For more than thirty years, Al Bernstein has been one of the most recognizable and respected sportscasters in America. In those three decades, the "voice of boxing" reported the funny, poignant, and bizarre events that helped shape sports television, ESPN, boxing, Las Vegas, and SHOWTIME. With an eclectic cast of characters that includes every big name in boxing, including Marvin Hagler, Mike Tyson, Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, as well as such names in the entertainment world as Rodney Dangerfield, Sylvester Stallone, Russell Crowe, and Jerry Lewis, Bernstein's memoir will have you in stitches.
For more than thirty years, Al Bernstein has been one of the most recognizable and respected sportscasters in America. In those three decades, the "voice of boxing" reported the funny, poignant, and bizarre events that helped shape sports television, ESPN, boxing, Las Vegas, and SHOWTIME. With an eclectic cast of characters that includes every big name in boxing, including Marvin Hagler, Mike Tyson, Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, as well as such names in the entertainment world as Rodney Dangerfield, Sylvester Stallone, Russell Crowe, and Jerry Lewis, Bernstein's memoir will have you in stitches.
Al Bernstein: 30 Years, 30 Undeniable Truths About Boxing, Sports, and TV
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Al Bernstein: 30 Years, 30 Undeniable Truths About Boxing, Sports, and TV
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Overview
For more than thirty years, Al Bernstein has been one of the most recognizable and respected sportscasters in America. In those three decades, the "voice of boxing" reported the funny, poignant, and bizarre events that helped shape sports television, ESPN, boxing, Las Vegas, and SHOWTIME. With an eclectic cast of characters that includes every big name in boxing, including Marvin Hagler, Mike Tyson, Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, as well as such names in the entertainment world as Rodney Dangerfield, Sylvester Stallone, Russell Crowe, and Jerry Lewis, Bernstein's memoir will have you in stitches.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781938120145 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Diversion Publishing |
| Publication date: | 02/06/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
UNDENIABLE TRUTH #1: THERE IS ALWAYS TIME FOR HUMOR
ESPN was not always the sports media empire of gigantic proportions we know today. It did not always have five television networks, a massive radio network, a national magazine, a Website that gets millions of hits, and a themed restaurant.
In 1980, ESPN was one lonely struggling cable network in its first (and some thought last) year of existence that reached only about three million homes in America. I had just joined ESPN as a boxing commentator on the Top Rank Boxing series and became one of the merry band of pioneers inventing cable television as we went along. After all, there had never been a twenty-four-hour all-sports television network before, and all of cable television programming represented one big crapshoot.
After a quarter century of existence, the ESPN holiday party had reached the point where it had an employee guest list that topped six thousand people and was held at a massive banquet location that featured several buildings to accommodate the throng. However, at the 1981 ESPN holiday party there were about two hundred people on hand at the glamorous Holiday Inn in Plainville, Connecticut. At the end of the evening Dick Vitale and I were designated to pick out the winning raffle tickets for two lucky ESPN employees. What were those big prizes? They were two twenty-four-inch black and white televisions. I kid you not.
The ESPN programming schedule back then was nothing like the current model. That schedule did not have the NFL, NBA, MLB, and major golf and tennis tourneys that now dot the ESPN schedule. No, back then it was monster truck races, tape-delayed college football and basketball from the lowest conferences, kickboxing, and any other cheaply acquired programming they could get their hands on for about $4.95 — give or take a few cents.
The network was certainly in its embryonic stages back then, but the show I was lucky enough to be on, Top Rank Boxing, was by far ESPN's most-watched series. How many people were watching? Well, the figure was probably somewhere between the number of children Evander Holyfield has fathered out of wedlock and the number of lawsuits annually filed against Don King — in other words, a big number, but not big by television standards. So, we knew somebody was watching and we had to get on the air. That was not always an easy task.
