About the Book.
From Jim Lampley, HBO’s ringside face and voice of boxing, comes a first-person, blow-by-blow account of the evolution of sports television chock full of famous names, history-making events, and never-before-told stories from the world of sports.
About the Author.
Jim Lampley is a Hall of Fame sportscaster with 50 years of on-site experience at numerous live sports events that include college and NFL football and ABC’s Wide World of Sports, inside NBA and MLB locker rooms, Wimbledon, Ryder Cup PGA Golf, and 14 Olympics. For 30 years, he was the face and voice of HBO World Championship boxing, including anecdotes and interactions with the most famous fighters of his era (Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson, Ray Leonard and George Foreman) and the biggest boxing matches up to and including the “Billion Dollar Bout” between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, which had the largest gross income in the history of pay-per-view sports.
About the Moderator.
A former New York Golden Gloves boxer, Matthews attended C.W. Post and began his career as a boxing journalist in 1983, covering fights at Madison Square Garden’s Felt Forum while working part-time for Newsday. Over the next four decades he was ringside reporting on such iconic fights as Hagler vs. Hearns, Hagler vs. Leonard, Spinks vs. Holmes I & II and all the major Mike Tyson fights. In addition to Newsday, his byline appeared in such notable outlets as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New York Post, the New York Daily News, Sports Illustrated, Sport Magazine, Yahoo Sports and ESPN.com. The multi-talented journalist has also served as the ringside reporter for NBC-TV at the 1988 and 1992 Olympics and worked as a ringside analyst for Showtime, CBS-TV, SportsChannel America, Versus and ESPN. Matthews also hosted the SiriusXM boxing show “Going the Distance’’ with Teddy Atlas and Nabate Isles. He also hosted a drive-time sports talk show “Wally and the Keeg” on ESPN radio. From 1989-1993 he served as president of the Boxing Writers Association of America and, in 1994, was awarded the Nat Fleischer Award for Excellence in Boxing Journalism by the BWAA.