Southern California Notebook By Doug Fischer (Aug 21, 2008) Send this page to friend Give us your feedback The plan was to hit at least two gyms yesterday. A nanny visits Casa Del Fischer in Inglewood, Wednesdays and Thursdays, from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., to help your intrepid fight scribe with his 18-pound, 4-month-old bundle of joy, giving me one day to collect my usual gym observations for the Southern California Notebook before the column’s deadline. Knowing that Rudy Hernandez’s “boys” train in the mornings, I was going to drop by the Maywood Boxing Club – just a nine-mile jaunt east on West Slauson Avenue from ‘the Wood’ – and check up on Urbano Antillon, Jose Armando Santa Cruz, Nestor Rocha and Japan’s nifty junior welterweight southpaw Norio Kimura (who Rudy is training to challenge WBA 140-pound belt holder Andreas Kotelnik in Ukraine next month) before jumping on the I-710 North (to the I-5 North to the 101 North and exiting Sunset Boulevard) and finally checking out Justin Fortune’s new gym. If time permitted, I would have popped in to the Wild Card Boxing Club, just around the corner from the Fortune Gym (east on Sunset and a right turn on Vine Street), and peeped who was training at Freddie Roach’s famous gym. But it didn’t happen. Allow me to explain. I got a call from James Wimberly, the longtime producer of Rich Marotta’s Neutral Corner – a weekly radio show dedicated to boxing heard here in Southern California now in its ninth year – late Tuesday night. The “Doctor of Style” had been trying to reach me through the weekend, but since my cell phone has been, um… misplaced (OK, I lost he damn thing), since Saturday, I had no idea. Wimberly asked if would tape a segment for Marotta’s show Wednesday morning. (A weekend engagement for his other radio gig – political commentary for the Bill Handle Show on KFI AM 640 – prevented Marotta from doing his boxing program during its usual Saturday 9-11 a.m. morning slot.) I said I’d love to. Then he told me that Marotta, an Emmy-award winning sportscaster who has covered boxing for three decades, was wondering if I could join him for the segment at the radio station’s Burbank studio. “No problem,” I said. “I’ll be there.” Now I usually hate driving more than 10 miles in any direction, but Marotta, one of the sport’s good guys, is special. He’s a lifelong boxing fan and his passion for the fighters and their fights comes through in every one of his broadcasts. Marotta is someone I’ve learned from (as the color commentator to some of his blow-by-blow announcing jobs for Top Rank’s pay-per-view events and international broadcasts) and a professional I’ve enjoyed listening to for more than 15 years, so I was happy to make the 25-mile drive (15 of which were on the God-awful 405) from Inglewood to Burbank through Wednesday morning freeway traffic. “So, I’ll skip the Maywood Boxing Club,” I thought, “I can still drop by the Fortune Gym and the Wild Card after Rich and I finish.” Well, that didn’t happen. I wound up doing two segments with Marotta (my fault; I’m a long-winded brotha, as you all know), and then I sat in with Rich’s interview with unified lightweight champ Nate Campbell. The interview with the always entertaining Campbell was accidentally taped over my first segment with Rich, so we had to record it again, but not before Marotta did interviews with lightweight contender Michael Katsidis and veteran trainer Roger Bloodworth, both of whom called in during my stay at the Burbank studios. I worried about having time to drop by a gym before heading home but I enjoyed co-interviewing Campbell, who defends his WBA/WBO/IBF titles vs. Joan Guzman on Sept. 13th, and listening in on Marotta’s one-on-one sessions with Bloodworth, who is training Joel Casamayor for the Cuban vet’s showdown with Juan Manuel Marquez the same night of Campbell-Guzman, and with Katsidis, who is training here in Southern California for his Sept. 6th showdown with Juan Diaz. Katsidis, who is taking on the former champ on a HBO Boxing After Dark telecast from Houston, said his the clash with Diaz will be “the fight of my life. “It’s going to be a battle of wills between the two of us.” Marotta asked Katsidis about his stoppage loss to Casamayor this past March, a fight that Rich rates among the year’s best, second only to the Vazquez-Marquez rubber match. The Aussie of Greek descent said that loss was “one of the reasons I love the sport; the risk of getting in there and winning it all or losing it all is what makes boxing special, and it’s valuable experiences like that which make me a better fighter. “I’d never been cut before I fought Czar [Amonsot], and that was a valuable experience; I’d never lost or been stopped before fighting Casamayor. I grew from both fights.” Marotta brought up the fact the Katsidis has engaged in three consecutive fight-of-the-year candidates with his bouts vs. Britain’s Graham Earl, Amonsot, and Casamayor; and then asked if “back-to-back-to-back” fights of that nature could take too much out of him. “I don’t know how much longer I’m going to box but when I retire, I don’t want to have any regrets,” the fighter answered. “I want to say