Back then ESPN was to television what M*A*S*H units are to hospitals. In the case of ESPN, however, only shows and careers died from our on-the-air meatball surgery. No people actually perished …to my knowledge. The budgets were too low and number of shows to do too high. In contrast, on the over-the-air networks — ABC, NBC, and CBS — the 1980s were halcyon days for sports programming. The sports department budgets at those networks rivaled the gross national product of Peru. I think more money was spent at ABC for the creature comforts of Howard Cosell and Director Chet Forte on one Monday night football show than ESPN spent on televising an entire boxing show. I know you think I'm exaggerating, but that's only because you don't know how much money was needed for the creature comforts of Howard and Chet. Meanwhile, at ESPN we were all so new to network television that we just didn't know any better. We simply worked hard, endured any hardships, and tried to overcome the obstacles at hand. And, believe me, there were obstacles.
In 1981 we were doing a boxing show from the University of Illinois–Chicago Circle campus in a gym that would normally never have boxing inside it, so the ring had to be imported and constructed. We were about five minutes away from going on the air live when we noticed that the ring had not yet been completed. This was one of those thorny little details that somehow slipped through the cracks. Up in the ring was the local promoter Ernie Terrell, a former heavyweight champion, helping the crew finish putting the ring together. He started out in his business suit, but soon both jacket and tie were shed as desperation and perspiration increased.
When the clock struck 8pm and my broadcast partner, Sal Marchiano, and I were welcoming our viewers live at ringside, Ernie (now with shirttails hanging and sweat pouring), and his intrepid band of men were working feverishly on the ring in the background. Sal and I were done with the content we had planned and the producer nervously told us to keep talking. About five minutes later we were still talking and had pretty much run out of pertinent boxing topics. And still the ring was incomplete. Our stage manager yelled to Ernie, "The producer says we are starting the show NOW, no matter what. So get your men out of the ring." Ernie looked perplexed and worried, which pretty much describes Ernie's normal state, but this time it was real worry. To be sure, no one seemed certain that the ring was secure and ready for two hours of big men bouncing around in it. We trudged forward anyway, and throughout the show we all hoped no boxer would fall down through the middle of the ring. This might have been a first in boxing, a fatality caused not by the innate violence of the sport, but by faulty construction. We dodged this bullet as we would so many others on that series over the years.
Did I say bullet? On one 1980 Top Rank Boxing show in Chicago the crew very nearly had to dodge some real ones. The city of Chicago was not wired for cable in 1980 and so most Chicagoans certainly did not know anything about ESPN. An observant police officer saw a big truck with an ESPN logo on it parked outside the Aragon ballroom on the northwest side of the city. To him the letters ESPN were just as likely to have been Dan Quayle's misguided attempt at spelling the acronym for extrasensory perception as it would be a television network. So, when he saw someone going into the truck with a piece of audio equipment, he deduced that a robbery was in progress. Five minutes later the truck was surrounded by squad cars, and a few minutes after that police officers entered the truck, guns drawn and ready for business. A shaken producer eventually convinced them we were televising a boxing match and got them to stand down. Actually, the only crime committed that night came later when one of the boxers was robbed by the ringside judges of a well-earned decision.
Now that the letters ESPN are familiar to every male in the western hemisphere and many in the eastern one as well, this story reads like an episode out of the Twilight Zone. This story could have been set on some alternative universe. As delightful as it would be to think that we have a parallel universe that has not yet been sullied by Stephen A. Smith's commentaries or the Around the Horn show, I assure you this all took place right here on planet Earth.
In a postscript to this incident, there was still one obstacle to getting the show on the air that night. The police said that there was a "special permit" required for the truck to remain there — a permit that required several days to obtain. The ESPN operations manager said he had not been informed of such a permit and seemed amazed and horrified at all of this. I may have been new to network sportscasting, but as a lifelong resident of Chicago I was not new to how things worked back then. I told the operations manager that it seemed to me that the police were strongly suggesting that there might be some "alternative" way of handling this situation. It turned out I was correct: an agreement was reached, the truck stayed, and the show went on as planned. To this day I am not quite sure how that operations person listed that expenditure on his ESPN expense report.
