Q&A: HBO boxing's Jim Lampley talks Mayweather-Pacquiao, career

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If you vividly recall a big fight in the last 27 years, Jim Lampley is probably a big reason.

The soon-to-be International Boxing Hall of Fame inductee has been the signature voice of HBO's boxing shows since he called the Mike Tyson-Tony Tubbs match in 1988, and the role has since landed him ringside for epic heavyweight upsets like Tyson-Buster Douglas and George Foreman-Michael Moorer, as well as a trilogy of brawls involving Arturo Gatti and Micky Ward.

He's been reported by various sources as a front-runner to land blow-by-blow duties for the Mayweather-Pacquiao showdown in Las Vegas -- where broadcast duties will be handled jointly by HBO and Showtime -- though neither network has made an official announcement.

He took time to chat with CBSSports.com about his preparation routine before a fight, the differences between calling boxing and other sports and the career-long habit he expects to break on May 2.

Lyle Fitzsimmons, CBSSports.com: Going into a big event -- like a Tyson fight, a Pacquiao fight or a Mayweather fight -- what is involved in your preparation? How do you get ready?

Jim Lampley: My preparation for all fights is basically the same. There's reading material that summarizes what they've done in all of the last several fights leading up to this one. There are videotapes if I feel like I need to look back at fights. In cases like Mike Tyson, Manny Pacquiao, and Floyd Mayweather through most of his career before the last few years, I've covered all those fights, so I've seen them.

In addition to all of the reading and watching videotapes, generally the contract requires the fighters to meet with broadcasters the day before the fight. Fifteen, 20, sometimes 30 minutes of sitting with them and looking into their eyes and getting a look at how they are physically and how they respond to questions. It's sometimes more about how they answer than the words they use. It's sometimes more just the energy they show in responses. Or how in command of their own psyches they seem going onto a fight. That's probably the most important preparation when we're able to make it work right.

CBSSports.com: Do you feel any different for a Tyson-Lewis than you would for a Tyson-Tubbs, or do you try very hard to approach them all the same way?

Lampley: You're always conscious when more people care and more people are watching, and that's interesting and exciting and maybe your energy level is a little higher in situations like that. But obviously the goal is to prepare the same way every time and treat every fight as though it's exactly the same thing. You're naturally going to be a little bit more excited and maybe a little bit more engaged when the fight is this important to the public -- and by that I mean Mayweather-Pacquiao.

When 1,500 people have asked you about it in the last six months, that's going to feel a little different than when nobody has asked you about it, which is sometimes the case with our fights.

CBSSports.com: Everyone talks about how the fighters feel in the last few days and hours before a fight. What is Jim Lampley feeling or doing in those same final hours?

Lampley: [After] the fighter meetings the day before the fight, in some instances I'll go back over reading material just to solidify things in my mind. Another element of preparation, quite frankly, is just to be in the hotel where the arena is located and to be there with other boxing media people and talk with them and share impressions. The media room is a good place to be. I try to spend a certain amount of time in the media room the day before the fight and sometimes the day of the fight for almost every fight, because it's always useful to talk to other media and those reporters whom you trust and get a sense of whether their fix on this is the same as yours.

Sometimes, of course, you're stealing material. And that's all a part of it as well. By and large, you do all the videotape and reading preparation before the fighter meetings to be pretty sure you know what you're talking about when you're in that room. From there its usually another 24-36 hours before you call the fight, and you're just sort of settling in and solidifying your impressions and maybe during that period of time, some things that you might wind up saying on the air materialize in your mind, but you don't want to get too locked in to that.

As Larry Merchant used to frequently say on the air, boxing is the theater of the unexpected, and the more strongly you feel about what you're going to see sometimes the more strongly you're locked in on the wrong thing. You have to be ready to change your mind based on what happens in the ring.

Jim Lampley has called some of the biggest fights in boxing history. (Getty Images)

CBSSports.com: You've called a lot of other sports. How does boxing compare?

Lampley: It's different. The biggest thing is that because of the loose free flow of a fight, it's not broken up and segmented the way team sports generally are for commentary. There's no stop in the action.

In boxing more than in any other kind of commentary, the blow-by-blow person might at some point deliver a line that seems characteristic of the expert commentator, and vice versa. Very frequently, if Roy Jones was in the middle of making a comment and somebody lands a punch as he's speaking, he'll suddenly become a blow-by-blow man and say "that was a great right hand." That's necessary to keep the flow of commentary going for the audience so they can understand it.

CBSSports.com: Do you have a preference for boxing now?

Lampley: My career wound up being very boxing-centric. To a certain degree that made sense for my background. I was an extremely devoted boxing fan when I was a teenager. The first 13 years that I worked in sports television, I didn't do anything related to boxing. It's the nature of the beast. It wasn't what I was hired to do. And then somebody asked me to call a fight and I did, and from there it wasn't very long before I was to become pretty much a full-time boxing announcer. It's definitely at this point my preference, and probably was somewhat written in the stars from the beginning based on my background as a kid.

CBSSports.com: When you get to your chair at ringside, what do you have with you?

Lampley: I try to bring as little written material to the ring as possible, at least in terms of what I'm going to use or touch during a fight. There's a thing called a bout sheet -- which is compiled by one of our production people -- and for each fight the bout sheet will show you who are the officials, who is the referee, who are the people in the corners, what exactly is the fighter's numerical record coming into the ring, how many wins, how many losses, how many knockouts. That's all I want really, that one particular basic sheet of information that I can refer to.

If a cutman suddenly becomes important in a fight, I want to be certain that I have the right name of the cutman in front of me. If the ring doctor becomes important, I need to know that I have that name. I always want to know who the judges are, that kind of thing. Those are the things that are written down on the bout sheet, and that's the only piece of paper I want to have at ringside.

CBSSports.com: Do you have a person in the truck in your ear as well?

Lampley: Yes. I have a producer in my ear. Every once in a while a director will talk to me, too, to alert me to something that might be coming on the picture. There's a constant flow of evaluative commentary and feedback from the producer in the truck, but again, boxing is not like other sports, and I work on premium pay cable, so I don't ever throw to commercial we don't ever stop down during a commercial to say "OK, this is what we've been doing and this is what we need to do better, etc., etc."

In a football game you do that 27 times. That's just another difference in the nature of what we're doing as compared to what most other sportscasters experience in their work.

CBSSports.com: Do you ever come to the ring with rehearsed lines, or is that completely off the table?

Lampley: Normally, I would have nothing. But in this particular instance [Mayweather-Pacquiao], I do have one line that I am planning, hoping that I will use at the very outset of the fight, either before the opening bell or immediately after the opening bell. That line has been evolving in my mind for six years. And that's the only one. I'll tell you the day after the fight whether I actually got that sentence in or whether it gets lost in the flow of everything else that's going on. But I do have an observation that I'm planning to make which is in my head and I think I'll probably make it around the time of the opening bell.

CBSSports.com: So, at the end of the Tyson-Lewis fight, for instance, a line like "Lennox Lewis knocks out Mike Tyson and banishes him from the upper stratosphere of the heavyweight division" is completely spur of the moment and organic?

Lampley: That was completely organic. And I don't remember saying it. It sounds like a pretty good line. Not bad. I know the camera shot. A cameraman managed to lean out on the ropes and hold his camera directly above Mike's face and you're looking directly down on Mike's face, and he's bleeding from both eyes, bleeding from both nostrils and bleeding from the mouth. It was like an artwork, demonstrating what Lennox had been able to do to him over the course of the eight rounds.