Jim Lampley was nervous. In a matter of hours, the man who was HBO's blow-by-blow commentator for 30 years and is widely regarded as the best ever at his trade would be calling Turki Alalshikh’s triple-championship fight card in Times Square last weekend. Outside of the fighters, no one had more at stake than Lampley.

“I didn't expect that more than six years would go by after we said goodbye at HBO without my being behind the microphone to call blow-by-blow,” Lampley acknowledged. "During that time, I had to deal with my disappointment that such a long period was passing without someone in charge wanting me back. If I wasn't apprehensive and borderline scared to death about what tonight can do to my reputation, I wouldn't be professional. When the night is over, some people will say I’ve lost my fastball and others will say I was magnificent. My goal is to be good enough that my severest critics say, ‘That's Jim Lampley.’"

Lampley’s journey to the ranks of sportscasting’s elite began in his home state of North Carolina. He went to school at UNC Chapel Hill and graduated in 1974 with a masters degree in communications. Then he got lucky. ABC wanted to hire an announcer who was close to college age for sideline reporting on college football broadcasts. There were national auditions. Jim got the role. At 25, he was on network television.

Lampley spent 12 years at ABC, upgrading to college football play-by-play, spanning the globe for Wide World of Sports and handling blow-by-blow commentary for professional boxing after Howard Cosell walked away from the sport. In 1987, he moved to CBS where, in addition to sports, he co-anchored the evening news for KCBS in Los Angeles. That was followed by a stint at NBC where he covered NFL, Wimbledon and the Olympics.

The first fight card that Lampley called for premium cable was on Showtime — a cruiserweight doubleheader in St. Tropez on Aug. 15, 1987, when Evander Holyfield knock out Ossie Ocasio and Dwight Muhammad Qawi did the same to Leroy Murphy. "There were topless women sunbathing on the beach,” Jim fondly remembers. “And it was premium cable so the director showed it."

Then HBO called.

From March 20, 1988 (Mike Tyson vs. Tony Tubbs) through Dec. 8, 2018, Lampley provided the soundtrack for some of boxing’s greatest events. He understood the sport and business; had the ability to summarize the action in terse sound bites as it unfolded; and was blessed with an electric voice that demanded attention. His presence at ringside made fights more important to viewers than might otherwise have been the case.

Larry Merchant, who was HBO’s lead analyst on boxing telecasts for 34 years and worked with Lampley for 24 of them, later recalled: “I was never on a telecast with Jim where I thought he just mailed it in. It's like that old line from Joe DiMaggio about how he worked as hard as he did all the time because there might be someone in the stands that day who had never seen him play baseball before and might never see him play again. That's Jim. He might not get it completely right every time. None of us do. But I've never seen him get it wrong either. He's a true professional who makes what's really a very complicated job look effortless. There are very few people in any sport who can do what he does as well as he does."

Lampley is now 76 years old. He moved from California to North Carolina five years ago and lives with his wife, Debra, in a renovated farm house on 6.2 acres of land on the outskirts of Chapel Hill. He has taught a course in American news media at his alma mater and written a memoir (It Happened!: A Uniquely Lucky Life In Sports Television) with the help of Art Chansky, who was sports editor of The Daily Tar Heel when Jim was a college freshman.

In September 2023, PPV.com hired Lampley to promote its brand and post written commentary during its stream of Canelo Alvarez vs. Jermell Charlo. Jim was warmly received by the boxing community. PPV.com hired him again for subsequent events. And the powers that be took note.

Chris Glanville, head of boxing for DAZN, offered Lampley "the third chair" for the Feb. 22 rematch between Artur Beterbiev and Dmitry Bivol in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, but he turned down the offer. Then Turki Alalshikh asked WWE CEO Nick Khan, who was once Lampley’s agent, to broker a deal for Jim’s services as blow-by-blow commentator for the Times Square event.

Announcers matter. Anyone who doubts that assertion should look at what John Madden did for the experience of watching football on television. And announcers are particularly important in boxing. In most sports, fans develop an allegiance to an athlete or team and follow that athlete or team through the season. But elite fighters now fight only once or twice a year, so a network's announcing team is essential to its brand.

Boxing thrived on HBO in part because Lampley, Merchant, George Foreman, Emanuel Steward and Harold Lederman gave the telecasts continuity. They were the brand. Indeed, one reason that boxing on DAZN has failed to permeate the American market is that the announcers vary from show to show and not even the "A team" has caught on.

That said, Lampley had a lot of work to do to prepare for May 2 in Times Square. When he was at HBO, he was embedded in boxing. Time goes by. Jim hasn't been embedded in the sport since 2018. And like everyone else, he has gotten older.

“If those factors didn't affect how I prepare for May 2nd,” Lampley noted after accepting Alalshik’s offer, “I'd be looney. This will be hard work and the most challenging preparation for me in my entire career. I've hired a researcher. I’ve watched fights that I called for HBO as a reminder of what I did well. I'm reading everything I can and watching videos of the fighters who will be on the Times Square card. Calling a fight is the single most subjective job in sportscasting. There are no point counts while the action is going on, no first downs or yard-markers. So I have to be on my A-game for every second of every fight.”

And there was another question to be asked.

