THE RING OPENS THE RABBIT HOLE
a preview of the upcoming clash between Ray Mercer and Tommy Morrison. Foreman, Morrison and Mercer were all familiar faces, and that clash of undefeated young studs was exciting. That storyline alone was an easy sell, but here was a whole magazine devoted to your favorite sport. You didn’t even notice the line at the bottom promising a look back on someone named Charley Burley. Years later, it’s somehow the only article from the issue you still vividly remember. During that initial cover- to-cover read, the Burley retrospective on page 18 under the sub-headline “Why Boxing’s ‘Finest All-Around Fighter’ Never Got A Title Shot” … it was the rabbit hole. Eddie Futch, the old man in the corner of Riddick Bowe on all those Tuesday Night
That all changed in January 2026. After teasing it since the launch of the new website, RingMagazine. com, subscribers for the first time had access to a full online archive dating back to the launch of The Ring in 1922. Organized by decade, and then by year, the chance to explore any era, any fighter, any fantastic battle over the last 104 years is a click away. For Editor-in-Chief Doug Fischer, it is the realization of a decade’s desire. An online archive was one of the first suggestions he made when he took the job under previous owner Oscar De La Hoya. “When I replaced [Michael] Rosenthal as editor-in-chief, Oscar met with me and he had a few of the executives there and he wanted to know, how can we make this
was still in some part of Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia, wherever the offices were with [former editor-in-chief] Nigel Collins at the helm. When they got rid of Nigel and company, they shipped all of that over to L.A. But under [former Golden Boy Promotions executive] Richard Schaefer, they just had them in the file cabinets, and the file cabinets were all wrapped up in the basement. They remained there for a few years.”
able to scan in some of the archives of [medieval London mayor] Dick Whittington, kings and queens of England from Henry VIII to Richard II, going back to the 12, 1300s.” Coleman noted, “Lots of organizations in the last 15 years have realized the physical, paper-based records they have are actually assets. Take the archives you take for granted on dusty bookshelves in the dungeons, wherever they are, and actually start reusing them and purposing them – the great bastions of the U.K. have always had these great, wonderful archives going back to Victorian times and older, quite often, particularly with minute books. So doing archives from like the last 100, 150 years has become the staple of our everyday life. And then, you know, whole school photographs, team photographs, cricket, rugby, soccer, basketball – it doesn’t matter. We scan all these kinds of archives.” Coleman was approached with the idea of digitizing The Ring’s archives a little over a year ago. “They just bought the archive of The Ring magazine, which is 100 years’ worth, and they wanted to digitize it. So I went to London to meet [Alalshikh] and some of his team when he was over. I think they saw about two or three other companies, but they chose SDS because we had that turnkey solution that wasn’t just a case of scanning the archive. Anybody can scan an archive. What we were going to do was index it, look at the metadata and lay it in a matrix, which meant that we’d do the job once, and it meant that the archive could exist for digital perpetuity. So in 100 years’ time, 50 years’ time, a thousand years’
The condition of the back issues, along with original photographs and assorted other priceless pieces of the publication’s history, varied. When still stored in the
basement, “God, there were leaky pipes dripping on top of these old cabinets and priceless photographs, books, even old 8mm film rolls. Never mind the magazines. A lot of magazines got ruined, but hard copy photos were water-damaged. So then there was a project to move it up to the second or third floor.” The physical archives survived long enough, and in good enough shape, for the ultimate archiving project fans have access to now. The job of creating an online archive went to Mark Coleman, founder of SDS & IA Group. Coleman and his team have worked for decades in perfecting the digital archiving of historical documents. “I started the company 30 years ago,” Coleman said. “My degree was in software engineering, but my passion was in history and heritage.
more profitable? And I said, ‘Digitize the archives.’ That was one of the things that I thought that they should do.” The effort got an initial start but stalled, according to Fischer. “They got it started, I think in 2019. Then the pandemic hit and they ceased all of that.” The effort resumed almost immediately under new ownership when The Ring was sold to Turki Alalshikh in 2024. Again, Fischer recalls the
Fights cards you watched with your grandfather, sang Burley’s praises to article author Ronald K. Fried, even saying Sugar Ray Robinson and Jake LaMotta avoided him. Who the hell was this guy? Are there more guys like him? When does the next issue of The Ring come into the store? The return to print for The
The return to print for The Ring in 2024 was welcome news for collectors, and its return to magazine stands in stores like Barnes & Noble brought the opportunity for new and old fans alike to dive into its pages and learn something.
Ring in 2024 was welcome news for collectors, and its return to magazine stands in stores like Barnes & Noble brought the opportunity for new and old fans alike to dive into its pages and learn something. For those truly drawn to the rabbit hole, the chance to go back and read more was limited. eBay has no shortage of back issue collections of The Ring, but the farther back one goes, the harder on the budget it gets. If one wanted to find out what was being said about Burley in his time, the issues that covered his career in the 1930s and ’40s could cost at least a few hundred dollars. Without access to an already assembled archive, those words were largely lost to time.
archive being one of the first things discussed at “the very first meeting I had with [Alalshikh], which was a few days after the Vergil Ortiz- Serhii Bohachuk fight in Vegas. So that was August of 2024.” Fischer continued, painting a picture of a process that went well beyond creating PDFs from easily stored and well-maintained archives. “Maybe two hours into our conversation, we talked about the archive, and His Excellency asked me what the archives entailed. How much access did I have to the archives over the years? I told him I had access now, but I didn’t have a lot of access initially, because it wasn’t in L.A. It
And so I built a company that would originally take on solicitor archives and accountancy archives. Luckily, in the U.K., we’ve got rich history. We’ve got archives going back a thousand years. So I’ve been
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