uh, card as an enormous event. So, they have elite fighters fight in the entire card. It's not top-heavy. Like, one of the problems with boxing is you would just say, "When's the main event? When is Canelo fighting?" And you didn't, the, the other stuff is just nonsense. Whereas the UFC, you look at it like, "Oh, look who's fighting. First fight of pay-per-view. There's five fights on pay-per-view. First fight of pay-per-view is a banger." And everybody's, the, the seats are packed and everybody's excited to see it, whereas everybody starts shuffling in about 20 minutes before Canelo fights in one of these big boxing events. That, I think, is kind of unfortunate.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  I, I totally agree.

• 5:34Joe Rogan?

  And a little bit short-sighted.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  And I, I accede to your point of view, because I've made this point before. I'm not a UFC expert. Any comment I make about UFC is, um, atmospheric, but it's not expertly informed. I didn't have the bandwidth for that. I was trying to be knowledgeable out about every single tributary and every single meaningless pocket in the boxing world.

• 6:02Joe Rogan?

  That's a lot.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  That's a lot.

• 6:03Joe Rogan?

  It's a lot to follow.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  It took time. And, and frankly, you know, I decided it would be distracting to me to try to keep up with two combat sports at once.

• 6:13Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  This is the one where I make my living. This is the one where the audience identifies me. This is the one that's on HBO.

• 6:21Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  And I, and I know that... Dana, in particular, is said by some to have been quite upset that he had a deal with HBO and the deal with HBO went away. If that's the case, and I don't know, I'm very sorry to hear it, because I think it would have been good for both if UFC had been on HBO.

• 6:44Joe Rogan?

  I think so as well. I mean HBO at that time was the premier network for combat sports.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  For show.

• 6:51Joe Rogan?

  The work that you guys had done in boxing was the top of the food chain. It was the best.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Well, Larry Merchant, Ray Leonard, George Foreman, Roy Jones.

• 6:59Joe Rogan?

  It's also the production. Everything was on point. It was just so well honed.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Good production.

• 7:04Joe Rogan?

  Yes. It was just a well polished machine. One of the issues is they wanted to replace the commentators. HBO did.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Oh, they did?

• 7:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, so if we came over there, I wouldn't go over there as well.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Oh, really? Yeah, because HBO was always about their own producer autonomy.

• 7:19Joe Rogan?

  Yes. So they wanted to have control.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  We don't want anybody telling us what to do.

• 7:23Joe Rogan?

  Exactly.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:25Joe Rogan?

  The problem with that is in mixed martial arts, there's a very small pool of people who have a deep understanding of the entire history of the sport.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 7:34Joe Rogan?

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• 8:43Joe Rogan?

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• 9:28Joe Rogan?

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• 10:13Joe Rogan?

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• 10:42Speaker 01

  Well, going back to the developmental stages, and I try very hard not to use the word "unique." It's massively overused in American society. Sports media have beaten it to death. It means "only one like this on the whole planet." But you were unique in those days, because you had the full knowledge of UFC, and you also knew some stuff about boxing. So... I thi- I think you were not just unusual, but unique.

• 11:11Joe Rogan?

  Well, all I was doing was just following my interests, and I've always been a huge boxing fan. From the time I was a child.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Can you remember what your first fight was?

• 11:22Joe Rogan?

  The first fight I watched, my parents watched it, which was crazy, because my parents were hippies. And they were really interested in Ali's rematch with Leon Spinks.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  New Orleans.

• 11:35Joe Rogan?

  Yup. When Leon had beat Muhammad Ali, because Muhammad Ali was, he was a cultural icon, as much as he was a sports figure.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Like, multiply that by a hundred, you know, to get to where he was.

• 11:48Joe Rogan?

  He was very, very unique, and his, his opposition to the Vietnam War made him a hero to many Americans.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Well, I always say, um, he was my childhood hero, and he was my childhood hero as Cassius Clay. The very first live prize fight I ever attended was Cassius Clay versus Sonny Liston, February 25, 1964, in Miami Beach.

• 12:15Joe Rogan?

  Oh, you were there for the first fight?

• 12:16Speaker 01

  I saved lawn mowing and car washing money for months to buy a ticket that in my memory was a hundred dollars, but I don't really know for sure what the cost of that ticket was. I didn't save it. It would be worth millions now. Um, and my mother took me, my mother took me over from our crappy southwest Miami tract house rental, uh, and dropped me off at the Miami Beach Convention Center, and then came and picked me up afterward. And I, I went in alone. Uh, and that was the first live-

• 12:47Joe Rogan?

  How old were you?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  I was 14.

• 12:49Joe Rogan?

  14.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  It was the first live prize fight I had ever attended. It was all about my hero worship for Cassius Clay.

• 12:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Two days later, he stands on Brickell Avenue in Miami and tells two reporters that he's a follower of the Nation of Islam, and now his name is Muhammad Ali. And I'm in shock, okay? What do you mean? I'm, you're Cassius Clay, you can't. And so I, nowadays, I say, the lesson he taught me then was, a man's identity is his own. And it does not matter how much I love him. Or cherish him, or feel connected to him. He has the right to say who he is. I mean, back in those days, Islam? What is that?

• 13:33Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  You know, I had no clue. But, you know, he, he got over with me on that one. I understood it was his right. Then he taught me my stance on the Vietnam War. My mother was double widow of two United States military heroes. I grew up with a basement filled to the gills with memorabilia from their tours of duty as B-20, B-17, B-24, and, and B-29 pilots in World War II. So there was nationalistic and patriotic material all over my household.

• 14:13Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  And when Ali said what he said about Vietcom, I mean, about Vietnam, that moved the meter for me in that regard. And I understood. And eventually, eventually, my mother said, "You'll go to Canada before I'll ever allow you to accede to being drafted into the Army and going to Vietnam." Because her thought was that it was a pointless war.

• 14:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and she was correct. Yeah.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  She was right.

• 14:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and they took three years of his prime. That's what's crazy. I always point to the Cleveland Big Cat Williams fight.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  That was his best.

• 14:50Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  You're totally right. That was his number one performance, and he was never 100% the same after that. But he still had his mind.

• 14:59Joe Rogan?

  Yes, but he didn't train for three years. That's part of the problem.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 15:03Joe Rogan?

  And, you know, at 30 years old, in that day and age, it was just a different world. Like, you don't train for three years.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Not as much knowledge of nutrition.

• 15:11Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Not as much knowledge of training techniques, you know, the old fashioned stuff in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania, uh, not the same as, no hyperbaric chamber.

• 15:23Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Et cetera, et cetera.

• 15:25Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's just, they just robbed him. They robbed us too, because he came back and he's a different fighter than. He was much more easy to hit, and, you know, he became... You know, he relied on his chin more and, you know, he didn't have the fleet of foot movement that he had before then.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  But he found a way to rise to the top again.

• 15:42Joe Rogan?

  Yes, he did. Well, the championship mind was always there.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  That's 100% correct.

• 15:47Joe Rogan?

  But as a fan of boxing, it drives me crazy because you imagine what we could have seen in those three years if Ali had never been robbed, never took his title away and allowed him to fight all those guys like Joe Frazier, George Foreman, all those guys with keeping the same skills that he had when he was younger.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  But, and I think you're 100% correct, Joe, but isn't it, in a perverse way, a part of his mystique?

• 16:12Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  The fact that he was able to come back from those three and a half years off? The fact that he was able to rise to the top again? The fact that he was able to beat Foreman the way he beat Foreman?

• 16:24Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  And beat Frazier in the third fight?

• 16:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  In the kind of fight you would never have imagined him being in?

• 16:31Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  All these things combined to create the unique mystique of Muhammad Ali.

• 16:37Joe Rogan?

  Oh, for sure, yeah. And then also the tragic ending, you know, the staying in too long and too many beatings. You know, the, just the, seeing him at the end of his life was just so horrible, you know, and we all know that that was trauma-induced. We all know that. And it's just, it was just sad to see.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  We haven't seen that yet in MMA, right?

• 16:59Joe Rogan?

  No, not quite, but you're seeing some damage. You're seeing some guys that are really struggling. You know, you just, they're not as public, so you're not seeing it from a George St. Pierre or someone like that. George is one of the very unique former champions who has all of his wits, his faculties, retired as champion, very healthy.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Roy Jones.

• 17:21Joe Rogan?

  Roy Jones is a good example.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:23Joe Rogan?

  And Roy, you know, Roy famously, after Gerald McClellan was hurt when the Nigel Benn fight, he was really concerned because Gerald McClellan was the guy that a lot of people thought was a giant threat to Roy.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  For a long period of time when Roy and I were working together, he was providing helpful financial support to McClellan's sisters who were caring for Gerald and, you know, keeping him alive on a daily basis, I think in Illinois or Ohio, someplace like that. But, yeah, Roy loved...

• 18:00Speaker 01

  All other fighters and he did what he could to help with McClellan.

• 18:04Joe Rogan?

  I know that that loss that McClellan had and the subsequent medical issues, the stroke and the aneurysm. All that stuff really disturbed Roy and made him think, you know, about getting out early.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  100%. Yeah, cuz cuz Roy was nothing if not smart.

• 18:22Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Roy was brilliant, okay? And Roy very assertively fought in a style that would limit harm.

• 18:31Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  He didn't want to get hurt.

• 18:32Joe Rogan?

  His gifts. I mean, what a what a guy like who else in recent memory?

• 18:38Speaker 01

  There's heavyweight boxing and then there's weight class boxing. Ali is the unique physical specimen in heavyweight boxing.

• 18:44Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Roy is the unique physical specimen in weight class boxing.

• 18:48Joe Rogan?

  Right, right.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  And.

• 18:50Joe Rogan?

  So much so that he actually won the heavyweight title.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Well, exactly right. Whatever he wanted to do, if you put his mind to it, he could do that, you know, and and a part of the ongoing cliche was he could play any sport. You know, he could be great in football, basketball, baseball, etc., etc. And of course, he did go through the theatrics of playing a basketball game on the same day that he fought a fight.

• 19:15Joe Rogan?

  Which was so crazy.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  It was. It was insane.

• 19:17Joe Rogan?

  It was so crazy.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  But that was, his talent was insane.

• 19:20Joe Rogan?

  But it was also like he was just showing people. He was kind of playing with his food. He's like, I'm gonna play a basketball game and then go and easily win a fight same night.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  It's interesting you use the phrase playing with his food.

• 19:32Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  And I like it. Roy liked to play with his food.

• 19:36Joe Rogan?

  Gets to a certain level.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Sometimes you do things because you can. He knew what he could do.

• 19:42Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  So.

• 19:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I mean, his speed was so preposterous. When he would forego the jab to lead with left hooks, which was just so crazy.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  When he stood against the ropes in Miami against Glenn Kelly.

• 19:56Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  And put both hands behind his back. And made Kelly miss, miss, and then hit him with one straight hand and knocked him out?

• 20:02Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  That's Roy Jones.

• 20:04Joe Rogan?

  Oh, it was incredible. How about the Vinnie Pazienza fight when he didn't get hit for the entire round? The only round in CompuBox history where someone never got hit.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:14Joe Rogan?

  It was crazy.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  And I was with Roy at the International Boxing Hall of Fame induction ceremony a few weeks ago, and we were talking about exactly that. You know, I was, we were, you know, talking about Pazienza, and I said, is he the guy that you shut out for a round? And he said, yeah. Uh, and I just, I did it just because I wanted to do it.

• 20:32Joe Rogan?

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• 21:12Speaker 01

  That he had to create competition by doing stuff like that.

• 21:15Joe Rogan?

  He had to have fun.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:16Joe Rogan?

  He had to play with his food.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Well said.

• 21:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, no, he was spectacular. He, you know, he was one of those guys that's a unique once-in-a-lifetime talent that unfortunately, though, his mistake was going up to heavyweight and then trying to go down to 175, which is unbelievably grueling. Because he was, when he was 200 pounds at heavyweight, he was 200 lean, muscular, fast pounds. That was not like fat to lose. And so to starve himself to get down to 175, like, he was diminished. And you saw that in the Tarver fight.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  I'm not here to feather your nest, but you're brilliant. That's 100% correct.

• 21:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, if I was in, if I was his friend.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  And he lamented it afterward because he understood how he had penalized himself in that way.

• 22:05Joe Rogan?

  25 pounds is so much weight to lose. Lean muscle mass.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  And you made the point, when it's muscle.

• 22:11Joe Rogan?

  Muscle.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  If it's fat.

• 22:13Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  You can go into the steam room and sweat it off.

• 22:16Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  But once it's muscle.

• 22:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  It's there, you know, and it's, it's a part of the structure. It's a part of the building.

• 22:23Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  Now how are you gonna rip it out?

• 22:24Joe Rogan?

  Not only that, it diminishes his endurance, it diminishes durability, gets compromised because you can't take a punch as well because you've cut so much weight.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  It gets to his confidence.

• 22:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  And his confidence was unshakable.

• 22:37Joe Rogan?

  Right, it was everything.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:38Joe Rogan?

  Like when you go into the fight fatigued. You're feeling fatigued. And then you've got a guy like Tarver who's infinitely talented and has legitimate knockout power and is talking shit to you.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:48Joe Rogan?

  Right before the fight, "Got any excuses tonight, Roy?" Remember that? And then he knocks him out like, "Holy shit."

• 22:55Speaker 01

  With a brilliant, straight left hand against the ropes, I can see it in my mind, yeah.

• 22:58Joe Rogan?

  And then the Glen Johnson fight after that.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  A few weeks ago, when you mentioned the Times Square card.

• 23:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  And Tarver was my expert commentator on the Times Square card. So energetic.

• 23:09Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, Tarver's great.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  So lively, really good. Yeah, I was thrilled.

• 23:14Joe Rogan?

  And he's another guy that with his boxing skill went all the way up to heavyweight. Because he was just so much better than everybody else.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Well, how many southpaw heavyweights?

• 23:21Joe Rogan?

  Right, very few, very few. Michael Moore.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, he was southpaw, but again, another-

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Who won the championship.

• 23:27Joe Rogan?

  Yep, another light heavyweight who went up.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  And lost it to my man.

• 23:30Joe Rogan?

  George Foreman, one punch. Yeah, that was crazy.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, thus the title of my book. Thank you so much, George. You know the reason why my book is titled "It Happened"?

• 23:40Joe Rogan?

  Why?

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Where I came up with "It Happened"? So, he was the expert commentator in the weeks leading to his fight with Moore. He and I together had called Moore against Holyfield when Moore won the championship. And in the weeks before he fought Moore, I would pull him aside at crew meals and fighter meetings and other occasions when I could get a minute with him. Three, four times, I asked him, "George, how are you going to beat Moore? He's a southpaw, he's a mover, he has great feet. Holyfield couldn't find him and Holyfield was much faster than you."

• 24:24Speaker 01

  And every time I said it, George would fix me with that implacable George Foreman gaze. And say, Jim, you watch, there will come a moment late in the fight. He will come and stand in front of me and let me knock him out. Always the same words. He will come and stand in front of me and let me knock him out.

• 24:47Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  So now his moor is on the canvas. And Joe Cortez is six, seven, eight. And I'm thinking, what am I going to say about this? How in the world do you establish this without being self glorifying? You know, I've got to say something that's meaningful, but I want it to be about him.

• 25:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  And I thought about what he had said to me. And what came out spontaneously was, it happened. It happened.

• 25:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  It's really me talking to George, saying to him, okay, I get it. You told me it was going to happen and it happened.

• 25:23Joe Rogan?

  Well, do you remember when George came back and he was 300 pounds and everybody was laughing at him? And he was in his late 30s, I believe. Was he 34, 35?

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Something like that.

• 25:32Joe Rogan?

  When he made his comeback, he hadn't fought in 10 years. Everyone dismissed him like, what is he doing? He was very overweight.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  And he started the bum of the month tour.

• 25:41Joe Rogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, and, and that, that's not a fair way to say it. They weren't bums, but they were people that he knew he could beat.

• 25:49Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  To build a dossier toward what he really wanted.

• 25:53Joe Rogan?

  And get in shape.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 25:54Joe Rogan?

  And no one believed in him. No one. I remember me as a boxing fan, watching that comeback, being sad. Like, oh, George Foreman's coming back and he's all fat now. This is sad.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Well, I'm sure you've known a lot of people like this, Joe. You want to see George do something? Tell him he can't do it.

