Muhammad Ali once babysat Jim Lampley’s 8-year-old daughter during a boxing awards dinner in 1991. That may tell you a lot of what you need to know about the extraordinary, improbable journey of the Chapel Hill resident, from college dropout to Hall of Fame broadcaster.
Along the way he managed to report on a record 14 Olympics, did on-air work for ABC, NBC, CBS and TBS, and covered boxing for HBO for nearly 30 years, picking up three career sports Emmys.
He writes about all this in his autobiography, “It Happened, A Uniquely Lucky Life in Sports Television,” which was published in April with help from co-author and fellow UNC Chapel Hill grad, Art Chansky, a veteran
Tar Heel sportswriter.
Jim Heavner, the founder of Village Companies in Chapel Hill and a former owner of the local WCHL radio station, helped give Lampley his start in the early 1970s as a $15-a-show reporter.
Born in Hendersonville, Lampley moved to Miami with his mother when he was 5, following the death of her second husband, Lampley’s father. He returned to North Carolina in 1967 to attend Chapel Hill. Going to class was not at the top of his “to do” list, and he soon became a habitué of the now-defunct Shack, a rundown bar on Rosemary Street popular with the fraternity and sorority set. In 1968, he lost his mother’s car, a 1964 Oldsmobile Cutlass, playing cards at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house. Down $3,000 at a time when UNC’s tuition stood at $700 a year for out-of-state students, he had no other way to settle up but to hand over the keys.
A year or so later, he dropped out. Following a stint compiling mortgage documents in a Florida bank, Lampley reapplied to UNC and returned to campus with a new seriousness. He finished his undergraduate work and went on to pursue a master’s in Radio, Television and Motion Pictures. While he never earned that degree, he beat 431 other contestants to win a role at ABC Sports as the first college football sideline television sports reporter, debuting on Sept. 7, 1974, during a game between UCLA and Tennessee. His experience at WCHL may have been the key reason for landing the job, he says.
He then spent decades circling the globe, bringing viewers the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat,” as cited by the intro to the “ABC Wide World of Sports” program that was a Saturday afternoon staple for 36 years. He covered everything from “The Miracle on Ice,” USA hockey team’s gold medal victory during the 1980 Winter Olympics to the Indianapolis 500. He became known in part for doing what he calls the “wacky Wide Worlds” such as wrist wrestling and log rolling.
Then came the Ironman Triathlon and Race Across America, where Lampley’s interest in new technology and in different forms of storytelling helped develop audiences for these emerging sports.
Many A-listers from the ‘80s and ‘90s are mentioned in the book, while the lessons of corporate infighting are timeless. In 1986, Lampley found himself on the wrong side of an acquisition when Capital Cities Broadcasting bought ABC. His new boss, ABC Sports President Dennis Swanson, was not a fan. “Who is Jim Lampley and why are we paying him all this money?” Lampley recalls Swanson asking by way of introduction. Clearly, Lampley’s days at the network were numbered.
It turned out to be fortuitous, setting him on a path that led to HBO and boxing, which he characterizes as, “The most personal, the most subjective, the most psychological, the most confrontational sport.
Lampley had a major impact in raising the profile of boxing during his tenure at HBO. It’s the sport for which he is best known today, including the 1994 bout between Michael Moorer and George Foreman in which the latter regained the heavyweight title at age 45. “It happened!” exclaimed Lampley at ringside when Moorer went down in the 10th round, coining a signature phrase and a future book title.
In January 2020, Lampley again returned to Chapel Hill with his wife, Debra. “For decades I had the ambition to come here and teach,” he says. At a 2015 fundraising luncheon in California, then-Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz told him that he could “just stand up in front of the students and talk about how the university benefitted you and we’ll call it a class.” Lampley envisioned something more rigorous, a course that would include “all the factors that influence the way a story is told, and what gets onto the air.” The result was COMM 490: “Evolution of Storytelling in American Electronic News Media.”
He taught the course for five semesters before running into
the latest disruptive communications technology: social media. “I could not convince the students of the importance of the sanctity of truth and the degree to which they will participate in the destruction of truth if they continue down the path of social media,” Lampley says. “I couldn’t get through their social media-addicted skulls.”
NEXT UP
The hair a little grayer but the familiar voice intact, Lampley earlier this year did blow-by-blow for a boxing event held outdoors in New York’s Times Square. The fights were disappointing, but his performance received generally good notices. He hopes to be tapped for future boxing events. “I’m hoping to call Canelo (Alvarez) vs. Terence Crawford,” referring to two leading pugilists. If I do that, then I’m back to calling arguably the best fight in boxing,” he says.
In the meantime, he has been promoting the book, doing more than 200 interviews to date. In a business where egos tend to run rampant and narcissism is the order of the day, Lampley’s daughter helped to give him a little perspective along the way. Heading up Madison Avenue in a cab after that evening of rubbing shoulders with one of the greatest boxers who ever lived, she turned to her father and asked, “Dad, who was that man?” ■
