You think you’re a boxing nerd?

From the time Corey Erdman learned to read, he was walking to the library in his native Kitchener, Ontario, digging into the newspaper archives, and printing out fight reports from the 1940s and ‘50s.

For his first ever writing assignment in school, in first grade, while other kids were scrawling about their pet hamster or their favorite Sega Genesis game, little six-year-old Corey was waxing poetic — as poetic as a first-grader could, anyway — about the 1933 heavyweight fight between Max Baer and Max Schmeling.

He soon started learning to box, and when he would hit the heavybag, there was a squeaky-voiced Don Dunphy on the scene, as Corey would provide his own narrative soundtrack.

Erdman is now 37, and has spent about half his life getting paid to write about boxing and to provide blow-by-blow commentary. But the innate passion that drove him in his earliest years to do those things for free hasn’t gone away.

“I’ve never lost the level of obsession that you have about things when you’re a kid,” Erdman told BoxingScene.

Again: You think you’re a boxing nerd?

Not long ago, Erdman finished a broadcast, took off the headset, and, when he got back to his hotel room at about 1.30am., remembered there was a Korean club show streaming. So he fired it up, and jumped in the most hardcore of boxing Discord channels to talk about it.

Erdman doesn’t have the exact numbers in front of him, but he says with confidence that he’s “the busiest boxing commentator” in the world and believes he called more fight cards in 2024 than there were weeks in the year.

Starting with the Manuel Gallegos-Khalil Coe card on DAZN this Friday night, he’s scheduled to work 10 shows from five different countries before the end of June. Included in that is a run where he’s calling an ESPN+ show from Montreal on a Thursday, the Hall of Fame Induction Weekend show for DAZN from Verona, New York on Friday, and the Junto Nakatani-Ryosuke Nishida Tokyo card from a studio in Toronto for ESPN+ on Sunday … and then he’s going home and sleeping for about three hours before returning to the studio to call an ESPN+ show emanating from Florence, Italy.

You have to be a complete and total boxing nerd to do what Erdman does and to get up for every assignment. And he proudly admits that’s what he is. He simply loves the sport.

He even claimed to “find some romance” in last year’s Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson carnival act. “I don’t know if that’s a talent or if it’s just sickness,” he said with a laugh.

Sick or not, Erdman’s talents are increasingly shining through.

“I think you’re doing a story on him at exactly the right time,” Hall of Famer Al Bernstein said this week, “because the boxing public is really taking notice of Corey. I think the boxing public is starting to realize that Corey Erdman is the next voice of boxing.”

That’s high praise. And it gets higher.

Bernstein is currently calling “Big Time Boxing” shows on DAZN with Erdman, his latest gig in a four-decade-plus run calling fights for just about any outlet you could name. “I’ve worked with many of the greats of play-by-play in the sport,” Bernstein said. “Corey does not have to take a backseat to anybody.”

One thing all of those “greats of play-by-play” have in common: They’re all older than Erdman. In most cases, much older. Among today’s noteworthy blow-by-blow men, Erdman’s DAZN colleague Todd Grisham is in his 40s (but only for another seven months), and everyone else based in North America and routinely sitting in that ringside seat for high-profile bouts is over 50. In some cases, well over 50.

Whatever one’s opinion of Erdman’s skills on the microphone, the “next voice of boxing” characterization rings true in the sense that nobody else in this particular role has as much career runway ahead of them as he does.

Although Erdman was obsessed with boxing from as far back as he can remember, he didn’t necessarily know growing up that this would be his career path. When he finished high school, he enrolled at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, one town over from Kitchener, and planned to study political science.

But almost immediately, Erdman felt an itch to pursue sports media. He’d done a little writing in high school and had been published in some sports magazines — and as head-over-heels as he was for boxing, he also had a passion for baseball (which he played at a high level and, in his prime, actually hit home runs in major league stadiums) and hockey (no backstory required; he’s Canadian, so, by law, he played hockey and loved hockey).

And it was a story he wrote on spec and sent to The Hockey News that sent him on his way. An editor there liked it and offered him an internship in Toronto, and just like that, before finishing his first semester at Wilfrid Laurier, Erdman became a college dropout.

“I was like 18 or 19 years old, and it was such a valuable experience because I was learning how actual journalism works,” he recalled. “I learned the process of reporting a story and editing stories and being in a newsroom.”

But print alone wasn’t enough for him. Still in his teens, he nudged his way in at The Score, a national TV station in Canada that also had a SiriusXM radio arm, and before he knew it, Erdman was appearing on and booking guests for the station’s boxing show.

And he wasn’t quite done sticking his foot in open doors.

On October 30, 2010, Casino Rama in Ontario was going to host a live fight card headlined by cruiserweights Troy Ross and Carl Handy. It wasn’t on TV — just streaming on SecondsOut. Erdman wrote to the man in charge, Robert Waterman, touted his SiriusXM radio experience, and suggested that if Waterman needed a commentator for the card, Erdman was available.