• 26:12Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Challenge his will. You know, because he's a self constructed person. You're talking about a guy who, as a teenager, 17 or 18 years old, says to himself, I want to get out of the fifth ward of Houston. I don't want this life as a gangster or a laborer or whatever I'm going to get by living in the fifth ward of Houston. I want something else. So he goes to the Job Corps in Hayward, California and enrolls in the Job Corps. And that's where he learned to box. That's what set him up a year and a half later to win his Olympic gold medal

• 26:51Speaker 01

  in Mexico City. And, uh, and then go on to his storied professional boxing career. But, you know, he, he was in his own mind, proving he could do something that other people didn't think he could do, even at that point. He told me that when he first got to Hayward, he befriended one of the other people in the Job Corps, who was a white kid. And, uh, he said, you know, they're talking about things that they like. And the guy talks about Bob Dylan, how much he likes Bob Dylan. So George got the first two or three Bob Dylan albums and listened, wanted to hear what this is all about and

• 27:35Speaker 01

  absorbed the lyrics and paid attention. And when George told me this story, I said, George, you, Bob Dylan, you know, how am I supposed to process all this? And he began quoting lyrics for me. Okay. From Blown in the Wind, from Don't Think Twice, It's All Right, etc. From early Bob Dylan songs. Yes. He knew about Hurricane. Yes. So he was just an amazing person, you know, so broad-based, you know, and that was, I think that was part of what burned in him, was that everybody, myself included, gave Ali

• 28:15Speaker 01

  credit for all that. And George wanted, in his own way, for people to see, hey, I'm not that different than that, you know? And I mean, one thing he said to me was, you can't win the heavyweight championship of the world without being smart. Okay? A stupid person couldn't do this. You know? Yeah. So he respected Moore's intelligence, but he also... Understood something that I didn't understand. He'll come and stand in front of me late in the fight and let me knock him out.

• 28:45Joe Rogan?

  Crazy that he predicted it that way because that's exactly how it played out.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, go to YouTube.

• 28:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  If you haven't seen it, it's uncanny. It really is.

• 28:55Joe Rogan?

  I was a giant Michael Moore fan when he was a light heavyweight. I think a lot of people forgot how dangerous he was at light heavyweight. He was one of the great light heavyweights.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  No question. Because of the southpaw punching power.

• 29:06Joe Rogan?

  The power at light heavyweight was extraordinary.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's true in UFC as it is in boxing, but you don't see southpaw punchers very often. Southpaws are technical. They box, they take advantage of their foot skills and their hand speed and they they beat you with boxing skills. You're not often going to run into a southpaw who's going to knock you out. But we've already talked about Tarver and and Moore was another one who had punching power. And it's, you know, kind of Cooney. Cooney was a southpaw with punching power. It's kind of doubly effective if you've got that because you're worried about the technical issues with a southpaw. And now he brings a cannon.

• 29:44Joe Rogan?

  Right, right. Yeah, the southpaw thing was always so confusing to people because if you ever boxed before, you're so accustomed to that left hand being forward.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:53Joe Rogan?

  Then all of a sudden, everything's reversed and now you're thinking.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:55Joe Rogan?

  And if you don't have a lot of southpaws that you train with on a regular basis, things aren't automatic anymore.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  And one of the things that George used to talk to him about all the time was angles. That, you know, you're you're standing in front of another man, you're confronting him, you're trying to deliver and stop delivery angles. It's all about where does it come from and where is it going and how can I deal with that? Now, I was never a fighter, so I can't empathize, but I can sympathize when I listen to that kind of thing.

• 30:23Joe Rogan?

  Well, you can see it, right? And I think the greatest at angles of all time is Lomachenko. Nobody, nobody.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  The greatest footwork, the greatest hand skills, the the most effective training by his father.

• 30:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, what a genius move to take him out of boxing for two years to study Ukrainian dance.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  And brilliant, absolutely brilliant. And and by the way, he had an effect on the national team for several years. And what culture in the world has had more? accomplishments and surprising new stars in boxing

• 31:02Joe Rogan?

  right

• 31:02Speaker 01

  other than Ukraine

• 31:04Joe Rogan?

  right and Usyk who is basically like moves like a giant Lomachenko just not quite as effective

• 31:09Speaker 01

  that's a really great phrase that I had never conjured before this moment thank you Joe a giant Lomachenko

• 31:15Joe Rogan?

  yeah you can't quite move that well when you're 220 pounds you're just dealing with gravity and mass

• 31:22Speaker 01

  but you're still creating unique angles you're you're coming at them from unique approaches etc you're hard for your opponent to figure out and Usyk is impossible for most other heavyweights

• 31:33Joe Rogan?

  constant motion

• 31:34Speaker 01

  constant motion constantly cutting off the ring with his feet and hammers you to the body as often as he can

• 31:41Joe Rogan?

  yep yeah Lomachenko in his prime was just a magical thing to watch

• 31:46Speaker 01

  brilliant

• 31:47Joe Rogan?

  it was like you were just watching poetry

• 31:48Speaker 01

  and I had the privilege of calling those fights you know it was an extreme privilege

• 31:52Joe Rogan?

  yeah it was uh it was amazing watching him just do something where you'd seen so many different versions of boxers and you watch him do it and you're like oh my god he put a new thing on this

• 32:06Speaker 01

  that's why I can't understand at this moment can't really figure out what's up with Teofimo Lopez how do you

• 32:13Joe Rogan?

  right

• 32:13Speaker 01

  beat Vasili Lomachenko

• 32:15Joe Rogan?

  right

• 32:15Speaker 01

  and then wind up you know with somewhat indifferent results since that time

• 32:21Joe Rogan?

  yeah the Cambosus fight was kinda shocking

• 32:23Speaker 01

  he fought better than the other guys in Times Square and I give him credit for upholding the card uh but still there's nothing since the Lomachenko win I mean you lose to George Cambosus

• 32:34Joe Rogan?

  I think the Cambosus fight was I think he was just a little overconfident and he got caught and then that really rocked him that really shocked him he got dropped early in the fight remember that

• 32:45Speaker 01

  it's a bad sport to be overconfident in it

• 32:47Joe Rogan?

  it's the worst sport the worst sport

• 32:50Speaker 01

  whether you're talking UFC or boxing

• 32:51Joe Rogan?

  yeah any combat sport when you don't appreciate the potential that your opponent has to do damage

• 32:57Speaker 01

  well I used to say to people all the time These are fine margins of competition. You think you see a lot of wipeouts in boxing because you see a second round knockout or a third round knockout and you think that means there's a huge talent gap between the two fighters? No, it means one fighter made a mistake.

• 33:14Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Okay?

• 33:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Ninety percent of the time, it means one fighter made a mistake. And if he thinks about it and trains against it, he won't make that mistake again.

• 33:21Joe Rogan?

  Well, like the perfect examples, Juan Manuel Marquez versus Pacquiao.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  One hundred percent.

• 33:26Joe Rogan?

  They have three insane fights that are very close. Marquez lands one bomb and starches Pacquiao. This one error, he got a little overconfident, a little, little too...

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Greatest counterpuncher of his era.

• 33:42Joe Rogan?

  And power.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and with, with power, with the straight ahead power from the shoulder. Marcus was a gifted fighter.

• 33:49Joe Rogan?

  Very gifted, but just like that one moment, like if that had happened in the first fight, we would look at the whole thing very differently.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 33:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:58Joe Rogan?

  This is like, the, the margins, as you were saying, are so small for victory, that when you see like a spectacular result, you do automatically assume, oh, that person's just that much better. Sometimes it's just one error.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  It's a moment in time.

• 34:13Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  You know, if it's a knockout, you know, that, now, if, if somebody gets knocked down six times, then you're talking about something different.

• 34:20Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  But one knockdown that leads to a ten count, that was a momentary mistake.

• 34:26Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Uh, and that's, again, that goes to the fine margins of competition. You can't make the one mistake.

• 34:34Joe Rogan?

  Right, and then, you know, it's also how do you bounce back from that? Like, some people, the one moment, e- even if just a knockdown, they don't have the capacity to correct and stay safe and then regroup. Like, they get shook and then now they're fighting from this position, this defensive position where they're a little bit gun shy.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  So, Marquez exposed the difficulties that Pacquiao could have against a great counterpuncher. And now we get ready for Mayweather-Pacquiao.

• 35:04Joe Rogan?

  Right. Mayweather just did such a smart thing, but also a devious thing. Waiting until Pacquiao was older, waiting until he slowed down, and then...

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Devious is not illegal in boxing.

• 35:14Joe Rogan?

  It's encouraged.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. In any entrepreneurial sport, devious is not illegal.

• 35:21Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Devious can be an asset.

• 35:22Joe Rogan?

  That's how you retire with a 50-0 record.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  I give Floyd credit for brilliance, okay?

• 35:26Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Floyd wasn't just a smart fighter. Floyd was a brilliant fighter. He was on his own level. And so much so, you know, in any matchup between the great counterpuncher and the great attacker, you know that the counterpuncher has the advantage. He's got more options, he's got more ways of winning. The attacker has to break through the wall, so to speak. So, in the years before Mayweather-Pacquiao, people would run up to me on the street, run up to me in the shopping center in Vegas, run up to me in a hotel. "When am I gonna see Mayweather-Pacquiao?" And I would say, "Well, we don't know, but what exactly is it you think you're going to see?" "Oh, I can't wait, it's gonna be such a great fight." No.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  It's not gonna be a great fight. It's gonna be watching, like watching somebody pluck the legs off a spider, alright? You know, at a step-by-step method. And you're going to watch Mayweather pluck the legs off the spider, that is Pacquiao, and it's going to be pretty easy for him. And it's not gonna be wildly entertaining, but it is gonna be one-sided victory. So why are you so excited about the fight? "Oh, no, I don't think that's the case, dah dah dah dah dah." But if you knew Floyd, you know, Floyd was only about winning the fight. He'll make fans other way, on the web. I call him the first great social media genius.

• 36:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. He was great at talking shit. He got everybody upset at him so badly that they wanted to see him lose, and that would sell tons of pay-per-views.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  He realized you could build an audience with negativity.

• 37:03Joe Rogan?

  Yes, a huge one.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  You didn't have to be an omnibus character. You didn't have to be somebody everybody loved. You could be totally negative.

• 37:10Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  And that would build a following, too.

• 37:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, when he shifted from Pretty Boy Floyd to Money Mayweather. Changed the whole thing.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  He knew what he was doing.

• 37:18Joe Rogan?

  He definitely did. Look, and it was, it would have been an interesting fight had he fought Pacquiao when he was younger, in his prime. It would have been a very different fight.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Would have been a more interesting fight.

• 37:28Joe Rogan?

  Much more different.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Because, because any go-forward, physical warrior like Pacquiao is going to wear down.

• 37:34Joe Rogan?

  Right, exactly.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  And any brilliant counterpuncher like Floyd is going to retain more.

• 37:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  So he did.

• 37:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it would have been much more interesting when they were younger. Also, the fact that Pacquiao fought him with a bum shoulder. That was a disaster, too.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Money talks.

• 37:48Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I mean, look, I guess he was faced with this thing, legacy, or, I mean, it was the biggest pay-per-view of all time in boxing, correct?

• 37:55Speaker 01

  I believe so.

• 37:56Joe Rogan?

  I believe so. And I think it was like four million buys or something crazy like that.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  It was huge.

• 38:00Joe Rogan?

  So like, what is that?

• 38:01Speaker 01

  It was massive.

• 38:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, just lured Pacquiao into those...

• 38:04Speaker 01

  All those people who had run up to me on the street corners for years finally got the chance to see what they wanted to see.

• 38:09Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, give him a cortisone shot, throw him out there. Yeah, unfortunately. This is an advertisement from BetterHelp. Stress in the workplace is becoming an issue around the world. Did you know that 60% of the global workforce is reported experiencing higher-than-normal levels of stress? So, it's more important than ever that we learn to take some time for ourselves. Plan a nice, long holiday this summer, go hiking, read a book, play video games. I've found that even a few minutes of meditation can help. Another great option is therapy. Everyone can benefit from it, and it's arguably one of the better long-term solutions to stress. Therapy can teach you how to positively cope and manage anxiety while improving your self-confidence and self-awareness.

• 38:54Joe Rogan?

  It can be very empowering. And thanks to BetterHelp, therapy is becoming more and more convenient. All it takes is a few clicks to join a session. You can also join from anywhere, whether you're at the beach, on your vacation, or at home after a grueling day of work. Plus, as the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com/jre. That's better H-E-L-P dot com slash J-R-E. Unfortunately, I remember there was like a class-action lawsuit. It was a lot of people were upset that Pacquiao fought injured. A lot of the gamblers.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  I never talked to Freddie about that, but you know, at the end of the day, the fighter makes the decision.

• 39:46Joe Rogan?

  Well, the money, yeah.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  And the money.

• 39:49Joe Rogan?

  And the money, yeah. That happens a lot in the UFC. There's a lot of fighters that fight injured and you know.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I gotta tell you this while we're talking about him, alright? I apologize for going off script here a little bit. I was with Manny three weeks ago, less than a month ago, at the Hall of Fame inductions in Canostota, New York, where he was being inducted into the Hall of Fame. And on the night before the induction ceremony, there's a big banquet in a banquet hall at the Turning Stone Casino, and I'm sitting up on the dais between Roy and Ross Greenberg, my former boss at HBO, and right across to the left of us, behind the podium, is Manny. And several people spoke. I didn't know that I was gonna speak.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  I was asked to get up and speak. I did. Roy did a speech, et cetera, et cetera. Eventually, Manny got up and made a speech. Now, I met Manny Pacquiao 24 years ago, in a fighter meeting room in Las Vegas before his fight against Lechonola Ledwaba, which was his first appearance in the United States.

• 40:59Joe Rogan?

  What weight class was that?

• 41:00Speaker 01

  He was a kind of a throw-in opponent. What weight class was that?

• 41:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  So that would have been 122.

• 41:06Joe Rogan?

  Oh, isn't that nuts?

• 41:08Speaker 01

  And Larry and I were 100% convinced that Ledwaba was the best 122-pound fighter in the world. We had seen him on the undercard of Lewis Rockman in Johannesburg, South Africa. There's nobody, nobody who could possibly be better than that. Grace, style, hand skills, all the stuff. And I meet Manny in that room. He can't put three or four words of English together. I learn his backstory, that he survived by selling stolen cigarettes on the streets of General Santos City in the Philippines. I-

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Get and understand that his big activity outside of the gym is to go play pool. Yeah. He's a pool player in Professional level. In bar rooms, exactly. Yeah, he plays very good. Professional level, pool player, etc., all of that. And, um, and then fast forward 24 years and he's being inducted at the Hall of Fame. And without warning, he's asked to speak that night. And he stands up and makes a 15-minute speech, maybe 12 minutes, but it was more than 10. All in English, all perfect, uh, all more or less off the top of his head, unedited. It was brilliant. And, and I went to him afterward, hugged him, told him how much I loved him, and I said, I said, Manny,

• 42:29Speaker 01

  I first met you 24 years ago when you couldn't put three words of English together. And I know that politics had something to do with this. And he said, yes, but a lot of my political speeches were in Tagalog. Uh, and I said, well, some of them were in English. He said, yes, some. Um, and I said, uh, I don't think there's any sport other than boxing where somebody could have achieved the kind of personal transformation that you have achieved. This is the only one. And he said, well, it sure helped me, that's for sure. Now, you probably know the story about Muhammad Ali and graduating from high school in Louisville? Yes.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Okay, so just for our listeners and consumers, um, Ali had very bad grades. And in his senior year, he was flunking a math course. And in order to graduate, he had to pass the math course. And he was nowhere near it. And the math teacher went to the principal of the high school and said, I'm gonna give him a passing grade, even though he has not performed on any of the tests and he doesn't do the homework and stuff like that. And the principal is like, why would you do this for, for this kid? Why would you give him a passing grade when he hasn't earned it? And the teacher said, "You have to understand, he's going to be the most famous man in the world.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  And we cannot be the high school that denied a diploma to the most famous man in the world."

• 44:03Joe Rogan?

  That's such a crazy statement. I wonder if it's true.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  I wonder if it's true too, but it's a fun story to tell and of course, it's secondhand. You're exactly right.

• 44:13Joe Rogan?

  It is, it's so good.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  I don't know the teacher and I don't know the principal. I just know the story. Uh, and I know, and I know Ali's primary biographer, uh, Tom Hauser. So, maybe I got it from Tom.

• 44:26Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I, I'd like to believe that that's true.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  I'd like to believe it's true too.

• 44:30Joe Rogan?

  It makes it more fun.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  Let's make a pact to believe it's true.

• 44:33Joe Rogan?

  The thing about Pacquiao that's so extraordinary is that he kept his power through eight weight classes. That is just wild. Like who, what other fighter can you name that went through eight different weight classes as a world champion?

• 44:46Speaker 01

  I can't. None. No, obviously. Um, what I, what I did learn that may relate to that is Foreman was at great pains to explain to me and explained a couple of times that power punching is not a physical gift. Power punching is a science. Power punching is the product of real technical knowledge. Power punching is about, um, footwork, weight shift, uh, the angle at which you deliver the punch. Uh, you know, all sorts of things not directly related to your strength or quote, "power." Uh, and George was a disciplined and knowledgeable scientist, uh, about stuff like that.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  And he, he explained it all to me one time. And of course, if you watch the Muir knockout, he lands the first one-two right on the button.

• 45:39Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  And then, having Muir where he wants him, he puts a little more mustard on the second one-two and we're out of there.

• 45:47Joe Rogan?

  But there are physical gifts that you are just, they're just God-given gifts of power.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Big hands, big hands.

• 45:54Joe Rogan?

  Big hands are...

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Shoulders. Yeah, all that.

• 45:57Joe Rogan?

