In March 2000, Michael Katz became the first major boxing writer to move from the print media to the internet when he left the Daily News to join a website called Houseofboxing.com. Houseofboxing had been founded by Doug Fischer and Gary Randall, who sold it to a company that then became a subsidiary of Magnum Sports & Entertainment.

Katz signed a five-year contract that was extraordinary for its time. His annual salary for the first three years would be $157,500 ($286,911 in today's dollars) with increases thereafter. He would also receive a generous allowance for medical insurance.

Mike announced the move with a statement that read, "The New York Daily News was my home for fifteen years. I have many good friends there. It was an honor to write for such a respected institution, as it was to spend twenty-five years before that with the New York Times. I'm leaving the Daily News for three reasons. First, Houseofboxing is giving me the opportunity to write whatever I want to write without the space limitations that are a fact of life at a daily newspaper. Second, Houseofboxing has offered me a generous financial package that provides increased security for my family. And third, Houseofboxing represents a unique opportunity to be on the cutting edge of new technologies that will transform both the business of boxing and the way boxing is covered by the media in the years ahead. I wish everyone at the Daily News well. I'm excited by the prospect of building Houseofboxing into a respected force in the boxing and media industries. And I look forward to continuing the many friendships I have made over the years. You will see me at ringside."

Katz loved writing for the internet. But not everything went smoothly. Tom Gerbasi (now a respected boxing writer) recalls, "I was hired to edit Katz and post what he wrote because he had no idea how to post and no interest in learning how. That was my job and we didn't have the easiest working relationship. I could have retired long ago if I had a dollar for each time Katz screamed at me. His copy was always clean. That wasn't a problem. Except for typos, I rarely edited his content. There was one time when he wrote something and I said, 'I think we might get sued over this.' We pulled it and he threw a fit.

"The larger issue between us," Gerbasi continues, "was that Katz was not computer savvy. And it was a problem. One time, he was covering a Tony Ayala fight in San Antonio and called me screaming, 'My machine is dead!' It got so bad that I hung up on him. Another time, he dictated his entire column over the phone to me because he couldn't figure out how to click and send. He expected me to be available to post for him 24-7 which was not a reasonable expectation. And there were times when he was nasty to people who didn't deserve it. As a boxing writer, he was the best of his time. But you get the picture."

Then a problem more significant than posting articles arose at Houseofboxing. In early 2002, Magnum Sports and Entertainment went bankrupt. Katz lost his job and was relegated to writing freelance pieces for various print publications and websites for a small fraction of what he had been paid before.

Meanwhile, an ugly confrontation was brewing.

Unlike other awards given out annually by the Boxing Writers Association of America, the Nat Fleischer Award for Career Excellence in Boxing Journalism is voted upon by past honorees, not by the entire BWAA membership. Each year, Katz was responsible for polling the previous honorees.

In late 2003 after that year's winner was announced, Jerry Izenberg (a past honoree) told BWAA president Bernard Fernandez that he was returning his Fleischer plaque and resigning from the organization. Fernandez asked why. Izenberg replied that he hadn't been polled in years and that the so-called polling conducted by Katz was fraudulent.

Fernandez hadn't been polled in recent years either. He then called six past Fleischer honorees, none of whom had been polled. Further inquiries on his part revealed that, for years, the winner of the award had been chosen, not by a vote of past honorees, but by Katz and two of his friends who decided who they wanted to win and then purported to poll past winners to confirm their choice.

In other words, the principled boxing writer who railed against the world sanctioning bodies for orchestrating "phony ratings" had orchestrated a series of phony elections.

Fernandez referred the matter to the BWAA officers and board of directors who voted to vacate the award for 2003 and remove Katz from the board. Katz then resigned from the BWAA and proceeded to heap abuse on Fernandez.

"I don't know what made Mike think he had the right to do what he did with the Fleischer," Fernandez says, looking back on that time. "There was no excuse for it, but he acted afterward like I was the bad guy. He was the one who had done something wrong but he held it against me forever. I thought we had a good relationship. We were friends. And then it all fell apart. He stopped talking to me. I was in the press room in Las Vegas for a fight not long after that and he was trashing me to anyone who would listen."

Fernandez bore the brunt of Katz's anger over Mike's "Fleischer toy" being taken away from him. The following year, that rage was aimed at me.