The Times Square show was part of Alalshikh’s effort to be the dominant force in boxing and would be rife with economic and political overtones. Would Lampley pull his punches on the air?

“There's more than 30 years of concrete evidence for the kind of things I say and how I say them,” Jim answered. “The people who hired me for this event know how I've presented in the past, and no one has suggested to me that I change that.”

Lampley had arrived in New York four days before fight night. He spent the early part of the week with family and sitting for interviews with more than a hundred media outlets ranging from The New York Times to obscure boxing podcasts. Some of those interviews were keyed to the fights he would call Friday evening and others to promoting his book. On Thursday, he turned his full attention to the Times Square bouts and interviewed the six boxers who would be in the championship contests.

“This never gets old for me,” Jim said as the hour of reckoning neared. “But I am apprehensive. My future in commentating will depend on how warmly I’m received and how well I do tonight. The production process is different from what we did at HBO. But my job behind the microphone will be the same as it always was.”

The DAZN stream began at 5 p.m. with an introductory segment featuring Mike Tyson, Pat McAfee, and Kate Scott. At 5:07, Lampley appeared on camera for the first time with Antonio Tarver and The Ring's Mike Coppinger, who would be commentating with him. Unlike his days at HBO when he wore a tuxedo for big events, he was clad in a sport jacket with a white shirt open at the collar. There were five fights on the card, and he called all of them.

Fight No. 1 was a late addition — a three-round amateur bout between Joel Allen (a NYPD policer officer) and James Gennari (a FDNY firefighter). Lampley’s commentary was sparse in the manner of a baseball player taking a few warm-up swings during batting practice. Gennari won a unanimous decision.

That was followed by the pro debut of Reito Tsutsumi, a highly touted Japanese prospect who won a six-round decision over 50-to-1 underdog Levale Whittington (who fought his heart out but just wasn’t good enough).

Then the featured fights began.

When Teofimo Lopez is on, he’s very good. Against Arnold Barboza, he was clicking on all cylinders. Lopez dictated the pace of the fight, fought more aggressively that Barboza, boxed more proficiently and hit harder. He kept putting rounds in the bank. And Barboza had no “Plan B” to change the narrative. The 118-110, 116-112, 116-112 scorecards in Lopez’s favor were on the mark.

The two bouts that followed presented a commentating challenge.

Devin Haney vs. Jose Ramirez (10-to-1 underdog) was a dreadful fight. Haney looked gun-shy in his first outing since being knocked down three times by Ryan Garcia a year ago. Devin might not have been scared, but he fought like it. He skittered around the ring and seldom engaged. Meanwhile, Ramirez, who’s on the downside of his career, was slow, plodding and couldn’t figure out how to cut off the ring.

In an age when too many blow-blow-by commentators are shills and would have waxed eloquently about Haney’s defensive skills, Lampley kept it real. He addressed the flow of the bout honestly and, after the 11th, told viewers: “Not a whole lot of drama so far.” With 30 seconds left in the final round, he added, “Nobody has hurt anybody in this fight.”

Haney emerged with a lopsided unanimous-decision win although it’s hard to imagine anyone saying, “Gee, I can’t wait to buy Devin’s next pay-per-view fight.”

The final bout matched Garcia against Rolly Romero. Several months earlier, Alalshikh had financed the settlement of litigation between Garcia and Haney with an eye toward hosting a rematch between them in Riyadh later this year.

Garcia entered the ring to face Romero as an 8-to-1 favorite. But Ryan looked awful. His timing was off. His balance was poor. He had no fire and fought like a fighter who hadn’t trained. Romero dropped him with a left hook in the second, and there wasn’t much action either way after that. In the seventh, Lampley bemoaned “all this posing and looking.” In Round 10, he warned, “The door is closing for Ryan Garcia.”

The judges’ scorecards — 118-109, 115-112, 115-112 for Romero — confirmed that view.

Putting the final two fights in perspective, Haney and Ramirez threw a total of 503 punches between them, which was the third lowest total for a full twelve-round fight in the history of CompuBox. An hour later, that number was undercut when Garcia and Romero threw a combined 490. Sadly, one day later in Riyadh, William Scull mistook a prize fight for a track meet and shattered the glass floor as he and Canelo Alvarez combined to throw an all-time-low 445.

Lampley wasn’t away from boxing for as long as the 10 years that Foreman was on hiatus before beginning his comeback. But almost seven years —the length of time that Jim wasn’t behind the microphone — is a long time. Thus, it’s reassuring to note that, yes, he’s still Jim Lampley. Only one thing was missing from the equation on Friday night.

When Lampley was at HBO, he treated fight fans to three decades of excellence. But he’s best remembered for his call of historic fights.

Great fights are a key component in making a commentator great. The fights in Times Square were lacking in greatness and drama. One can only imagine what Lampley’s call would have been had he been at ringside for the seven historic bouts contested during his absence amongst Tyson Fury, Oleksandr Usyk, Anthony Joshua and Deontay Wilder.

Let’s see what comes next.

Reach Thomas Hauser at thomashauserwriter@gmail.com. His most recent book — MY MOTHER and me — is a personal memoir available at Amazon. In 2004, the Boxing Writers Association of America honored Hauser with the Nat Fleischer Award for career excellence in boxing journalism. In 2019, Hauser was selected for boxing's highest honor - induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.