  There's just certain guys though, that just have extraordinary power. Like you remember Julian Jackson in his prime.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh. Hawk. Oh my gosh.

• 46:05Joe Rogan?

  Extraordinary power.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  At some moment or another, he's gonna get you.

• 46:09Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it was just disturbing.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:11Joe Rogan?

  How hard he hit. It was just different than everybody else and it looked like he was doing the same thing, but the results were so much different.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  How about Andy Lee? Skinny, not somebody you would expect to have, you know, heavy hands, knocking everybody out with the left hand.

• 46:26Joe Rogan?

  Deontay Wilder.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, another one.

• 46:28Joe Rogan?

  A 209-pound heavyweight, that's flattening people. I have 209 pounds when he fights Tyson Fury the first time.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  Some of it is the bravery to commit.

• 46:37Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  You know, can you, can you push your weight forward?

• 46:41Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  In a way that might leave you open to the counter and, and believe that you're gonna get the better of that exchange. If you believe you're gonna get the better of the exchange, go ahead, go forward. And, and that enhances your chance of knocking someone out.

• 46:56Joe Rogan?

  But there is, there's physical gifts that you are just God given, and some people have them. And these are the extraordinary outliers, the Deontay Wilders, the Julian Jacksons, the John Mugabes. Remember Mugabe?

• 47:11Speaker 01

  John the Beast Mugabe.

• 47:12Joe Rogan?

  Ooh, I rewatched that Mugabe Hagler fight the other day in the gym.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  What a great fight. What a great fight.

• 47:19Joe Rogan?

  What a fight. What a fight. Hagler was my hero when I was a kid. And he was one of the first guys.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  So I'm sure you're an advocate with regard to what I call the number one elevator fight of all time.

• 47:33Joe Rogan?

  Thomas Hearns.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Hagler was the winner.

• 47:35Joe Rogan?

  Which one?

• 47:36Speaker 01

  The number one elevator fight of all time, and an elevator fight is the fight where you're Jim Lampley, or you're Joe Rogan, or you're any combat sports expert, et cetera, and you step onto an elevator with six people, and somebody turns around and says, "Who won Leonard Hagler?"

• 47:51Joe Rogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  The debate about the decision, you know?

• 47:55Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  And, uh, you know, I'm sure you say Hagler beat Rey.

• 48:00Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Uh, and of course, we all know that Rey partially won the judges and the crowd with showbiz.

• 48:08Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  With, you know, with the way that he threw his arms up at the end of every round and, you know, called attention to himself. And he, he was quite aware of what he was doing. Uh, and he was quite aware also that it would get under Hagler's skin.

• 48:21Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  You know, there, there was an element of genius in Rey, as we talked about already.

• 48:27Joe Rogan?

  For sure.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  That, that went to more than- Just his spectacular physical gifts.

• 48:32Joe Rogan?

  Right, yeah, no, he he gamed the system a little bit. He figured out how to flurry at the end of the rounds and make a big impression in the judges' eyes. That was a very close fight, but that fight always bothered me. And one of the things that bothered me is I felt like there were moments where Hagler could have turned it up and didn't. And then when he retired after that fight and went to Italy and became a giant movie star in Italy, the conspiratorial part of my brain was always like, was that like one of those deals? Where everybody assumed that Hagler was gonna win. Hagler was a destroyer, Hagler had knocked out Tommy Hearns, Hagler had beaten everybody in the division, knocked out Mugabe. He was, he was the man, you know?

• 49:17Speaker 01

  You fought, right?

• 49:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  So you fought, I didn't, I mean, I've only talked. But because you fought, you probably have an even stronger sense than I do of how difficult the sport is.

• 49:29Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Uh, the training is difficult.

• 49:31Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  The fear factor is is certainly part of it. Um, the level of concentration and devotion that it takes, uh, it it's not easy.

• 49:43Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  Team sports are easier. Uh, and and um, and so, you know, I'm I'm I'm thinking that every fighter reaches a point where enough.

• 49:56Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  And and they might reach that point without really cognitively knowing that they've reached that point where it's enough. Hagler went to Italy, as you say.

• 50:05Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Maybe he had already reached something like enough.

• 50:09Joe Rogan?

  Could be.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Before he fought Rey in that fight.

• 50:11Joe Rogan?

  Well, you know, he had accomplished so much and also his training camps were the stuff of legend. I mean, he would spar a hundred rounds a week sometimes, which is just insane.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:24Joe Rogan?

  Hagler was a monster. I mean, his conditioning and his drive and his will and his discipline, he was a monster. He would scare the shit out of everybody just from his work ethic. I remember I told the story, there was a news piece, um, when he was training on the Cape, and it was in the middle of the winter and he was fighting Mustafa Hamseh, and he was running down the sand dune screaming "War!" With combat boots on in the winter. And I remember thinking.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  War, war!

• 50:54Joe Rogan?

  Because you think you're disciplined, you think you're driven, you think, you know, you're special. And then you see a guy like that, it's like, he's what my friend David Goggins calls uncommon amongst uncommon men.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  Great line. So where does Hagler Hearns rank among your all-time favorites?

• 51:09Joe Rogan?

  One of the greatest of all time. Great, one of the greatest fights of all time. Because Hagler just threw caution to the wind. Fuck all this boxing. Just jumped, jumped out.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  So did Tommy.

• 51:20Joe Rogan?

  So did Tommy.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Tommy didn't, Tommy didn't go in with a self-protective approach.

• 51:25Joe Rogan?

  He tried to box. Remember, after he broke his hand, he tried just throwing the jab out there. You could tell early on in the first round when he broke his hand.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 51:32Joe Rogan?

  Because from then on, he's moving, he's a little, but he's already endured so much damage. I mean, they have just thrown each other into the wood chipper. Both guys were just blasting away.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  I hope, I hope a lot of people are gonna listen to this and go watch Hagler Hearns on, on their web attachment.

• 51:50Joe Rogan?

  They have to.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  Because it is great, as, as anything has ever been.

• 51:53Joe Rogan?

  It was insane. I remember being in my living room when, when Hearns went down and just going, wow! Like, you can't believe, and this was after Hearns had knocked out Duran. And I thought, nobody could knock out Duran. When Hearns flatlined Duran, I was like, good lord, good lord. Like, to see Duran face down on the canvas is like, yeah, you have to check your eyes. Like, is this real?

• 52:17Speaker 01

  Well, did Tommy break his hand with that right hand in the first round against Hagler?

• 52:21Joe Rogan?

  Yes, yeah, yeah.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 52:23Joe Rogan?

  There you go.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  You've lost, you've lost your primary weapon.

• 52:26Joe Rogan?

  He has one knockdown attributed to him in his career, and it's bullshit. The Juan Roldan fight.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 52:32Joe Rogan?

  Bullshit, not really a knockdown.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  And now we deal with Canelo.

• 52:35Joe Rogan?

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• 53:20Joe Rogan?

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• 54:03Joe Rogan?

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• 54:16Speaker 01

  Who has had one knockdown attributed to him in his career, and in my view, it was bullshit.

• 54:22Joe Rogan?

  Which fight was that?

• 54:23Speaker 01

  So it was Miguel Coto's little brother, Jose Coto. It was the first time we had Canelo on HBO. Believe it was an undercard of a top-ranked pay-per-view. I'm not 100% certain about that. And Coto's little brother, Jose, caught Canelo with a right-hand body punch to the chest. And Canelo hit the ropes behind him and bounced off the ropes kind of unbalanced. He didn't go down, but he came off the ropes ungainly, unbalanced, etc. And the referee, and I can't remember which referee, stepped in and very technically ruled that the ropes had held him up.

• 55:05Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  So that's the only official knockdown in Canelo's career, and he didn't touch the canvas.

• 55:12Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  Nobody has ever put him on the canvas. And this is part of what Terrence is facing. As he gets ready to fight him in September is you're you're fighting a guy who up to this moment in his career has been utterly knockout proof.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  Knockdown proof.

• 55:29Joe Rogan?

  Well, even against a guy like Bivol, who's huge.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 55:33Joe Rogan?

  A huge light heavyweight.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, but Bivol is, Bivol is, I'm gonna say at least 50 50 a backup counterpuncher. Uh, and they don't muster exactly the same power as a go forward attacker.

• 55:48Joe Rogan?

  True.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  I, you know, you notice that he hasn't fought Betterbiev. Uh, and I'm not sure that Betterbiev would be the right matchup, but.

• 55:57Joe Rogan?

  For Canelo.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:58Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  Canelo.

• 55:58Joe Rogan?

  I think that would be a nightmare matchup. You know, Betterbiev especially, even though he's almost 40 now, right? Is he 40? He might be 40.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  He might be 40.

• 56:06Joe Rogan?

  But.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  But he's still in shape and he still comes forward and he's a, you know, naturally heavy hands.

• 56:10Joe Rogan?

  Oh, one of the scariest of all time at 175. He's another one of those guys. It's just like, but with him, it's volume. It's not one shot, but it's this thudding volume that never ends, this constant attack.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  Which is what has made his two fights with Bivol so spectacular to watch, you know? Because Bivol is not a make fire fighter.

• 56:33Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  He's a natural counterpuncher.

• 56:35Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  But if you insist on making the fire and you're strong enough to make the fire, then Bivol has to fight.

• 56:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  Which he's done twice against Betterbiev.

• 56:43Joe Rogan?

  Well, he made brilliant adjustments in the second fight. Brilliant adjustments.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  He's a brilliant guy.

• 56:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I mean, he really, really made the proper adjustments and the counter strikes and the movement and he was just much better in the second fight.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  It's another country with very good boxing training.

• 56:57Joe Rogan?

  Oh, phenomenal. Do you think that they're, are they having a rubber match?

• 57:00Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 57:01Joe Rogan?

  A third?

• 57:01Speaker 01

  I don't know. Yeah, I'm not, I don't talk to promoters anymore, so yeah, I'm not sure about that. I hope they do.

• 57:09Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  I think it's a fantastic idea.

• 57:11Joe Rogan?

  I think Riyadh season was trying to put that together. I think they're trying to put together a third fight and I really hope they do make that fight.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Go Turkey.

• 57:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you, you kind of have to do it now before Betterbiev is just. He's probably past his prime.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  Forty-one, forty-two, etc. These numbers sound forbidding, yes.

• 57:29Joe Rogan?

  But still, even as a guy.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  Remember, Foreman was forty-five.

• 57:32Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  What did he still have?

• 57:34Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  Power.

• 57:35Joe Rogan?

  Right, true. And in skill, the skill thing. Like, here's the best example of that, Bernard Hopkins. Who has maintained their skill deep into their forties. In fact, at a world-class level, at forty-nine years old, beating, like, top contenders at forty-nine years old.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  One of the smartest men I've ever met, okay? Bernard Hopkins is smart beyond smart. Uh, he has, uh, PhD-type intelligence, he really does. And he was also a very critical and thoughtful self-examiner. So, those two things helped Bernard to sustain long into, you know, antiquity. And an extremely disciplined personal life.

• 58:20Joe Rogan?

  Yes, that's the big one.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  Because, you know, he, he kept his prison tattoo on his arm. And he kept that number on his arm to remind him that he was never going to go back. And, and I asked him one time, I said, "What, what's the hardest thing you've ever done?" And he said, "Well, the hardest thing I've ever done was to walk off nine in the neighborhood in which I grew up." I said, "What do you mean, 'walk off nine'?" Nine years of probation. Nine years of living on and in the same streets where I was, the king of the streets when I was, uh, on the other side of the law. Nine years of reminding myself that I could never go back, that my, my behavior had to change completely.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  That's what he called walking off nine.

• 59:10Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  What a phrase, huh?

• 59:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, what a phrase.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  What a guy.

• 59:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  Really, what a guy.

• 59:15Joe Rogan?

  Well, I remember when he was middleweight champion, and he wasn't getting the credit that he felt like he deserved, and he was, you know, squabbling with promoters, they kept him on the shelf, I'm like, "My god, he's like wasting away in the prime of his life." And I felt like we were gonna like miss out on the prime of his life, and then here he, he gets into the Felix Trinidad fight. And I was like, "This guy's, this is crazy, watching this guy like completely outclass Tito Trinidad." I'm like, "This is nuts."

• 59:46Speaker 01

  Of all the fighters I've ever known, if you were to ask me... Who is the one most likely to still be holding every dollar he ever made? That's Bernard.

• 59:56Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  Okay. He gives nothing away. Uh, and he protects himself, he protects his family, he protects everything about his experience in an extremely devoted way. Why? Walking off nine. Never wants to go back.

• 1:00:12Joe Rogan?

  Wow. Well, those are the stories that are so inspiring about boxing, right? The, the, the people that have used boxing as a vehicle to get out of their circumstances.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah, and Bernard's one of the greatest examples imaginable. I love him. You know, I had him on my show, The Fight Game on HBO. I had him do technical pieces. Because he was better than anybody at explaining footwork, technique, et cetera. Andre Ward could have done it too. But Andre was still fighting, uh, at that period of time.

• 1:00:44Joe Rogan?

  Hmm. Yeah, that was a great show, man. That was another bummer when, when HBO stopped doing boxing.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  Well, look.

• 1:00:51Joe Rogan?

  But it had to be successful for them.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  I like to say this, it wasn't HBO, okay? The minute that Time Warner was bought by a bunch of cell phone salesmen from Dallas, AT&T, the character of the operation changed. And the first thing that went away was boxing. Uh, it's in my book, you'll read it. Uh, there's an anecdote about, uh, me, uh, at a post Emmy Awards or post Golden Globe Awards event in Hollywood shortly after AT&T had purchased HBO. And I was seated at the table of Richard Plepler, the, uh, longtime brilliant chairman of HBO, my beloved boss. And, uh, Plepler said, see that guy over there in the gray suit?

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  And I said, yeah. He said, that's your new boss. That's John Stanky, the CEO of AT&T. I think you ought to go say hello. Think you ought to go meet him and just spend a little time with him. So I took his advice, so went over and had a 10-minute discussion with Stanky, very nice, um, very cordial, fun.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  And I walked back to Plepler's table and he said, "So what do you think?" I said, "I think boxing is dead." He said, "I agree with you." "I just wanted to be sure that we were on the same page."

• 1:02:12Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it was clear. It was clear from that moment that they they were not interested in going forward with something as-

• 1:02:19Joe Rogan?

  Why did you think boxing was dead? Why'd you say that?

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I could just tell from the way in which he spoke to me and the-

• 1:02:28Joe Rogan?

  Oh, so you weren't saying it based on your personal opinion?

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  The diffident replies to questions like, "Are we gonna do this fight?" You know, "What do you think about that?" Stuff like that. It was abundantly clear that they just they saw it as a negative rather than a positive.

• 1:02:43Joe Rogan?

  In public perception or profitability?

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  Profitability.

• 1:02:47Joe Rogan?

  Really? But it was the place-

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  Many unpredictables in boxing. You schedule a show, somebody gets hurt, etc. I think they didn't want that kind of um, real-life upheaval and also they saw it as unsavory. Or at least it felt that way to me. You know, so, um-

• 1:03:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well that was-

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  This goes to the fact, and you know this as well as I do or maybe better. People from outside combat sports don't understand combat sports. You know, you're either in the culture and you get it, or you're not.

• 1:03:21Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  You know, and I you know, when I first started calling fights, I was assigned to call boxing at ABC Sports by an incoming new president of the sports department who wanted to get rid of me. And who thought, and who thought that I would be such a misfit in boxing that if he assigned me to boxing, the audience would reject me.

• 1:03:46Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  That they would see me as the successor to Cosell. That would cut my throat. And then I would walk away from my contract, which is what he wanted me to do. He wanted me to, he thought my contract was absurd, too lucrative, he didn't like the guarantees for relative to exposure, and he told my agent, flat out, he said, "I'm gonna get rid of Jim, I'm gonna make him walk away." And his first method for doing it was boxing. Wow. So of course, that means he didn't know that the very first sports event my mother ever sat me down to watch, when I was six years old, after my father died when I was five, was Sugar Ray Robinson versus Boba Olsen for the middleweight championship on Gillette Friday Night Fights. That I had grown up, all through my childhood and teenage years, watching Gillette Friday

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  Night Fights. And later, people would say to me, "Who's the voice in the back of your mind when you're calling fights? Is it Cosell?" I said, "Oh, hell no. I would never try to emulate that." Don Dunphy, crisp, precise, factual, on point, that's who I'm hearing in the back of my head when I, uh, when I call fights. Interesting. Yeah, so he, he thought he could get rid of me by signing me to boxing. And, um, he also did not seem to be paying much attention to the fact that his division, with leadership of a guy named Alex Waller, who was a boxing freak, had just signed a get acquainted looksy contract with a nineteen-year-old heavyweight from upstate New York, whose name was Mike Tyson. Yeah.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  So the first fight I ever called on TV was Mike Tyson versus Jesse Ferguson in Glens Falls, New York. And this is the famous "drive his nose bone into his, into his brain" fight. Yeah. Alex went to do post-fight interview after Tyson had obliterated Jesse's nose with an uppercut. There was blood all over the ring. And, uh, and Alex said, you know, "Mike, tell me about the uppercut." And Mike said, "Captain Mott taught me that the purpose of the uppercut is to drive the opponent's nose bone into his brain. I was trying to drive his nose bone into his brain." And I'm standing on the other side of the ring, listening to this, headset on. And I thought to myself, oh my God, look at what I've stumbled into here.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  This kid is not only going to be the biggest attraction in boxing. He's going to be the biggest attraction in American culture. If he can keep coming up with quotes like that. And of course, within the next few weeks, they all started spilling out. Boxing is a hurt business. Everybody's got a plan until you hit them. All the things that D'Amato had taught him, which he memorized and then reproduced in his media contacts.