A microcosm of all these early issues came during a show in Miami in 1982: the truck ESPN rented for the show blew a tire when it tried to park; most of the tape machines inside the truck were defective; the power cables were not long enough to reach the arena; and finally, no phone lines were installed. To solve the last problem they "appropriated" phone lines from a nearby construction site — which may not have been legal. But, the punishment for that was nothing compared to not getting on the air. It was twenty minutes before this show was to start when a technician made a harmless joke to the tense producer, who shot back, "Hey, this is no time for humor." That producer's statement in the truck years ago demonstrated one of many things he would be wrong about in his career. In thirty years around sports and television I have found that, intentional or not, there is always time for humor.
CHAPTER 2UNDENIABLE TRUTH #2: BEWARE OF ANYONE WHO CALLS YOU MISTER
Do you remember Ernest T. Bass on the Andy Griffith show? Ernest was a hermit who lived out in the woods and would occasionally make a foray into Mayberry to create havoc. His behavior was, shall we say, eccentric. For some reason, windows were his big enemy — he threw rocks at just about every one he saw. In each episode Ernest T. appeared in, Andy would labor while explaining his wild antics. Then Barney Fife would just shake his head, look at Andy, and say, "Ange, he's a nut."
And, so it is with Mike Tyson. After more than two decades of trying to explain his chaotic behavior, we are left with Barney's simple explanation — he's a nut.
I average about ten guest appearances per month on sports talk radio shows. That means that over the last thirty years I have done about three thousand of these shows, and on close to 90 percent of these appearances, at some point I have been asked to explain some aspect of Mike Tyson's behavior. Since I can barely explain my behavior in life, explaining Tyson's is a daunting task.
For about three years I explained his antisocial behavior by citing his hardships as a youth and his rejection by society. Then I had close to a four-year period of relying on the "betrayed by trusted friends and confidants" approach to give us the reason for his misdeeds. And, for a few years I really played "shrink" and theorized about some sort of chemical imbalance being at the root of his problems.
Finally, I settled on the Ernest T. Bass theory. The eloquent simplicity of this approach on radio shows had two advantages: First, it got the radio interviewers to laugh and move on so that we could get to the really important business at hand — plugging my upcoming payper-view telecast, live stage appearance, or record album. Second, it made it painfully obvious to the host that I was only qualified to comment on Tyson's left hook, defense, or razor quick incisors, capable of taking off an earlobe quicker than Hannibal Lecter. I was just a bit undertrained to psychoanalyze him.
My perspective on the Tyson phenomenon is somewhat unique in that I announced Tyson fights at the very beginning of his career and then at the end. In between I covered him for ESPN's Sportscenter from a slight distance, but not a long enough distance to prevent some intriguing and even contentious interviews.
Tyson's early matches were televised on ESPN's Top Rank Boxing series. He was a raw and powerful young fighter. I'd like to say that from the moment I saw him I recognized that he was destined to become a heavyweight icon. I'd like to say that, but a check of the videotapes of those broadcasts would prove me a bigger liar than Bernie Madoff.
There is one cardinal rule in evaluating a young heavyweight prospect that is knocking everybody out. That is that you can't evaluate him — at least not until he has faced someone who will:
a. punch back in earnest
b. take a good punch without falling down
c. both of the above
In the half dozen or so Tyson fights I announced on ESPN, he never really faced anyone that fit those descriptions. So, the closest I came to anointing him a future king was this comment: "Mike Tyson has demonstrated the kind of quickness, power, and finishing ability that could carry him a long way." In retrospect that does make me look like a sage, until you realize that I said almost the exact same thing about Samson Po'uha and James Broad.
