Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2346 - Jim Lampley
Uploaded: 2025-07-08T17:00:57.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2346 - Jim Lampley' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-07-08. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2346 - Jim Lampley' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-07-08. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2346 - Jim Lampley

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Wow, really? That was your closest male friend?
Unexpected, unexpected, but over a period of time,
we just got closer and closer and closer and, you know,
very brotherly.
And the last public appearance Emmanuel ever made
was my wedding in September of 2012.
And that night, the wedding was at our house in Del Mar, California,
and that night his girlfriend came to me and said,
we have to leave early, Emmanuel's having stomach pains.
He was in oncology by the next week.
He was gone by three weeks later.
So, very touching to me and, you know,
deeply symbolic of my love for him and thus the Cronk Cat.
Yeah, what a classic Jim.
And he was one of the first guys to realize, like,
if you crank the heat up, it actually gives guys better conditioning.
He realized a lot of things.
Emmanuel was a genius in a lot of ways.
And there were a lot of sort of time-honored rules and techniques in boxing
that he quietly upended.
Yes.
Because he was more advanced in his point of view and thought process.
And then everybody else sort of followed his lead.
Once they understood what he was doing.
If you saw the McCrory's and Tommy and those guys, why wouldn't you imitate,
right?
Right, right.
Exactly.
Yeah.
No, he was...
And he did it at both the amateur and pro level, too.
Mm-hmm.
You know, so...
And he was always fantastic, too, as a commentator,
because he would give insight that you're really not going to get from someone
that's not, like, with these fighters day in, day out, through an entire camp.
He really understood things.
Well, we need to consider the privilege I had,
the expert commentators I work with,
starting with Ray.
Yes.
That's one perspective.
Then gravitating through George Foreman and Roy Jones.
Emmanuel's in there.
Yes.
And to me, he was the best.
I agree with you.
The public responded more to Roy and Ray.
Of course.
You know, famous guys.
Because of their stardom.
Yes.
Et cetera.
And they were really good, too.
And they were good.
But Emmanuel taught me more, you know,
because he was totally well-rounded.
Yeah.
As a human being, as well as as a boxing trainer.
I was very pleased to hear you back on the microphone for that Times Square
event.
Thank you.
Because it had been so long.
Six-plus years.
God, I was like, that's crazy.
It didn't make any sense.
You were the best in the business.
HBO was the best in the business.
And when they stepped away from boxing, I was really heartbroken.
If you look at what happened, we go from a situation where the television
networks have the authority and the self-belief to choose the commentators the
way they want to.
Yeah.
Then you get into a more subdivided and widely disparate marketplace.
And now the star promoters have a great deal more influence than you would have
thought before.
And now the star promoters start getting involved in influencing who's on the
air.
So PBC, Mayweather was never a fan.
We got along, but he, you know, he was the famous thing with Larry.
Well, and I guess he associated me with Larry, which makes all the sense in the
world.
Kind of, but you weren't nearly as critical.
I was just the blow-by-blow guy.
Right.
I'm not an expert commentator.
Right.
So I tried very hard, not always easy, but I tried very hard never to go over
the line into doing what the experts were supposed to do.
Right.
No, you were excellent at that.
It just, it didn't make any sense to me that, you know, and Kellerman, he's
also excellent.
That's another guy we should bring up.
And now he's back.
Yes.
It's nice.
And Andre Ward is another excellent guy.
Totally.
It just, the good thing about boxing was that HBO was completely independent
from these promoters.
And the bad thing about boxing is that the fighters don't get paid as much on
the undercard fights
and don't get paid as much coming up, as is the case in the more broadly
organized UFC universe.
Right?
Yeah, there is a difference.
Yeah.
There's a giant difference in the undercard pay.
I learned that from Joe Rogan.
Ha ha.
Yeah.
Well, the UFC treats the entire card as an enormous event.
So they have elite fighters fight in the entire card.
It's not top heavy.
Like one of the problems with boxing is you would just say, when's the main
event?
When is Canelo fighting?
And you didn't, the other stuff is just nonsense.
Whereas the UFC, you look at like, oh, look who's fighting first fight of pay-per-view.
There's five fights on pay-per-view.
First fight of pay-per-view is a banger.
And everybody's, the seats are packed and everybody's excited to see it.
Whereas everybody starts shuffling in about 20 minutes before Canelo fights in
one of these big boxing events.
That, I think, is kind of unfortunate.
I totally agree.
And a little bit short-sighted.
And I accede to your point of view because, and I've made this point before, I'm
not a UFC expert.
Any comment I make about UFC is atmospheric, but it's not expertly informed.
I didn't have the bandwidth for that.
I was trying to be knowledgeable about every single tributary and every single
meaningless pocket in the boxing world.
That's a lot.
That's a lot.
That's a lot to follow.
It took time.
And frankly, you know, I decided it would be distracting to me to try to keep
up with two combat sports at once.
This is the one where I make my living.
This is the one where the audience identifies me.
This is the one that's on HBO.
And I know that Dana, in particular, is said by some to have been quite upset
that he had a deal with HBO and the deal with HBO went away.
If that's the case, and I don't know, I'm very sorry to hear it.
Because I think it would have been good for both if UFC had been on HBO.
I think so as well.
I mean, HBO at that time was the premier network for combat sports.
For sure.
The work that you guys had done in boxing was the top of the food chain.
It was the best.
