Harold Lederman’s Distinctive Voice Has Been Stilled and Boxing is Poorer for It

Published

5 years ago

May 12, 2019

Not so very long ago, perpetually cheerful Harold Lederman, stricken with cancer and getting more and more ill every day, was asked if he could recall the last time he had gotten angry, as is sometimes the case with, you know, most normal people.

“Who knows?” the longtime “unofficial judge” of HBO Boxing responded in the same high-pitched, distinctive and enthusiastic voice that was just one of his distinguishing features. “There’s not enough time in life to get angry.”

There is, however, always time to be sad, and this is another of those occasions. Harold Lederman, boxing’s happiest proponent and one of its most sincerely nice ambassadors, was 79 when he passed away Saturday in hospice care in Rockland County, New York. His family was at his side, and it just stands to reason he left this life the way he lived it, as upbeat and positive as ever. Not even the ravaging disease that slowly and painfully moved him ever closer to the eternal 10-count that awaits everyone could strip him of his smile. And why should it have? Harold enjoyed the whole ride, and he was never more in his comfort zone than when he was at ringside, scoring fights as an official judge (he worked more than 100 world title bouts until his retirement in 1999) or an unofficial one for HBO, a labor of love that spanned from his hiring in 1986 to the premium-cable’s last fight telecast, on Dec. 8 of last year, over 1,000 fights in all. His worsening health prevented him from traveling toward the end, but he remained on the job off-site, determined to go the distance.

“It was one of the greatest privileges of my broadcasting career to work with Harold Lederman, whose unique humanity and lifelong love of boxing brought joy to the hearts of millions of fans, show after show after show,” Harold’s longtime broadcast partner, blow-by-blow announcer Jim Lampley, said in a prepared statement. “The world waited for his moments, they were thrilled by his insights, they gloried in imitating his voice. No one in the sport had more friends, because no one in the sport was more deserving of friends.

“As deeply saddened as I am by his passing, I am equally deeply joyful that he made it to the final bell on Dec. 8. Nothing was more important to the legacy of HBO Boxing, so in that we can take solace now that his scorecard is complete.”

Similar tributes poured in from Peter Nelson, executive vice president of HBO Sports, and one of Nelson’s predecessors at HBO, Lou DiBella, now a promoter. Even though the fight the beloved Lederman was waging was one he was destined to lose, that inevitability did not serve to soften the blow for his many admirers.

“I know Harold was suffering and I knew he was in hospice,” DiBella said. “Harold was truly one of a kind. He had no malice toward anyone in this world. No one loved boxing more than Harold Lederman. He was as loyal to boxing and to fighters as he was to his own family, and that was as loyal as can be.

“In a lot of ways, HBO Boxing is now dead, but nobody represented HBO Boxing better than Artie Curry (whose official title was manager of HBO Sports Talent Relations), may he rest in peace, and Harold Lederman. I’ve known Harold my whole 30 years in boxing. Any show that Harold could physically attend, when he was working in a pharmacy, he was there. Harold lived boxing, Harold loved boxing and Harold died boxing. He was one of a kind and there will never be another like him in boxing.”

That might be truer now than ever before. The Lederman brand of relentless optimism – about life, about boxing, about anything – was once shared by several marvelous individuals in the sport who had a special gift for making anyone who came into contact with them feel good. But one by one, those who shared Lederman’s passion for boxing, which also is populated by those with darker sides, have taken their leave. Legendary trainer Angelo Dundee was 90 when he passed away on Feb. 1, 2012; journalist and raconteur Bert Sugar was 75 when he died on March 25, 2012; Northern California promoter Don Chargin was 90 when he left us on Sept. 28, 2018, followed shortly thereafter by New York Times and Pulitzer Prize winner Dave Anderson, who was 88 when he passed on Oct. 4, 2018.