I’ve done all I set out to do in this sport before I die, so I don’t want any easy fights. I like taking the hard road.” Bloodworth, who trained Casamayor for the Katsidis fight, said he wasn’t surprised that the bout was as action-packed and dramatic as it was. “A lot of people underestimate [Casamayor] as a fighter, not a boxer or a ring artist, but as a fighter; he can box, but he’ll fight. So I wasn’t surprised at what he did against Katsidis, who was younger and stronger and bringing the fight to him. The plan was to take it to Katsidis late in that fight. Joel tried to do it earlier, probably because of what he did in the first round, and that’s why he got caught in the middle of the fight. “But it was a terrific fight for the fans and I think the fight with Marquez can be a good one depending on which version of Marquez shows up. If it’s the scientific Marquez, the guy who counter punches and backs away, it could be a boring fight, but if it’s the Juan Manuel we’ve been seeing lately, the guy who’s been brining it, it could be very exciting. “I think Marquez will bring a mixture of both styles, but I don’t think the winner of the fight can rely just on counter punching. My guy’s a counter puncher and if we have two counter punchers we have no fight, so I’m going to make sure my guy comes to fight.” One lightweight who always comes to fight is Campbell, who told us that his plan to deal with Guzman’s slippery style is simple: “I’m going to break his will.” I won’t go into any more detail of Campbell’s interview, but once he delved into his personal background it became riveting stuff. If you live in Southern California, you can listen to it on AM 570 Saturday morning (9-11 a.m.). If you live elsewhere you can find it in the On Demand section of the am570radio.com website. After wrapping up the second take of our first segment, I knew I wouldn’t have time to check out any gyms before 3 p.m., so I decided to grab some lunch with Marotta and get a little bit of background on his lifelong passion for boxing. We went to the Bob’s Big Boy Restaurant on Riverside Drive (in Toluca Lake) – “Bob’s TC” as Marotta, an L.A. native who attended Norte Dame High School in the Valley, grew up calling it – a landmark in the Burbank area for six decades. The restaurant, which Marotta said was the popular “post-date” spot when he was a teen, was seven years old when Floyd Patterson, Rich’s all-time favorite fighter, knocked out Archie Moore to win the heavyweight title Rocky Marciano had vacated in 1956. The first live fight Marotta ever attended (during his high school years) was Patterson’s first fight with local heavyweight contender, Jerry Quarry, which took place at the Coliseum in ’67. “It was a 12-round fight that wound up being a draw,” Marotta recalled. “Quarry dropped Patterson twice in the second round, and Patterson came back and put Quarry down in the seventh. The knockdowns were more of the flash variety, but it was a good fight, one I thought Patterson out-boxed Quarry in the majority of rounds, but Jerry got the hometown edge in scoring. “They fought again a few months later, this time at the Olympic, and I was at that fight, too. Quarry won a close decision in a bout that was part of the WBA’s tournament to find a successor to Muhammad Ali.” The version of Patterson that Marotta saw in the flesh was a gutsy, skilled veteran but not the world champion that he fell in love with as a kid. “Patterson was the heavyweight champ when I was a kid, so he became my hero,” Marotta said. “I was on Cloud 9 when he won and I was heart broken when he lost. I cried when he was knocked out by Ingemar Johansson. I left a Cub Scout meeting to listen to the rematch on the radio.” The first live Patterson fight that Marotta saw was not one of his idol’s better nights. “It was the closed circuit broadcast of his rematch with Liston,” he recalled. “July 22nd, 1963. It was at the Olympic. They had four big screens in a square hanging from the ceiling and the place was packed. “What I remember of that broadcast was that there were no other fights that they showed. There were no features on the main event or anything like that. The broadcast began with commentators introducing the fight while the camera focused on the area where Patterson would walk out of his dressing room, and two minutes after the broadcast started, Patterson emerged from his dressing room.” The fight that started it all for Marotta, the first professional boxing match he remembers, involved the greatest of all time – Sugar Ray Robinson – in a bout he lost. “I remember, at age six or seven, my father leaving the house to watch the closed circuit of Carmen Basilio’s challenge to Ray Robinson,” Marotta said. “Before he left, my Dad explained that Carmen was the welterweight champ challenging the middleweight champ, and that he was Italian like us, so he was going to watch the fight with his friends so he could cheer for Basilio. “I listened to the radio broadcast that night and that’s when I got interested in boxing. Not long after that fight, I watched my first fight on TV, the first Archie Moore-Yvon Durell fight. “My dad was going absolutely berserk during all those knockdowns