LAS VEGAS -- The legendary Jim Lampley of PPV.com sat down with The Sporting Tribune's Will Despart ahead of David Benavidez vs. David Morrell on Saturday in Las Vegas to breakdown the fight and the current state of sports.
First off, what are your thoughts on Benavidez vs. Morrell here this weekend? What's your prediction and do you believe this has fight of the year potential like some folks are saying?
Jim Lampley: Yes, it's potentially the fight of the year. It should be a confrontation that does involve real violence. That's what fight fans want to see. These are punchers, they both have multiple offensive skills. It's a conventional fighter against a southpaw. There are a lot of reasons to expect intense, fairly close contact or competition. I'm very excited about Benavidez vs. Morell.
You've obviously seen some great fighters throughout the course of your career. Do you see any shades of past legends in Benavidez or Morell?
JL: I don't know enough about Morell yet to make that kind of a statement, but Benavidez has color and drama. (He also has) the most important thing to win the hearts of fans, which is punching power and aggression to go with it. David Benavidez is, to a certain degree, born for stardom. If he continues on his present arc, which requires a win over Morell this weekend, he could conceivably become the face of American boxing."
What has it been like for you working with PPV.com? What are your thoughts on the streaming era and the future of sports television in general?
JL: Well, PPV.com is an example of something that I spoke about many times during my five semesters of teaching a course in communications at the University of North Carolina. The title of the course was Evolution of Storytelling in American Electronic News Media. One of the principles that I quoted to my students over and over and over is that you have to pay attention to how evolution in business structures, evolution in personnel, evolution in finance, and evolution in the relationship of the medium to the subject. These will ultimately conspire to create differences in the way the stories are told. There's a constant ongoing evolution in the shaping and development of stories in electronic news media.
Now here comes a perfect example of that. I work for PPV.com, we do live chat. I sit at ringside with three other boxing experts and we watch the fight and live stream an ongoing chat. We offer our observations on what we're seeing in the ring. Sometimes we agree with each other. Sometimes we don't agree with each other. But viewers are able to click a box and join us. They can push back or they can support and message as they see fit. It's all an ongoing shared conversation, which is an entirely new way of delivering comments on the boxing match, and I'm replicating exactly what I told my students by being a part of it.
Do you see the streaming era as a net positive for boxing?
JL: Yes. Boxing is the most intimate sport. It's face-to-face. It's subjective to a large degree because even though CompuBox has succeeded in selling to the public the idea that you can create a statistical model that tells you a lot about what goes on in a fight, it doesn't tell you everything.
The only people who know everything about what goes on in a fight are the two fighters who have been in the ring, breathing on each other, touching each other, and experiencing at the closest range possible what this most intimate of sports is all about.
Super Bowl's coming up, so I have to ask. Do you have any thoughts on the game, and where does Mahomes rank among quarterbacks that you've seen play in your time?
JL: I think Mahomes is the most effectively improvisational quarterback of all of the great quarterbacks I've seen. Boxing has a reliable statistical model, so we know how good he is from the numbers, the touchdown passes, and the high completion percentage.
Obviously, he has an unusual and some would say unique relationship with Kelce, and I do think Kelce is within the long line of tight ends that we've seen. Highly unusual, if not actually unique. His bounciness, his ability to not just see the field, but feel the field, is enormous. He catches the ball, he makes an instinctive cut, or at least it appears that way, to the inside or the outside. Now he's got an avenue to get away from pursuit and run the ball for long distances. He's a remarkable talent, and Mahomes deals with him and uses him in exactly the most effective way.
The Olympics are coming to Los Angeles in 2028, of course. You were a part of it in 1984. What do you remember about those games, and what should people expect in 2028?
JL: The 1984 Olympics were a great memory for me because I had two highly visible assignments there. I was the stroke-by-stroke voice of swimming at the 1984 Olympics, and there were a lot of fascinating and great stories that emerged in the pool. I was also the host of the late-night show with my beloved friend Donna De Varona. I was the only commentator on the ABC staff who had both an event assignment and a studio assignment. Therefore, it was a big moment in my career and another step forward in my evolution as a network television sportscaster.
If you could relive any sporting event that you've been a part of in your career, what would it be?
JL: I did a post-game interview and was at the Miracle on Ice in 1980. That's obviously a cherished memory. But if you read my book, you will see that I have this really graphic memory, and it's a very strong emotional attachment to the first Olympic event I ever saw. I wound up going to 14 Olympics, which is reputedly more than any other American broadcaster, but at the end of the day, the one that I would return to would be my very first Olympic event. That was Franz Klammer's downhill run at the Innsbruck Olympic Games in 1976. That may be the single most dramatic event I've ever covered in sports.
