Boxing to be buoyed by Jim Lampley's return to ringside in iconic Times Square on May 2 in New York

When Jim Lampley walks into a media center during fight week, it’s like royalty stepping onto the balcony at Buckingham Palace. The room shifts. Conversations stop. Heads turn. All eyes lock onto boxing’s voice of record.

Boxing’s most revered voice has arrived, and everyone — writers, fighters, promoters — wants their moment with him. The fighters adore him. The writers treasure his insights and his wealth of knowledge of boxing history.

It's been more than six years since he sat ringside and did what he has done better than anyone else ever has: Call a prizefight. His voice is the soundtrack of boxing for so many, the fight game's equivalent of baseball legends like Vin Scully, Mel Allen, Red Barber, Harry Caray and Bob Prince.

Thanks to a post on X from Turki Alalshikh that came seemingly out of nowhere, Lampley will return to ringside on May 2 to call the card from Times Square in New York that features Ryan Garcia, Devin Haney and Teofimo Lopez in separate bouts.

It will be Lampley's first time at ringside since HBO Sports' final boxing card, on Dec. 8, 2018, from Carson, Calif. 

"It's what I love," Lampley said of calling the fights.

He nearly called a Lopez-George Kambosos fight for Triller, but when the bout fell through, so did the opportunity. Until Alalshikh’s surprise X post in February, Lampley hadn’t received a single offer to return to ringside.

Dale Hopkins, the CEO of PPV.com, brought him back into boxing when she hired him to do a live chat with viewers during its fight broadcasts. Lampley wound up doing a series of media interviews to boost awareness ahead of the fight in addition to his fight night chats.

He also interviewed main event fighters like Ryan Garcia, Canelo Alvarez and Gervonta Davis, who all showed great deference and treated him like a legend.

"I wasn't even sure he would take my call," Hopkins said. "But I thought about it and it made so much sense to try to have him work with us. He's a huge figure in boxing and everyone knows him and respects him. I can't even begin to explain how much he's done for us and what that's meant. I'm grateful he even took my call."

Lampley wasn’t even on social media when Alalshikh’s surprise Feb. 2 post set this all in motion. Lampley was in Las Vegas working on the David Benavidez-David Morrell fight for PPV.com when he heard of it.

Lampley had called some Mike Tyson fights on ABC in the 1980s but became the de facto voice of boxing in 1988 when HBO's Ross Greenburg hired him to become the network's new blow-by-blow announcer. He held the chair until 2018 and did it well enough that he was elected to the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

Greenburg, who was first executive producer and later president of HBO Sports, needed to land an impact voice in 1988 when he was searching for a new announcer. When HBO went on the air in 1973, Don Dunphy did its play-by-play. He was followed by the great Barry Tompkins.

A tradition had been established and finding a worthy successor was a priority for Greenburg.

"At that point [in the late 1980s], there was so much talent at ABC Sports and Jim was kind of being pushed aside," said Greenburg, who was elected to the Hall of Fame in December and will be inducted in June in Canastota, N.Y.  "He got assigned to do boxing as kind of a throwaway thing. They had so many people and they had to do something with him. I watched a couple of the Tyson fights he did early in Mike's career and I said, 'This guy is a great talent. We need him as our blow-by-blow guy.' And so I set out to make that happen."

He paired Lampley with Larry Merchant and the pair clicked instantly. The third voice in the booth was first Sugar Ray Leonard and then George Foreman, and Greenburg felt he'd hit a home run.

There was instant chemistry, and it was clear to anyone who valued boxing and quality broadcasting that this pairing was genius.

"I kind of felt like with Jim, Larry and Ray and later George, we'd formed our own mini Monday Night Football thing like Howard [Cosell], Dandy Don [Meredith] and Frank [Gifford]," Greenburg said. "Jim was fantastic and as you know, doing blow-by-blow is an art unto itself. It's not like calling a shot going through the hoop from 30 feet or Patrick Mahomes throwing a long touchdown pass.

"Doing boxing play-by-play is an art. As Howard said, you need to capture the ebb and flow of a fight. You have to tell the story of what is happening and not just the boxing equivalent of 'He hit the fastball to right for a single.' Jim had a scary photographic memory that enabled him to get into a fighter's history or discuss boxing history like that."

Lampley met Alalshikh in New York and agreed to do the May 2 card. He's excited about the opportunity -- "I just haven't had any legitimate offers to do this since HBO went off the air," he said -- but he's also concerned about adapting.

The HBO crew stuck together for a long time and Lampley had a familiarity not just with the on-air talent but those behind the scenes.

"I won't have that HBO infrastructure around me that was manned for so long by very competent professionals whom I knew very well and whose work habits I knew very well," Lampley said. "I'm going into the unknown to a degree here. ... But this is something that I love doing. I know I can't go in there after six years away and lay an egg, so I have to do very well. That means preparing well and researching and knowing everything I can about the fighters and the event before we start."

He'll make the call from one of the most iconic venues ever. Joe Frazier once did a public workout in Times Square, but setting up a ring and doing a fight broadcast is something else entirely.

Greenburg produced fights at iconic New York venues such as Madison Square Garden, Barclays Center, Radio City Music Hall, Yankee Stadium and Nassau Coliseum. 

He said the logistics of putting that together are mind-blowing -- "It's not an easy thing to pull off and I don't even want to think about everything you'd have to do to get that done," he said -- but he said he thinks when the fight goes off, it will be worth it.

"It's going to be pretty powerful," he said of seeing the fights on TV from Times Square. "There is beautiful scenery and it's going to add a spectacle to the event. It's a lot, a lot of work, but the beauty and the glamor that Times Square will provide makes it worth it, I'd think."

Lampley, whose book, "It Happened!" is available for pre-order now on Amazon and at B&N.com, will be published on April 15, said it's a different business from the one he left in 2018. He's excited, though, to get rolling.

"First of all, if it weren't for Dale Hopkins, none of this would be happening," Lampley said. "So I owe her so much. She brought me back to the public view and into the media room and back to ringside. I powerfully suspect this might not be happening if Dale Hopkins had not reached out to me and asked me to work with her. Look what she's done for me.

"And working with Turki is something I am looking forward to. My impression of him is that he wants everything he does, everything he touches, in the boxing space to be memorable, significant and meaningful for the sport. He wants to make the biggest impression he can make for the sport of boxing and I'm honored to be a part of that."