and since I was his son I did the same thing; I was jumping out of my seat and screaming too.” Marotta was bitten by the boxing bug, and set out to learn all he could about the sport, which wasn’t hard to do since his father was a bona fide fan. “Dad had a stack of The Ring and the Police Gazette magazines dating back to the ‘30s that was taller than me. I read them all and became completely obsessed with boxing. I’m steeped in boxing. I spent my summers reading those magazines and learning about the history of this great sport.” But Marotta’s interest went beyond reading magazines. “I set up a speed bag in our garage and invited neighborhood kids to come over and put on the gloves for backyard boxing that my Dad supervised.” Marotta remained an unabashed fan throughout high school and college. “There’s a goofy senior year picture I took with my friends in the ’67 yearbook at Norte Dame where I’m wearing boxing gloves, a robe and trunks with a sign hung around my neck that read: ‘Rich ‘Muhammad’ Marotta: Next Heavyweight Champ’. Dan Goossen is in the picture, sitting there with his arms crossed, looking like he’s running the show – looking like a promoter! That’s how far back we go. “Throughout high school and even college, I stayed loyal to Floyd Patterson, he was my guy. In college, other guys had pin ups of Raquel Welch and other sex symbols on their walls but I had posters of Patterson on mine. “Two weeks before his first fight with Quarry, I got to watch Patterson train at the Hacienda Hotel in El Segundo. Boy, that was a thrill. The whole training camp was open to the public. After he was done with all his training, he’d speak to the crowd and then he’d do autographs. Every day I got in line to get an autograph. He was so nice.” Five years later, Marotta got the opportunity to talk to his boyhood idol while working at his first broadcast job. “I was writing copy for the sports anchors on KFWB AM, an all-news station,” he said. “It was my first real job, and I was still in college, but they let me do interviews if I wanted, so I got a chance to interview Patterson before his second fight with Ali. It was such a thrill just to do a phone interview with him.” Patterson was just as obliging, kind and humble as he was when he signed repeated autographs for an ecstatic teenager. Marotta, in many ways, has emulated his boxing hero’s down-to-earth personality in the manner in which he covers and commentates on the sport. The first major fight Marotta called the action to took place in the early ‘80s. “It was on the USA Network,” he recalled. “Alan Malamud was my color man. This was before they had a weekly show, before Sean O’Grady and Al Albert. It was a Bruce Curry fight and it took place at the Showboat Hotel in Las Vegas, but I can’t remember who he fought.” Marotta did a few other fights from the classic Vegas fight venue before getting the opportunity to do a few cards that were closer to home. “I sporadically did fights from Irvine in the mid-‘80s,” he said. “Like the Showboat fights, they were promoted by Don Chargin, but televised by a small network that was owned by Donny Osmond. I saw Genaro Hernandez come up on those shows, and my color guy was Jerry Quarry – and he was good.” Marotta’s first regular broadcast gig for boxing – the shows where I became familiar with his voice along with commentating partner Tom Kelly’s – was the Forum Boxing shows that were broadcast on the old Prime Ticket cable network beginning in the early ‘90s. “I started out filling in for Ruben Castillo in ’92 and soon became a regular,” he said. “I was lucky enough to call the action on some terrific fighters like Barrera, Marquez, Chiquita Gonzalez, 2-Sharp Johnson, and Israel Vazquez.” The best fight he called during the Forum days? “The last fight Chiquita Gonzalez had vs. Saman Sorjaturong was dramatic,” he recalled. “And I called the Barrera-McKinney fight for HBO’s international broadcast. That was pretty darn good, too. “Ezzra Sellers vs. Alex Stewart, a fight I called with Barry Tompkins on Fox Sports Net in Kansas City was awesome. It had seven knockdowns in three rounds.” But the best fight the veteran broadcaster has ever seen was more recent. Marotta did the international play-by-play for the first bout between Diego Corrales and Jose Luis Castillo. “I think that was the greatest fight ever,” he said, “because from the first round, it started out with non-stop exchanges and intensity and it built on that from every round until the 10th round, which sets it apart from all the other candidates for the all-time best fight in my opinion.” I was also there, covering the bout from press row for MaxBoxing.com. It was a special fight and a special night. An hour or so after the fight, I saw Rich by the sports book in the Mandalay Bay and he was still in awe of he had just witnessed. Marotta, a five-decade fight fan and three-decade broadcaster, was just as thrilled and humbled by the fighters and the effort they put forth that night as young internet writers who were covering their first major fight. That’s why Marotta is special. For Questions or Comments E-Mail Doug Fischer at dougie@maxboxing.com Discuss this Topic - Go to the forums