• 1:06:27Joe Rogan?

  Yes. One of my favorite TV fights was him versus Marvus Frazier. Cause it was such a terrifying execution.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  I'm giving away too much of the book, Joe. I mean, my, my publisher would say, wait, don't tell them the whole book.

• 1:06:41Joe Rogan?

  Come on, people are gonna buy it anyway. Don't worry about that. Don't ever listen to publishers.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  So Alex Wallow and I lived five blocks apart on Upper Fifth Avenue in New York. And when we went to upstate New York for the Tyson fights, of which there were several, we would always ride up in his green Jaguar and he knew the route. He would drive, play me his esoteric rock music. You ever heard of Cock Robin? Try him out sometime.

• 1:07:08Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  And, and so all the way up to Albany for the Marvus Frazier fight. Alex is saying to me, you know, I'm thinking of saying in the opening on camera, that Mike will knock him out in the first round. Do you think that's too audacious? And I said, well, Alex, you're the expert. You know, I'm just a throw in blow by blow guy who's trying to get my feet wet here. I'm the last person who's going to tell you what it is you should say. So if you believe Mike is going to knock him out in the first round, then you're confident saying that. First of all, no one's going to penalize you on Monday, if you're wrong. Nobody's going to print some big headline that says Wallow was crazy or something like that.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  It's, it goes into the wash at that point. And second of all, if you're right, you will get credit for it. If you're right, Rudy Martzky will say so in USA Today. And so that's our position for two thirds of the trip to Albany. And now in the last, oh, 40 or 50 miles, he starts saying, what if I said he's going to knock him out in the first minute? Do you think that's too brave?

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  Same thing, Alex, if you believe he's gonna knock him out in the first minute, go ahead and say he's gonna knock him out in the first minute. I'm not here to control you or tell you what to say. Say whatever you want to say. I think I'm gonna say that he's gonna knock him out in the first minute. So the following day, we do rehearsal for the opening on camera, and he says he'll knock him out in the first minute. Then when we do the live opening on camera for the show, he gets a little more cautious, and he pulls it back to, "There you are."

• 1:08:49Joe Rogan?

  Look at young, handsome, Jim Almaly.

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:52Joe Rogan?

  Look at you.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  Hair parted on the right. We'll get to that in a moment. Um, he, uh, he pulls it back, and when we do it live on camera, he says, "Mike will knock him out in the first round." Was it 33 seconds or 31 seconds?

• 1:09:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  I think it was 33 seconds. And all the way back to New York.

• 1:09:13Joe Rogan?

  He said, "Should've said in the first minute."

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  He is moaning and groaning, "Why in God's name didn't I say what I really believed?" Like, "Alex, Alex, you said he'd knock him out in the first round."

• 1:09:23Joe Rogan?

  And you were right.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  You're going to get credit for that. You were right. Yeah, but I could've gotten more credit if I'd said what I really believed.

• 1:09:30Joe Rogan?

  That's such a silly perspective.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  We talk about fighters freezing. Marvis froze on Saturday. I mean, on Friday, the day before the fight. Marvis was frozen.

• 1:09:39Joe Rogan?

  Well, we knew. We knew coming into that fight. We knew. It was a perfect fight for Mike to showcase because Marvis had the giant name because he was Joe Frazier's son, and Joe Frazier had been trash-talking Mike and...

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  It helped to create what ultimately became...

• 1:09:55Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  The myth of Mike Tyson. The notion that he was going to knock everybody out in that way.

• 1:10:01Joe Rogan?

  And it was such an execution.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  And partially because of stuff like that, that Douglas is a 42-1 underdog in Tokyo.

• 1:10:07Joe Rogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  When if you looked at the record for the preceding year, year and a half coming into Tokyo... Mike went the distance with James Bonecrusher Smith.

• 1:10:17Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  Mike went the distance with Tony Tucker.

• 1:10:19Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  Mike went the distance with James Quick Tillis.

• 1:10:22Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  There were scores at ringside in upstate New York who had Tillis as the winner in the fight. He went to the last 10 seconds with Jose Rivalta. He went the distance with Mitch Bloodgreen.

• 1:10:32Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  What did they all have in common? They were all taller than Mike.

• 1:10:36Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  Some of them have a right hand that would come over the top where he would have difficulty seeing the delivery. And, um, when you get to Douglas, best athlete of the group, former college basketball player with good feet, had a big right hand. I mean, looking back, pure logic, no way in the world Mike should be a 42 to 1 favorite against Buster Douglas.

• 1:11:00Joe Rogan?

  But Buster Douglas had underperformed most of his career and had not been motivated. Then his mother dies.

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  That's correct. 100% correct and you're right on point for saying it at this moment.

• 1:11:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, his mother died and then...

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  And that lit him up.

• 1:11:15Joe Rogan?

  Lit him up and never again.

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  And Mike was at the height

• 1:11:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  of his differences with Robin Givens.

• 1:11:22Joe Rogan?

  Right, right.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:24Joe Rogan?

  Constant turmoil and, yeah, and partying and, and feeling invincible.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  Nothing that can do more damage to a good man than the wrong woman, right?

• 1:11:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  And she was the wrong woman.

• 1:11:36Joe Rogan?

  She's the wrong woman, period. Yeah, that was... There's, there's, there's certain women out there like that, that they could tank your life, yeah, and unfortunately.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  OJ used to say to me, "If you want to know what the daughter's going to be like, look at the mother." And if you looked at her mother and the background relative to Dave Winfield and all of that, maybe you could have predicted.

• 1:12:02Joe Rogan?

  You probably could have.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  Or, or as Merchant said in our on-camera prior to the Tubbs Tokyo fight, Tyson versus Tubbs in Tokyo, first fight I ever did on HBO. Larry had a line before the fight where he said, "This is the beginning of the Robin thing." Cus had died, um, Jimmy Jacobs had died. No, Cus hadn't died, Jimmy Jacobs had... At any rate... Um.

• 1:12:28Joe Rogan?

  With Kevin Rooney was already out then, right?

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:12:32Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  Larry said, "Since the beginning of organized boxing, heavyweight champions have often consorted with actresses, and never to their benefit."

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  It's a classic Merchant line, among many classic Merchant lines. I love him.

• 1:12:55Joe Rogan?

  That was one of the best things about you and Merchant, and just the entire commentary team at HBO, was that there's, you had these intelligent, articulate people involved in what many people think of as the most barbaric of all sports.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:13:12Joe Rogan?

  So, it defined it in a very different way.

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  That's the HBO way.

• 1:13:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  Elevated.

• 1:13:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. It certainly was elevated.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  And HBO's executives were smart enough to see that you can treat it as an intellectual event.

• 1:13:26Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  And, and if you're doing it right, you'll get away with it.

• 1:13:30Joe Rogan?

  But it has to be with the commentators. It, it, it frames everything. The same exact event with crude commentators is not the same experience. Because you don't get that intelligent, articulate analysis, and a guy like Larry Merchant, who'd been around boxing for his entire life, and had a deep understanding of it, and you, and then, it's even the funny back-and-forth banter between Larry and George Foreman, when they would disagree on things.

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. And I'm very proud to say, not blowing my own horn, but Larry and George in particular, there's a sports television columnist in the New York Daily News named Bob Raissman, R-A-I-S-S-M-A-N. And at some point in that arc, Raissman wrote in his TV sports column in the Daily News, "Lampley, Merchant, and Foreman are the greatest three-man broadcasting team in the history of sports television." Now, think about that.

• 1:14:28Joe Rogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  This is not Monday Night Football. This is HBO Boxing.

• 1:14:34Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know what I mean? And so he was saying, in effect, this is better than Gifford, Meredith and Cosell.

• 1:14:41Joe Rogan?

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• 1:15:26Joe Rogan?

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• 1:16:11Joe Rogan?

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• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  Uh, and you know, I was, I was very, very flattered by that. You know, which I should have been.

• 1:16:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah, having a great team like that. And then, and it was also, there was the flow where you guys had worked together so often.

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  And, and there was.

• 1:16:58Speaker 01

  The Between Rounds though.

• 1:16:59Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  What set Showtime and HBO apart from ABC, CBS and NBC? No commercials.

• 1:17:06Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  And, and no commercials means you get one of the most meaningful and communicative parts of the narrative, which is what goes on in the corner between rounds. So you're watching Tyson Douglas, for instance, and you see these two novice trainers struggling with a condom filled with water.

• 1:17:28Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:17:29Speaker 01

  To try to, to try to do something to ease the swelling in his eye. No inswell. Unbelievable. I remember Ray, Ray nearly fell off his chair when he saw that.

• 1:17:39Joe Rogan?

  It's just so hard to believe that you could achieve the highest level of combat sports, the heavyweight champion of the world, and yet have this really rank amateur corner.

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  There was so much that was taken for granted about Mike.

• 1:17:55Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  During that stage of his career. The only person in that camp, once Tomado died, the only person, and Jimmy died, the only person in that camp who was really aware of how vulnerable he could be was Mike. Mike, Mike was a boxing genius. Mike knew much more than those guys about how to prepare for a fight, et cetera, et cetera. But again, before Tokyo, he was distracted.

• 1:18:22Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  Thoroughly distracted.

• 1:18:23Joe Rogan?

  And it just, it comes with success, all the trappings. I mean, he was just constantly, you know.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  You know Mike, right?

• 1:18:32Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  Have you had him in here?

• 1:18:34Joe Rogan?

  Oh, a couple of times, yeah.

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  One of the most lovable people in the world.

• 1:18:37Joe Rogan?

  I love him to death, yeah, he's great.

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  You can't not love Mike. If you, if you know him.

• 1:18:40Joe Rogan?

  No, if you know him, I mean, the first time I met him, it's, it's hard to believe he's really in the room. You're like, you're like, I can't believe he's real. Like, he's right there, this is Mike Tyson.

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:49Joe Rogan?

  Me, as a child, I remember when I was a kid, when I, I guess I wasn't a child, I'm only a year younger than him, but when he lost to Buster Douglas, I didn't watch it until after the fight. I watched a replay of it and I still expected him to win.

• 1:19:06Joe Rogan?

  You know how crazy that is? That's the kind of aura-

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  So you've read in the paper and on the web that he's lost, but you're still expecting him to win?

• 1:19:14Joe Rogan?

  I remember I heard about it in a gas station. Someone told me in a gas station-

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  And I can't believe this is true.

• 1:19:21Joe Rogan?

  I was getting gas and I heard, "Did you hear Mike Tyson got knocked out?" And I remember pumping gas, "What the fuck are you talking about? Like, what? Like Buster Douglas knocked out Mike Tyson? What? For real?"

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  So we talked about the call of Foreman Moore and where that call came from. The other call that is on that same level in terms of, you know, people remembering and stuff like that, is that call. And you just came very close to identically articulating what my call was. Because, you know, I'm watching the rounds in Tokyo, and I've arrived in Tokyo with a firm opinion that Mike is gonna knock this guy out in one, two, three rounds, something like that. And as the rounds go on and you're watching the debacle unfold, the, you know, water in the rubber glove to try to stop the swelling and stuff like that,

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  you realize that the preparation might not be all there. And Douglas is getting more confident. And Douglas is landing his jab, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:20:23Joe Rogan?

  And hooking off the jab.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  And hooking off the jab, and, I mean, people think that he knocked him out with a right hand, it was the left hook that did the damage. The left hook was thunderous and Mike stumbled to his side and then... But at any rate, I'm sitting there in Tokyo. It's 10:30 or 11 o'clock in the morning. There are 34,000 people seated around me making no noise whatsoever.

• 1:20:53Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  The culture of a Japanese sports event. It's as though they are at an opera. You know, and that's just cultural, it's the way they are. And as that count is rising, five, six, seven, and it's abundantly clear that Mike's not gonna get up. And I'm thinking, "Oh my god, what am I gonna say about this?" The very first live fight I ever attended was the biggest upset in boxing history. And now, here in front of me, 12, 14 feet away, is the result that's going to supplant that as the biggest upset in boxing history. So what do I say? And I've told this story many times. If you've heard it, I apologize for repeating.

• 1:21:38Speaker 01

  But I was developing a golf relationship with the greatest actor of my generation, Jack Nicholson, who became a close friend and later saved my career, but that's another story. And I had asked Jack on the golf course about two or three weeks before Tokyo. So Jack, when you're going to the set to deliver the fulcrum line in the movie, when you're going to the set to do the one thing that everybody in the audience is going to remember, when you're getting ready to go deliver, you can't handle the truth, what is it you have on your mind? What's your mantra? He said, "Lamb, same thing I've been saying to myself ever since I first went to acting class. Don't overact."

• 1:22:22Speaker 01

  So I'm in Tokyo. The count reaches four or five, and I hear in the back of my mind Jack's voice, "Don't overact." And that call became, "Mike Tyson has been knocked out." In about that tone of voice, I wanted to make it as matter of fact as possible because there was nothing I could do to elevate it by screaming, or shouting, or delivering any kind of window dressing, etc. It was what it was. "Mike Tyson has been knocked out." That was that.

• 1:22:55Joe Rogan?

  I remember that. Now that you said it, I remember that.

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. I appreciate it.

• 1:23:01Joe Rogan?

  It was energetic, but matter of fact.

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  Well, there it is.

• 1:23:18Speaker 01

  Alright, so I did shout a little bit. I did shout it a little bit. I give myself too much credit for the matter of fact. But that, of course, was, that's my younger voice. It was a little bit higher. Octavio Moran was the name of the referee.

• 1:23:33Joe Rogan?

  I just remember Buster Douglas winning that fight thinking, man, what, what happens to him now?

• 1:23:39Speaker 01

  Well, what happens to him, of course, is that he goes on a celebration rampage. He puts on, oh, I don't know, forty, fifty pounds, something like that. He tries to train them off, but not effectively enough. He goes into the ring against Holyfield and Holyfield delivers one left hook. One perfect counter left hook in the first round and we're out of there.

• 1:24:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's what it was. It was a left hook? I thought it was a right hand.

• 1:24:05Speaker 01

  Might have been a right hand.

• 1:24:06Joe Rogan?

  I don't remember.

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  I could be wrong.

• 1:24:07Joe Rogan?

  See if you can find it.

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  Might have been a right hand. They'll find it.

• 1:24:10Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, Jamie will find it. But, uh, yeah, he just never reached those heights again. That was it. He just never.

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  Money.

• 1:24:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I mean, also like the.

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  Money, money, food.

• 1:24:24Joe Rogan?

  Food. He got real fat.

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  He was an addictive eater.

• 1:24:26Joe Rogan?

  Here it is.

• 1:24:28Speaker 01

  Okay, let's see.

• 1:24:28Joe Rogan?

  Counter right.

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  Right hand, you're right. Uh, then there were, then there was a left hook following, but the right, the right hand is the one that did it.

• 1:24:35Joe Rogan?

  I think the left hook missed.

• 1:24:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, the left hook missed. You're right. All right. So one for Rogan. Zero for Lampley.

• 1:24:43Joe Rogan?

  It's cemented in my mind because I remember, what year was that?

• 1:24:50Speaker 01

  Well, it's nineteen ninety when Buster knocks out Mike.

• 1:24:54Joe Rogan?

  Was it?

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:56Joe Rogan?

  Ninety? No, that'd be earlier than that.

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  Huh? No, it was, it was, it was ninety. It was February, February ten nineteen ninety.

• 1:25:05Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:25:06Speaker 01

  February ten in the United States, February eleven in Tokyo.

• 1:25:09Joe Rogan?

  Hmm, okay, right. And so this is probably ninety-one then? Then he.

• 1:25:14Speaker 01

  It might have been ninety.

• 1:25:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  And I think, I think it was later in nineteen ninety.

• 1:25:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I just remember that, you know, when, when someone does something extraordinary and arrives to the occasion, I always root on them. I always root for them. Like, wow, he's gonna turn his life around. He's gonna be great.

• 1:25:30Speaker 01

  So now you're rooting for Buster to beat Holyfield.

• 1:25:32Joe Rogan?

  Well, and also I was a giant Holyfield fan too. So it was one of those conflicted fights. And Holyfield, to me, was extraordinary because what he did with Mackie Schillstone in his training.

• 1:25:42Speaker 01

  October twenty-five nineteen ninety.

• 1:25:43Joe Rogan?

  There it is.

• 1:25:45Speaker 01

  This time I was right.

