Is Larry HBO’s Merchant of Menace?
After Saturday’s fight between Floyd Mayweather and Victor Ortiz, Larry Merchant, not for the first time, finds himself in the crosshairs…
I admit to having a soft spot for Larry Merchant. It’s not because of his age or race, but because he’s been there for half a century dedicatedly reporting on the fights. If you think that’s easy you should try it sometime. It’s not just the amount of hard work involved. It also means having to deal with, and having been able to deal with, more rogues and scoundrels than you can imagine. To have put up with that for decades, while keeping his head clear and anger in check, is no mean feat.
I grew up in Philly and read Merchant religiously when he wrote for the Philadelphia Daily News. I was just a kid, but boxing seduced me when I was a kid, and he was my first introduction to boxing journalism. Even back then he was eloquent and opinionated, and I accepted that as being part and parcel of what a good journalist was supposed to be.
After Saturday’s fight between Floyd Mayweather and Victor Ortiz, Merchant, not for the first time, finds himself in the crosshairs. Some fans have never bought his wise old sage routine. They prefer someone who sucks up to the fighters instead of asking tough questions, and that’s their prerogative. But it’s my prerogative to feel otherwise. For better or worse, Larry Merchant is part of my boxing DNA, and I relish that simple fact.
Merchant was born on Feb. 11, 1931, in New York City. His mom was a legal secretary. His dad was a “small businessman” who ran a laundry and dry-cleaning business. “My father was also a big sports fan,” Merchant told me. “My father and uncles took me to baseball games all the time. Saw a lot of football games. Pretty much my life outside school was athletics.”
Baseball and football are okay, but they’re not the fights, so I asked Merchant if boxing was part of the equation.
“It was,” he said, “because boxing was a mainstream sport. The first boxing event I can remember is listening with my father to the second Louis-Schmeling on radio. I had an uncle who fought in the amateurs. There was some distant relative, I mean some very distant relative, who had been a professional. So a lot of people were connected one way or another to boxing in those days.”
After graduating from high school, Merchant attended the University of Oklahoma. He was on the football team—“Football is a passion of mine”—but a shoulder injury KO’d his career in college ball. Fortunately the college newspaper, the Oklahoma Daily, had an opening suited to his talents. Merchant became sports editor and then editor of the paper.
But “I wasn’t 100% committed to being a sportswriter,” he said. “At one time I thought I might like to write about science, another time about politics.” He also thought about being a football coach.
After graduating from college, Merchant became backfield coach at Lafayette High School in Brooklyn. But as usual there was a war going on, the Korean War, and Merchant was drafted and shipped off to Germany where he became sports editor of the Stars and Stripes.
At war’s end Merchant was discharged and, having found his niche, was hired as sports editor of the Wilmington Daily News in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1953. Then he worked for the AP for six months, before landing the plum position of photo editor at the Philadelphia Daily News. “And from that I became sports editor when I was 26 years old. I was there 10 years.” That 10-year stint at the Daily News was followed by another 10-year stint, but at the more prestigious New York Post in the Big Apple.
Merchant did his first radio and TV during this time. He worked at NBC for a couple of years as a reporter, commentator and producer, before leaving New York and moving to the sunny clime of southern California. “I had written some books,” Merchant said, “sold one, wrote a screenplay, came out here and the cable revolution happened and I got sort of recruited into cable.”
Initially he was host and producer of a showed called “Sports Probe” on the USA cable network, which Merchant described as a “Meet the Press of Sports.” But that was the minor league. The major league, HBO, hired him to do their color commentary and analysis for the fights—and the rest is broadcast journalism history.
“I had, in a sense, burned out as a columnist after 20 years,” Merchant said, “and I liked TV for two reasons. Number one, I liked the technical people—everybody seemed to be on their toes trying to make the best show they could—and secondly, it was just another way of telling a story. There came a time when I felt I wasn’t as eager to go to the ballparks as much as I had been, and I had to make a decision on whether I wanted to be one of those old columnists who kept repeating himself or did I want to move on.”
Merchant decided to move on. Goodbye written word. Hello TV.
“I’d always been attracted to boxing as much because of boxing writers as the prizefights themselves,” said Merchant. “I just found that the writers had such a rich area to write about, with the shenanigans outside the ring, with all the hustlers and rustlers around the ring, and the drama going on inside the ring, that if you cared about competition, if you cared about drama in sports, if you cared about human behavior as a way of looking at sports, it just seemed like a very rich territory.”
I asked Merchant which sportswriters influenced his early work and he rattled off some iconic names: “W.C Heinz, a great boxing writer, John Lardner, who wrote a lot about boxing, A.J. Liebling, Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, and Dan Parker in particular, who was a columnist at the New York Mirror, an old tabloid, and who wrote a lot about the colorful characters around boxing. And of course there was Hemingway, who wrote about boxing.”
Because of my interest in boxing and fine writing, I want to know if Merchant recalled some boxing writing that was especially vivid.
“I tell the story of my first fight at Madison Square Garden. I was taken by an uncle, the uncle who had once been an amateur, and it was a spirited fight between two fighters whose names I’ve never forgotten: Bobby Ruffin and Johnny Greco. And the next day I read in the paper, in Dan Parker’s column, how Ruffin, if I remember correctly, ‘Gave up his fish dinner in the corner’—that was the way he put it—and I can remember thinking: I’ve got to find a way to get closer to the ring.”
Having been a boxing insider for most of his life, Merchant has seen the game’s popularity wax and wane. I have my own thoughts on the matter, but wanted to know what Merchant felt were the reasons that boxing is now held in such low esteem.
“It’s basically societal reasons,” he said. “Once upon a time, a young athlete would dream of becoming champion. There weren’t a lot of high school graduates, much less college graduates, and virtually every town had a gym. And kids, whether they were from coal towns or mill towns or big cities, for some of them boxing was a way out and up. But today there are alternatives, so that part has changed.
“Boxing is no longer a mainstream sport, but it has a devoted smaller following. It is a very big deal in the societal fabric still for Latinos—they’re just the latest racial or ethnic group that has dominated the sport—which is a growing presence in America, which is why the sport will always be around in one form or another. And boxing, like every other major American sport except American football, has been globalized. Look at the rosters in baseball. Look at the rosters in basketball and hockey. Look who’s dominating tennis. So boxing is more global now.”
Merchant continued: “In that sense, there’s been a tectonic shift of the plates in boxing, and it’s noticeably no longer the kind of socially acceptable kind of competition it once was. All the heavyweight prospects are playing linebacker. But it’s also a shift in the sense that boxing is entertainment for most people who go [to the fights]. It’s not a gut thing.”
The latest kerfuffle to ensnare Merchant is nothing new or anything to get worked up about.
“I’m not to everyone’s taste. They have their favorites. And my feeling is that a fighter is a performer who’s frequently getting millions of dollars to get on his stage, and there are times when a fighter doesn’t perform up to his standards, or does things that have to be questioned, so that’s my role as a journalist. I’m trying to find the story and what happened and why it happened.
“When a great singer or band or musician performs in public and the critic or the reporter goes to write about it, if his performance is beneath his customary standard or is in some way not what he normally does, then it’s going to be written about and talked about. We’re not just there to worship and/or appreciate, which is what every performer thinks every critic or reporter should do. We’re there to ask questions. And in my mind, there’s no hard questions if you know the answer.
“I understand that the passionate fan who wants to celebrate or commiserate with his champion doesn’t want to hear or see him in a way others might see him, and I get that, but it’s part of the deal. If I dish it out, I have to be able to take it.”
