The impact a mother can have on their son knows no bounds.
For Jim Lampley, the impact his mother, Peggy Lampley, had on him both personally and professionally can’t be measured. And if it wasn’t for her, Lampley may have never found his love for boxing.
On May 18, 1956, Lampley’s mother, Peggy Lampley, sat him down to watch his first boxing match on TV as she believed it’s what he’d be doing with his father, James Bratton Lampley, if he was still alive. The fight was Sugar Ray Robinson’s second-round knockout of Bobo Olson in their rematch at Wrigley Field in Chicago.
From there, his love for the sport was born.
Now, over 68 years later after watching Robinson vs Olson II, Lampley’s return to ringside as a blow-by-blow commentator for Ryan Garcia vs Rolando Romero on Friday at Times Square in New York is among the key headlines in a loaded boxing weekend.
On Saturday, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez will face William Scull for the undisputed super middleweight title in Saudi Arabia, and pound-for-pound great Naoya Inoue is looking to defend his undisputed junior featherweight crown vs. Ramon Cardenas on Sunday in Las Vegas.
Lampley, HBO Boxing’s blow-by-blow commentator from 1988 to 2018, opened up on the impact of his mother in his memoir, It Happened! A Uniquely Lucky Life In Sports Television was released on April 15. Lampley credits Peggy and his grandmother, Mildred Lampley, for his foundation as a storyteller, as the stories they told him were influential not just in his life but in who he became through his numerous roles covering various sports. With their impact as storytellers, Lampley let a lot of what they taught guide him as he wrote his memoir.
“They were both inveterate, nonstop, skilled storytellers and so a lot of what goes through the personal narrative of my life and my recollection of my life is shaped by the way they told stories, the words they used, the things they wanted me to remember and keep as an influence in my life, ways in which they wanted me to honor my father,” Lampley told KO on SI. “All those things are a part of my commentary career over the years, and all those things are the character of how the book was written.”
Peggy and Mildred’s storytelling was pertinent to how Lampley wrote his memoir. Rather than go with a structured approach, he allowed their influence to put him on the right path as he put the book together.
“I had a high level of faith that if I allowed what they had done and the way they shaped me to guide me in telling the story, that the story would be personal, not academic,” Lampley said. “I didn’t want to do some kind of academic, carefully structured treatise about what my life in sports television had been.
“I wanted it to reflect the constantly lucky, incidental, unpredictable character of what happened to me, and I wanted the book to feel that way, so the best way to do that was to stay away from the most structured approach and let those two women talk to me every day as I sat down to write and reconstructed what had happened, not only in my childhood, but all through those years of sports television.”
Lampley got his start as a College Football sideline reporter for ABC Sports in 1974. From there, he covered nearly every sport imaginable and covered the Summer and Winter Olympics for the duration of his tenure with the company. Eventually, with then-ABC executive Dennis Swanson trying everything in his power to force Lampley out, he put him on an assignment to cover boxing and did boxing commentary work as Mike Tyson was climbing the ranks in the mid-1980s.
The rest was history.
Lampley developed into one of boxing’s most iconic voices over his 30 years at HBO Boxing and was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2015. Lampley’s work made him one of boxing’s most revered and respected figures.
Lampley’s ability to adapt and thrive in numerous roles was a credit to his mother and how she persevered while being a double-widow. Lampley’s father died of cancer when he was five years old, before he watched his first boxing match. Peggy’s first husband, Fred Trickery, died when the plane he was bringing back from Saipan at the end of World War II crashed 18 miles away from Lampley’s hometown of Hendersonville, N.C.
For Lampley, his love for Peggy and her impact was what he most wanted to express in his memoir and how it helped him become who he became as a person and in the sports world.
“I can barely tell you how much I admire her courage and perseverance,” Lampley said. “What she showed to me was nothing could stop her, nothing could back her down.
“Everything I am, I owe to my mother and my grandmother, and most particularly, my mother,” he added. “And I wanted the book to reflect that if you came out of it with an understanding and appreciation, this guy really loves his mother, who gave him a unique and, yes, incredible gift, then you got what I most wanted to say.”
