Larry Merchant went to his first boxing match at Madison Square Garden in the 1940s, then spent decades as a newspaperman in Philadelphia and New York before serving as HBO’s commentator from 1978-2012 – stationed ringside for more than half of the network’s 1,100-plus fight cards. 

Few knew the sport like Merchant and even fewer remain as in tune with where boxing’s been, what it’s done and where it’s going.

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So after Merchant turned 90 last week, The Athletic spoke with him over the phone from his home in Santa Monica, Calif. for nearly 90 minutes. The chat netted all you’d expect from the master conversationalist – honesty, vivid remembrances and frank talk about the sport he devoted the second half of his life to.

I know you were recently vaccinated at The Forum parking lot. What does a typical day in the life of Larry Merchant look like now?

Since I was retired before the pandemic came, it’s not a whole lot different. We don’t go out to restaurants, shows, ballgames and whatnot, but when everything returns to normal, I suppose we’ll realize how much we were missing. But if you’re going to have to live through a pandemic, you might as well live in Santa Monica.

How does 90 feel?

It feels like I must’ve done something right. I’m not sure what it is, but I think going into the sports world made it more or less stress-free being a journalist. There were a lot of laughs. That helps the longevity. I’ve always been athletic on an everyday basis and I’ve tried to do the right things. I never smoked – which was a thing, with every movie star seeming to do it — and I never drank a cup of coffee and I inherited some pretty good DNA. All of those things came together in a cocktail of life.

Your vibrancy and intellect remain. It was less than 10 years ago when you and Floyd Mayweather Jr. had that famous post-fight exchange. Do you miss the work?

Sometimes I think that I do, but mostly I’m just a fan and sometimes when there’s a fight, I have a few fight-fan friends over and we watch it and we babble and I just kibitz, and it’s almost like I’m at ringside.

Your journalism chops were sharpened in the boxing city of Philadelphia at the Daily News where there was an intense competition among three newspapers. How did that allow you to develop as a journalist?

I had a few jobs before I went to Philadelphia and came there when I was around 24, becoming the sports editor and the columnist. Then I went to New York, where there were five newspapers. By culling through the best of the best, reading them, it was like a graduate course in journalism, an onsite version of a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. 

To compare yourself to whoever else was writing at a big event, comparing your story to theirs and learning from them, from Red Smith and Jimmy Cannon – who I got to know – along with many others as I traveled around the country. In one way or another, their work became inspiration. From Red Smith, there was humor. From Jimmy Cannon, I got that having a column is like show biz and if you’re up there on the stage, what you do from song to song or bit to bit, you have to leave the audience wondering, ‘What’s that bum up to now?’

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It was more than sports. It was a great time of social unrest and resetting, culturally, whether it was civil rights, women’s rights, anti-Vietnam, how people dressed and spoke a new language. I was curious about all of that and some it was laid out in my columns. I had a different take on what a sportswriter should be doing. It didn’t always have to be about the major leaguers.

You had the ideal muse for all of that in Ali. Did he or something else draw you to boxing?

As a kid, boxing was just in the air – the most popular sport alongside baseball. Joe Louis was a champion virtually throughout my childhood, then I’d listen to fights on the radio. I read a lot about it, and through A.J. Liebling I learned how the atmospherics and the stories radiated from two guys fighting in the ring. I could remember listening to Henry Armstrong and Ray Robinson fights. Boxing was part of the dialogue of the times and I had an uncle who took me to a really good fight during World War II at the Garden. And that was that. In Philadelphia, I was absorbed into the fight scene there and covered a Sugar Ray Robinson-Carmen Busilio fight at Yankee Stadium when I was about 26. Sitting about 20 feet away from me were Hemingway and DiMaggio and I thought to myself, ‘I’m in the right place.’

When I was sports editor, I had an outstanding boxing writer, Jack McKinney, and when there was a big enough fight, I would cover it along with him. But I’ll let you know how we looked at boxing with so many fights … at some point, Jack McKinney got wind of the commission allowing two guys who had a fight on a construction job to step in the ring for two or three rounds in a club fight. The headline on the first piece Jack wrote was, ‘He called me a lousy bricklayer.’ The second piece the next day was headlined, ‘He is a lousy bricklayer.’ The result was they had to call fire trucks out because there were so many fight fans in Philly trying to get into the club, the Cambria, and the undercard fighters overwhelmed the main event. So some of the boxing entrepreneurs tried to then offer me money to make sure their fighters were acknowledged. That’s part of the fight game, too.

