TSS Salutes Lance Pugmire, the 2023 Nat Fleischer Award Winner

TSS Salutes Lance Pugmire, the 2023 Nat Fleischer Award Winner

As journalists go, Nat Fleischer was a hack. One would not know this considering all the great wordsmiths that have been clothed with his name. Winners of the Nat Fleischer Award for Excellence in Boxing Journalism, bestowed by the Boxing Writers Association of America, include Pulitzer Prize winners Red Smith, Jim Murray, and Dave Anderson, plus Hugh McIlvanney, “The British Liebling,” to name just four.

To this august roster one can now add the name of Lance Pugmire. A dispatch from the desk of BWAA prexy Joe Santoliquito informs us that Pugmire has been named the 50^th recipient of the Fleischer award.

For the uninitiated, Nat Fleischer, the self-described Official Historian of the Ring, co-founded The Ring magazine in 1922 and served as the magazine’s editor and publisher for fifty years. Fleischer was also the chairman of the organizing committee that staged the first BWAA banquet under its original name, the Boxing Writers Association of Greater New York. The inaugural gala was held on April 25, 1926, in the grand ballroom of New York’s grand Hotel Astor with entertainment provided by Broadway star Sophie Tucker, among others.

Under Nat Fleischer’s stewardship, The Ring clobbered the competition. Stories about old fighters and old fights were a staple of the magazine, especially in its early days. The writers that assembled these pieces, some of whom used Fleischer’s byline, were apparently governed by this exhortation: “never let the facts get in the way of a good yarn.”

A graduate of Cal State Fullerton, class of 1990, Lance Pugmire spent 19 years and 11 months at the Los Angeles Times, beginning on the Metro desk before gravitating to the sports department where he covered the Los Angeles Angels with their budding superstar Mike Trout and the Anaheim Ducks before becoming the paper’s chief boxing and MMA correspondent. He is the fifth LA Times writer to win the Fleischer Award following on the heels of Jim Murray (1989), Richard Hoffer (2001), Steve Springer (2002) and Bill Dwyre (2016).

Pugmire has bounced around quite a bit since leaving the Times in June of 2019. For 28 months he was part of the outstanding team of sportswriters at The Athletic. While there he authored two long-form stories — the first on promoter Kathy Duva and the second on Deontay Wilder – that finished first in the flagship category of the Bernie awards, a group of six awards created by the BWAA to recognize outstanding writing. He then spent 14 months at USA Today where for a time he was the paper’s point man for boxing, sports betting, and fantasy sports (whew).

Several months ago, it appeared that the sports writing fraternity had lost yet another stalwart. Pugmire tweeted that he had begun a new chapter in his life as a member of the sales force at Seven Gables, a real estate firm in Huntington Beach. But, as college football guru Lee Corso would have said, “not so fast, my friend.” News that Pugmire was a free agent, so to speak, spread fast and last month he was right back where he belonged in press row covering the Davis-Garcia fight in Las Vegas.

“Humbled beyond words by this honor,” tweeted Pugmire upon learning that he had been given the Fleischer Award. “Thank you to the greats that allowed me to tell their stories.”

Pugmire will be honored alongside ESPN’s Mark Kriegel, his Fleischer Award predecessor, at the 97^th/98^th BWAA awards dinner on Thursday, June 8, at the Edison Rooftop ballroom in Times Square, two days before the fight at Madison Square Garden between Josh Taylor and Teofimo Lopez. The dinner is a doubleheader in a fashion, a year having been lost to the Covid pandemic.

We here at TSS congratulate Lance Pugmire on receiving this richly deserved honor.

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