People think nothing of flopping down on the couch, grabbing the television clicker, and flipping on a favorite station. Sometimes, boxing buffs can see old fights courtesy of a classic sports station.
Things weren’t always this way.
Remember no cable? How about no color television, or a time when the best sporting events were available for free on network TV?
In 1965, with the sporting world on the edge of its collective seat as Muhammad Ali prepared to fight Sonny Liston in Lewiston, promoters had a wary eye on the emerging medium. With the fight being shown on closed-circuit television, a precursor to the modern pay-per-view culture, it made fight promoters’ lives simpler.
“We didn’t care whether there were 10,000 people or 5,000 people at the fight,” said John Michael, son of local promoter Sam Michael, who landed the bout for Lewiston when John was 14. “The money for us was in the television audience. I remember having gone to Portland to watch two other fights on closed-circuit TV at the Expo building. It’s kind of where the whole thing began.”
With the purse for the fighters largely paid by the television network (ABC carried the fight for the closed-circuit audience), local promoters then went to work on the local fight fans. Cheap seats cost $25, and the more expensive seats were sold for $100.
“I think, then, in my mind, the TV people were playing the newspapers for suckers,” said Fred Gage, who was a radio reporter for WLAM in 1965, and served later as the sports editor at the Lewiston Evening Journal.
“(The newspapers) shouldn’t have said a word about that television stuff unless they were going to put it on for the average guy. Not many people could afford 40 or 50 bucks to see that on television.”
Despite its proximity to the fight, the Portland Expo continued to offer its closed-circuit broadcast to the masses for a reduced admission price of $5.
“The arena wasn’t half full,” said Gage. “But no one cared.”
Towering over
Part of having a closed-circuit television broadcast is finding a place to send the signal.
“Back then, there were no satellite dishes on top of trucks,” said Lewiston treasurer Paul Labrecque, who was 15 in 1965. “The technology obviously wasn’t like it is today.”
Gage remembers seeing a tower go up behind the arena, the sheer size of which awed many people.
“My God it was huge,” said Gage. “They had to get a line, a direct line of sight to their nearest satellite tower, so they built a huge tower back there.”
“Can you imagine building something like that so quickly?” mused Sam Michael’s widow, Doris. “That was just incredible.”
Sneak peek
Labrecque, meanwhile, came up with a clever way to watch the fight on television – for free.
“We’d heard that it was going to be broadcast on television,” said Labrecque. “We lived at the time right down the street from Applesass Hill, and word got around that ABC was going to use the tower at the top of the hill, the tower for WCOU radio, to help transmit the fight.”
Labrecque gathered some friends and trudged through the woods behind his home and located the van.
“There were a couple or three technicians there, and the monitors in the truck were black and white, and only about 6 inches or so,” said Labrecque. “They told us they would be seeing the fight from here. We ran home to eat, but told our mothers that we had to get back to the top of the hill before the fight started.”
After dinner, Labrecque gathered a couple more buddies and rushed back to the truck.
“When we got back, it was still bright out, being almost summer, and the sun was glaring right in our eyes,” said Labrecque. “We all huddled close to the doors of the van and tried to see the monitors.
“Once the fight was underway, we were still talking to each other. We weren’t paying that much attention. It was, after all, a long fight, but then the techs started yelling that the fight was over. It was kind of anti-climactic in a way for us. We looked forward to it, and then it was over.”
The legacy
Frank Fixaris, a longtime sportscaster in southern Maine, was at the fight as a reporter for WPOR radio. He says he saw water fly from Liston’s head at the moment of the “phantom punch.”
“I didn’t think it was a hard enough punch to knock him out,” said Fixaris. “The reason I think that fight stopped, though, was Jersey Joe Walcott’s inability to control the fight.”
Even those who saw it on television may not have seen anything that would have sent Liston sprawling.
“That was a very, very disappointing performance,” said Gage. “That little flick, a phantom punch. Bah! They got us together the next day, all of the reporters, or a couple of days later, at Steckino’s. They showed us the video over and over in super-slow motion. I mean over and over. I still didn’t see any phantom punch. Liston actually got back up and they had started to scrap with each other again. There was no way he was knocked out. You would have had to hit him over the head with a sledgehammer.”
The fight was the fourth major heavyweight fight to appear on closed-circuit television. In the years following, the medium took off, thanks in large part to Ali and his antics.
Now, viewers would be hard-pressed to find a major fight at any level on free television. There’s little money in it. Pay-per-view will likely remain the only way to see a title fight without being there.
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