The Ring: Who was your favorite fighter growing up?
LM: Growing up in the 1930s and ’40s, all you knew was that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the President and Joe Louis was the heavyweight champion. I also became aware of fighters like Sugar Ray Robinson and Henry Armstrong and their fights would sometimes be on the radio. But Louis blocked out the sun in terms of how big he was. Louis was the first Afro-American hero in America. He was the crossover of all crossovers. There have been many black artists and performers, particularly in the jazz age, but Joe Louis the heavyweight champion of the world, was considered the strongest man in the world. That became more apparent after his second fight with Max Schmeling. Everyone was fearful that World War II was about to happen and we would get drawn into war and that Adolf Hitler was such a megalomaniac who had the history of the 1936 Olympics, spurning Jesse Owens -- and here comes Joe Louis.
Louis came from the deepest South where segregation was alive and unwell. He was a national hero to kids, to everyone. I just happened to grow up in the center of the sports world, New York, where the great writers all wanted to be. It was a cultural center and a sports center.
The Ring: What led you to journalism?
LM:My parents didn’t understand why I went to journalism school, and they tried to figure how you make a living out of that (laughs). But what I think helped me was my senior year at Oklahoma, I was sports editor and editor of the school daily. My senior year, I wrote a piece for Sport Magazine on Billy Vessels, who was becoming the Heisman Trophy award winner. I got paid $250, which was a lot of money at that time, and my parents took a deep breath and maybe they thought I could make it (laughs). But my first job was as sports editor of the Wilmington News, in Wilmington, N.C. I wrote a lot about fishing, what they caught and what they caught it with. I’d go fishing with Captain Eddie for sailfish. That sort of stuff (laughs).
I was 23, a one-man sports staff. I have vivid recollections of that time. Then an interesting thing happened. I was there for just three or four months, because I used a photo of a black second baseman in the sports section. When I picked up the newspaper later that day, where that photo had been was a blank space. When I went into the office the next morning, the managing editor took me aside and said, “If Jackie Robinson hits five home runs in a game, you can put his photo in the paper, otherwise we do not have photos of Negroes in the newspaper.” When I went back to my apartment, I got a big jar and started to fill it with my change every night. When it was filled a few weeks later, I bought a tank of gas and left town. That was it. I went back home and got a job at The Associated Press, and went from there to the Philadelphia Daily News as an assistant photo editor around 1955.
The Ring: Your big break came soon afterward, right?
LM: There was a lot of transition going on at The Daily News. I was in the generation that looked at sports differently. The Daily News was housecleaning for financial reasons, and they made me sports editor. I was 26 and reflected a newish sensibility, heightened by TV -- we assumed that fans knew the score when they picked up the newspaper. We wrote about the sports scene and what was behind it, about the athletes as personalities and people as well as athletes. My column was called “Fun and Games” to convey the idea that it isn’t life and death for us, that it’s entertainment we are passionate about.
The Ring: Like what you and Floyd Mayweather provided?
LM: (Laughs) This is the world of modern communication. By the time I was out of the ring, it was around the world three times (laughs). I’m getting messages on the internet -- and an hour later, there was this poster up of Mayweather vs. Merchant, 1961 (laughs). Guys were selling T-shirts saying, “If I was 50 years younger … (laughs).” Most of the feedback I received was positive, some of it on the internet wasn’t.
It was a moment of spontaneous combustion. I wish I was smart enough to plan something like that, but I’m not (laughs). So it was a 15-minutes-of-fame thing, and I was in the merry-go-round for a few days there, and then it slowed down and I got off. There have been numbers of occasions when athletes have gotten hot with me, and I’d let them go on, and “Back to you Jim” and let viewers decide for themselves what they just saw and heard. But this was different. This was a personal attack. If what he did was legally sucker punch Ortiz, he was doing a variation of that of the same thing on me. He tried sucker punching me, and I counter punched. I had no idea it was coming and was amazed afterwards that it came.
I would like to point out that Mayweather has had these kinds of meltdowns with other people, too. He exploded on Brian Kenny, from ESPN, who is one of the most knowledgeable boxing people I’ve run across. This time it happened at the end of a fight. The crowd was incendiary. It was explosive, there was a lot of angry voices that wanted answers. I think he realized that whatever he did was legal, he wasn’t going to get the credit he always craves. And he went off. And I did. He never tried to apologize. To the contrary, he went to the press conference and reinstated his position about HBO firing me (laughs).
The Ring: Will you have any misgivings about entering the ring again after a Mayweather fight to do the postfight interview?
LM: I will give Mayweather a rematch provided the terms are right (laughs). With him, you never know how long it will take for him to fight again. Who knows whether or not it will be my turn to cover a Mayweather fight.
The Ring: Is there anything different that you would do? I have a sense that Lafayette High defensive back came raging out.
LM:I can’t deny it’s part of who I am. It’s like the crowd had an honest reaction to what they saw. They don’t read the fine print of the rules. It’s not on the back of a ticket stub. They saw one guy hit another guy who was looking away. They reacted with an honest emotion to it. It was legal and that was on Ortiz. He likes to turn his cheek to everything outside the ring, to stave off negative vibes, but you can’t do that inside the ring, and he paid the price for it. I’m not going to second guess the reaction of the crowd or second guess my reaction, which was a human response to being attacked. The aftermath was just a giggle. TMZ, which I had barely heard of, is intercepting me at the airport and restaurants (laughs). I treated it as Mayweather never laid a glove on me. I'm just a guy babbling about the fights and the fighters. I’m just another bit player in Floyd Mayweather’s reality show (laughs).
The Ring: How much longer do you see yourself doing this?
LM:As long as I love doing it, I’m able to do it (laughs), and as long as they'll have me. I've had an amazing run, and I'm still standing, still here, still crazy after all these years.