Painting Itself Into a Corner : ESPN Has Used Every Kind of Trick on Road to Televising From Reseda

Somebody had messed up. Real bad.

Here it was, the day of a 1983 ESPN fight in Ft. Worth, Tex., and the floor of the ring, called a mat, was in Cincinnati.

Now that may not seem like any big deal except this particular mat contained the logo for Budweiser beer on it, and Budweiser was going to pay the Top Rank boxing organization an undisclosed sum (thought to be more than $10,000) for the privilege of displaying it before the cameras.

The error wasn’t discovered until the day of the fight, a Sunday. It looked like Top Rank had blown a nice payday.

No way, said Akbar Muhammad, then a Top Rank executive.

Thinking quickly, he called the fight arena and asked if they sold that particular beer.

Yes, he was told.

When is their delivery truck due in? he asked.

Told it would soon pull up, Muhammad had a message for the truck driver: Want some easy money? Park your rig at the arena for a few hours.

The driver agreed and one problem was solved.

Next, Muhammad found a commercial artist in the phone book and asked if the man would be willing to work a few hours.

“It’s Sunday,” the artist said.

“How about for $1,000?” Muhammad asked.

“Where do I report?” the artist replied.

The two met at the arena where Muhammad directed the artist to the truck and told him to trace the logo off the side.

With about five hours until fight time, the artist took his drawing to the floor of the ring and began painstakingly to recreate the logo.

A new problem arose.

The artist would finish his job before the first bell, but would the paint be dry?

Probably not.

So Muhammad, the master of improvisation, rounded up a couple of hair dryers.

What a scene. As the ESPN camera crew set up and the fighters began to wander in, here was an artist at work on the floor of the arena, followed by a couple of guys zeroing in on him with hair dryers.

A visitor from the Orient was on hand for the fight. Watching all this, he turned to someone nearby and asked, “Tell me, do they always paint the day of a fight?”

Crazy as it all was, it worked. The beer company got its logo, Top Rank got its money and nobody got painted into a corner.

Just another day in the life of the Top Rank/ESPN weekly boxing shows.

From the beginning, the ESPN fight crew has been a group of traveling men. Many of the fights take place in casinos in Atlantic City and Las Vegas, but the shows have been everywhere from Totowa, N.J., to Ambridge, Penn., with stops in Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Dallas, Miami, Lake Charles, La., Bristol, Tenn., Cape Cod, Mass., and Wheeling, W.Va.

And tonight, ESPN arrives for the first time in California. In Reseda, of all places.

Why?

The obvious answer is Michael Nunn.

Nunn, unbeaten at 19-0 and ranked 10th by the World Boxing Assn., is operating under a contract with Bob Arum of Top Rank, who naturally wants to keep his fighter in the spotlight. Nunn will fight tonight’s ESPN main event at The Country Club in Reseda, meeting California middleweight champion Alex Ramos in a 12-round title fight. Nunn is managed by the Ten Goose Boxing Club of North Hollywood, which provides many of the fighters for the shows at the 900-seat Country Club.

“We offer a national forum for a fighter to showcase his talent,” says ESPN fight announcer Al Bernstein. “In that regard, Michael Nunn is the quintessential ESPN fighter. He is your basic up-and-comer, although in Michael’s case, he’s just about there.”

Nunn wouldn’t be the first to get there with an assist from ESPN. Former welterweight champion Donald Curry first shone in the ESPN cameras.

“It’ll be more interesting out here,” Bernstein says. “They’ve got lots of local flavor. This is a made-for-TV animal. A lot of times in casinos, there is not a lot of emotion.”

It’s been 6 1/2 years since those shows began. Weekly televised boxing is nearly as old as television itself. Back in the 1950s, Friday night fights were a staple.

But then television, which had been credited with putting boxing in the spotlight, was blamed for nearly killing the sport through overexposure, for swallowing up much of the talent and spitting it out. Fighters, it was said, were brought along too quickly, before they were ready, to satisfy the voracious appetite of a medium that constantly needs matches to fill out its shows.

ESPN, an all-sports cable outlet, was created in the fall of 1979. It needed live sports of all types, and what better sport to go to than boxing, which was inexpensive to produce, requiring only four cameras in a small space.

Top Rank signed a deal with ESPN to produce weekly fights in April, 1980. The initial contract called for ESPN to pay $920,000 for 52 fights that would be sent into 1.4 million homes.

Today, those weekly fights are still going on. The rights fee has gone up to $1.6 million, the audience up to 38.5 million homes.

Along the way, there have been a lot of thrills, some controversy and plenty of laughs, too, although nothing else as memorable as the invasion of the hair dryers.

By and large, the fights have been popular and competitive. But one early show contained so many mismatches--six of the seven fights were over before the end of the second round, leaving ESPN with over an hour to fill--that Arum went on camera immediately afterward to apologize and vow it would never happen again.

One ESPN fight, between Raphael Lopez and Juan Veloz, left a lot of people thinking somebody was due an apology. That fight was held in West Warwick, R.I., Lopez’ hometown. He went down four times in the fight, three times in one round. The referee ruled three of those trips to the canvas as slips and Lopez wound up winning the fight. Not everyone thought they were slips.

The ESPN switchboard was buzzing for hours.

“It was fairly bizarre,” says Bernstein. “We had people calling up saying they would never watch us again. One of them was author Kurt Vonnegut. Which is rather strange because what happened could have come out of a Kurt Vonnegut novel.”

The rise of Bernstein in the ESPN picture was rather strange. Here was a guy who was first making his living as the managing editor of a chain of community newspapers in the Chicago area, and later as a public information officer for the city of Skokie--all while moonlighting as a boxing announcer.

By day, he might be editing a story on hospital care. By night, he would be sitting next to Thomas Hearns, analyzing a fight for $200.

Not that Bernstein was just some guy picked out of a phone book. He was an amateur boxer, had authored a book on the sport and free-lanced for boxing magazines.

And now, he has become the man most identified with the ESPN series and one of the most well-known boxing voices in the country. He appeared in the recent movie, “Streets of Gold,” did the tremendous battle between Hearns and middleweight champion Marvin Hagler, did the Hagler-Roberto Duran match and has been selected as one of the announcers for April’s title fight between Hagler and Sugar Ray Leonard.

While Bernstein does not expect anything quite as compelling in Reseda tonight, he does think the Country Club show will have its own pluses.

“You’ve got all the Hollywood celebrities here,” he said. “That is an extra thing that sweetens the pot for us.”

Bruce Trampler of Top Rank agrees.

“Often the people you get in casinos are so laid back,” he says. “That type of crowd sits on its hands. Nunn is the main reason we are going out to Reseda. Plus they get such a good crowd out there, it ought to make great television.”

And if that doesn’t work, maybe they can get the guys with the hair dryers to come back. Now that would have made great television.