I’m sure you didn’t accept their money.

No. I told them, ‘That’s not the way it works.’

How did that lead you to the HBO job and can you discuss the responsibility you felt in that role?

I was at NBC doing stories, a little producing on the NFL weekend show and I had some ideas that were a little unusual – I think I was too avant-garde for them – but the cable industry came along and suddenly I was in demand after working some Ali fights. I worked on a boxing talk show for the best part of a year with some journalists on the panel. And then HBO asked me to come on and do their first live fight, with that fighter from Rahway State Prison, James Scott, and Eddie Mustafa. And I thought, ‘This is pretty cool.’ 

They were trying new things. Boxing was going through a low period. HBO was trying to still find its identity. And there was an open field, knowing if we had a lot of money to spend, we could get any fighter. And, you know, there was a 15-year period from the 80s through the 90s where HBO did every championship fight from lightweight to heavyweight. The field was open, and we created this monthly show with a string audience as young stars emerged – Sugar Ray Leonard, Tommy Hearns, Hagler – as it went on to become more of a thing than I ever realized.

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Out of all those fights you worked, which was your favorite, and why?

I don’t know that I can pick one favorite. Hagler and Hearns and Leonard and Hearns. That first Leonard-Hearns was one of those rare major showdowns in a huge event where the fight lives up to and exceeds all of the expectations.

What post-fight interview do you recall as your best?

I often think of the Tyson-Douglas fight. Douglas had come into the ring a few weeks after his mother had died. The emotion of that, plus the emotion of fighting for the heavyweight championship and the emotion of fighting Mike Tyson I thought somehow galvanized Buster into fighting the kind of fight many of us thought he had in him, even though he didn’t really love boxing. His father was a good fighter and had a gym, and I had once seen his father fight at Madison Square Garden.

He was so emotional in the interview, he couldn’t speak. He couldn’t get words out. And for about 20-to-25 seconds, which is a lifetime in television terms, I just held the mic there. I didn’t say anything. I let him gather himself. And he finally did, talked about all these things. To me, that’s the best interview I ever did because I could hear myself thinking, ‘Larry, this is show and tell.’ And when the show is so good, whether it’s the fight itself or a moment like that, just shut up and let the pictures tell the story. The fact that Buster was so emotional, and it was so graphic, I thought, ‘OK, now I’m a pro at this.’

Tell me about that infamous Mayweather exchange following his knockout of Victor Ortiz quickly off of referee Joe Cortez’s break. It started with Mayweather draping his left arm around you and then went so downhill, with him saying you never gave him a fair shake, and you responding, ‘I wish I was 50 years younger and I’d kick your ass.’ Were you even aware there was the bad blood that ended up surfacing in that interview?

(Laughter) … I think there was bad corpuscles … Floyd, by his actions and words on ‘24/7’and in the promotion, invited scrutiny. I was certainly not the only one who recognized Mayweather at the time was avoiding the top fighters and those who called him out on it were not in his clack and he had us numbered. I was hardly the only member of the media who felt that way, but I was on television, so everyone saw it. That was the background. 

Now, we have this highly controversial end to a big fight. Even though what he did was legal, from the audience’s point of view and the common-sense point of view, he sucker-punched an opponent. Now, almost as soon as the words came out of my mouth and as soon as he sensed I was going there – he’s very smart and he realizes this is going to be part of everyone’s view of the show and of Mayweather – he attacked me personally. ‘You don’t know anything about boxing. I’m going to tell HBO to fire you.’

I instinctively counter-punched with those lines that everybody knows about. You know, in a way, it was unprofessional in the sense that if you’re interviewing somebody or describing a fight, it’s not about you. It’s about the event. The people in the event. I’d subscribed to that belief system in journalism all my life. But now I had intuitively counter-punched. And that was personal. And so, you know, afterwards when I thought about it, it was over the line for me. As a professional. As a broadcaster. As a journalist. But it was a human reaction. And that’s OK. Hell, once in a lifetime, you had a human reaction to an event you’re covering … .

Many of us as reporters have found ourselves in a situation where our manhood is tested.