• 1:25:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. It was one of those things where Holyfield was one of the first guys that really embraced weightlifting. And I remember as a young fighter, I was always told, if you lift weights, it'll slow you down. Weights will make you stiff. Weights will slow you down. You should never lift weights. And so I listened to that and I never lifted weights. And then I remember watching Holyfield train for his heavyweight debut, thinking, God. I remember, I remember his fight with Dwight Mohammed Kawi. Remember that fight?

• 1:26:16Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:26:17Joe Rogan?

  Incredible fight. Like that was when he was a cruiserweight and I was thinking, how is this guy gonna go up to heavyweight? How is this gonna work?

• 1:26:23Speaker 01

  Strong mind.

• 1:26:25Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  Very strong mind.

• 1:26:27Joe Rogan?

  Unquestionably.

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

  You wanna see Evander do something, tell him he can't do it.

• 1:26:31Joe Rogan?

  Oh, for sure. Yeah. But also, one of the first applications of real modern science in regards to strength and conditioning.

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:26:40Joe Rogan?

  What Mackie Shilstone was doing was like very revolutionary.

• 1:26:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:26:44Joe Rogan?

  And to see him do all these crazy strength and cardio routines and putting all that mass on and seeing all the doubters and naysayers.

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  So which other fighter looked at that and realized who Mackie was? Bernard Hopkins.

• 1:26:56Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:26:57Speaker 01

  Genius.

• 1:26:58Joe Rogan?

  He worked with quite a few fighters, didn't he, Mackie? I believe Mackie worked with quite a few fighters after that whole...

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. He worked with quite a few fighters.

• 1:27:06Joe Rogan?

  Everybody saw like that the results were there.

• 1:27:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:27:08Joe Rogan?

  So everybody kinda changed their opinion on that kinda stuff.

• 1:27:10Speaker 01

  Did he work with any MMA guys?

• 1:27:11Joe Rogan?

  I don't know. I don't... Probably. There's probably a few.

• 1:27:15Speaker 01

  It makes sense.

• 1:27:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. I mean MMA guys are led... I mean, this is... With MMA, you have the grappling aspect of it. With... Without strength and conditioning, you really can't compete. It's not really possible at this day and age. Everyone uses strength and conditioning. There's very few fighters that just train using skill. Just, just train skills. Like George, George St Pierre did that for a certain period of his career.

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  I wonder if there's anybody left in boxing who, who trains just using the gym skills. There were a lot of them when I was first involved in the sport who would never have touched a weight.

• 1:27:46Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

  You know, they...

• 1:27:48Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  They subscribed totally to the notion that that was negative.

• 1:27:50Joe Rogan?

  Right. And it... The worst case... I mean, they definitely did calisthenics, but that was it. It was just body weight exercises. You know, um... Which is, brings us to Crawford, which I think is really interesting. The Crawford Canelo fight.

• 1:28:04Speaker 01

  Beyond interesting.

• 1:28:05Joe Rogan?

  Fascinating.

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:07Joe Rogan?

  Because how does Crawford compete with that size? And, you know, we, we have to recognize, okay, well, when Canelo fought Floyd, it was 152 pounds, right? So he had dropped down, which was a struggle for him, which is why Floyd was so brilliant in getting him to go down to 152, because he knew he would be drained.

• 1:28:25Speaker 01

  Was it 52 or 54?

• 1:28:26Joe Rogan?

  Well, the weight class, I believe, was 54, but I believe the clause in the contract for that fight was that he get down to 52.

• 1:28:32Speaker 01

  You're ahead of me.

• 1:28:33Joe Rogan?

  Let's see if that's true. Find out, find out if that's true. I'm pretty sure that that's true, that they had a fight at one.

• 1:28:37Speaker 01

  I love fact checking on the fly.

• 1:28:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Um, that was a struggle. The 54 was a struggle. Now Canelo goes all the way up to 68, and then even to 75, and now back down to 68, whereas Crawford's leapfrogging. He's going, he goes to super middleweight.

• 1:28:55Speaker 01

  47 to 54, and now to 68.

• 1:28:58Joe Rogan?

  And the Magravov fight in 54 is

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  Biffy.

• 1:29:02Joe Rogan?

  A difficult fight.

• 1:29:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:03Joe Rogan?

  Difficult fight. 152.

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  52.

• 1:29:06Joe Rogan?

  Yes, catch weight.

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  Joe Rogan scores again.

• 1:29:09Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, I have a goofy memory. It, it works a lot of the time, but sometimes not. Sometimes, sometimes it's like

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  I don't think you could do this podcast without having a spectacular memory.

• 1:29:20Joe Rogan?

  Sometimes it's super accurate, and sometimes it's just terrible. I don't understand why. But, um, but certain things I do remember. And I do remember it because of the weight cutting thing, because I remember thinking, like, what a brilliant move to get him to do that. The same thing that Gervonta Davis did with, uh, Ryan Garcia.

• 1:29:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:29:37Joe Rogan?

  Like, you can't rehydrate.

• 1:29:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:29:39Joe Rogan?

  Like, which is like

• 1:29:40Speaker 01

  No rehydration clause.

• 1:29:41Joe Rogan?

  Sucker bet. That's such a sucker bet. You're gonna lose, but it's like the same thing with Pacquiao taking the fight when it's a bum shoulder.

• 1:29:49Speaker 01

  Don't you think some of that is Tank reading Ryan's personality and playing him a little bit?

• 1:29:55Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, you're fucking with him. Yeah, you're giving him other things to think about.

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  Tank is a brilliant con artist.

• 1:30:00Joe Rogan?

  Oh, he's so good.

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:02Joe Rogan?

  He's so good. And boy, the Lamont Roach fight. Ooh.

• 1:30:05Speaker 01

  Well, that was a knockout.

• 1:30:07Joe Rogan?

  Ooh, 100. Was a knockdown.

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  And that's a

• 1:30:09Joe Rogan?

  You have to call them a knockdown.

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  Dramatic mistake by the referee.

• 1:30:13Joe Rogan?

  Without that, you have a decision victory for Roach and he's a superstar. Now you have this fucking draw.

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:19Joe Rogan?

  That they have to fight again, but now Gervonta knows what's coming. They had fought in the amateurs, correct?

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  They both have knowledge now, you know, Roach knows that his counter punching can be effective against Tank. And Tank knows that he has to make an adjustment if he's going to land a power shot.

• 1:30:34Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's also, Tank is another guy that has experienced all the trappings of fame. All the success and the money and, you know, all the jewelry and all the craziness and the ladies.

• 1:30:48Speaker 01

  And Roach hasn't.

• 1:30:49Joe Rogan?

  And Roach has not. And Roach is a hungry motherfucker who can really fight.

• 1:30:52Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:30:53Joe Rogan?

  He can really fight. And he should have got his flowers after that fight. And, you know, a lot of the boxing people recognize like that was, that was a knockdown. But forever in his history books, it's not a knockdown. When you take a punch to the face and then you take a knee, that is a fucking knockdown. Period, end of story. I don't care if you got your hair fucking perm stuff in your eyes.

• 1:31:12Speaker 01

  It's like a literary idiosyncrasy, okay? And both of our sports, boxing and MMA, are littered throughout their history with these things that are egregiously unfair at the moment.

• 1:31:26Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:31:26Speaker 01

  But also prompt us to remember the fight.

• 1:31:29Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:31:29Speaker 01

  And, and remember both fighters. If, if you're a fighter who has been victimized by a severe injustice in one of your fights, the audience is going to remember you sympathetically.

• 1:31:40Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  And be more interested in your next fight.

• 1:31:43Joe Rogan?

  Absolutely.

• 1:31:44Speaker 01

  So, this, so this is an entertainment enterprise.

• 1:31:47Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  And anything that contributes to your legend is ultimately going to pay you back somewhere down the road.

• 1:31:55Joe Rogan?

  Yes, that's true. There, there's definitely something to that. And then, so Lamont will have a lot of fans on his side going to that second fight.

• 1:32:02Speaker 01

  Oh, big time. Yeah. In fact, I would put the fight in DC. Uh, although I, I don't think Tank would want to do that.

• 1:32:10Joe Rogan?

  Is that fight scheduled?

• 1:32:11Speaker 01

  Not to my knowledge.

• 1:32:12Joe Rogan?

  Um, see.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  Not to my awareness.

• 1:32:14Joe Rogan?

  Gervonta Davis.

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  I'm totally focused on Canelo Alvarez and, uh, Terrence Crawford at this particular moment.

• 1:32:20Joe Rogan?

  Are you calling that fight?

• 1:32:21Speaker 01

  No. All right, at least, wait a minute. Let, let me say, I don't know.

• 1:32:25Joe Rogan?

  You don't know?

• 1:32:25Speaker 01

  No, no. There was a, there was a news conference in New York yesterday and they announced that Max Kellerman is part of the broadcast team.

• 1:32:33Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 1:32:33Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:32:34Joe Rogan?

  So that's only one person they've announced. This is a-

• 1:32:36Speaker 01

  Obviously, I'd love to call the fight, but I don't know yet.

• 1:32:39Joe Rogan?

  August 16th.

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  Scheduled for August 16th in Las Vegas.

• 1:32:42Joe Rogan?

  Wow, boy, I might go to that.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  I might go to that.

• 1:32:47Joe Rogan?

  Maybe I'll go with you.

• 1:32:50Speaker 01

  Maybe we should.

• 1:32:50Joe Rogan?

  That would be fun.

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  Hey, we're getting along really well here, aren't we?

• 1:32:53Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah, for sure, yeah.

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I enjoy the conversation. It would be fun to go sit at a live fight, wouldn't it?

• 1:32:59Joe Rogan?

  Oh, no, is that a, is that a UFC weekend, goddammit? Let me check real quick, who's it might be? Yup, shit, UFC in Chicago, shit!

• 1:33:09Speaker 01

  Alright, I'll call you later that night and let you know.

• 1:33:12Joe Rogan?

  I'll watch it, I'll have it on my phone, I'll set my phone up and have it there while the fight's going on.

• 1:33:18Speaker 01

  Alright, looking forward to it, so who do you like in Canelo versus Crawford?

• 1:33:21Joe Rogan?

  Well, I'm a giant Crawford fan because I think he's the best switch hitter since Marvin Agler.

• 1:33:25Speaker 01

  I'm a giant Crawford fan because I called his coming out fight against Brad Esposito.

• 1:33:30Joe Rogan?

  He's special.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  And then various other stepping stones throughout his career.

• 1:33:34Joe Rogan?

  I also think he's one of those guys that if you tell him he can't do something, he wants to show you and shock the world.

• 1:33:39Speaker 01

  Thousand percent, absolutely right.

• 1:33:41Joe Rogan?

  I also think Canelo is slowing down, and Canelo is a, more of a one punch fighter now than the combination fighter he was when he was- This episode is brought to you by NOCO, your miles from home, you turn the key, nothing, dead battery. Normally, that means finding another car, someone willing to give you a jump, and dealing with old jumper cables. But what if you didn't need any of that? Keep a NOCO portable jump starter in your glove box and jump start your car yourself. No cables, no second vehicle, no waiting for help. It also works as a power bank and has a built-in LED flashlight. NOCO, the end of jumper cables. Use code ROGEN10 for 10% off select jump starters at NO.co.

• 1:34:28Joe Rogan?

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• 1:35:07Joe Rogan?

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• 1:35:43Speaker 01

  We'll see. Not yet ready to subscribe totally to that, because again, you're talking about somebody who is stubborn.

• 1:35:50Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 1:35:52Speaker 01

  And who wants to prove everything he can prove.

• 1:35:54Joe Rogan?

  100%. I agree with that, too. But I think there's this, like, in boxing, and certainly in MMA, there's a certain amount of years where a fighter can keep the RPMs up. And, you know, when they're in the red line. And there's some people subscribe to the idea of nine years. There's nine years is the most that an elite fighter in MMA has performed at their prime. I think that's a bullshit number, because I think it's entirely dependent upon lifestyle, nutrition, discipline, physical attributes. There's a lot of factors.

• 1:36:27Speaker 01

  George Foreman won the heavyweight championship of the world in boxing at age 45.

• 1:36:31Joe Rogan?

  True, but he took 10 years off.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  Yes, that's exactly right.

• 1:36:34Joe Rogan?

  So 10 complete years off, so you have to, like, factor in...

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  But were the 10 years off good or bad? They dull his reflexes, or did they actually allow his body to recover in such a way that, I mean, you could debate that all night.

• 1:36:45Joe Rogan?

  All night. And George is biologically very unusual. He had canned hams for fists. They were gigantic fists.

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  And intellectually unusual, as we discussed before. Yes.

• 1:36:55Joe Rogan?

  And, boy, you know, one of my favorite all-time heavyweight wars was him and Ron Lyle.

• 1:37:01Speaker 01

  That was one of his all-time favorite heavyweight wars, you know. Yeah, he loved, he loved to reminisce about the Lyle fight.

• 1:37:08Joe Rogan?

  God, that fight was crazy.

• 1:37:10Speaker 01

  Every fighter loves drama, and they love having been a part of drama. So George loved that.

• 1:37:16Joe Rogan?

  That was an insane fight. Insane. All the knockdowns, both guys rocked and hurt.

• 1:37:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:37:22Joe Rogan?

  Whew. And Ron Lyle's another one of those guys that's just kind of lost in the, the history books. You know, people sort of forgot, except for that fight. You know, there's a few of those guys that like people just kind of have forgotten.

• 1:37:33Speaker 01

  They attached them to one fight, because they didn't ever have that shining moment again in their career.

• 1:37:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Cruel game. What a cruel game, you know.

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  Ali, Ali and Cleveland Williams.

• 1:37:44Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

  Same thing.

• 1:37:46Joe Rogan?

  Right, right. Cleveland Williams is a murderer.

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  He was.

• 1:37:48Joe Rogan?

  Nasty knockout puncher.

• 1:37:50Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:37:51Joe Rogan?

  But Ali just boxed his face off and put him away.

• 1:37:54Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 1:37:55Joe Rogan?

  Big cat.

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  That, that was the one that caused a lot of people to realize, oh, Cassius Clay is a really legitimate, meaningful talent.

• 1:38:04Joe Rogan?

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:38:06Speaker 01

  And that's on the way to the first Liston fight.

• 1:38:08Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm, yeah. Special. It was a special fight. The first Liston fight was crazy. It was crazy. And also, the, the crazy thing was, there was something probably on Liston's gloves, right? That got in Cassius Clay's eyes.

• 1:38:23Speaker 01

  There was unquestionably something on Liston's gloves. And Cassius, at one point, asked Dundee to cut his gloves off.

• 1:38:29Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm, that's right.

• 1:38:30Speaker 01

  Because he was blinded.

• 1:38:32Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:32Speaker 01

  So I, I think it's the fifth round where he ran and, and had to stay away because he was waiting for his eyes to clear.

• 1:38:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then by the seventh round, he knocks Liston down.

• 1:38:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:46Speaker 01

  And Liston effectively quits.

• 1:38:48Joe Rogan?

  What a dirty business to put something on your gloves to get in someone's eyes when you punch them. So crazy.

• 1:38:54Speaker 01

  Hmm, what a dirty business to load someone's gloves with what amounts to cement. And send him in to fight Miguel Cotto in a pay-per-view in Las Vegas.

• 1:39:03Joe Rogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, yeah, they, they put holes in the gloves, removed some of the stuffing and watered it down. And then he also did something to his hand wraps as well, right?

• 1:39:15Speaker 01

  He was hitting Cotto with bricks.

• 1:39:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:17Speaker 01

  That's all I know for sure and, and he, and he could have killed him.

• 1:39:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:20Speaker 01

  You know, Cotto went through a life-threatening experience. And I always, you know, don't fall in love with a fighter, you could not know Miguel without falling in love with him. He was a wonderful, sweet, uh, great person. So, I was very, very, um, deeply disturbed and upset and sentimental calling that fight that night. Um, not because I knew that Margarito's gloves were loaded, I, I didn't, I just knew that.

• 1:39:47Joe Rogan?

  We didn't know until he fought Shane Mosley.

• 1:39:50Speaker 01

  We didn't know until the Shane Mosley fight, that's exactly right.

• 1:39:53Joe Rogan?

  Shane Mosley's.

• 1:39:54Speaker 01

  And I remember walking away from Vegas with a bad feeling after the Cotto fight, how could that happen to Miguel, et cetera, et cetera? And then it's, I don't know, several weeks later, maybe three months later, when we're in LA getting ready for, um, the Mosley versus, uh, uh, Margarito fight. And I hear in my headset, there's a disturbance in Margarito's dressing room, they're making him take his gloves off and da-da-da-da-da.

• 1:40:21Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:22Speaker 01

  And in that moment, it all comes together.

• 1:40:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that was a hand wraps thing, I'm conflating these two stories in my mind with Louis Resto and, uh, Billy Collins.

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  Plaster of Paris.

• 1:40:32Joe Rogan?

  Yes, that, so Louis Resto was with Panama Louis.

• 1:40:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:40:38Joe Rogan?

  Panama Louis who famously gave that drink to Aaron Pryor.

• 1:40:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:40:43Joe Rogan?

  Yes, get me the one that I fixed, and then Aaron Pryor goes out and knocks out Alexis Argüello, which is alleged to have been cocaine. A lot of people think it was cocaine, because Aaron then went to famously have a cocaine problem.