What was remarkable about Tyson at that time was his demeanor, which was nothing like the snarling and profane Tyson who later emerged. In the early 1980s he was unfailingly polite and cooperative. I remember sitting alone in a New York café during that time, and, coincidentally, Tyson was at another table with his manager, Jimmy Jacobs. I went over to the table and said hello, to which Tyson replied, "Hi, Mr. Bernstein, nice to see you here." He then launched into a rhapsodic description of some Joe Louis fights he had been watching from the extensive fight film collection that Jacobs owned. He extolled Joe's virtues both inside and outside the ring and said one day he would like to be a champion just like him.
Was that Mike Tyson simply a creation of his own Machiavellian mind, constructed to "put one over" on the people covering him in the media? Was it all just a well-rehearsed act, orchestrated by his management team to maximize what was already amazingly positive news coverage? Or was Tyson at that time just a wide-eyed young man who was mesmerized by boxing history and thrilled that he was headed for that kind of center stage himself? The answer might be yes to all three of those questions — they could all have been operating simultaneously.
Now, flash forward about ten years to 1995 to a twenty-nine-year-old Tyson who takes the stage at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas for weigh-in for his match with Peter McNeeley. After three years in prison, Tyson was now back in the sport, and the weigh-in scene was something to behold. Several thousand fans were on hand, along with hundreds of media members, and the proceedings were being televised live to millions on ESPN.
One of the intriguing aspects of the lead-in to this match was, in fact, the kind of press on hand to cover the event. The dynamics were interesting because many women's groups were outraged that Tyson was again making millions as an athlete after his conviction and prison sentence on rape charges. It was, they felt, as if nothing had happened in the interim. This was especially galling to them because it seemed that part of the appeal of seeing Tyson back in the ring was a sense that somehow he had been victimized in this situation.
There was a pretty eclectic group of journalists reporting on this event. On the one hand we had the usual ink-stained wretches that cover boxing for the newspapers, a crusty and colorful group of testosterone-filled gents. On the other hand there were reporters (many of them women) from news organizations, women's magazines, and networks such as Lifetime. These were not the usual media outlets you see covering a boxing match. This was like an interfaith wedding — without the music and dancing.
A friend of mine who covered hard news for a national magazine was covering this fight for its news value. She surveyed the boxing media gathered at one of the press conferences for the fight and dryly asked me, "So, do you ever actually dine with any of these people?" I assured her that, for the most part, they all used knives and forks. I'm not sure she believed me. The irony was that all the additional coverage actually benefited the event. So, while many women's advocacy groups were fuming, the promoter of the fight, Don King, was secretly smiling over the furor.
In this group at the weigh-in were many reporters who had never covered a boxing weigh-in — and would likely never cover one again. One newscaster from an East Coast station came up to me and asked if I would do a brief guest shot with her for her early evening newscast. Off camera she asked me if weigh-ins were always like this. I told her that no, this was not the norm, that this is to weigh-ins what the Super Bowl is to football. When this analogy produced only a blank stare from her, I realized that she was not a sports fan, so my allegedly clever analogy meant nothing. This mirrored my answer to her next question, "What does the boxer's weight mean in this fight?" To which I replied, "For these guys, virtually nothing." And that was the case because no conventional boxing factors mattered. Peter McNeeley probably couldn't beat Mike Tyson if he had a machete …and a handgun.
Then we did our on-camera interview where I was able to use my Ernest T. Bass analogy for about the one-thousandth time, and she laughed. OK, I know what you're thinking, "Can't this guy ever have an original thought?" Well, I will refer you to Rodney Dangerfield who once said to me, "Al, I have two important pieces of advice for you." He said in a soft, almost reverent tone, "First, if it works, never stop using it." He paused for a moment, so I asked him, "What's second?" He leaned closer to me and screamed in my ear, "IF IT WORKS, NEVER STOP USING IT!" Damaged eardrum and all, I have lived by that credo.
(Continues…)
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