By Thomas Gerbasi

It may have been one of the few things Tim Ryan and Gil Clancy ever disagreed on, but unlike some fans and pundits over the years, the dynamic duo that was synonymous with televised boxing back in its last Golden Age didn’t get too heated about the result of the 1987 bout between Sugar Ray Leonard and Marvin Hagler.

And even Leonard had to respect that, screening the fight with the commentating team the day after he shocked the sports world by winning a 12-round decision over Marvelous Marvin after a three-year absence from the ring, a bout Ryan saw for Hagler while Clancy believed the right verdict was rendered for Leonard.

“Gil, Ray, and I watched it together, and every round, Ray would say, ‘Did I win this one?’” laughed Ryan. “We went through the whole 12 rounds, and at the end of it, I said, ‘Well, you did great, but I’m sticking with my original call.’ We had a bunch of laughs over that.”

It’s a story that’s about the event, but not entirely, as it focuses more on a moment that had nothing to do with the 12 rounds fought on April 6, 1987. And that was exactly what Ryan was aiming for with his book, “On Someone Else’s Nickel: A Life in Television, Sports, and Travel,” because the way he sees it, his broadcasting career wasn’t necessarily about what happened on the field or in the ring, but what happened around it, and the people he met and places he saw along the way.

“The experiences and the people around the event were what I wanted to put into the book because those were my memories more than who won the fight or who won the game or who was the big star at the Olympics,” said Ryan, who covered 30 different sports during his time behind the microphone. “It was more about the chance that I was given to be in a foreign country or in a small town in America that I had never been to, and the experiences of meeting the people surrounding the event. That was the point of the book because that’s how I look back on the good fortune of my career. And boxing was the first sport that opened that door to international travel.”

Boxing was also the sport that put him in the world’s living rooms on an almost weekly basis back when fights were screened regularly on free television. In the 80s, a turn of the dial on the weekend would present championship fights, battles between top contenders, and stars on the rise, in the process making boxing fans for life while Ryan was the soundtrack throughout as the blow-by-blow announcer, primarily for CBS.

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“We were flattered by the attention we got and we were considered to be the top duo doing boxing at the time,” he said. “Part of that was because CBS made a larger commitment and they made it first, pretty much after the ’76 Olympic team turned pro. They jumped on the fact that it was time to bring boxing back to network television because the success of these Olympians got a lot of publicity. So I think we did more fights than NBC or ABC, and this was all pre-cable, and we got out in front. I can remember a lot of weekends where we would do fights Saturday and Sunday, especially throughout the summer time. So we had a chance to be more identified.”

But just being there more often than other networks wasn’t what made Ryan and Clancy the best in the business. There was an interplay between the two which mixed with their knowledge of the sport and made for a broadcast in which you learned something each time they called a fight. Ryan, who says, “Luck and timing plays such a big role in anyone’s career,” will certainly agree that the luck of the Irish was on his side when he met fellow Irishman Clancy, the renowned trainer who passed away in 2011.

“I hate to think it’s something as simple as Irish heritage, but I think there was a little bit of that at the beginning, where we just clicked,” Ryan, 77, laughs. “What was really amazing about it was that he was 16 years older than I was, so this wasn’t guys that would be normally hanging out together in their off-time. But that even stunned me when we first got started because I knew all about him and I had such respect for his place in boxing, and suddenly I’m now on the air with him.”

And once it was time to work, it was like they had been working together for decades, with Ryan letting the fight breathe and not trying to fill in every moment of silence, while Clancy added his no nonsense insight into the sweet science.

“He (Clancy) wanted to see the fight and react to what was important and tell you that,” Ryan said. “He didn’t feel any need to keep talking about it. And in his normal conversational nature, he wasn’t a guy that would go on and on. He would condense things and give you the important comment. And so he became a quick fit for television broadcasting of boxing. And the most important thing was that he was so good at it – he saw both fighters at the same time and I’ve made that comment about him many times. A lot of guys I’ve listened to since that time, especially ex-fighters, and it’s totally natural, they tend to focus on one guy. So they miss the actual combat. They talk about one guy and then they may wind up talking about the other guy, but they’re not telling you exactly what’s happening and the trends and flows at the same time. Gil was able to see those things and, in his own pithy way, was able to get the picture across to you immediately.”

Ryan did the same thing, and after calling more than 300 world title fights, a place in the International Boxing Hall of Fame should be the next stop for the Canada native. Not that you would ever hear that come out of his mouth, as Ryan is quick to deflect any praise from himself to others. Again, it’s about letting things breathe.

But with the 30th anniversary of Leonard-Hagler coming up next week, has he changed his opinion of the final verdict at all?

“I screened it the other day and I started to have some doubts,” he said. “I remember I scored it very close for Hagler, like 6-5-1. I watched the whole thing again and I thought, okay, I can see – and I even did then – why a lot of people would have scored it for Ray. It was so close that you could have a difference of opinion about it. When that happens, you’ve obviously had a close fight; usually, that’s going to be an entertaining fight and this was wildly entertaining. But I didn’t have a reason to change my opinion about the winner.

“What I was seeing in the mid to late rounds was that Hagler, even though he was kind of plodding ahead, was making the fight happen and Ray was getting a second wind, then he’d get tired and then get another one and do a whole lot of dancing and a little Ali stuff,” Ryan continues. “And my sense was that Hagler continued to press the fight and was more aggressive than Ray was, at least in the six rounds I gave him, and he wasn’t as aggressive or successful in the other five, with one even. But the story of Ray for me in that was that three years after the eye injury, the fact that he looked as good as he did and fought like hell, with great spirit and style, was a great story even if he would have lost.”

And if anyone knows a great story and how to tell it, it’s Tim Ryan.

Tim Ryan’s book, On Someone Else’s Nickel, is available on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com