Cap wrote:For me it was being picked from ringside to hold Tom Sharkey's water bottle for him while he passed through the ropes to tackle big Jim Jeffords at Detroit the winter of 1900. I was just a wee kid and Sharkey looked as wide as a barn door across the shoulders. That big moose Jeffords crumpled like paper in the second as I recall.
it's obvious that you were kneehigh to a grasshopper back then. "They don't make 'em like they used to. Work it out of your system young fella. By golly those youngsters of today have no respect for their elders. fetch my hot water bottle. help me, I've crapped my pants again" etc etc
first live fight i ever watched was de la hoya-mosely I was the fight i was i think 13 at the time.
what fights got me addicted boxing???
my dad having me watch with him fights with him on classic sports channel.
i was around 13. i remember there used to be a lot of louis and marciano bouts on and my dad would tell me about them and how great they were. those 2 were the first old boxers that were introduced to me so thats probably how they got to be my favorites
being of a younger generation (i'm 24), what hooked me was Holyfield-Bowe II. Seeing the smaller guy more than hold his own on the inside with those jolting inside shots...also Benn-McClellan, as it was a thrilling battle on prime time terrestrial TV in England.
look at the shit on prime time, terrestrial tv in england now. Calzaghe and Audley are putting a whole generation who've been boxing starved (as sky monopolized from 96-2004) completely off boxing. Guys who don't want to, or can't, FIGHT!
Cap wrote:For me it was being picked from ringside to hold Tom Sharkey's water bottle for him while he passed through the ropes to tackle big Jim Jeffords at Detroit the winter of 1900. I was just a wee kid and Sharkey looked as wide as a barn door across the shoulders. That big moose Jeffords crumpled like paper in the second as I recall.
Hey didn't I see you ringside that night Abe Freakin Simon knocked out Jersey Joe Walcott?
Two fights, Benn - Eubank 2 got me intersted when i was about 10 & then from their i watched Bruno, Benn, Eubank, Naz etc then i went off boxing from the age of 15. The second fight is Sanders - Wlad, i'd not watched a boxing fight in about 5 or 6 years and had heard that the Klitschko's were going to be the the men at heavyweight, i remember looking at Sanders & thinking he's gunna get beat bad & then what happens he batters Wlad all over, and thats what got me hooked, the simple fact that anything can happen in boxing.
I just saw ome old home movies of a Christmas when I was 3-4 years old and I was hitting one of those "weebles wobble" punching toys, throwing straight punches and going to the body... The first fight I saw would have been around that time and it would have been Armando Muniz at the Olympic Auditorium, against who I do not know. The second fight I know I saw was Chacon/Little Red Lopez; I was a Lopez fan, bad night.
My mother took me too thew fights- we'd take the RTD bus from Pomona/Ontario area to downtown LA, then a local bus to the Olympic- so I saw Muniz and Chacon most times as they were her favorites. I was, however, already hooked on boxing, sight unseen, due to the stories my father would tell me about boxing in general and in particular Rocky Marciano. Beyond that, however were the stories about Fritzie Zivic. My father told me about him daily as they were from the same neighborhood in Pittsburgh, plus he was Croatian too, and my father sparred with him in the early 1940s. I have a 1940 autograph (Fritzie was champ then) that is the most precious thing in life to me and I only regret that my aunt had misplaced the Billy Conn autograph she had from the same evening.
Hagler -Briscoe . But also Hagler versus all of the 70s era Philly middleweights.Marvin went out of his way to seek these guys out to make a name for himself. That attitude is not seen very often anymore.Bobby Watts ,worm monroe, Cyclone hart,Bad Bennie,These guys were tough very tough.
it's obvious that you were kneehigh to a grasshopper back then. "They don't make 'em like they used to. Work it out of your system young fella. By golly those youngsters of today have no respect for their elders. fetch my hot water bottle. help me, I've crapped my pants again" etc etc