Center Ring Is His Stage, So to Speak

They were an American institution, like carnival barkers, camp town racers, sidewalk pitchmen or soft-shoe dancers. Their sound was as evocative and nostalgic as a train whistle on a summer night. If you closed your eyes, you could hear them. . . .

“Ladeez and gentle-mun, yer attention pleez! This is the main event of the evening! In the white corner, wearing purple trunks, weighing two-oh-one and one half, from Detroit, the internationally famous Brown Bomber, the heavyweight champion of the world--Joe Louis!”

The spine would tingle, the hair prickle. The crowd would roar, the bell would clang.

The fight announcer, as a breed, belongs in any collection of Americana. They were to become as familiar and famous as some of the champions they introduced. They had center stage in the most emotionally charged moments in all the drama of sports, the minutes just before two great pugilists were unleashed on each another. They were the scene-setters in the greatest theater that sports has to offer.

Joe Humphreys was the first. A man with a foghorn voice who disdained the niceties of a megaphone or a microphone, he was the first to embellish introductions, to milk the moment. Before him, the intros had been as cut and dried as name-rank-and-serial-number terseness. Name-weight-and-color-of trunks.

After him, it became a calling. It was Joe Humphreys who interrupted the introduction of Jack Sharkey and Jim Maloney to ask the audience to pray for a brave aviator who even as he spoke was winging his way across the Atlantic alone in a frail monoplane. Humphreys asked the crowd to stand in a moment of silent prayer for the safety of Charles A. Lindbergh. No one remembers who won the fight (Sharkey), but everyone remembers Joe Humphreys’ gesture.

Everyone remembered also that it was Humphreys who was announcing the fight (Jim Corbett knocked out Kid McCoy) in 1900 that was to have been the last before the sport was outlawed in New York, and Humphreys led the audience in the tearful singing of “Auld Lang Syne.” The sport went back to the barges, and so did Joe Humphreys, whose lusty pipes were equal to the challenge of an audience on shore.

Harry Balogh replaced Joe Humphreys in New York of the ‘30s and ‘40s, and Harry’s stock-in-trade was misguided pedantry. Harry was a study in malaprops. “And may the better contestant emoige triumphant!”

His successor, Johnny Addie, was a no-nonsense Lower East Side boy whose tick was to repeat for emphasis. “And, in this cornah, the worthy contendah, Joey Giambra.

“Giambra!”

But, no one was any better at this lively art than James Frederick Lennon, the latest of the line and, maybe, the best. On the West Coast, when you talk of historic fight announcers, you can only mean the silver-throated thrush of Santa Monica, the artist whose melodious speaking voice is a cross between a bell tinkling and a bird singing.

You’d know Jimmy Lennon even if you never went to a fight. For, while he’s been in more center rings than any fighter who ever lived, he’s also been in more movies than Paul Newman and Spencer Tracy put together.

Jimmy hasn’t uttered a word of prose in his entire life. His voice is such that he can make the telephone book sound like an opera. His conversation sounds like a Victor Herbert duet. “You imagine that’s what angels sound like,” the promoter Don Fraser once observed.

He didn’t set out to be a fight announcer. He was a singer, a good one. But, a kid growing up in those Depression days in Los Angeles couldn’t rely on show business, and Jimmy got a trade. A man whose father had been a press agent to the studio moguls and whose mother had been a German ballerina and whose nieces were to become the most famous singing sister act on television, Jimmy became a butcher.

He’s not ashamed. “I’ll tell you something,” he said. “I may be a passable announcer, but I was a g-r-e-a-t butcher!”

He likes to point out: “I haven’t been out of work since I was 14 years old.”

Originally, he sang songs on street corners, “5 cents a song, three for a dime,” and graduated to dance bands, “5 dollars a night,” and to funerals, “20 a month for a hundred dollars and 5 dollars apiece after that.”

He parlayed that to a long run singing ballads on the old “Al Pearce and his Gang” radio shows, a gig that brought him into contact with Bing Crosby, who was just getting started in the next studio.

Ring announcing became a sideline he fell into when he accidentally emceed an Elks Club smoker that he thought was a musical revue but turned out to be a fight card. A promoter heard him and, as they say, a star was born.

Lennon was one of the first to wear a tuxedo in the ring, the first to learn Spanish and to introduce Julio Jiminez as “Hoolieo Himinaze” and not “Jeweleo Jamaniz.”

He has introduced fights and fighters all over the world and in over a hundred movies and TV shows. The nature of fight fans being what it is, they confuse the messenger with the bad news, and he once had his ankle broken and his ribs kicked in by a band of fans outside the auditorium who disagreed with the decision he had to announce. He has been pelted in the head with heated pesos and was once chewed out by Sonny Liston for no reason at all.