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City native Jim Lampley heads to Boxing Hall of Fame

Jim Lampley will be inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame on June 14.

By Bill Moss, Published: May 11, 2015

The seed of Jim Lampley’s broadcasting career was planted at a dinner party in Laurel Park.

“I can very very vividly remember that in the summer of 1957 when my mother took me up to a party at the home of Margaret Ann Blocker,” the veteran sportscaster said. “My mother took me down the hall into a room by myself — this was a party for adults — and she installed me in front of the television set and said, ‘Sit right here. You are going to watch Friday night fights with Sugar Ray Robinson and Bobo Olson, and the reason you’re going to do this is because if your father was here that’s what he’d be doing. So you sit here and watch the fights the way your father would have.’
Jim Lampley as a boy.“Like virtually everything in my life and in my career, it was a gift from my mother,” Lampley went on. “That’s how I got interested in sports, how I became a sports commentator. That I got specifically into boxing was the way to keep the flame of my father alive in me. It launched me into a lifetime of being a boxing fan.”
In the past 25 years as the voice of boxing for HBO, Lampley has served as one of the sport’s most listened to fight callers and perhaps its most authoritative storyteller. A four-time Sports Emmy Award winner, he hosts “The Fight Game with Jim Lampley” on the pay TV network.
He has always honored “the sweet science” in his broadcasting work and with his clear-eyed and tough commentary on its foibles and frauds. Now the boxing world is honoring him. On June 14 the International Boxing Hall of Fame will induct Lampley into its World Hall of Fame.
Lampley has covered 14 Olympics and called games and matches in every major sport. Yet when he became prominent enough to make his own path, he chose boxing.
“Boxing became my home,” he said. “There is a challenge in fight calling which is different from every sport. They all have natural structural breaks in them, which sort of structures the enterprise for announcers.” Baseball has pitches, outs and innings. Football has plays, penalties and first downs. Basketball has made baskets, dead balls and free throws.
“Boxing never breaks down like that,” he said. “It’s always going to be free form. I work on a premium network so there’s never a moment when we stop (for commercials). So there’s a different kind of challenge and a different kind of flow and what you do as boxing commentator is different than in all the other kinds of sports commentating.”
Lampley calls boxing the most intense psychological sport. On one level, the training, strategy and tactics are highly sophisticated. Yet in the ring, boxing is as base, as universal and as timeless as any physical contest.
“Almost all of us think we understand a little bit anyway what a fight is and what it’s all about,” he said. “The general audience says I know that, I understand. These two guys are in the middle of the ring, half naked and they’re going to fight, I get that.”

Caddying at Country Club

Lampley’s mother, Peggy, and his father, James Bratton Lampley. Lampley’s father, James Bratton Lampley, was a bomber pilot in World War II who flew Liberators and Flying Fortresses over Europe and the Pacific. When James Lampley died of testicular cancer at age 36, his wife, Peggy, was widowed for a second time before the age of 40. Her first husband, Air Force Lt. Col. Fred L. Trickey Jr., a highly-decorated B-29 bomber pilot, was among five World War II heroes who perished in a B-25 bomber crash on Cold Mountain on Sept. 13, 1946. Trickey, 30, was best friends with James Bratton Lampley, whom Peggy would marry.
Young Jim, his half brother, Fred, and his mother remained in Hendersonville for six years after the elder Lampley’s death, moving to Miami when Jim was 11. Jim came home to Hendersonville in the summers and stayed with his grandparents, Mildred “Mid” and James Hoyt “Pappy” Lampley, in a house on Fourth Avenue West.
“From age 11 onward I would come back every summer, making money by caddying at the golf course and getting in trouble at Boyd Park and Brock’s,” he said of the popular burger joint and teenage hangout.
“We were extremely close back in those days,” he said. He had uncles and aunts — Dr. Bill and Mary Ann Lampley and Pete and Trudy Lampley — and four cousins close in age. “I grew up with all of those cousins. They were like brothers and sisters to me really because of the amount of time we spent together.”
Dr. Lampley’s son, Bill, recalled his cousin staring at flashcards, one after another, closing his eyes until the information clicked in, then tossing the flashcard aside.
“He was born to do that job because all his life he’d been an encyclopedia of sports data and information,” he said.
Lampley returned to his home state to enroll as a freshman at the University of North Carolina and began his broadcast career at WCHL, an AM radio station that covered UNC football and basketball games. A few years later, when he had just started graduate school, Lampley caught the eye — and ear — of the legendary sports producer Roone Arledge, who wanted to recruit some young broadcasters. It was the job of a lifetime, and Lampley wasn’t sure he wanted it.
“My only ambition was to stay in Chapel Hill for as long as I possibly could because I had credentials to the basketball games,” he said. “Why in the world would I have left? My friends literally had to take me to the airport to put me on the plane to go to New York I was so reluctant to leave Chapel Hill.”

Steel vault of a memory

Anyone who has ever asked Jim’s uncle, Doc Lampley, to recall Hendersonville history 50 and 60 years ago would understand that the family shares a steel vault memory.
“There’s a lot of homework that goes into all kinds of sports broadcasting,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve done anything unusual in terms of memorizing things.”
But then he remembers his early childhood and a powerful sensation that came over him after his father died.
“I can very very vividly remember thinking that if you did not remember everything you lost it,” he said. “I used to lie awake and memorize the seating chart of every elementary class I was ever in. I would memorize record albums in order, and I would recite all their songs on each one so I could quote to you all the albums.
“I will say this. I have a memory which other people regard as unusual,” he said. “A lot of those things are stuck in my head. The date of this, the date of that, etc. etc.”
So, in the end, he has to acknowledge that, like his grandmother and his uncle Bill, he has a steel vault of a memory.
“Grandma Mid was the ultimate oral historian,” he said. “The picture was presented to you, whether it was true or not, that Grandma never forgot anything.”

A new Lampley family memory

The historic punches, the world championships and the bigger-than-life personalities will come flooding back to Jim Lampley next month when he stands on stage with boxing legends including Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini and Riddick Bowe. Family memories will drift in, too.
With guidance from his wife, Debra (a Southern California event planner), Lampley has arranged for Mary Ann and Doc Lampley and their children, Bill, Margie and John, and spouses, and the Lampley cousins from Norfolk to fly to New York for the Hall of Fame induction.
“It’s a rather large event,” he said. “What’s happening is that HBO is televising a boxing match in Madison Square Garden. We will have a fight to cover on the eve of the (Hall of Fame) event, on Saturday, June 13.”
The next day, the entourage will fly to Syracuse and then ride to Canastota, home of the International Boxing Hall of Fame. The sport that kept “the flame of my father alive,” as Lampley put it, has now sparked the reunion party of Lampleys from California to Hendersonville to Virginia.
“So it should be a fond memory for us all,” said the newly named Hall of Famer. “Bill is my father’s younger brother and Mary Ann was my mother’s best friend. That’s the closest the universe can get to putting my mother and dad in the car with me.”