What all of the aforementioned shared, other than their professional acumen, was the ultimate tribute of being inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Lederman got his call to the hall in 2016, and during his four days in Canastota, N.Y., he seemed more like a little kid on Christmas morning who awakened to find every gift he ever wanted under the tree. Then again, Harold – his day job was as a pharmacist, but the Bronx native and Columbia University grad couldn’t possibly have been as satisfied filling prescriptions as he was chatting up fight fans – didn’t lack for validation in his other job, the one which made him famous. He was inducted into the World Boxing Hall of Fame in Los Angeles in 1997 and was twice honored by the Boxing Writers Association of America, receiving the Marvin Kohn Good Guy Award in 2006 and the Sam Taub Award for broadcast excellence in 2009.

Actually, Lederman made it a hat trick from the BWAA when, on May 11 of last year – ironically, exactly one year prior to his death – he received a special citation at the organization’s annual award dinner for being, well, Harold Lederman.

“Harold is the mayor at ringside of every fight he goes to,” Lampley said of his dear friend preceding that event. “Whether it’s in the United States or on foreign soil, Harold knows everybody and everybody knows Harold. He’s a global ambassador for boxing, and his enthusiasm for life is wonderful. Harold is ebullient about everything. He’s ebullient about what he ate for breakfast. That’s the glory of Harold.”

And if he wasn’t always crazy about breakfast, he likely wouldn’t have complained to his waiter in any case. My wife and I were privileged to be at the same table as Harold and his wife Eileen for the wedding of one of former BWAA president Jack Hirsch’s daughters. Harold’s unofficial scoring of the quality of the varied dessert items would have had any pastry chef beaming with pride.

“It’s unusual for someone who has been part of boxing for as long as Harold to maintain a wide-eyed enthusiasm for the sport,” another longtime broadcast partner, Larry Merchant, said prior to the BWAA awards dinner in 2018. “Harold has a wide-eyed enthusiasm for boxing that’s beyond compare. When we do a show at an arena away from the hotel we’re staying in, HBO arranges for a car to take us to the arena. Harold never goes with us. That’s because, without fail, he’s at the arena hours ahead of us, watching every preliminary fight, saying hello to every judge and shaking hands with virtually every fan in the arena.”

In addition to his wife Eileen, Harold Lederman is survived by daughters Julie and Iris. Julie followed in her father’s footsteps and also is a boxing judge who has drawn assignments to a number of big-time bouts.

Funeral arrangements are pending.

Bernard Fernandez is the retired boxing writer for the Philadelphia Daily News. He is a five-term former president of the Boxing Writers Association of America, an inductee into the Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Atlantic City Boxing Halls of Fame and the recipient of the Nat Fleischer Award for Excellence in Boxing Journalism and the Barney Nagler Award for Long and Meritorious Service to Boxing.

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Bernard Fernandez

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Haney-Garcia Redux with the Focus on Harvey Dock

Published

2 days ago

April 22, 2024

Arne K. Lang

Haney-Garcia-Redux-with-the-Focus-on-Harvey-Dock

Saturday’s skirmish between Ryan Garcia and WBC super lightweight champion Devin Haney was a messy affair, and yet a hugely entertaining fight fused with great drama. In the aftermath, Garcia and Haney were celebrated – the former for fooling all the experts and the latter for his gallant performance in a losing effort – but there were only brickbats for the third man in the ring, referee Harvey Dock.

Devin Haney was plainly ahead heading into the seventh frame when there was a sudden turnabout when Garcia put him on the canvas with his vaunted left hook. Moments later, Dock deducted a point from Garcia for a late punch coming out of a break. The deduction forced a temporary cease-fire that gave Haney a few precious seconds to regain his faculties. Before the round was over, Haney was on the deck twice more but these were ruled slips.

The deduction, which effectively negated the knockdown, struck many as too heavy-handed as Dock hadn’t previously issued a warning for this infraction. Moreover, many thought he could have taken a point away from Haney for excessive clinching. As for Haney’s second and third trips to the canvas in round seven, they struck this reporter – watching at home – as borderline, sufficient to give referee Dock the benefit of the doubt.