I couldn’t have made that moment up. I couldn’t have made up my response. It was intuitive in the heat of discussion. I didn’t understand in the moment that he was attacking me to draw interest away from what happened in the fight. He was trying to change the subject. And he did. 

I was asking the questions that have to be asked in whatever event I’m covering. This one had a highly emotional atmosphere in the arena and people were engaged. Nothing on the back of their ticket said whether a sucker punch was legal. They were in an uproar. I think Floyd understood that.

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Floyd ended up apologizing to you? Did he end up following up on his threat to have HBO fire you?

No, not that I heard of. He apologized. It was weird because we had a new head of sports at HBO, Ken Hershman. And now this happened on camera. Afterwards, he sent word to me that I shouldn’t talk about it. Actually, Hershman, when he came on the scene and had conversations with everybody, his conversation with me was, ‘Take it a little easier on Mayweather, because it could mean millions of dollars to HBO,’ and this was before the Mayweather incident. They were in a negotiation for a number of fights (and Mayweather ultimately left HBO for Showtime less than two years later, in early 2013). And I just looked at Hershman and didn’t respond because I knew if they wanted me on the air … I told them, ‘I don’t know how to bunt.’

That was the only time at HBO anybody told me what to say or what not to say.

You wound up leaving HBO in 2012. Why?

We were in El Paso for a (Julio Cesar Chavez Jr.) fight and some gang wars between drug groups in Juarez and El Paso were worrying about gang wars, and (law enforcement) worked out a deal with the city that they wouldn’t sell beer. Whoever heard of a prizefight without beer? I thought it was funny. And it was interesting to talk about the atmospherics of the fight. They told me before the fight that I shouldn’t say anything about it. When I went on to do my thing before the fight, I said, ‘I’ve never heard of anything like this,’ and told the story. And soon after that, I submitted my resignation and we worked out a deal. 

I didn’t want to be there anymore. And he didn’t want me, particularly, because he thought I might jeopardize him in some way. I know I had a few incidents I could’ve done better. Someone would remark to me about something I said or how I said it. I incorporated criticism if it was right on. Being a pro means you don’t know it all. But that was the final thing … . That? I couldn’t work there anymore.

You once lamented to me before that time when I was at the Los Angeles Times that boxing had become a sport reduced to being written about on websites. Are you pleased now to see it on FOX, ESPN, Showtime and DAZN? And how do you think boxing’s health is now?

With the pandemic, you can’t really measure it. Boxing has been affected like every other sport. There’ve been a few significant fighters, and young fighters bubbling up, which shows promise for later this year. We’ve heard Canelo would like to fight four times this year. That could be significant in terms of other significant fighters wanting to also get out there instead of hiding and waiting for a bigger offer. And so many young guns have stepped up, particularly those lightweights, while the welterweights seem to be wasting away. But hopefully we’ll get these big heavyweight fights with guys who can fight in different styles with big personalities. Once we can get people into the arena, it will be as good as it can be.

The fact that the heavyweights are so prominent. The fact that the networks are giving more platforms to boxing than ever indicates it’s one of those perennial sports that will re-establish itself and get kids to enter the gym, with the best ones finding their way into the ring.

Who are your favorite fighters now?

Well, the heavyweights are in a world of their own. I’m certainly interested in the Tyson Fury-Anthony Joshua fight. I want to see what Deontay Wilder has coming back. I want to see if Andy Ruiz Jr. comes back. He has good things going for him, but I don’t know if he wants it. Anything that Canelo does interests me. I’d like to see Jermall Charlo fight him. 

The welterweights speak for themselves. While everyone wants Spence-Crawford, they’re all waiting on the jackpot of fighting Manny Pacquiao, a fight they could win and make money at. But I guess Keith Thurman thought that, too … I lost all my money. There are new middleweights and 168-pound contenders to fight Canelo. 

Below that, there’s Teofimo and (Ryan) Garcia. I love Garcia. I think he’s an amazing young man in the sense of him attracting so many followers and getting it, being well-spoken and having the look of a star in and out of the ring. I want to see how it works against the top fighters. It may be a little early, but I think he’s willing to take some chances, just as Canelo was when he was that age. Canelo lost to Mayweather, and so what?

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I watch all these fights and watch most of them with the sound off. Maybe that’s my way of being involved in watching the fight.

What most upsets you about the way boxing operates?

