By Charles Jay

You know, broadcasting a sporting event isn't the toughest job in the world, but sometimes, on the spur of the moment, and in the interest of saying something significant, you wind up saying something that is, well, pretty awkward.
 
For example, in the days when I was doing color commentary for Prime Network telecasts in Florida, I was interviewing Hector Camacho after a fight, and as Hector's going on and on about being "ambushed" by some promoter I turn my head downward and get a good look at the trunks he was wearing. And I see a design that, if sliced up just a little bit, might be something I'd decorate my Christmas tree with. And so, not really knowing how to describe them, and kind of being tongue-tied, I remarked that they were "colorful and, uh, noteworthy." Ugh.
 
When he was at USA Network, Sean O'Grady said something at a show in Tampa that raised a few eyebrows. One of the fighters had slipped on the Budweiser logo, which had been freshly painted on a new canvas for that event. After the guy got up, Sean said words to this effect - "That's what can happen when you drink too much Budweiser," which, as you might guess, gave everyone in the production truck a case of "agita."
 
These are things that are said spontaneously, and sometimes they just come out wrong. Do we have to revisit the cases of Howard Cosell ("Look at that monkey go") or Jimmy The Greek? I don't think so.
 
This thing with Max Kellerman, though - that's quite a different story.
 
No, I'm not talking about steroid-related remarks he made about Evander Holyfield on a radio show. I'm referring to the way he handled himself a few weeks ago while he was part of the HBO "Boxing After Dark" team for the Paul Malignaggi-Edner Cherry fight.
 
In that package, one of Kellerman's responsibilities, apparently, is to make a few comments about the fighters as they enter the ring. The bullet points related to those comments are put on the screen in the form of a graphic.
 
After Kellerman provided comfort by assuring us that Cherry, a devout Christian, wasn't  "obnoxious about his religion," then using a segue that, for some reason, intimated that someone of sound mind, somewhere on the face of this earth, would draw a comparison between Tampa Bay Devil Rays outfielder Rocco Baldelli and Joe DiMaggio, just because they were both Italian-American, Max then proceeded to make this comment about Malignaggi as the self-proclaimed "Magic Man" entered the ring:
 
"He's an ethnic white guy, fights in the Northeast, doesn't hit with a lot of power, and so inevitably he reminds me of the great Billy Conn, light heavyweight champion, who gave a very good showing against the great Joe Louis, a heavyweight, much like Malignaggi gave a very good showing against Miguel Cotto at junior welterweight."
 
INEVITABLY he reminds you of Conn, you say? I had no idea of the inevitability of that comparison.
 
That's kind of liking saying that because they're both loud, obnoxious in their own way, and Jewish, Kellerman should be compared to Cosell.
 
Well, I knew Billy Conn. My father was a friend of Billy Conn. And Max, I must clue you in - Paul Malignaggi is no Billy Conn.
 
Not on this day. Not on any day.
 
Take out your notebooks, class. It's time for today's history lesson.
 
First of all, let's separate Conn from Malignaggi - a chasm that is about as wide as the Grand Canyon - by using two of Max's own words - "great" and "champion."
 
Conn was both. Malignaggi is neither.
 
Which is not to disparage the young man from Brooklyn.
 
He fought with an awful lot of courage against Cotto, sustaining the orbital bone injury and toughing out the distance in defeat. He'll be able to earn his way back into matches with world-class fighters and may yet prove that he is one of them.
 
But Conn was a boxer of the highest stature; a technician of considerable renown. He beat some tremendous fighters, including Tony Zale, Fritzie Zivic, Vince Dundee, Babe Risko, Teddy Yarosz, Solly Krieger, Fred Apostoli, Melio Bettina and Young Corbett III, in addition to some of the heavyweight contenders who wound up fighting Joe Louis for the title - Nathan Mann, Al McCoy, Bob Pastor, and Lee Savold, who in fact ten years later would be recognized as world heavyweight champion by the British Board of Boxing Control (roughly comparable to being a WBO champion now).
 
Furthermore, when Conn challenged Louis for the heavyweight crown in June of 1941, he came in at 174, giving up 25-1/2 pounds to the Brown Bomber, who already had 17 world championship defenses under his belt. And he was actually ahead on two of the judges's scorecards when Louis knocked him out in the 13th round. This is pretzel logic, for certain, but if championship fights were twelve rounds like they are now, who would have been holding the belt? That's a legitimate question.
 
By contrast, Malignaggi, though valiant, lost decisively against Cotto. He was behind by five points on two of the judges' scorecards and three on the other (this according to BoxRec), but those numbers were somewhat deceiving. At no time was Cotto ever in any danger of losing that fight.
 
Malignaggi and Cotto came in at the same weight, unlike the Louis-Conn matchup, and Paulie had been campaigning as a junior welterweight for the previous four years.
 
So Conn "gave a very good showing against the great Joe Louis much like Malignaggi gave a very good showing against Miguel Cotto"?
 
I don't believe I am physically capable of stretching myself that far.
 
I haven't convinced you yet? OK, then it's time to go to a higher authority.
 
What does Hall of Famer Hank Kaplan, the noted historian and archivist, think of comments like Kellerman's?
 
"It's totally ridiculous," Kaplan says. "The analogy is piss-poor because, first of all, he's comparing apples and oranges. It's the lighter weight divisions against the heavier weight divisions. As far as being a boxer is concerned, Malignaggi has a style of moving around, using his feet for defense, that's true, but he's not nearly as clever as Conn was.
 
"Conn was a tried and proven champion. When Malignaggi fought Cotto, that was the first fight where he was supposed to prove himself. He survived. He didn't win. His (Kellerman's) analogy is poor, let's put it that way."
 
Let me tell you why there is no excuse whatsoever for Kellerman here; why he could never just pass it off as a "spontaneous" comment.
 
The very fact that a graphic with Conn's name appeared on the screen in association with Kellerman's remarks indicates that no one had just thought of it right then and there. It had to be fed to the production truck, at Kellerman's specific request, so that it could be entered into the "Chyron" in time to build all the graphics. In fact, if the production team is meticulous (and there's no reason to believe they are not), this subject may have even come up in the production meeting that takes place the day before (which Kellerman would be attending). If anyone was wide awake in that production meeting, there may have been a discussion and/or debate about the wisdom of exploring such a parallel. In other words, there had to have been a considerable amount of CONTEMPLATION that went into it.
 
So, I ask, THIS was the product of all that contemplation?
 
A few years ago, a writer for the Las Vegas Sun named Dean Juipe penned a column in response to Ring Magazine's listing of the top all-time pound-for-pound fighters. In his piece, Juipe, who covered boxing for years, opined that the likes of Michael Spinks and Felix Trinidad should rank ahead of people like Sugar Ray Robinson, Muhammad Ali and Henry Armstrong, simply because they lost less fights.
 
Reacting to that, Michael Katz, then writing for an internet site, speculated that perhaps Juipe was, in a journalistic sense, "taking a dive"; in other words, in writing something so ridiculously stupid and devoid of perspective, he was trying to get himself pulled off the boxing beat.
 
I'm not suggesting that in making the comparison between Billy Conn and Paul Malignaggi that Kellerman was also "taking a dive." But let's put it this way, metaphorically speaking - if there's a referee in the ring he better come in and stop the fight. Quickly.