• 1:40:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:40:56Joe Rogan?

  Um, but the Louis Resto.

• 1:40:58Speaker 01

  I don't see how cocaine could help you in a fight, I really.

• 1:41:01Joe Rogan?

  It's a stimulant, it's a stimulant.

• 1:41:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess you're right, it's a stimulant.

• 1:41:05Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, if you're exhausted and all of a sudden you get a bump and you're fired up and you go out there and fuck him up, you could help you, certainly if you're tired. Yeah, 100% it would help. And this is coming, I've never done cocaine, but I'm just guessing.

• 1:41:16Speaker 01

  It ruins a lot of other things, that's all.

• 1:41:18Joe Rogan?

  Oh yeah, it does, but in that moment, I guess, you know, in that moment, especially if you're a person who imbibes and you, you know, you've had a history of cocaine and then, you know, what does it do? It boosts up confidence and it's a stimulant. I would imagine that Alexis Arguelo fight, woo!

• 1:41:35Speaker 01

  Phenomenal.

• 1:41:36Joe Rogan?

  Oh my goodness.

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

  Phenomenal, and he was, you know, again, another great person.

• 1:41:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  Uh, another really, uh, I didn't know Aaron all that well, but Alexis was lovable in every way.

• 1:41:47Joe Rogan?

  Wasn't he murdered? He was a politician in Nicaragua, right?

• 1:41:50Speaker 01

  I think he was.

• 1:41:50Joe Rogan?

  Was he murdered?

• 1:41:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. Nicaragua.

• 1:41:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, man, the, the, so I was conflating those, the, the, so with Margarito, I think it was just the wraps, where they had put plastered Paris in his wraps. But Billy Collins Jr. and Louis Resto was a fight where Billy Collins was this up and coming fighter and he fought Louis Resto and Louis Resto was like breaking his face open with every punch.

• 1:42:16Speaker 01

  And there are photos that you can find on the web of columns that show that.

• 1:42:20Joe Rogan?

  Yes, and so Resto then, when the fight was over, Billy Collins' dad grabs Resto's gloves and realizes there's no padding in the gloves.

• 1:42:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:42:30Joe Rogan?

  And then Billy Collins' career is over and he winds up drinking himself to death, actually drive, drove into a tree. Yeah.

• 1:42:40Speaker 01

  So we don't know whether that was suicide or not.

• 1:42:42Joe Rogan?

  We don't know, no, but you know, the guys, you couldn't see after that fight.

• 1:42:46Speaker 01

  It's a great story.

• 1:42:47Joe Rogan?

  His eyes were fucked.

• 1:42:47Speaker 01

  I hope everybody who is listening to this will go to the web and pick up some of these things because you are touching on a lot of the most meaningful and poignant stories, yeah.

• 1:42:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:59Speaker 01

  There's the photo right there of Billy and there's his dad in the photo.

• 1:43:02Joe Rogan?

  Crazy, just crazy. I mean, his vision was fucked for the rest of his life, for as long as he lived after that, never fought again and no, and everyone was so confused because they couldn't believe that this guy, Louis Resto, was not known as being this big puncher, was just busting him up with every shot he landed. It was confusing. It's a dirty businessman. And Panama Lewis was, he did some corner work with Mike Tyson as well. Remember? Like later in Mike's career when everything was kinda chaotic and he had all those wackadoos in his corner. Panama Lewis was like on the sidelines there. But wasn't able to be officially a part of it because he was still banned?

• 1:43:43Speaker 01

  Well, you know, Mike by late in his career had a very clear understanding of his vulnerabilities. Now, Mike was a boxing scientist. He knew better than anybody that styles make fights. And that there were certain stylistic matchups which for him would be difficult. He had spent a week training with Lennox Lewis when they were 14 years old. Um, because Lewis's, Arnie Bem, his amateur trainer, had brought Lennox from the Toronto area to Canastoda, I mean, not to Canastoda, but to upstate New York, um, to the Catskills. And Mike and Lennox

• 1:44:25Speaker 01

  spent much of a week, maybe all of a week, watching old black and white fight films on the wall, sleeping in the same room, training and sometimes sparring every day.

• 1:44:36Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:44:37Speaker 01

  And so Mike had known Lennox for a long, long time. Uh, by the time they met, June 8, 2002 in, uh, Memphis. And, um, I don't, I don't know that he would subscribe exactly to me saying he knew what was coming. But I, I think he had a pretty good idea. And you'll recall that at the first news conference, he ran across the stage and bit Lennox on the leg.

• 1:45:05Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, he went crazy.

• 1:45:07Speaker 01

  Lennox claimed that he drew blood through, through the pants leg. Uh, and, um, and my interpretation of that at the time was, he wants to get the fight canceled.

• 1:45:18Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:45:19Speaker 01

  He wants to get this fight wiped away.

• 1:45:21Joe Rogan?

  Well, you gotta think, this is also 12 years after the Buster Douglas loss.

• 1:45:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:45:26Joe Rogan?

  Which is a long time in boxing.

• 1:45:28Speaker 01

  Long time and, and a lot of trials and tribulations. Prison.

• 1:45:32Joe Rogan?

  Yep.

• 1:45:33Speaker 01

  You know, you, I don't, I mean, you might, maybe you get a little chance to train in prison, but not the way you train in a boxing gym. So.

• 1:45:41Joe Rogan?

  Well, you know.

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  So he paid a lot of prices for a lot of experiences.

• 1:45:45Joe Rogan?

  There it is.

• 1:45:49Speaker 01

  Lennox throws a right hand. I'm not sure he landed that right hand. Might have broken his hand if he'd landed it on Tyson's jaw.

• 1:45:57Joe Rogan?

  Crazy.

• 1:45:58Speaker 01

  That's the hard part about bare knuckles boxing, right?

• 1:46:00Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah. They break their hands all the time.

• 1:46:02Speaker 01

  You know why gloves emerged? Gloves emerged because John L. Sullivan got tired of breaking his hands.

• 1:46:10Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:46:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. He was a big proponent of, behind the scenes, of going to gloves. And then, of course, in the first gloved prize fighting heavyweight championship fight, he loses to Corbett.

• 1:46:23Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 1:46:24Speaker 01

  Because Corbett was a boxing scientist.

• 1:46:26Joe Rogan?

  And back then, they probably had terrible medical treatment for broken hands. Like, what'd they do?

• 1:46:32Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:46:33Joe Rogan?

  I mean, they didn't have the kind of surgery that they have.

• 1:46:35Speaker 01

  Certainly not the sophisticated surgeries that take place now.

• 1:46:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:39Speaker 01

  If there were any surgeries at all.

• 1:46:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they probably just...

• 1:46:41Speaker 01

  He got tired of breaking his hands. Along comes this idea, this phenomenon of gloves. Yeah, absolutely. Let's do that.

• 1:46:48Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:46:49Speaker 01

  And then he loses to Corbett.

• 1:46:50Joe Rogan?

  Wow. I was, uh, watching a piece yesterday about, uh, it was a YouTube video on Sugar Ray Robinson and his training and the, the type of training that Sugar Ray would do and how phenomenal his dedication was. And if you think about a guy that like, when he had his first loss, how many fights had he won?

• 1:47:15Speaker 01

  Hundred twenty.

• 1:47:16Joe Rogan?

  You know how crazy that is?

• 1:47:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:18Joe Rogan?

  Stop and think.

• 1:47:19Speaker 01

  I sort of have a sense of it, yeah.

• 1:47:21Joe Rogan?

  Stop and think about how insane that is.

• 1:47:24Speaker 01

  Did you ever drink in Jimmy Glenn's bar in New York?

• 1:47:26Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:47:27Speaker 01

  Jimmy's Corner? Oh, that's too bad. Jimmy Glenn was a really great, well-known corner man who worked with Robinson, worked with Joe Louis, worked with a lot of really big name fighters. And he had a bar on 44th between 6th and 7th. It's the, still to this day, I think his son is running it now. I hope he still is, uh, the ultimate boxing bar. The photographs on the wall, the atmosphere.

• 1:47:53Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:47:53Speaker 01

  There we are.

• 1:47:54Joe Rogan?

  Oh, what a cool little hole in the wall.

• 1:47:55Speaker 01

  We're in Jimmy's Corner, yeah.

• 1:47:56Joe Rogan?

  What a great spot.

• 1:47:58Speaker 01

  44th between 6th and 7th. There's Jimmy.

• 1:47:59Joe Rogan?

  Is it gone?

• 1:48:00Speaker 01

  There's Jimmy down to the left.

• 1:48:01Joe Rogan?

  Is it still there? Is it gone?

• 1:48:03Speaker 01

  Uh, the bar, I think, is still there. Jimmy's gone. Uh, what a wonderful, wonderful, loving man. Um, he was like an uncle to me. Uh, because I spent so much time in the bar and just, his, his stories were fantastic because of the people with whom he worked.

• 1:48:20Joe Rogan?

  Wow. That's awesome.

• 1:48:23Speaker 01

  You gotta go sometime.

• 1:48:24Joe Rogan?

  I would love to. I'd love to go sometime. Sugar Ray Robinson was one of the first guys also that showed how effective being a great dancer.

• 1:48:32Speaker 01

  My mother's favorite fighter.

• 1:48:34Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:48:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I told you that the first fight she ever sat me down to watch was Sugar Ray Robinson versus Bobo Olson.

• 1:48:40Joe Rogan?

  Right, right.

• 1:48:40Speaker 01

  And the last thing she said before she left the room and left me in front of a little TV set on a TV dinner tray was, uh, Sugar Ray Robinson's my favorite fighter because he dances while he fights.

• 1:48:53Joe Rogan?

  Wow. And he did?

• 1:48:55Speaker 01

  And he did.

• 1:48:56Joe Rogan?

  He did. He, uh, you know, there was, the, the thing about his training, you know, this, uh, video that I was watching was so interesting to watch someone who's really just ahead of the curve, like above everybody. Like, no one really understood how to move like that. And then, of course, Cassius Clay, his favorite fighter, Sugar Ray Robinson.

• 1:49:17Speaker 01

  100%.

• 1:49:17Joe Rogan?

  And so he's like a heavyweight version of Sugar Ray Robinson.

• 1:49:20Speaker 01

  So what's the greatest asset for any fighter? Is it his punching powers? Is it his hand speed? Is it his footwork? Or is it his intelligence?

• 1:49:28Joe Rogan?

  It's the mind.

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

  It's the mind.

• 1:49:30Joe Rogan?

  But...

• 1:49:30Speaker 01

  It's the willingness to accept what you need to accept and to see what you can do.

• 1:49:36Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:49:37Speaker 01

  That's what makes for great fighters.

• 1:49:38Joe Rogan?

  And also the ability to objectively analyze your skills and recognize where you need to advance and what you need to do differently.

• 1:49:45Speaker 01

  Because you have a trainer to help you with that.

• 1:49:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. But you don't have coaches per se, the way you do in organized team sports and stuff like that. At the end of the day, you're the one. You gotta figure this out, you know?

• 1:49:56Joe Rogan?

  And you can have, uh, an idea of what's effective, but until you see someone come along and do something totally different, you were really, like, that's the, where the innovators come in, where the real groundbreakers come in. Like, I bet before Sugar Ray Robinson, nobody, like, you, you had Willie Pep, right?

• 1:50:13Speaker 01

  Well, you've mentioned what I think of as the modern supreme innovator earlier.

• 1:50:19Joe Rogan?

  Lomachenko.

• 1:50:19Speaker 01

  I'll see Lomachenko.

• 1:50:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. He recreated. You know, our approach to the sport.

• 1:50:25Joe Rogan?

  Well, you see a lot of that now in MMA. You see a lot of footwork and movement and switching stances. It's like a fighter that can't switch stances in MMA is kind of archaic. Because you-

• 1:50:38Speaker 01

  I think we'll reach that point in boxing, too.

• 1:50:40Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:50:41Speaker 01

  And I think eventually, as, as time goes by.

• 1:50:43Joe Rogan?

  Well, Hagler was an example of one of the first guys to be a switch hitter that people sort of dismissed.

• 1:50:48Speaker 01

  So you just, you, earlier we talked about Canelo versus Crawford.

• 1:50:52Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:50:53Speaker 01

  Do you think Terrence Crawford can beat Canelo Alvarez?

• 1:50:55Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I think he can win.

• 1:50:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:50:57Joe Rogan?

  I don't know if he's going to win, but I think he can win.

• 1:50:59Speaker 01

  So I asked-

• 1:51:00Joe Rogan?

  But he's going to have to, he's going to have to box a brilliant fight.

• 1:51:05Speaker 01

  Okay, what kind of a fight? I'm, I'm gonna get to that. I asked the great Larry Merchant.

• 1:51:11Joe Rogan?

  What did he say?

• 1:51:11Speaker 01

  Ninety-four years old, living on Ocean Boulevard in Santa Monica, looking out at the ocean, reflecting on all the amazing things he did. And I asked Larry, I said, "Do you think Terrence Crawford has a beat, has a chance to beat Canelo Alvarez?" And Larry said, "Jim, did Ray Leonard get an official decision victory over marvelous Marvin Hagler?" And I said, "Yes, he did." He said, "Well, if Ray Leonard could beat marvelous Marvin Hagler, then Terrence Crawford can beat Canelo Alvarez." And I said, "Why do you say that?" He said, "Same equation. Get in, get out. Get in, get out. Over and over and over. He's got to figure the angles and the approaches that

• 1:51:56Speaker 01

  will allow him to step in, land to the body, or occasionally upstairs, and then get out."

• 1:52:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:02Speaker 01

  Before he's facing any damage.

• 1:52:05Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:52:05Speaker 01

  That's what Ray did so effectively against Hagler. And it frustrated Hagler. Uh, and the more you frustrate the opponent, the better off you are.

• 1:52:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Canelo has such unique skills, and one of the weird things that he does that very few people, since Rocky Marciano does, is he punches your arms.

• 1:52:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:52:23Joe Rogan?

  He brutalizes your arms.

• 1:52:25Speaker 01

  He's another brilliant guy. He has the greatest punch resistance in the sport. You know, we talked about it earlier. One knockout in the whole career.

• 1:52:32Joe Rogan?

  Knockdown.

• 1:52:33Speaker 01

  And it wasn't, knocked down. And it wasn't really a knockdown, in, in my, uh, personal view. Um, so, because he didn't touch the canvas. He's never been on the canvas. And, and we call it chin. And I think that we kinda missed the point by calling it chin. Cause I used to be Canelo's neighbor in Del Mar, California. Used to run into Chepo, his senior trainer at the grocery store. I'd look into the cart and say, "Oh, he's, he's eating tuna." And he said, "Yes, and, and he's eating chicken, da-da-da." And, um, and so I also used to go down the hill from my house off of Villa de la Valle in, uh, Del Mar and watch him train at the Equestrian Center.

• 1:53:18Speaker 01

  Where he would go to the Equestrian Center in the morning and do two and a half hours of hunter jumper riding before going to his gym in the afternoon to do three and a half hours of boxing training.

• 1:53:31Joe Rogan?

  Hunter jumper riding? What is that?

• 1:53:33Speaker 01

  Hunter jumper is where you, you go over jumps and you, uh-

• 1:53:38Joe Rogan?

  With a horse?

• 1:53:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, on the horse.

• 1:53:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Why the fuck would you do that when you're training for a fight? What if the horse falls?

• 1:53:44Speaker 01

  He was riding horses since he was a little kid. He was skilled enough to do it. You controlled the height of the jumps. You say, "Set the jumps at 36 inches or 40 inches." You know what the horse can do. It's all about staying on the horse. And, uh, and I asked him, you know, "How can you do that?" And he said, "Everything I do in boxing is upper body and everything I do, uh, on the horse is lower body." And on, on that basis, I am the one who theorizes that the reason you can't knock him down is not because of his chin, it's because of his legs.

• 1:54:20Joe Rogan?

  His base.

• 1:54:20Speaker 01

  You can't get him off balance. He's too strong from the waist down. And, you know, if other fighters would pay attention to what Canelo does, they might go do a little horseback riding.

• 1:54:33Joe Rogan?

  I wasn't even aware of that until you brought that up. That's extra- that's incredible.

• 1:54:37Speaker 01

  There he is with his horses.

• 1:54:38Joe Rogan?

  Wow. That completely makes sense if you think about it squeezing with the lower legs, the core strength that you have to have.

• 1:54:47Speaker 01

  100% correct.

• 1:54:48Joe Rogan?

  The balance.

• 1:54:49Speaker 01

  The balance, exactly. The timing, all of it, yeah. I trained hunter jumper for a couple of years in the

• 1:54:58Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:54:58Speaker 01

  early 90s trying to please a wife who was a horse freak, okay? And I had a really great trainer at the stables over next to Griffith Park in Los Angeles. Fabulous trainer named Jonathan Sorese. Hey, John, if you hear me. And I trained for, I don't know, I want to say three quarters of a year riding hunter jumper. And I got to the point where I was jumping 36, 38 inch jumps. And I was riding quality horses and I was doing pretty well.

