![]() When I was sports editor, I had an outstanding boxing writer, Jack McKinney, and when there was a big enough fight, I would cover it along with him. Sitting about 20 feet away from me were Hemingway and DiMaggio and I thought to myself, ‘I’m in the right place.’ In Philadelphia, I was absorbed into the fight scene there and covered a Sugar Ray Robinson-Carmen Busilio fight at Yankee Stadium when I was about 26. Boxing was part of the dialogue of the times and I had an uncle who took me to a really good fight during World War II at the Garden. I could remember listening to Henry Armstrong and Ray Robinson fights. Liebling I learned how the atmospherics and the stories radiated from two guys fighting in the ring. Joe Louis was a champion virtually throughout my childhood, then I’d listen to fights on the radio. Did he or something else draw you to boxing?Īs a kid, boxing was just in the air – the most popular sport alongside baseball. You had the ideal muse for all of that in Ali. It didn’t always have to be about the major leaguers. I had a different take on what a sportswriter should be doing. I was curious about all of that and some it was laid out in my columns. It was a great time of social unrest and resetting, culturally, whether it was civil rights, women’s rights, anti-Vietnam, how people dressed and spoke a new language. From Jimmy Cannon, I got that having a column is like show biz and if you’re up there on the stage, what you do from song to song or bit to bit, you have to leave the audience wondering, ‘What’s that bum up to now?’ In one way or another, their work became inspiration. To compare yourself to whoever else was writing at a big event, comparing your story to theirs and learning from them, from Red Smith and Jimmy Cannon – who I got to know – along with many others as I traveled around the country. By culling through the best of the best, reading them, it was like a graduate course in journalism, an onsite version of a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. Then I went to New York, where there were five newspapers. I had a few jobs before I went to Philadelphia and came there when I was around 24, becoming the sports editor and the columnist. How did that allow you to develop as a journalist? Your journalism chops were sharpened in the boxing city of Philadelphia at the Daily News where there was an intense competition among three newspapers. Sometimes I think that I do, but mostly I’m just a fan and sometimes when there’s a fight, I have a few fight-fan friends over and we watch it and we babble and I just kibitz, and it’s almost like I’m at ringside. ![]() It was less than 10 years ago when you and Floyd Mayweather Jr. All of those things came together in a cocktail of life. I never smoked – which was a thing, with every movie star seeming to do it - and I never drank a cup of coffee and I inherited some pretty good DNA. I’ve always been athletic on an everyday basis and I’ve tried to do the right things. I’m not sure what it is, but I think going into the sports world made it more or less stress-free being a journalist. ![]() ![]() It feels like I must’ve done something right. But if you’re going to have to live through a pandemic, you might as well live in Santa Monica. We don’t go out to restaurants, shows, ballgames and whatnot, but when everything returns to normal, I suppose we’ll realize how much we were missing. Since I was retired before the pandemic came, it’s not a whole lot different. What does a typical day in the life of Larry Merchant look like now? I know you were recently vaccinated at The Forum parking lot. The chat netted all you’d expect from the master conversationalist – honesty, vivid remembrances and frank talk about the sport he devoted the second half of his life to. So after Merchant turned 90 last week, The Athletic spoke with him over the phone from his home in Santa Monica, Calif. ![]()
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