In a post-fight interview, Ryan Garcia faulted the referee for denying him the satisfaction of a TKO. “At the end of the day, Harvey Dock, I think he was tripping,” said Garcia. “He could have stopped that fight.”

Those that played the rounds proposition, placing their coin on the “under,” undoubtedly felt the same way.

The internet lit up with comments assailing Dock’s competence and/or his character. Some of the ponderings were whimsical, but they were swamped by the scurrilous screeching of dolts who find a conspiracy under every rock.

Stephen A. Smith, reputedly America’s highest-paid TV sports personality, was among those that felt a need to weigh-in: “This referee is absolutely terrible….Unreal! Horrible officiating,” tweeted Stephen A whose primary area of expertise is basketball.

Harvey Dock

Dock fought as an amateur and had one professional fight, winning a four-round decision over a fellow novice on a show at a non-gaming resort in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. He says that as an amateur he was merely average, but he was better than that, a New Jersey and regional amateur champion in 1993 and 1994 while a student New Jersey’s Essex County Community College where he majored in journalism.

A passionate fan of Sugar Ray Leonard, he started officiating amateur fights in 1998 and six years later, at age 32, had his first documented action at the professional level, working low-level cards in New Jersey. The top boxing referees, to a far greater extent than the top judges, had long apprenticeships, having worked their way up from the boonies and Dock is no exception.

Per boxrec, Haney vs Garcia was Harvey Dock’s 364^th assignment in the pros and his forty-second world title fight. Some of those title fights were title in name only, they weren’t even main events, but, bit by bit, more lucrative offerings started coming his way.

On May 13, 2023, Dock worked his first fights in Nevada, a 4-rounder and then a 12-rounder on a card at the Cosmopolitan topped by the 140-pound title fight between Rolly Romero and Ismael Barroso. It was the first time that this reporter got to watch Dock in the flesh.

Ironically (in hindsight), the card would be remembered for the actions of a referee, in this case Tony Weeks who handled the main event. Barroso was winning the fight on all three cards when Weeks stepped in and waived it off in the ninth round after Romero cornered Barroso against the ropes and let loose a barrage of punches, none of which landed cleanly. Few “premature stoppages” were ever as garishly, nay ghoulishly, premature.

With all the brickbats raining down on Weeks, I felt a need to tamp down the noise by diverting attention away from Tony Weeks and toward Harvey Dock and took to the TSS Forum to share my thoughts. Referencing the 12-rounder, a robust junior welterweight affair between Batyr Akhmedov and Kenneth Sims Jr, I noted that Dock’s Las Vegas debut went smoothly. He glided effortlessly around the ring, making him inconspicuous, the mark of a good referee. (This post ran on May 15, two days after the fight.)

Folks at the Nevada State Athletic Commission were also paying attention. Dock was back in Las Vegas the following week to referee the lightweight title fight between Devin Haney and Vasyl Lomachenko and before the year was out, he would be tabbed to referee the biggest non-heavyweight fight of the year, the July 29 match in Las Vegas between Terence Crawford and Errol Spence Jr.

The Haney-Garcia fight wasn’t Harvey Dock’s best hour, I’ll concede that, but a closer look at his full body of work informs us that he is an outstanding referee.

—

While the Haney-Garcia bout was in progress, WBC president Mauricio Sulaiman threw everyone a curve ball, tweeting on “X” that Devin Haney would keep his title if he lost the fight. Everyone, including the TV commentators, was under the impression that the title would become vacant in the event that Haney lost.

Sulaiman cited the precedent of Corrales-Castillo II.