Waterman needed a commentator for the card.

Erdman was hired.

He was 22 years old and calling a boxing broadcast — solo the whole way, Dunphy-style.

From there Erdman dedicated himself to getting reps. He did various English-language calls for Canadian pay-per-views out of French-speaking parts of the country. He voiced archival fights for the Canadian equivalent to ESPN Classic.

He also dabbled in color commentary, but recognized that every ex-fighter and every boxing writer would be angling for those roles, whereas blow-by-blow was a significantly less crowded lane.

“With my experience of calling fights solo and my experience being on SiriusXM, where sometimes I would have like three-hour radio shows where I’m just hosting it by myself, I felt like I knew how to fill the air — and also knew how to guide a conversation and work people in appropriately,” he said. “I just felt like it was a better fit for me to be in the play-by-play role.

“And then ultimately, the industry kind of chooses for you. Once you start getting booked as that, that just becomes what you are, right?”

Bigger outlets gradually noticed. He was on ESPN international feeds. In 2015, one of his mentors, Showtime’s Steve Farhood, helped get him an opportunity as the researcher and ringside scorer for high-profile PBC shows.

“From the start, mentoring Corey was easy and enjoyable, at least partly because he was plainly talented enough to call fights upon having just left the womb,” Farhood quipped to BoxingScene. “In my 47 years in boxing journalism, I don’t recall any boxing broadcaster who was as capable at such an early age.”

When DAZN launched in the US, Erdman worked as a researcher and scorer for them, too, until finally he spoke up and mentioned to a producer, “Hey, you know I do commentary too, right?”

The next time a card came along when neither Grisham nor any of the other DAZN regulars was available — Alexis Rocha vs. Blair Cobbs, March 19, 2022, in Los Angeles — Erdman got his shot.

Now Erdman is calling fights for major outlets seemingly every time a boxing fan opens one of their apps. He’s gotten this far with no formal broadcasting training — instead always learning on the job. And at no point in his adult life has he had a true full-time job. From calling fights to hosting radio shows to writing articles for magazines and the web, Erdman is thriving in the gig economy.

And Erdman firmly believes his approach, working in as many different forms of media as possible, has been critical to his success and to finding his commentary voice.

“I think that my ideology when it comes to calling fights, and to whatever degree I’m good at it, I am aided by that foundation in journalism and in writing,” he said. “I want to say that I think of myself as a writer first, and that leads to a curiosity about what is a good story and how to tell it.”

Farhood echoed that exact thought without any prompting.

“I suspect one of the main reasons Corey and I hit it off and understood each other,” the 2017 International Boxing Hall of Fame inductee said, “was because, like me, he was a writer first. And that significantly contributed to his ability to excel as a broadcaster.”

In addition to being influenced very directly by Farhood and Bernstein, Erdman drew inspiration from the likes of Jim Lampley and Barry Tompkins and borrowed from them the technique of using the ring-walk to establish for the audience what the fighter’s personal stakes are.

“I want you to be able to understand what the context is, and what this means to both participants, because I have such a deep reverence for the people who do this at any level,” Erdman said. “That moment we’re about to watch in the ring could be the most important one in the lives of both participants, and I want to give it that kind of respect. I want to tell their story. That, for me, is more important than bombast. Way more important.”

To tell those stories to the best of his ability, Erdman spends much of his downtime when he isn’t calling fights doing preparation for the next fights he’ll be calling. (In fairness, he also spends some of his downtime with his wife, Amanda Ross, and their four-year-old miniature poodle, Brownie. Boxing isn’t Corey’s only love.)

Erdman estimates that he comes into every fight card with between 5,000 and 7,000 words of notes he personally compiled. As time-consuming as that sounds, though, the more you work, the easier it gets; at this point, Erdman already has a working file on the great majority of boxers he sees on his ringside monitor.

“You might not like my voice, you might not like something I say, you might disagree with how I saw a fight,” Erdman said. “But I want people to know that I really fucking care and I really do try to put my heart and soul into every broadcast.”

His friend and occasional partner Bernstein pushes back hard on the “you might nots” that started that comment from Erdman.

“I couldn’t possibly pinpoint why anybody would not like his call of fights, because it embodies everything in my opinion that we want out of a play-by-play announcer in boxing,” Bernstein insisted. “We want objectivity, and he has that in spades. We want knowledge, which he has. We want them to let a fight breathe once in a while, which he does. Those are the things that we should want from a boxing play-by-play announcer, and he does all of those.”

And he figures to be doing them for a long time to come. Good luck getting him to believe, though, that he’s the “next voice of boxing.” Erdman isn’t wired that way.

“I don’t want to be the show,” he emphasized. “I’m not the show. I want to enhance the show.

“And I want you to be excited with me. Because, whoever the nerdiest fan out there watching is, believe me, I’m right there with you.”

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.