Like Bernard, I thought that Mike and I had a good relationship. We had lunch together from time to time. He had been a guest in my home. We had worked together at Houseofboxing. I had been supportive of him for a long time; most notably in 1998 when Bob Arum sued him for libel.

When Katz was with the Daily News, he had written occasional freelance pieces for other publications. One of these pieces was a column for International Boxing Digest in which Mike referred to Arum as the “Yom Kippur Whore” because Top Rank was promoting a fight card to be televised by HBO several hours after the conclusion of the Yom Kippur holiday. Mike's column also expressed the view that Arum would “sell his own religion.”

Arum was understandably upset and sued Katz for libel. The magazine was not a defendant. That meant Mike (who lived in New York) would be burdened with the cost of hiring a lawyer in Las Vegas (where the suit was filed) and going through all of the uncertainties of litigation.

I'm a lawyer. Before the start of my writing career, I spent five years as a litigator at a large Wall Street law firm. Much of that time was spent as defense counsel for companies like CBS when they were sued for libel.

Acting on Katz's behalf, I brokered a settlement with Arum. Mike didn't have to pay anything. Instead, he issued a statement that read in part, "Mr. Arum has communicated to me his belief that he is a committed Jew and that he found these characterizations highly offensive. I have also been advised by Mr. Arum that he himself would not have attended the fight because he would have been observing Yom Kippur at his temple in Las Vegas, and that no Jewish member of his staff would have been required to work on Yom Kippur. My choice of words crossed a line that I myself regret."

But that history between Mike and myself was now forgotten. In February 2005, Fernandez announced that I had been chosen as the Fleischer honoree in the first "honest election" in years. And Katz exploded.

The following day, Mike wrote on Maxboxing.com, "I took my Fleischer off the wall for a few moments of mourning." He never spoke to me again other than on one occasion when I went over to say hello to him at a party and he told me, "Fuck you. Never speak to me again."

As time went by, more of Mike's old friends became the object of his rage. Katz and Ron Borges had once been comrades in arms. Then Mike aimed his venom at Borges.

In 2004, Ron had worked as an expert commentator on one of Don King's pay-per-view cards. That offended Katz's sense of morality, and he wrote an online column that accused Borges of being a "toadie" and "puppet" for King, stated that Ron was "no longer a respected colleague," and called him "a vomit-smelling pool of sleaze."

Soon after that, the two former friends found themselves together in the media center at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas where Top Rank was promoting a fight card featuring Oscar De La Hoya vs. Felix Sturm and Bernard Hopkins vs. Robert Allen.

Katz made another disparaging remark; this one to Borges's face.

"I'm really sick and tired of your shit," Borges told him. "You would be wise not to say that again."

"Shut the fuck up," Katz responded.

At that point, Borges reached over and knocked the beret off Mike's head.

"You schmuck," Katz screamed. "How can you hit a cripple?"

Katz then started whacking Borges with his cane. Several onlookers moved to break up the altercation. Bob Arum, who was giving an interview nearby, was knocked to the ground. Top Rank publicist Lee Samuels thought he heard gunshots and threw himself over Arum as a protective shield (injuring his own shoulder). And Arum started shouting, "Get the fuck off me."

"When it was over," Borges recalls, "a security guard took Mike out of the room. Then he came over to me and I figured, 'Now it's my turn to get escorted out.' But all the guard did was look at me and say, 'It's about time somebody smacked that guy in the head.' Do I wish the incident hadn't happened? Of course. And by the way; it was one of the most overblown fights in history."

More troubling times followed.

Mike had cared a lot about boxing journalism. But as the years passed, he seemed to care less about it. He held grudges to the point of cutting off his nose to spite his face. He stopped working for two websites because they hired writers he didn't like. Virtually everyone in boxing became an equal-opportunity target. "That's just Katz being Katz," was an often-heard refrain.

Randy Roberts (who was honored by the BWAA with the A.J. Liebling Award for Outstanding Boxing Writing) recalls, "I was sitting in the row behind Katz in the press section at a fight. When it was over, he got up to leave and I saw a wallet on the floor. I looked at it to see who it belonged to. Katz's name was in it, so I called after him and gave him the wallet. He didn't even thank me. He looked at me like I had stolen his wallet, checked to see if the money was all there, and walked away."

Mike had never taken care of himself physically. As time passed, his physical ailments worsened.

