ALEX WALLAU’S IMPACT ON BOXING By Jim Lampley
Wallau was a mentor, a colleague and a dear friend to Lampley.
kept asking me, “Do you think I can get away with saying Mike will knock him out in the first minute?” “Alex, you are the expert. If that is what you believe, you should say it.” Eventually he backed off. “Too iffy, too many things could prevent it.” He chose to say it would happen in the first round. Thirty-one seconds. All the way back to New York, Alex vilified himself for falling short of what he really believed. About a year and a half later, Alex revealed to me, to his friends in the gyms, to the ringside press corps who all knew and admired him, that he had contracted throat cancer. That was 37 years ago. That fall he went to the famous cancer clinic in Houston to have barium tubes implanted into his neck to shrink the tumors. He lay still for months waiting for that to work. His wonderful wife Martha, his partner in what I am certain was the best marriage I ever saw, stayed with him until the end, which astonishingly didn’t arrive until October 2025. Every fighter, every trainer, every cutman, every Little Italy waiter who ever knew him shed tears. It was as brave a fight as has ever been undertaken, in or out of the ring. I am just one of the many who owe him love, gratitude and eternal respect. He taught me how to call fights. It was the gift of a lifetime, and every fight I have ever called or will call is a tribute to Alex Wallau. Sleep peacefully, Alex. I love you forever. Jim Lampley’s best-selling memoir, IT HAPPENED! A Uniquely Lucky Life in Sports Television (Matt Holt Books) may be purchased at all major booksellers, including Amazon, Amazon UK and Barnes & Noble. It’s available in hard copy, eBook and audiobook (narrated by Lampley) formats.
A lex Wallau’s first definitive public imprint at ABC Sports was a fitting tribute to his unusual level of confidence and self-possession. Hired by the network’s legendary chief sports executive, Roone Arledge, to help administer a new programming venture titled The United States Boxing Championships, Alex rapidly stepped up above his rank to expose the reality that promoter Don King was using the series’ rights budget as a slush fund to set up exclusive contracts with an assortment of American fighters. By publicly kicking the teeth of King and the program’s host, the
signature double-knit yellow blazer with the ABC patch. ABC also controlled the TV rights to five of the six upcoming Olympic Games, where I could work first as a feature reporter in 1976 and 1980, and eventually as a fledgling studio host in Sarajevo and Los Angeles in 1984. At that time, these were unprecedented opportunities for an American sportscaster my age. It only made sense my astonishing good fortune might occasion some jealousies and resentments among older network veterans who had put in more time and traditional effort, and eventually it did. Not surprisingly, one of my severest
Swanson’s first chosen solution was to put me in a position he was pretty sure would mercilessly embarrass me: He would assign me to the boxing telecast. I would slide into Cosell’s ringside chair in February 1986 to cover a fight between rapidly rising heavyweight star Mike Tyson and North Carolina fringe contender Jesse Ferguson. And just to ensure my discomfort, as Swanson saw it, he would make Alex, who had never worked live on the air, my expert commentator colleague. To the new Sports boss, it looked on the surface like a sure formula for failure. A few days later, Alex called my phone. “Jim, where do you live?” It turned out we were only a few blocks apart. I began going to his apartment a couple of times a week, for hours at a time, and he delivered for me a unique boxing clinic, watching videotapes of fights from recent years. “Watch how the skilled body-puncher holds his opponent’s arm on the side opposite the referee, so he can get in extra rib shots before a break. Look at how the attacker steps on his opponent’s lead foot to lock into position or destroy his rhythm. Watch the infighter lock his glove onto the back of his opponent’s head to set up the uppercut.” There were dozens of such lessons,
every day. By the time we stepped into Alex’s green Jaguar sedan and drove to Troy, New York, for me to call my first prizefight, I wasn’t apprehensive. I knew I was working with a uniquely gifted expert and he wouldn’t let me fail. I was a mountain boy from Hendersonville, North Carolina, who had grown up on the golf course. Alex was a son of privilege and sophistication from tony Greenwich, Connecticut, who had somehow fallen in love with the ring early in life and spent his high school years riding the train into New York to visit the gyms in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, devoting hours every week to watching sparring sessions and talking to fighters, trainers, cutmen and boxing writers about his passion. Together we gave my career, in particular, a new trajectory. Tyson was part of it. The very first fight we ever called was Mike’s brutal performance against Ferguson, and it was partly due to Mike’s comfort with Alex, who he had known for years, that Tyson uttered the infamous, often paraphrased line “I was trying to drive his nose bone into his brain” shortly after the fight. A few months later, we went upstate again, this time for Mike’s assignment against the ill-equipped Marvis Frazier. All the way up, a three-hour drive, Alex
legendary Howard Cosell, Alex Wallau established a brand of integrity that was rare for a television executive in that era. At the time, I didn’t really know Alex Wallau. But like most everyone else in the halls of 1330 Avenue of the Americas, I knew I was impressed. He had taken a massive career risk on behalf of being right. I wasn’t sure how many others at his somewhat anonymous level would have done the same. When Roone chose to back him and the tournament was dissolved, I felt proud even just to know him vaguely. He clearly had a brand of DNA that was rarer than it should have been. My own career as a network television sports broadcaster had begun as a fluke, when I was chosen from among 432 candidates in the summer of 1974 to be one of the first two TV reporters ever to
stand on the sidelines of a football game with a camera and a microphone. That lucky accident opened the door for me to begin a long apprenticeship as an on-air figure at ABC Sports, which was at that time the dominant purveyor of televised sports events in the United States. In addition to its iconic college football telecast, where I roamed the sidelines for three years before talking my way into regional play-by-play assignments, ABC had the signature anthology series ABC’s Wide World of Sports, where I could cut my teeth on esoteric folk events like the Oriental World of Self Defense, the World Lumberjack Championships and the World Wrist Wrestling Championships, each of which I would cover multiple times as I paid my dues within the hierarchy of on-air stars who wore the
critics was the network’s biggest on-air star, Cosell. But I was still only 35 years old, and Cosell was aging out. But in 1985, ABC was bought from Leonard Goldenson by a stations ownership group named Capital Cities. As one of their first moves, they decided it was illogical for Arledge to be heading up two major divisions – Sports and News – so they rearranged the management chess pieces to reflect their priorities. Arledge surrendered control of the Sports division to focus on News. The previous ABC stations chief exec, Dennis Swanson, was transferred to head of Sports. And Swanson arrived at Sports with one outspoken priority: Who the hell is Jim Lampley? Why does he have a long-term contract with exposure guarantees? And how do I get rid of him and his contract?
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