No Holds Barred: George Kimball and the State of Boxing

On this audio edition of No Holds Barred, host Eddie Goldman pays tribute to the noted sports and boxing journalist George Kimball.

After a long battle with esophageal cancer, George Kimball passed away Wednesday, July 6, at age 67, in New York.

While many reminiscences are being written about his life, we are focusing on his contributions to the battle for boxing reform. The lead boxing writer for the Boston Herald for 25 years, George was one of the few newspaper reporters who helped launch the Boxing Writers' Rankings Poll in 2000, and remained a registered voter in it until its demise some years later. We also read comments about his passing from Howie Sirota, who founded the Boxing Writers' Rankings Poll.

On October 18, 2008, we conducted an interview with George in Atlantic City before the Bernard Hopkins-Kelly Pavlik fight. We discussed the book he had just written, Four Kings: Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, Duran and the Last Great Era of Boxing. This marvelous book traced the intertwined careers of Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Thomas Hearns, and Roberto Duran. We spoke with him right after he had participated in a forum on the book with trainer Emanuel Steward, promoter Bob Arum, and announcer Larry Merchant.

We also discussed with him why such an era of so many great rivalries can't happen today, why media coverage of boxing is harder to do today than it was in the past, the changed role of publicists, the decline of newspapers, the Internet and television and the future of boxing, and more. As part of our tribute to him, we replay that interview on No Holds Barred.

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