The plaques on the walls of the tiny museum in Canastota, New York, plaques honoring the brave men and women who achieved greatness in the ring and the maybe-or-maybe-not-brave men and women who contributed to the sport in other ways, are as close as one can come in boxing to achieving immortality.
And so it’s perhaps counterintuitive to consider the role mortality may play in someone’s chances of getting one of those plaques.
But the passing last Friday of Alex Wallau, while his name is among the 24 currently up for possible International Boxing Hall of Fame induction in the “Observer” category, triggered contemplation of this topic.
Wallau, the long-time ABC on-air boxing analyst and executive who eventually rose all the way to president of the network, was first diagnosed with throat cancer in 1987 and was told he may have only months to live. He was 42 at the time, and it turned out he was barely halfway through his life, making it all the way to 80.
So Wallau was very much a fighter, even if he wasn’t one of those brave men or women who achieved greatness in the ring.
And he was very much a viable candidate for Hall of Fame induction. He first appeared on the ballot in 2020, and his name is one every voter should have at least been seriously considering each year, even if cases could be made every time to select five other nominees a voter found more deserving.
In other words, Wallau was neither a sure-fire Hall of Famer nor an obvious cross-off. He, like so many names on the ballot in so many different categories, resides in that enormous hazy “maybe” middle.
And one can’t help but wonder if, for those who received their ballots at the outset of the month but didn’t fill them out immediately and haven’t mailed them back yet – we have until Halloween to get them postmarked – Wallau’s death could make a difference and serve as a tipping point.
It shouldn’t, of course. A candidate for any Hall of Fame – or any award, or any job, or any application, really – should be judged on their merits, both objective and subjective.
But it’s not always easy to keep emotion out of it.
This is a topic I touched on last week in my article assessing Vernon Forrest’s Hall of Fame candidacy, with the two-division former titlist appearing on the “Modern” boxer ballot for the first time, 16 years after his murder.
(As an aside, I am well aware that having written about Forrest, Gennadiy Golovkin and Leo Gamez since the ballots came out, this is now four Hall-of-Fame focused columns in my last five. I didn’t intend to keep going back to this particular well so many times, but, have you noticed how little actual high-quality boxing there’s been to write about this month?)
I shudder to use the term “sympathy vote,” because it wouldn’t be that – not for Wallau, not for Forrest, not for any number of current IBHOF candidates who are no longer alive.
But when you’re on the fence, any passing breeze could be the one that knocks you to one side of it or the other.
Forrest may be the lone deceased newcomer on the Modern ballot – joined by the very much alive Golovkin and Steve Collins – but he’s not the only fighter up for posthumous induction. There’s Genaro “Chicanito” Hernandez, who died of cancer at age 45 back in 2011. There’s Rocky Lockridge, who died at age 60 in 2019 following multiple strokes. There’s Gilberto Roman, who perished in a car accident in 1990 at just 28 years of age. And there’s Israel Vazquez, who died of lung cancer at 46 last December, shortly after the last round of Hall of Fame voting.
I wondered at the time if Vazquez, whose great rival Rafael Marquez got the votes needed to enter the Hall in the class of 2023, might move toward the top of the list because his name had been in the news again, even if for the worst of reasons.
Or rather because it had been in the news for the worst of reasons.
Imagine if Ricky Hatton, a tough choice to either vote for or leave off year after year beginning with his first ballot in 2017, hadn’t gained induction in 2024 and was still on the ballot now, mere weeks after his death. As many fine candidates as there are to choose from on the present Modern ballot, logic tells you voters would probably rally to give “The Hitman” boxing’s highest honor now that he wouldn’t be around to appreciate it.
Thankfully, Hatton did get to experience that thrill while he was still with us.
But if he hadn’t, if voters had kept him on the brink two more years, how difficult would it be not to let sentimentality seep in this year?
The tug toward voting for candidates who have recently died, or hypothetically candidates who are in ill health or experiencing some sort of personal tragedy, is just one way in which emotions can potentially factor into the distribution of votes.
Another one – a more common one to confront for many Hall of Fame voters – is the emotion attached to personal relationships.
I learned early in my career covering boxing to try to keep some distance between myself and the fighters; we could certainly become friendly, but we shouldn’t become friends.
But I couldn’t possibly apply that same standard to all of the non-participants, especially my media brethren.
Most of my closest friends in the boxing media are too young to be on the Observer ballot. But that won’t always be the case. And it wasn’t the case when my first boss and good friend of nearly 20 years at the time Nigel Collins first got nominated.
I firmly believe Nigel was and is an entirely deserving Hall of Famer, a belief supported by the fact that enough other folks voted for him to help him gain first-ballot induction.
But I’d also be a liar if I tried to claim I voted for Nigel without some degree of emotion or, frankly, bias.
The same has been true of other media friends who have since been inducted. And a decade or two from now, that ballot will likely be filled with names of people I’ve befriended and worked with, including colleagues here at BoxingScene.
As it stands now, there are several people on the ballot I’ve worked with directly, to varying degrees. The late Glyn Leach was my editor at Boxing Monthly for a handful of years. New addition to the ballot Gordon Hall was a beloved colleague at Showtime for five years. Kevin Iole was a frequent freelance contributor to The Ring when I was an editor there. Photographer Tom Casino was my companion for the Arturo Gatti-Micky Ward baseball bat cover shoot at Gleason’s Gym in 2002, among other times we collaborated. And you could perhaps say that I worked with Bob Canobbio, Mark Taffet and David Dinkins Jnr; at the very least, they appeared on podcasts I hosted while we were in varying states of employment with the same networks.
The “Non-Participant” category isn’t as packed with personal friends, but there are a handful of candidates I’ve gotten to know – including, most recently, new nominee Steve Weisfeld, whom I just spent an hour or so on the phone with last month, a week or so before finding out he had made the HOF short list.
For nearly every voter, there are challenges to checking off up to five Non-Participants and up to five Observers with complete impartiality. I suppose the most generous way to think of it is that different voters’ biases should theoretically cancel each other out. If one person has an emotional connection to Steve Bunce and another has personal history with Carlos Irusta and someone else was buddy-buddy with Tim Dahlberg … well, you just hope those are distributed evenly enough so that merit ends up the deciding factor.
But it’s certainly trickier when considering the emotions raised by someone’s death — whether they died very recently or tragically young. That becomes a factor potentially universal among voters, with the possibility of impacting enough minds to change the math.
All we can do is try our best to be professionals and to keep sentimentality out of it. If you’re considering voting for Alex Wallau this year, hopefully you were giving him just as much consideration last year. Same for Israel Vazquez. And, although it wasn’t possible to give Vernon Forrest consideration last year because he wasn’t on the ballot yet, hopefully you’re judging him this year based on the objective facts of what he achieved and your subjective analysis of what those achievements were worth.
We are only human, of course. We are vulnerable to emotional influence. We are not robots.
But if The Ring’s AI-powered judge – which unofficially scored Terence Crawford vs. Saul "Canelo" Alvarez a draw – is any indication, we emotionally susceptible humans are still the best option the Hall of Fame has.
Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.
