palooka wrote:
I watch the bouts with my lad (he's 7) and we'll walk up to the bookies and I'll put a fiver each on one of the boxers, I try to explain who is who and what is happening, we get a chinese and it's a boys night in! If we win the bet we spilit the winnings. Effing mint it is and hopefully my boy will look back fondly when he's a man and maybe have good memories of boxing and be a fan (gotta get em young)
Well at least he gets some food out of it ;;-) . To be fair i used to love doing anything with my Dad, still do, but these days I buy the chinese.
I have a daughter, only 2, but I am hopeful I can turn her into a sports buff. Our lass is fighting against it though.
Yes, I'm not too good at picking a winner but console myself that I'm learning him about disappointment when he's young enough to adjust.
i had 3 older brothers that boxed so there was loads of trophies around the house and my dad got to boxing news every friday .
i went boxing from about 10/14 then stopped till i was about 21 when i started again for about 3 years . the hagler hearns fight was a big one for me and later on duran vs barkley had me jumping around shadow boxing my then girlfriend .
When Naz lost, my dad was looking at a newspaper and said 'Prince Naseem has lost' and, equating boxing to other sports I said 'But surely he has lost before?' Then I looked him up online, found his record on a young Boxrec and found that indeed, he has NEVER lost until now, he must be one of the greatest fighters ever, I thought, Undefeated! Who can claim that in other sports? Noone! And that must make Barrera EVEN BETTER! Then I learned about boxing.
My old man used to follow Bruno during the 80s, and my mum worked Tues and wed nights. My younger bro would go to bed about 8 then I'd be allowed to stay up and watch, i guess on sportsnight or something. Cheese and crackers and a "shandy" made up from about 1cm of his home brew and the rest lemonade...."don't tell your mum etc"
I can't really remember any particular fight clearly though. Me and my bro had one of those punch balls On a stand but was more his toy than mine.
Dad only liked heavyweights for some random reason so we never watched the middle and super middles on itv nor naz. He was too tight to buy sky so didn't really follow at all beyond being aware of some of the huge fights eg Bruno lewis etc and reading in paper about them.
Then at uni couple of my mates loved boxing so watched a fair few fights half cut. Remember lewis v grant and Naz v Barrera quite vividly. That got me semi interested again as did aud at the olympics, then as someone said earlier saw Gomez v arthur on sky. Arthur doing his bit to the camera having been put down just sticks in my mind even now, and started following really seriously last ten years or so.
Got some serious gaps in knowledge historically, butlearn loads being on here, plus in terms of modern day game i read loads and watch loads.....just wish i'd started earlier like i did on a load of other sports
GreedyG wrote:When I was 10 years old in the late seventies, I was a bit of a weakling and was being bullied so my Dad took me along to a local gym (not a famous one, just a hut with a ramshackle ring and some bags etc) and told the guy there to toughen me up. I was scared shitless at first but then started to really enjoy it and combined with running and playing football, I started to actually toughen up. I was never good enough to make a living from boxing but I got the bullies off my back after a while....... Anyway, one of the blokes at the gym started telling me about all these great fighters like Muhammad Ali, Roberto Duran, et al and my Dad let me stay up late a few nights now and again to watch Sportsnight and later on ITV Fight Night and that was me hooked. I don't post here that much as I'm just a passionate fan and many of you are experts and actually involved in the business and I'm happy just to read and drop in the occasional comment about a fight.
I hope you post more often, there are more 'experts in their own heads' than actual exerts and your opinions are needed
My old man used to follow Bruno during the 80s, and my mum worked Tues and wed nights. My younger bro would go to bed about 8 then I'd be allowed to stay up and watch, i guess on sportsnight or something. Cheese and crackers and a "shandy" made up from about 1cm of his home brew and the rest lemonade...."don't tell your mum etc"
Would have been the mid 1980s when I was 12 or 13...I remember watching McGuigan-Taylor which was on Saturday teatime after the football scores and sort of being interested, but I got properly hooked in late 1986/early 1987...at the time boxing seemed to then get into sports news on local radio a bit, so I remember hearing about Lloyd Honeygahn and that Bonecrusher Smith had beaten Tim Witherspoon. Gradually I got more drawn in and the first fight I saw on TV actually really wanting to watch it was Dennis Andries-Tommy Hearns and then I saw the first Dave Mcauley-Fidel Bassa fight a few weeks later. Kind of snowballed from there. Lloyd Honeygahn was the first boxer I really liked...I remember being absolutely gutted when he lost to Jorge Vaca.
Of course in those days you had regular fights on Sportsnight and Midweek Sports Special on Wednesday nights and occasional fights on Saturday night. Where I lived it was really hard to get Boxing News (no-where seemed to stock it) but there was one shop that had The Ring and KO so I bought then religiously. One shop then got Boxing Weekly when that came out so I used to get that.
As a grown-up (!?) in the 1990s I had Sky etc, but then moved to Holland where there was virtually no boxing on TV...just used to get Boxing Monthly so follow the gane. And then got Sky again when I moved back to the UK but don't get chance these days to watch many fights on TV. Work gets in the way.
Boxing being on mainstream TV in the 1980s and lots of charasmatic British fighters also being around then made it easy to get into boxing. Not sure it works the same way now...I wonder if my son will be more enticed by MMA, UFC and wrestling than boxing (if he even ends up liking 'fight sports' at all).
My old man used to follow Bruno during the 80s, and my mum worked Tues and wed nights. My younger bro would go to bed about 8 then I'd be allowed to stay up and watch, i guess on sportsnight or something. Cheese and crackers and a "shandy" made up from about 1cm of his home brew and the rest lemonade...."don't tell your mum etc"
love that detail
Funny what you remember. I was all of about ten years old as well!
Dad doesn't follow boxing at all now, sad but I think he was a bit old school and in fairness its mind boggling now all the various belts within each body.
Me mum bought me one of them boxing magazines, where u get a video with it- in the early 90s. Mine was clay vs liston and rumble in the jungle. Was only a kid but proper loved it.
rob h wrote:Me mum bought me one of them boxing magazines, where u get a video with it- in the early 90s. Mine was clay vs liston and rumble in the jungle. Was only a kid but proper loved it.
"Boxers", a few of my mates bought it but I wasn't interested as I had all the fights on Betamax...
To be fair the quality's not bad on DVD. My two gripes are that it's got that annoying graphic in-between rounds and quite often, entire rounds are missing.
It's the only place I've ever seen Patterson/Johansson III (until that point) though.
Yes, I'm not too good at picking a winner but console myself that I'm learning him about disappointment when he's young enough to adjust.