With multiple promoters and networks, the downside is the promoters want to protect their moneymakers, which is nothing absolutely new in boxing. But there was a time if a fighter fought another top fighter and he happened to lose, it wasn’t the end of his career or life. The fact it’s so hard to make these big fights because of financial reasons is disappointing. Once upon a time, it might’ve been easier because although the money was good in those times, there wasn’t a feeling that there was so much money at stake in a major fight that your very being depended upon getting that fight, or avoiding the loss that meant you wouldn’t get that fight. So it brings a kind of stasis to the picture. We should always be having fights, and while we’re having them, be looking forward to another big fight coming on instead of the one big fight being the big fight of the year.   

I’m not sure you can answer this question now that I know you’re watching fights with the sound off, but what is your opinion of the state of boxing broadcasting now? There’s been some criticism of broadcasters neglecting attention on a rival broadcaster’s fighter. I can’t imagine that happening in a broadcast Larry Merchant was involved in.

You have to be careful about being as objective as possible. Sometimes that means speaking truth to power and sometimes that means censoring yourself.

I’m a big Brian Kenny fan. I think ESPN does a good job. Sometimes there are too many, like five people covering an event. It’s too many people and overwhelming to me. To me, the ideal ringside chatter in terms of the things you want to cover is a blow-by-blow host who understood the big picture and was like a quarterback passing it off. We had an expert, like Emanuel Steward or Roy Jones, who saw stuff from the inside that journalists rarely see. And a third person who should be some kind of kibitzer, adding to what the others are saying and not echoing it. 

I feel too much echo chambering among three or four people. There’s always another dimension to the fight you can cover. And then maybe you have a fourth guy there commenting on the fight, the scene, the background, the dialog around the fight. And if you can have some fun doing that, you’ve got it covered.

Some are very good at what they do, professional in their interviews. Mark Kriegel, in his own way, does the work I used to do.

I can hear you in him.

Well, thank you. I like Mark. He’s very smart and a real good writer and he also once told me I was his idol while he was a young writer in New York.

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To me, if you had Brian Kenny, an ex-fighter who’s knowledgeable and somebody like Mark, I’d be happy. I also like the work of (DAZN’s Chris) Mannix. What I find absent too often is anything that makes you smile. Watching a sports event should be fun. There are opportunities to put some fun in it and frame it in some way that maybe gets people to smile and enjoy the byplay, as well as the fight.

I’d like to see your good friend from HBO, Jim Lampley, back ringside. Is that possible?

Jim was a big personality and professional guy who did his homework and brought everybody into it, but right now he’s a professor at North Carolina. He has a good life in Chapel Hill. But, yeah, Jim was a big presence.

Could HBO ever get back into the boxing business or was your departure the end of an era?

Forever is a long time. They never said, ‘We’re out of boxing for all time.’ So is it possible they could return for a big, singular event? They’ve left that possibility open. Whether it happens with all the other platforms … maybe HBO has played its role in the history of boxing and how it went up and down. But certain fighters are like ‘Hamilton’ on Broadway. ‘Hamilton’ is the heavyweight champion who brought everyone back to Broadway. Every so often, a fighter or fighters come along and fill that role … but promoters are tied to broadcasters.

Still, I’m hopeful. There are smart guys (in broadcasting) now and I believe that eventually the best fights and the best broadcasts will emerge because FOX, ESPN, Showtime and DAZN are all tied to developing fighters that people want to see.

There’s a likely classic coming Saturday night on ESPN when Mexicans Miguel Berchelt and Oscar Valdez fight for Berchelt’s super-featherweight belt. Do these events still put excitement in your heart? And will you be watching?

I’m not sure, but since I’m home, I probably will take a look. I can’t say I get excited very often, but fighters I love are Jose Ramirez and Ryan Garcia, the California kids with Mexican backgrounds who can fight and light up a place.

And watching the kid (Teofimo) Lopez beat Lomachenko made my heart beat a little lighter. To see this and think, ‘Wow, where did this guy come from.’ So there’s some excitement, but mostly now, I’m just observing.

Well, Happy Birthday and thank you for accepting this call and staying on for so long, Larry. More than that, thank you for setting the bar for all of us about how a reporter is supposed to behave and cover this sport. I know many of us look to you as the standard of how we should carry ourselves, to pass along the truth in the most responsible way.

That’s very kind, Lance, and I consider that full payment for my time.

(Top photo:  Al Bello/Getty Images)