FYI: The Corrales-Castillo rematch, originally scheduled for June 3, 2005 and aborted on the day prior when Castillo failed to make weight, finally came off on Oct. 8 of that year, notwithstanding the fact that Castillo failed to make weight once again, scaling three-and-a-half pounds above the lightweight limit. He knocked out Corrales in the fourth round with a left hook that Las Vegas Review-Journal boxing writer Kevin Iole, alluding to the movie “Blazing Saddles,” described as Mongo-esque (translation: the punch would have knocked out a horse). After initially insisting on a rubber match, which had scant chance of happening, WBC president Jose Sulaiman, Mauricio’s late father, ruled that Corrales could keep his title.

Whether or not you agree with Mauricio Sulaiman’s rationale, the timing of his announcement was certainly awkward.

Haney’s mandatory is Spanish southpaw Sandor Martin (42-3, 15 KOs), a cutie best known for his 2021 upset of Mikey Garcia. A bout between Haney and Martin has the earmarks of a dull fight.

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In a Shocker, Ryan Garcia Confounds the Experts and Upsets Devin Haney

Published

4 days ago

April 21, 2024

David A. Avila

In-a-Shocker-Ryan-Garcia-Confounds-the-Experts-and-Upsets-Devin-Haney

Its good to be crazy. Like a fox.

Ryan “KingRy” Garcia knocked down WBC super lightweight titlist Devin Haney three times to remind everyone of his fighting abilities in winning by majority decision on Saturday.

“I just knew what I could do,” Garcia said.

Fans will not forget the lanky kid from Victorville, California now.

Garcia (25-1, 20 KOs) fooled everyone in playing crazy weeks before the fight, then showed shocking power to hand Haney (30-1, 15 KOs) his first loss as a professional at Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

Haney’s WBC super lightweight title was not at stake for Garcia because he weighed three pounds over the limit.

After Garcia seemingly acting out of control on social media, Haney’s guard must have slipped in the first round during the first few seconds as Garcia connected with that hellish left hook and Haney, with a look of shock in his eyes, almost went down. He barely survived the first round.

“He caught me with it,” said Haney.

During the next few rounds, Haney proceeded to advance toward Garcia seemingly fully aware of the lethal left hook. He used feints and rights to score with a busier approach as Garcia seemed cocked and ready to counter with a left hook.

In the fourth round it seemed Haney was confident he had regained control of the fight, but every time he opened up with more than a two-punch combination Garcia reminded him whose hands were faster and more dangerous.

Though Garcia seldom jabbed he seemed bent on looking for the right moment to unleash his deadly left hook. And every time the Southern California fighter opened up with a combination he scored and Haney dare not exchange.

A few times Haney smiled as if signifying he escaped.

In the seventh round Haney looked to punish Garcia’s body and instead was met with a three-punch combination included a left hook to the chin and down went Haney slumped on the ground. He managed to beat the count and as soon as Garcia came within reach Haney wrapped his arms around him with a python grip. Despite the warnings by referee Harvey Dock, the fallen fighter would not release and Garcia impatiently fired a weak punch during the break. The referee deducted a point from Garcia though he could have deducted a point from Haney for not obeying his instructions to release his hold. Haney actually went down three times in the round but only one was counted by the referee.

From that point on Haney was very cautious but still looking to win by decision.

Though Garcia kept using a shoulder-roll defense that left his body exposed, he would retaliate with three and four punch combinations that usually Haney could defend against other fighters.. But Garcia’s blazing combinations were too fast to defend.

In the 10^th round Haney looked to attack and was countered by Garcia’s right and a blinding left hook to the chin and another two blows that sent the former undisputed lightweight champion to the floor again.

It didn’t look good for Haney to survive.

Garcia walked into the 11^th round still composed and never out-of-control He dared Haney to exchange and when within striking distance Garcia unleashed another lightning combination and down went Haney again with a defeated look.

Both fighters had fought each other as amateurs six times so there were no surprises between them. But Garcia’s power and speed were superior and that was the difference in a professional fight.

In the final round both were cautious with Garcia’s combination punching proving too dangerous for Haney to open up. Garcia celebrated early as the round ended confident of victory.

After 12 rounds Garcia was seen the victor by majority decision 112-112, 114-110, 115-109.

