Sugar Ray and talked about doing some articles together or writing a book together but dealing with Sugar Ray was a lot like fighting him. He would fake you in and then he’d drop you.

I think on balance, Don King has been bad for boxing. I think he’s done some very good things and I think he did a heck of a job of promoting Ali but I think I could have promoted Ali.

Golf is a bloodless sport-if you don’t count ulcers.

It’s kind of ironic that the two sports with the greatest characters, boxing and horse racing, have both been on the decline. In both cases it’s for the lack of a suitable hero.

I think my mistakes were kind of common – leaning on cliches and adjectives in the place of clear, vivid writing. But at least I knew how to spell, which seems to be a rarity these days.

My writing improved the more I wrote – and the more I read good writing, from Shakespeare on down.

He's in it for Don King and that's understandable because that's why people go into business. He's just kind of slippery about it.

The best thing, ... was that my subject was accessible, which wasn't always true with the other people I worked with. Secondly, I didn't have to split the money with him. He did it gratis, which was nice of him. And if he was wrong, I had nobody to blame but myself. I couldn't pull a Charles Barkley and claim I was misquoted in my autobiography.

All of journalism is a shrinking art, ... So much of it is hype. The O.J. Simpson story is a landmark in the decline of journalism.

You need heroes like that for a sport to surge the way basketball did with Michael Jordan. Now he's gone and that sport is having problems.