By the time CoronaVirus shut down the sport, HBO was about a year and a half into its voluntary exit from boxing. Taking with it one of the sports greatests assets and ambassadors, Jim Lampley. The broadcasting legend has resettled, from his ringside seat to Chapel Hill, where Lampley teaches a course he developed at the University of North Carolina, Evolution of Storytelling in Electronic News Media.
“What I wanted to do was to develop a course that would talk about how electronic media developed processes of storytelling,” Lampley said. “The CoronaVirus crisis was the greatest possible labratory experiment for my course.”
But the prospect of calling boxing mid-pandemic, with no audience, doesn’t seem to be a challenge Lampley would relish.
During an electronic Q and A on Zoom with UNC Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz, Lampley was asked how he would handle a boxing broadcast with no audience, like we’ll see Christy Martin Promotions attempt this Summer.
“It’s extremely unsatisfying. I think, both to the viewer and to the people who are producing the event,” Lampley said.
He knows from experience.
Working on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, Lampley said he called, “Quite a number of events. Countless, really,” without a crowd.
“The nature of ABC’s Wide World of Sports at that time was that it was an anthology show [where] any kind of sports event from anywhere in the world might appear,” Lampley said. “Some of them were esoteric to the point of being bizarre.”
ABC would send a team to record anything from a Mexican cliff diving competition, to barrel jumping, or a demolition derby and Jim Lampley, sometimes months after the event happened, would record, “What is supposed to sound like a live, play-by-play track to an event that is lying there flat as an egg on video tape.”
“So I’ve done it. And I know how it feels and I know how challenging it is,” Lampley said. “Sometimes I would come out of a six hour, or eight-hour voice over session for a Wide World of Sports event, physically exhausted. Because I constantly felt this urge and this impetous to try to add the excitement that the crowd would have brought.”
“Unfortuneately, I was too good at it,” Lampley said. “And the result of being to good at it was, for instance, every other Hall of Fame sportscaster at ABC did the World Wristwrestling Championships one time. And I did them six times.”
Even if it’s, “extremely unsatisfying,” Lampley said he could call a fight in an empty arena on one condition. No artificial crowd noise.
“I don’t think anything artificial should be done,” Lampley said. “If we’re going to call events with no crowd and no excitement, let’s just do it, and do it honestly the way it is. Leave it to the broadcasters and the producers to try to put back whatever excitement they can.”
Jim Lampley said he’s enjoying this new phase of his career. He and his wife, Debra, have moved to Chapel Hill and, “we’re not going anywhere.”
Jim Lampley is also a North Carolina native, born in Hendersonville, NC. It’s the same city where Jack Dempsey trained for his first fight with Gene Tunney (as we mentioned in our recent book review). Lampley graduated from University of North Carolina in 1971. He was the voice of HBO Boxing from 1988 to 2018. He’s now a “Professor of the Practice” in the UNC Communications Department.
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