“You really thought I was crazy,” Garcia told the interviewer and the crowd. “You guys hated on me.”

Other Bouts

Arnold Barboza (30-0) won a curious split decision victory over United Kingdom’s Sean McComb (18-2) in a 10-round super lightweight fight. McComb’s long reach and busy southpaw style gave Barboza trouble. But he managed to win the fight though the crowd was not pleased.

Bektemir Melikuziev (14-1, 10 KOs) defeated France’s Pierre Dibombe (22-1-1) by technical decision after eight rounds due to a cut on his eye from an accidental head butt. It was a very competitive super middleweight fight.

Costa Rica’s David Jimenez (16-1, 11 KOs) outworked John “Scrappy Ramirez (13-1, 9 KOs) in a 12-round scrap to upset the Los Angeles based fighter. After a few close rounds Jimenez simply bullied his way inside and forced Ramirez against the ropes and unloaded his guns.

After 12 rounds two judges saw it 117-111 and 116-114 all for Jimenez.

“I’m a hard-working man from Cartago I come from nothing,” said Jimenez. “My corner told me I had to work inside.”

Charles Conwell (19-0, 14 KOs) stepped on the gas early with vicious body shots and uppercuts and blasted through the resilient Nathaniel Gallimore (22-8-1, 17 KOs) for several rounds. After a brutal fifth and sixth round the referee halted the one-side beating in favor of Conwell who was fighting for the first time under the Golden Boy banner.

Another winner was Sergiy Derevyanchenko (15-5) by decision over Vaughn Alexander (18-11-1) in a super middleweight match.

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Haney and Garcia: Bipolar Opposites

Published

4 days ago

April 20, 2024

TSS Press

Haney and Garcia: Bipolar Opposites

One young man flew halfway around the world to take on a world champion in his own living room; not once, but twice. The other young man quit prior to one fight, and then again during another one.

The first guy mentioned is an obedient son of an ultra-streetwise father. The type of parent where, if he doesn’t know the answer (and more times than not he most likely does), he will know where to find it. The second guy doesn’t appear to have that quality guidance scenario going on for him, which is probably for the best, because he believes he has all the answers.

The first guy is on record as saying he wants to go down in boxing history as an all-time great. The other guy? He decided not to continue in a fight while he was still sporting an undefeated record. You may think to yourself if there was ever a time to soldier through, right?

Then yesterday, that same guy missed making weight by 3.2 pounds, and seemed to be more than fine with it, to the point where he actually appeared to be quite pleased with himself.

If you haven’t heard, Devin Haney and Ryan Garcia are going to share a boxing ring in a twelve round go for God knows what will be at stake by the time they actually punch off. The fact that no one from Garcia’s team has stepped in and rescued him from these unfolding events, his own personal well-being, and/or not to mention Devin Haney is, well, troubling in and of itself.

Back in the amateur days, the record shows they split six fights. They were boys back then, so it means zero. If anything, you’d want to be the older of the two, and Ryan had over a three-month age advantage. If you’ve only been on the planet for a total of 120 months or so, every extra month could be a big enough difference in strength and development. Now as world class professionals in their prime? That’s different. Younger is always better. Devin is that guy.

Haney and Garcia fought six times for free but will fight only once as professionals. Then one of them will continue with their march for historic greatness, while the other will head back to Kamp Krazy, where he’s the current Mayor.

It’s never smart to lay 8-1, 9-1 in boxing. And if you see taking Garcia as a value bet with +500 to +600 and beyond, you don’t understand value and you evidently don’t like money.

There is, however, a wagering opportunity here.

Total Rounds: Fight doesn’t go 10.5 rounds.

Take anything over +125. It’s worth a unit on a scale of 5. Logically, there are a lot of ways to cash this ticket: legitimate victory, meltdown, catching lightning in a bottle, etc. Or simply the exiting stage left of a guy who may be already plotting his next career move.

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