• 1:55:37Speaker 01

  And one day after my training session, I was in the stall, combing the horse down, brushing, do the things, the busy work that you're supposed to do to be a part of it. And Jonathan came in and said, how do you feel about your riding? I said, I think I'm doing pretty well, don't you? He said, I think you're doing really well. He said, but I think that this would probably be a great day for you to quit. I said, quit? What are you talking about? You just said, I'm doing pretty well. He said, well, you're doing pretty well because you love to do the fun stuff. You love the jumping and you love the riding around the ring fast, et cetera, et cetera. But you don't want to do the busy work.

• 1:56:20Speaker 01

  You don't want to do what we call sitting trot. And the other things that help you to build your awareness and your command of what you do. And the result is that you're getting closer and closer to the stage at which something negative is going to happen. And the first time something negative happens, you're not going to be able to respond to it. So I think today would be a great day for you to quit.

• 1:56:47Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:56:48Speaker 01

  Wild, right?

• 1:56:49Joe Rogan?

  Did you listen to him?

• 1:56:50Speaker 01

  I quit.

• 1:56:53Speaker 01

  I went home and thought about it and I thought, he's right.

• 1:56:57Joe Rogan?

  But wouldn't positive constructive advice being if you enjoy this, there's some other stuff that you need to do.

• 1:57:02Speaker 01

  Well, he, I mean, he did say, look, I'm perfectly happy to keep training you if you will come and do the busy work that I need you to do to 20 to 30 minutes before you go out and, and jump. But if you just want to come here, sit on the saddle and run and jump, you're asking for trouble and I'm not going to be a part of it.

• 1:57:21Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:57:22Speaker 01

  Because of course, if you fall off, and I saw this one a couple of times, if you fall off, the horse can stomp you.

• 1:57:29Joe Rogan?

  Ooh.

• 1:57:30Speaker 01

  You get a hoof on the chest or a hoof on the neck.

• 1:57:33Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 1:57:34Speaker 01

  And you're in the hospital and you're in big trouble.

• 1:57:36Joe Rogan?

  If you're lucky.

• 1:57:37Speaker 01

  I saw it happen to a woman in the ring, a really good rider.

• 1:57:41Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 1:57:42Speaker 01

  So at the end of the day, you can't do that.

• 1:57:44Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yah, yah.

• 1:57:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, there he is. Look at Canelo.

• 1:57:49Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:57:50Speaker 01

  Now that is, that's, that's a skill he has carried since his early childhood.

• 1:57:55Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:57:57Speaker 01

  You can't knock him down.

• 1:57:59Joe Rogan?

  That makes so much sense. Also, he's got a square head.

• 1:58:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:03Joe Rogan?

  He's got a, and it's not a small head.

• 1:58:06Speaker 01

  No. He's got a great structure. A brilliant mind.

• 1:58:10Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, oh, clearly.

• 1:58:11Speaker 01

  Give credit where credit is due.

• 1:58:12Joe Rogan?

  No doubt, no doubt. I mean, the, just the, the evolution in the three fights with Triple G. Triple G was one of my all time favorites.

• 1:58:20Speaker 01

  If you can fight Triple G and never be badly hurt.

• 1:58:24Joe Rogan?

  Right. That's a great point.

• 1:58:26Speaker 01

  That's astonishing. Triple G never badly hurt him.

• 1:58:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:30Speaker 01

  And he was destroying everybody else you put in his path.

• 1:58:32Joe Rogan?

  Everybody. Yeah, everybody.

• 1:58:34Speaker 01

  One of the heaviest punchers I ever saw.

• 1:58:36Joe Rogan?

  And he would do weird stuff like throw a, a left hook over the top and hit the top of your head.

• 1:58:41Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:58:41Joe Rogan?

  He would throw a left hook like that.

• 1:58:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:43Joe Rogan?

  Like a looping over, overhand left.

• 1:58:45Speaker 01

  By the way, is very much like the shot that Douglas landed against Tyson in the 10th round.

• 1:58:50Joe Rogan?

  Mmm.

• 1:58:50Speaker 01

  Over the top with the left hand. Yeah.

• 1:58:52Joe Rogan?

  But the way Triple G would do it, it would be going down on you.

• 1:58:55Speaker 01

  Right. Down on you. Exactly. Yeah.

• 1:58:57Joe Rogan?

  It was a weird punch and he would hit you in the forehead, which is like, or the temple, which is where a lot of people lose their equilibrium.

• 1:59:04Speaker 01

  Well, whatever they do in Kazakhstan, it might be different from what they do in the United States.

• 1:59:09Joe Rogan?

  No, he was special. He was very special. Another guy, we, we gotta talk about Julio Cesar Chavez, who's also one of my all time favorites. Julio Cesar Chavez, in his prime, he would just systematically break people down. And the volume, like constant, a constant attack and volume.

• 1:59:29Speaker 01

  His volume, volume was the real key. Because his power shots did not look like hellacious power shots, okay? His left hook didn't look all that devastating.

• 1:59:38Joe Rogan?

  Wasn't a one punch guy.

• 1:59:40Speaker 01

  But it would hurt you, you know, over time, he would break you down.

• 1:59:43Joe Rogan?

  Like the Magic Taylor fight.

• 1:59:44Speaker 01

  And then we go to the Taylor fight.

• 1:59:46Joe Rogan?

  What is it, two seconds before the final bell? That the fight gets stopped?

• 1:59:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:59:51Joe Rogan?

  Larry Hazard stops it and everybody wants to kill him?

• 1:59:53Speaker 01

  Not Larry Hazard.

• 1:59:54Joe Rogan?

  It wasn't?

• 1:59:54Speaker 01

  No, it was Richard Steele.

• 1:59:56Joe Rogan?

  That's right, Richard Steele, that's right.

• 1:59:58Speaker 01

  Okay, so you corrected me on one earlier and now I got you.

• 2:00:01Joe Rogan?

  That's right.

• 2:00:02Speaker 01

  That was Richard Steele, and, and...

• 2:00:04Joe Rogan?

  And he took a tremendous amount of grief for that.

• 2:00:06Speaker 01

  And I think he deserved the grief. I thought it was a very bad stoppage. You had a, an unbeaten American Olympic star, who's on the verge of his career-defining victory. There's no question, at this moment, that he has won the fight. When he stands up and Steele is counting, watch how he gets distracted when Lou Duvva steps up on the ring apron, and when he looks away from Steele, Steele uses that as his pretext to stop the fight. With two seconds left, alright? Giving Chavez a victory that he did not deserve.

• 2:00:40Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:00:42Speaker 01

  If, if, if Duvva had not stepped up on the apron, and, and distracted Meldrick in such a way that Meldrick looked away from Steele, then I think that Steele would have caught a lot more heat, and wouldn't have had any valid pretext for stopping the fight.

• 2:01:00Joe Rogan?

  What if that had been in the eighth round?

• 2:01:03Joe Rogan?

  Would you be okay with it?

• 2:01:05Speaker 01

  Fight goes on, no, I mean, I, I, well, if that had been the eighth round, no, I still wouldn't be okay.

• 2:01:11Joe Rogan?

  So, it's, but is it dependent?

• 2:01:13Speaker 01

  It's the first knockdown, it's not as if he knocked him down three or four times.

• 2:01:16Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:01:17Speaker 01

  Meldrick had won the fight.

• 2:01:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, no, it's all, it's interesting, right, the subjective calls of stoppages by referees.

• 2:01:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:24Joe Rogan?

  Things get very weird.

• 2:01:25Speaker 01

  It's one of the toughest things.

• 2:01:26Joe Rogan?

  It's one of the toughest things.

• 2:01:27Speaker 01

  Good stoppage, bad stoppage, et cetera, et cetera, it's one of the toughest things. And, and I disciplined myself to be very, very careful about ever...

• 2:01:35Speaker 01

  Um, criticizing a referee in the moment. I'm not sure that I criticized Richard that night, but I'll tell you one thing. This is in some ways part of the proof of the pudding. Las Vegas boxing fans and Las Vegas boxing crowds are knowledgeable, right? They've seen more of the sport than other people. They know what they're watching. Richard was never again introduced in Las Vegas before a fight without the crowd booing. He was subjected to boos every time he was introduced, which shows you that a majority of the fans in that particular boxing capital agree with me that it was a bad stoppage.

• 2:02:14Joe Rogan?

  Imagine what that did to his psyche. Like every time you go out there, you have the whole crowd. I think he wound up committing suicide.

• 2:02:22Speaker 01

  Steel?

• 2:02:23Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:02:24Speaker 01

  Those boos might have had something to do with that.

• 2:02:26Joe Rogan?

  That's what I was gonna say. Did Richard Steel commit suicide? I think he did.

• 2:02:30Speaker 01

  That's a great fact to check because I don't know.

• 2:02:32Joe Rogan?

  I think he did. And you got to imagine the kind of depression that would come just knowing that you altered the course of boxing history.

• 2:02:43Speaker 01

  With that one momentary decision?

• 2:02:46Joe Rogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:02:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, so Chavez Chavez is avenged in certain ways. Deloya beat him twice.

• 2:02:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, there's one where he didn't, where he won, but he shouldn't have won. Purnell Whitaker.

• 2:03:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:03:04Joe Rogan?

  Who's another genius.

• 2:03:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:03:06Joe Rogan?

  One of the greatest defensive boxers of all time.

• 2:03:09Speaker 01

  Certainly in the top, certainly in the top five.

• 2:03:12Joe Rogan?

  Yes, genius. And I remember that decision being called and I was like, what the fuck is this? That, that one was nuts.

• 2:03:20Speaker 01

  Oscar was Oscar, you know, and, and he had a glamour image that was difficult to deal with at that time, you know? So, uh, that kind of, that kind of thing was part of the reason that my dear friend Fernando Vargas was in some ways jealous of Oscar. You know, what other fighter would get a decision over Purnell Whitaker in that circumstance?

• 2:03:42Joe Rogan?

  But wasn't it Chavez? Didn't Chavez have a decision win over Pernell Whitaker as well?

• 2:03:48Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:03:48Joe Rogan?

  That's, that's the one that I'm talking about.

• 2:03:50Speaker 01

  That's the one you're talking about.

• 2:03:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:51Speaker 01

  I thought you were talking about Delaue.

• 2:03:53Joe Rogan?

  So is that one similar as well? I don't, I don't really recall that one as much.

• 2:03:56Speaker 01

  Oscar gets a decision win over Whitaker on a night when Larry and a lot of other experts thought that Whitaker deserved the decision.

• 2:04:03Joe Rogan?

  Well, Whitaker was like, underappreciated because it was so defensively brilliant.

• 2:04:08Speaker 01

  Well, sure.

• 2:04:08Joe Rogan?

  I mean, he knocked a lot of guys out as well.

• 2:04:10Speaker 01

  The great defenders never get as much credit as the, I mean, Hopkins.

• 2:04:15Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:04:15Speaker 01

  Hopkins had to become a media star late in his career.

• 2:04:18Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:04:19Speaker 01

  To really get credit for what he had done.

• 2:04:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. When you look back at your career and all the fights that you called, and, and think about the beginnings, and think about when they were trying to just get you out of the business, and by giving you boxing, like, it's almost like, it's very much a storybook tale.

• 2:04:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:04:41Joe Rogan?

  It really is.

• 2:04:42Speaker 01

  But, but, the, part of the reason for using "It Happened" as the title of the book is that there are so many circumstances in my career which are like that, counterintuitive, somebody wanted to do something with me that turns in the other direction, et cetera, et cetera. That was not the first time that, that, that kind of thing had happened to me. The, you know, my whole career begins when I win a talent hunt in 1974 to become one of the first two people ever to stand on the sideline of a college football game with a camera and a microphone.

• 2:05:17Joe Rogan?

  How do you, what is a talent hunt? How's that work?

• 2:05:21Speaker 01

  So, first of all, this emerges from the Munich massacre, all right? This emerges from the nine, 10, 11 days of captivity of the American athletes, excuse me, the Israeli athletes, eh, by Black September terrorists in Munich, and during that period of time, ABC is of course the, uh, broadcast, uh, organizer for the United States, and during that time, two reporters, Howard Cosell and Peter Jennings are pushing the control room, how can we get more information? How can we get sound out of the dorm room? How can we get pictures from some adjoining building through the windows, et cetera, et cetera?

• 2:06:06Speaker 01

  And in trying to service the needs of those two reporters Jennings and Cosell, ABC Sports learned things about radio frequency cameras and microphones, wireless cameras and microphones, that they had not known before. So they came back to New York and they convened a meeting, this is after the 72 Olympics, they convened a meeting among the sports division, the news division, and the engineering division to figure out, okay, now that we know these things, now that we've learned what we learned in Munich, what can we do with it? And one of the first ideas that gets adopted is, we can put a reporter on the sideline of a football game.

• 2:06:48Speaker 01

  So in 1974, Ruud Arledge's chief administrative assistant, a guy named Dick Ebersol, who later became a constant and meaningful factor in my career, Dick Ebersol takes two lieutenants out to conduct a search at 16 different college campuses, and they talked to a total of 432 college age or extremely close to college age candidates for this job. I am at first harvested out because I'm number 34 out of 36 on a 97 degree day in Birmingham, Alabama. I have driven overnight from Chapel Hill to get there.

• 2:07:33Speaker 01

  I'm wearing my best discount plaid suit. I look ridiculous in a pair of shoes I bought with two and a half inch heels, so they'll make me look taller. And I go into the room and have the screening interview, and the screening interview is 12 minutes, and before, and when we all have to draw numbers out of a fishbowl to determine in what order the interviews are going to take place, and I'm number 34 out of 36. So I know I'm going to have to sit around in the Parliament House Hotel lobby for hours in Birmingham, waiting to go in, and by the time I go in, I'm grinding my teeth. And the first thing...

• 2:08:16Speaker 01

  One of the other guys in the room, Terry Jastro, says to me is, "What do you think of our, our idea here? What do you think of what we're trying to do?" And I couldn't resist. I said, "I think it's the biggest crock of crap I ever heard in my life." And he said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well, you tell us that you're going around the country to interview 432 people for eight to 10 minutes each, and on that basis, you're going to choose what you describe as the face and voice of the American college student." He said, "Yeah?" I said, "I rest my case. I think this is ridiculous load of crap, and I'm embarrassed that I drove from Chapel Hill overnight to be a part of this." (laughing)

• 2:08:59Speaker 01

  Later, much later, I was shown the evaluation form on which Ebersole had written arrogant, abrasive, alienated, antagonistic. When I was finally chosen as one of the two people, that became known in the college football production truck as the four A's. Every time I would bitch about something, every time I would get up streppish about something and raise my voice a little bit, there it is, the four A's, arrogant, abrasive, alienated, antagonistic. But, you know, the bottom line was, through a long and highly unusual process,

• 2:09:40Speaker 01

  I was the person who was chosen. Now, what was ridiculous about it? The most ridiculous of the thing about it, which I've never really revealed until this year, the book, Media Appearances, this, the most prominent media appearance with your 19 million followers, was that, um, Ronald Arlidge was still the dictatorial and canonized president of ABC Sports. And I, when I was...

• 2:10:12Speaker 01

  Under 11 years old, maybe 10 or 11, 12, living in Hendersonville, North Carolina, had asked my mother while watching Wide World of Sports one day, is this guy, Rune Arledge, is he related to the Arlages who live around the corner from us? Yes, he's their son. So I grew up around the corner from Arledge's parents. I caddied for both his mother and father at the Hendersonville Golf and Country Club. And when I was finally the person chosen, counterintuitively, because I was 25 instead of 22, and because I had already done a lot of sports broadcasting, this person was supposed to be completely fresh.

• 2:10:51Speaker 01

  When I get chosen, I meet Rune in the restroom at 1336th Avenue in New York. And, "Hi Rune, I'm Jim Lampley, oh, great to meet you," et cetera, et cetera. And as he's going out of the restroom, I say, "By the way, how's your dad?" And he turns around, quizzical expression, says, "Why would you ask a question like that?" I said, "Well, I guess, nobody told you, because probably nobody could have known, but I'm from Hendersonville originally, and I've caddied for both your mom and dad. In fact, my mother's in the same bridge club with your mother." The famous red face turned white, and he said, "Don't ever tell anybody that. Never, ever, reveal that to anyone." So of course now it can be revealed.

• 2:11:36Speaker 01

  Why wouldn't he want that revealed? That they had chosen out of 432 candidates, the one who grew up around the street from his parents? He didn't know. Well, but yeah, he could say he didn't know, and somebody might kick back, and at any rate, his first instinct was to say, "Don't ever tell anybody that." A long time has passed, Rune has passed, there are sideline reporters everywhere now, so, you know, I can very easily reveal and let you know that they accidentally chose... The other accident was, they had already installed a guy from Stanford named Don Tollison. And they knew that Tollison was gonna be chosen, he was in the first batch of 16 people

• 2:12:21Speaker 01

  they talked to, his credentials were unbelievable, and so they were dead set in their minds on choosing Don Tollison all along. And now they were two, three weeks away from the first game.