Well, Larry Merchant, Ray Leonard, George Foreman, Roy Jones, Emmanuel Stewart.
It's also the production.
Everything was on point.
It was just so well-honed.
Good production.
Yes.
It was just a well-polished machine.
One of the issues is they wanted to replace the commentators.
HBO did.
Oh, they did?
Yeah.
So if we came over there, I wouldn't go over there as well.
Oh, really?
Yeah, because HBO was always about their own producer autonomy.
Yes.
So they wanted to have control.
We don't want anybody telling us what to do.
Exactly.
Right.
Yeah.
The problem with that is in mixed martial arts, there's a very small pool of
people who have
a deep understanding of the entire history of the sport.
Yep.
And you can't just hire a regular sports guy to take that part.
They're not going to be able to get it.
Well, going back to the developmental stages, and I try very hard not to use
the word unique.
It's massively overused in American society.
Sports media have beaten it to death.
It means only one like this on the whole planet.
But you were unique in those days because you had the full knowledge of UFC,
and you also knew some stuff about boxing.
So I think you were not just unusual, but unique.
Well, all I was doing was just following my interests, and I've always been a
huge boxing fan from the time I was a child.
Can you remember what your first fight was?
The first fight I watched, my parents watched it, which was crazy because my
parents were hippies.
And they were really interested in Ali's rematch with Leon Spinks.
New Orleans.
Yep.
When Leon had beat Muhammad Ali because Muhammad Ali was a cultural icon as
much as he was a sports figure.
Oh, yeah.
Like, multiply that by 100 to get to where he was.
He was very, very unique.
And his opposition to the Vietnam War made him a hero to many Americans.
Well, I always say he was my childhood hero, and he was my childhood hero as
Cassius Clay.
The very first live prize fight I ever attended was Cassius Clay versus Sonny
Liston, February 25, 1964, in Miami Beach.
Oh, you were there for the first fight.
I saved lawn mowing and car washing money for months to buy a ticket that in my
memory was $100, but I don't really know for sure what the cost of that ticket
was.
I didn't save it.
It would be worth millions now.
And my mother took me over from our crappy Southwest Miami tract house rental
and dropped me off at the Miami Beach Convention Center and then came and
picked me up afterward.
And I went in alone.
And that was the first live.
How old were you?
I was 14.
I was 14.
It was the first live prize fight I had ever attended.
It was all about my hero worship for Cassius Clay.
Yeah.
Two days later, he stands on Brickle Avenue in Miami and tells two reporters
that he's a follower of the Nation of Islam.
And now his name is Muhammad Ali.
And I'm in shock.
Okay, what do you mean?
I mean, you're Cassius Clay.
You can't.
And so nowadays I say the lesson he taught me then was a man's identity is his
own.
And it does not matter how much I love him or cherish him or feel connected to
him.
He has the right to say who he is.
I mean, back in those days, Islam, what is that?
Right.
You know, I had no clue.
But, you know, he got over with me on that when I understood it was his right.
Then he taught me my stance on the Vietnam War.
My mother was double widow of two United States military heroes.
I grew up with a basement filled to the gills with memorabilia from their tours
of duty as B-17, B-24, and B-29 pilots in World War II.
So there was nationalistic and patriotic material all over my household.
And when Ali said what he said about Vietnam, that moved the meter for me in
that regard.
And I understood.
And eventually my mother said, you'll go to Canada before I'll ever allow you
to accede to being drafted into the Army and going to Vietnam.
Because her thought was that it was a pointless war.
Yeah, and she was correct.
Yeah.
She was right.
Yeah, and they took three years of his prime.
That's what's crazy.
I always point to the Cleveland Big Cat Williams fight.
That was his best.
Yes.
You're totally right.
That was his number one performance.
And he was never 100% the same after that.
But he still had his mind.
Yes, but he didn't train for three years.
That's part of the problem.
Of course.
And, you know, at 30 years old, in that day and age, it was just a different
world.
You don't train for three years.
Not as much knowledge of nutrition.
Right.
Not as much knowledge of training techniques.
Yeah.
You know, the old-fashioned stuff in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania, not the same as
no hyperbaric chamber.
Right, right, right.
Et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah, it's just they just robbed him.
They robbed us, too, because he came back and he's a different fighter then.
He was much more easy to hit, and, you know, he became, you know, he relied on
his chin more, and, you know, he didn't have the fleet of foot movement that he
had before then.
But he found a way to rise to the top again.
Yes, he did.
Well, the championship mind was always there.
That's 100% correct.
But as a fan of boxing, it drives me crazy.
Because you imagine what we could have seen in those three years if Ali had
never been robbed, never took his title away, and allowed him to fight all
those guys like Joe Frazier, George Foreman, all those guys with keeping the
same skills that he had when he was younger.
But, and I think you're 100% correct, Joe, but isn't it, in a perverse way, a
part of his mystique?
Yes.
The fact that he was able to come back from those three and a half years off,
the fact that he was able to rise to the top again, the fact that he was able
to beat Foreman the way he beat Foreman, and beat Frazier in the third fight in
the kind of fight you would never have imagined him being in.
Right.
All these things combine to create the unique mystique of Muhammad Ali.
Oh, for sure.
Yeah.
And then also the tragic ending, you know, the staying in too long and too many
beatings, you know, just seeing him at the end of his life was just so horrible,
you know, and we all know that t