"He reached out to me a few years ago," Robert Lipsyte recalls. "We had lost contact but the cult of the Times is strong. He called me and came out to [my home in] Shelter Island with his daughter and son-in-law. We hung out together for a few hours but it was hard to keep the conversation going. He seemed depressed."

Then the unthinkable happened.

Mike had been a devoted father. His daughter, Moorea, became a lawyer; then a wife and mother.

In August 2021, Moorea died of cancer at age 39.

"There's a saying," Ron Borges says, "that God will never give you more of a burden than you can carry. But God put too much pain on Mike. The tragedies he suffered ground him down."

After Moorea's death, Mike lived pretty much as a recluse in Brooklyn. His life was, stay at home . . . read a book. . . go across the street to a diner for lunch . . . and see his granddaughter which was the only thing left in his life that brought him joy.

"He had his own apartment," Jerry Eskenazi, who visited Mike, recalls. "It was an odd set up inside a fenced-in area. You rang the bell and he came out in his wheelchair and opened the gate for you. He was frail but his mind was still sharp. I got along with him. But one of the home nursing services that sent people there refused to have anything more to do with him after a while."

Then circumstances forced Mike to enter a nursing home. His diabetes worsened and he needed kidney dialysis three days a week.

"I visited him there about six months ago," Eskenazi says. "It was one of those places where you share a room with someone. And they had to change Mike's room from time to time because he couldn't get along with whoever he was sharing a room with. The last time I saw him was about six months ago. An aide came in. Mike looked at her and said, 'What the fuck do you want?' It was sad for a lot of reasons. I spoke to him on the phone last week [the week before Mike died]. It was hard having a conversation with him because he'd gotten hard of hearing. But we talked about the football [NFL] playoffs."

Katz leaves a complicated legacy. In the aftermath of his death, Ron Borges posted a remembrance on social media that spoke of Mike's love for his family and the tragedies he endured in addition to calling him "one of the best boxing writers who ever lived."

"Like most who knew him for any period of time (a minute could be enough in some cases)," Borges noted, "I had my ups and downs with him. But we traveled the world together for nearly 50 years and I long admired his talent, his willingness to stand up for fighters, and to call out the b.s. of boxing and its promoters and broadcast entities who worked diligently to try and destroy a noble sport. He wasn’t always right and he could be petulant, obstreperous, and sometimes cruel and mean. But he had things that are really missing in much of what passes for boxing writing today."

Other members of the boxing community also had their say:

* Teddy Atlas: "I knew Mike for more than forty years. And let's face it. He wasn't going to win a prize for being Mr. Congeniality. But I came to terms with his crankiness and - let's call it - his undiplomatic behavior because he was a real professional in his writing and he understood and loved the sport. Boxing is a harsh world and Mike fit well with that. One of the good things about him was, you always knew where you stood with him. He was honest and told you what he thought. So yeah; Mike Katz; the good, the bad, and the ugly. But the good outweighed the bad and the ugly."

* Wally Matthews: "Katz had a way of getting people to talk with him. And the fighters loved him. Marvin Hagler wouldn't talk to anybody. And Hagler talked to Katz."

* Pat English: "He played Michael Katz better than anybody else could. That's for sure."

* Jerry Izenberg: "A lot of guys get so full of themselves that they become insufferable. I don't think Katz ever got full of himself. There were times when he was insufferable. But at his best, he was a tremendous writer. When his wife died, everything fell apart. Then his daughter died and things got even worse. But I don't think you can criticize him for what happened after those tragedies."

* Don Elbaum: "They don't make them like Katz anymore. In fact, they didn't make them like Katz before Katz either."

* Mark Kriegel: "He had his excesses. He could be intimidating. But underneath all that cantankerousness, there was something tender and, I think, a little damaged. He was an excellent teacher and worldly and smart. He could be funny as hell. He was incorruptible, and we all know writers who weren't. I'm in awe of how he raised his daughter after his wife died. That makes him as tough as any of the guys he wrote about. I loved him."

Michael Katz was one of the many people who make boxing what it is. At his best, he was a very good journalist, one of the best ever to cover the sport. His 2012 induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame was richly deserved. He could be witty, erudite, even charming when he was in the mood. He loved his wife and daughter. He was as good a husband and father as he knew how to be. And that's how I'll choose to remember him.