• 2:12:35Speaker 01

  Four weeks away from the first game. It was August 8th and the first game was September 7th. And August 8th, 1974, I am at a rented beach house in Swan Corner, North Carolina with a friend of mine named Buck Goldstein and his wife. My wife Linda and I are there and the phone on the wall rings. And to this day, I don't know how Ebersole got that phone number because the house was rented in the name of Buck Goldstein. So Buck picks up the phone. Hello. Yeah, he's right here. Jim, it's Dick Ebersole. I was, huh? What is this? Hello. And Dick says, you know, I'm so glad I found you. We are getting ready to announce

• 2:13:18Speaker 01

  the college age reporter thing and we think we've settled on one person, but Rune is a little concerned about putting on the air somebody who has never had any on-air experience at all. And within that discussion, that brought us back to you. Would you be willing to go to Birmingham, Alabama and do a film, in those days, 16 millimeter film, do a film audition for us? And I said, what do you want me to do in Birmingham? He said, well, there's a quarterback there named George Myra. He's now with the Birmingham Americans of, I think it was the World Football League.

• 2:14:00Speaker 01

  He's already been busted out of the NFL, the AFL, Canada. This is his last shot as a pro football quarterback. And we think it's an interesting story and we want you to go interview him. So of course, they didn't know that I had watched George Myra play all three years of his college career at the University of Miami. He was a huge childhood hero of mine. I had once hitched a ride in his very dull beige Ford Falcon, going to pick up basketball on the campus of the University of Miami. I knew more about George Myra than probably some members of his family did. I still had a number 10

• 2:14:44Speaker 01

  green and orange George Myra jersey in my closet in Chapel Hill.

• 2:14:52Speaker 01

  So they, they think they're putting me on the spot here to send me to interview George Myra. And I'm gonna have to do a quick research job with no web in those days to find out what I need to ask this guy. And I know more about George Myra than people in his family. So I, I go down to Birmingham, I'm laughing about it. I do the interview. I go through all these things in his college career and stuff like that, his 49ers experience, and send the film off to New York. And about a week before the first game, I get a call and he said, "You're gonna be on the sideline. You're gonna be, we're gonna have two college football reporters. You're gonna be on one sideline. Don Tolleson will be, uh, on the other." Rune feels a lot better about this because he can see

• 2:15:36Speaker 01

  that you have on-camera performance skills and understand what you're doing.

• 2:15:41Joe Rogan?

  Wow. What are the odds that they picked that player?

• 2:15:45Speaker 01

  The odds are astronomical. The odds are beyond all belief. They could choose any story in the world they wanted me to do as an audition. They choose my childhood hero.

• 2:15:55Joe Rogan?

  It kind of almost makes you feel like it's meant to be.

• 2:15:58Speaker 01

  Correct. There's, there's no other way to, to describe it other than this was supposed to happen.

• 2:16:05Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Well, I think you're the best ever. So if that, that's how it had to play out. That's how it had to play out. Jamie, the Richard Steele thing, did he kill, did he commit suicide? Oh, Jesus. I'm sorry, Richard.

• 2:16:19Speaker 01

  Somebody else committed suicide. Well, I mean, Richard.

• 2:16:21Joe Rogan?

  Did Larry Hazard commit suicide?

• 2:16:22Speaker 01

  Richard's dead. Larry Hazard's still around, I'm pretty sure.

• 2:16:25Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, Larry Hazard is a athletic commissioner right now.

• 2:16:28Speaker 01

  New York State. Mitch Halpern.

• 2:16:29Joe Rogan?

  Mitch Halpern.

• 2:16:30Speaker 01

  Or New Jersey, excuse me, New Jersey, not New York.

• 2:16:32Joe Rogan?

  Oh, Mitch Halpern committed suicide.

• 2:16:34Speaker 01

  Mitch Halpern committed suicide.

• 2:16:37Joe Rogan?

  Oh, that's right.

• 2:16:39Speaker 01

  All right. So what, so what is Mitch Halpern's marker? Oh, I, you know, I covered it.

• 2:16:45Joe Rogan?

  There was a fight.

• 2:16:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I covered it. It was, it was one of mine. I can't remember right off the top of my head, but yes.

• 2:16:52Joe Rogan?

  There was a very controversial fight, right?

• 2:16:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:54Joe Rogan?

  A similar type situation.

• 2:16:56Speaker 01

  Similar type thing. Something that stains your reputation going forward.

• 2:17:01Joe Rogan?

  My apologies to Richard Steele. I'm sorry.

• 2:17:03Speaker 01

  Halpern is, I believe, H-A-L-P-R-I-N, or H-A-L-P-E-R-I-N.

• 2:17:11Joe Rogan?

  Hmm. What was the big controversial fight?

• 2:17:18Speaker 01

  Can't remember right now. I saw Rich Alpern referee a number of fights. You're right. He did, he did kill himself.

• 2:17:25Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm, I'm connecting to it now. And as soon as we find out exactly what the fight was, I'll remember what the circumstance was.

• 2:17:34Joe Rogan?

  Again, I told you, my memory sucks sometimes.

• 2:17:36Speaker 01

  Well, Joe, Joe, I'm 76 years old, okay? My wife worries about whether I'm going to remember to put socks on in the morning. Uh, oh, Gabe Willis, Gabe Willis and Jimmy Garcia. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God.

• 2:17:50Joe Rogan?

  That's right.

• 2:17:50Speaker 01

  So, one of the oldest dictums in the sport is that when one fighter dies, the other career dies too. Gabe was absolutely never the same. Uh, and he allowed that fight to go on way longer than it should have. May 6, 1995. Never forget it. Hot day, outside in back of Caesar's Palace. My wife was sitting with Jack Nicholson. Can't resist the name drop. Uh, you know, there were a lot of things going on, but, um, Gabe was never, ever the same after that. And he, uh, you know, Gabe went to Columbia or Venezuela, I forget exactly where, um, for the funeral.

• 2:18:35Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God, look at this. And also, Richard Green committed suicide after the Mancini Kim fight. Similar situation.

• 2:18:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:45Joe Rogan?

  Similar situation with Doc Kukim when he dies famously on national television, Ray Boo Boo Mancini. And then that referee wants to have committed suicide as well.

• 2:18:54Speaker 01

  It's, um, you know, it's a, a haunting thing. Because it's so intimate. You're in the ring. You're four or five feet away from these guys. You're watching somebody land shot after shot after shot. You're trying to gauge in your mind, what is fair to the guy who's taking the beating?

• 2:19:13Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:19:13Speaker 01

  Because he could always land one big comeback counterpunch.

• 2:19:16Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:19:17Speaker 01

  And win the fight.

• 2:19:18Joe Rogan?

  And there's been so many instances over time.

• 2:19:20Speaker 01

  Many.

• 2:19:20Joe Rogan?

  Of guys recovering and coming back to win the fights.

• 2:19:23Speaker 01

  Many, absolutely.

• 2:19:24Joe Rogan?

  So many fights that could have been stopped, and if they were, who knows what we've gotten.

• 2:19:29Speaker 01

  Over and over and over. So, I mean, you know, I was always...

• 2:19:36Speaker 01

  Disciplined and restrained about criticizing referees live because what they do is an extremely important and critical job and sometimes they're the only they're the only safety barrier between life and death.

• 2:19:52Joe Rogan?

  I was just thinking of the Diego Corrales fight. Diego Corrales with that crazy fight where he's knocked down multiple times then comes back to win by knockout.

• 2:20:02Speaker 01

  Arguably the greatest fight of all time.

• 2:20:04Joe Rogan?

  Who was it against?

• 2:20:05Speaker 01

  Corrales versus um name is right on the tip of my tongue. Corrales.

• 2:20:12Joe Rogan?

  Jose Luis Castillo? Is that not it? That might have been it.

• 2:20:16Speaker 01

  Castillo.

• 2:20:17Joe Rogan?

  It was it.

• 2:20:18Speaker 01

  Corrales Castillo.

• 2:20:19Joe Rogan?

  That was it.

• 2:20:20Speaker 01

  Jose Luis Castillo.

• 2:20:21Joe Rogan?

  And that's.

• 2:20:22Speaker 01

  Arguably the greatest fight of all time. It was a Showtime fight by the way. I was watching it on TV.

• 2:20:27Joe Rogan?

  Easily could have been stopped.

• 2:20:28Speaker 01

  Huh?

• 2:20:29Joe Rogan?

  Easily could have been stopped.

• 2:20:30Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 2:20:31Joe Rogan?

  And Corrales comes back and wins.

• 2:20:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:20:33Joe Rogan?

  And I believe he died in a motorcycle accident.

• 2:20:36Speaker 01

  Corrales died in a motorcycle accident. Yes, he did.

• 2:20:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:40Speaker 01

  After after a lot of salacious revelations regarding his troubles with women.

• 2:20:47Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:20:48Speaker 01

  So but he was a sweet guy. You could not know Chico without loving him. Okay, and that's true of many very violent fighters. You couldn't know Chico without loving him. You couldn't know Mike in the early days without loving him. So um the sport is filled with ironies. I'm sure MMA is exactly the same thing.

• 2:21:10Joe Rogan?

  It is. It really is. Listen, I'm glad we had a chance to talk. I really appreciate it. It was really fun. Two hours just flew by.

• 2:21:17Speaker 01

  Great.

• 2:21:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:19Speaker 01

  I think I've had a fantastic time with you and I really enjoyed every moment and yes, thank you. I'm glad we had a chance to talk.

• 2:21:29Joe Rogan?

  And your book is available. It happened. Did you do the voiceover? Please tell me you did.

• 2:21:34Speaker 01

  I did.

• 2:21:35Joe Rogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:21:36Speaker 01

  I did record the audio book.

• 2:21:37Joe Rogan?

  Especially.

• 2:21:38Speaker 01

  People people heard the audio book, recommend it.

• 2:21:41Joe Rogan?

  Then you have to do it with you. It has to be.

• 2:21:44Speaker 01

  Well.

• 2:21:45Joe Rogan?

  Can you imagine if somebody else, if they forced somebody else to record your audio?

• 2:21:48Speaker 01

  Do you know the boxing writer, Tom Hauser?

• 2:21:49Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:21:50Speaker 01

  So Hauser's one of my dearest friends and and a great man. Um Ali's primary biographer. Hauser has written a book about his mother. And he knows about my relationship with my mother. By the way, I read that you were raised by a single mother. Is that correct?

• 2:22:08Joe Rogan?

  Well, I was stepfather.

• 2:22:10Speaker 01

  Stepfather, okay.

• 2:22:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:12Speaker 01

  I was raised by a double widow.

• 2:22:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:15Speaker 01

  Who never married again. Hauser has deep and great affection for his mother, so he wrote a book about his mother. And I'm thrilled to tell you that he called me and said, would you record the audio version of my book?

• 2:22:29Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 2:22:30Speaker 01

  So now I'm going to record, when I get back to Chapel Hill, um, Hauser's book about his mother.

• 2:22:38Joe Rogan?

  That's awesome.

• 2:22:39Speaker 01

  And if you like hearing my book, then you'll probably enjoy reading or hearing my book about Hauser's mother too.

• 2:22:45Joe Rogan?

  Well, I'm gonna listen to your book, cuz I, that's how I absorb most of my books.

• 2:22:49Speaker 01

  Well, I've given away a lot of it to you.

• 2:22:51Joe Rogan?

  No, I don't give a fuck. I'm listening to the whole damn thing. And I really hope that Netflix chooses you for the Canelo fight, the Canelo Crawford fight. That would be fantastic. Like I said, it was, made me so happy to hear you on the, the Madison Square, the Times Square card.

• 2:23:05Speaker 01

  Too bad the fights weren't, uh...

• 2:23:06Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that, that was true, but what do you think that is about? You know, cuz there's a lot of people that have said that Turkey is spending so much money, that he's spoiling these guys and they're afraid to lose and that they're fighting safe.

• 2:23:21Speaker 01

  Far be it from me to say anything about Turkey, okay?

• 2:23:23Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:23:24Speaker 01

  He, anything negative, he put me back at ringside.

• 2:23:27Joe Rogan?

  Right, I'm, I'm very happy that he's involved.

• 2:23:30Speaker 01

  On personal parochial level, I am a huge Turkey fan.

• 2:23:33Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:23:34Speaker 01

  I think that, um, more attention has to be paid to what real matchmaking is. Uh, i-if you put two counterpunchers in front of each other, that's not gonna make a fire.

• 2:23:45Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:23:46Speaker 01

  Two attackers, guaranteed fire.

• 2:23:48Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:23:48Speaker 01

  Uh, an attacker versus a counterpuncher, that can also be really good. Some of the greatest fights ever have been attacker against counterpuncher.

• 2:23:56Joe Rogan?

  So you think it's a matchmaking issue?

• 2:23:58Speaker 01

  I believe it was. That night, you had too many instances where two counterpunchers were standing in front of each other and waiting for the other guy to, uh, to move. I also think that Rolie Romero, um, very intelligently beefed up, put on strength, and went into the fight with, uh, Garcia.

• 2:24:17Speaker 01

  With a defensive frame of mind. I'm gonna take the air out of this balloon. Uh, I'm gonna slow the punch rate down. Uh, I'm gonna land selectively when I want to. Uh, and I'm not gonna allow him to ever land a left hook. He did a good job of that.

• 2:24:34Joe Rogan?

  He also landed that left hook of his own.

• 2:24:36Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:24:36Joe Rogan?

  And rocked him and dropped him, and I think that changed the entire...

• 2:24:39Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Mentally changed the fight. You know, Garcia's in there trying to land his left hook, and all of a sudden, he gets dropped by one. That's, that's got to affect your mentality.

• 2:24:49Joe Rogan?

  What did you think about Devin Haney's performance? Because I felt like that was an example of a guy, like, coming off of the Ryan Garcia fight where he got dropped multiple times.

• 2:24:58Speaker 01

  He needed to put on a show, and he didn't.

• 2:25:00Joe Rogan?

  He just looked different.

• 2:25:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:25:02Joe Rogan?

  If you go back to him versus Lomachenko...

• 2:25:04Speaker 01

  Of course, there's a lot of months in between, you know?

• 2:25:06Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:25:06Speaker 01

  You know, so we, it's not as if he's coming back two months later and you can draw a straight line from the mentality of, of his Garcia fight to what he's doing in the ring that night. That doesn't happen to be the case. Uh, but it was definitely a disappointing performance.

• 2:25:24Joe Rogan?

  Well, you definitely can draw a line between a guy getting rocked and dropped on multiple occasions from a person that he was supposed to beat easily.

• 2:25:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:25:33Joe Rogan?

  If you look at his boxing skill, you look at what he had done to Kombosis. I mean, he just boxed his face off. He looked fantastic in that fight.

• 2:25:41Speaker 01

  But you get, you get the benefit of being able to say to yourself, if you want to, "Okay, he tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug. That's the reason he knocked me down three times." You know, if you can convince yourself of that...

• 2:25:55Joe Rogan?

  The problem is, once you start saying that, people start saying, "Fuck you," and then the boos get louder.

• 2:26:01Speaker 01

  I'm talking about saying it to yourself.

• 2:26:03Joe Rogan?

  You can't say it to yourself.

• 2:26:04Speaker 01

  I'm not talking about saying it in public because you are 100% correct about saying it.

• 2:26:08Joe Rogan?

  No one says anything to themself anymore. If you say something publicly, the whole world responds now. It's not like a guy living in 1976. This is the different world we're living in.

• 2:26:20Speaker 01

  Tell me about it. I'm sitting here on the Joe Rogan Experience with the possibility that 19 million people are talking, uh, are listening to me. I'm sure I've made a mistake or two.

• 2:26:29Joe Rogan?

  Well, we both did.

• 2:26:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:30Joe Rogan?

  It's part of the fun. Just don't read the comments. That's the key. Jim Lampley, I appreciate you very much and I'm a giant fan and I'm really glad you're back in boxing. It means a lot to me. And your book, It Happened: A Uniquely Lucky Life in Sports Television, is available now. Thank you, sir.

• 2:26:47Speaker 01

  With the forward by Taylor Sheridan.

• 2:26:48Joe Rogan?

  Oh, I love that guy.

• 2:26:50Speaker 01

  I have to take care of my friend. Has he been on the show yet?

• 2:26:52Joe Rogan?

  Yes, yes. I love him to death. He's a good friend of mine.

• 2:26:55Speaker 01

  Friend of mine, too.

• 2:26:56Joe Rogan?

  I love him. All right.

• 2:26:58Speaker 01

  So we have a mutual friend.

• 2:26:59Joe Rogan?

  Yes, sir. All right. This was a lot of fun.

• 2:27:02Speaker 01

  Thank you very much.

• 2:27:03Joe Rogan?

  My pleasure. Thank you.

• 2:27:05Speaker 01

  I appreciate it.

• 2:27:06Joe Rogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:27:07Speaker 01

  All right. That was a handshake.

• 2:27:09Joe Rogan?

  Goodbye, everybody.

• 2:27:10Speaker 01

  All right. Suck your handshake.

• 2:27:22Speaker 04

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• 2:27:52Speaker 00

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