Sunday, October 03, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Story lines, human element fuel sports writer's love of boxing

Las Vegan Tim Dahlberg has covered about 300 title fights and 2,000 Olympic amateur bouts over the past 25 years. Photo by K.M. Cannon.

Like many young men of his era, Tim Dahlberg idolized Muhammad Ali. When Ali was training at the Stardust for an upcoming fight, Dahlberg was thrilled when his uncle offered to take him to watch the champion train.

That began a four decades-long love affair with boxing that continues to this day.

Dahlberg, 50, is a national sports writer for The Associated Press, for whom he covers boxing and golf and writes a general sports column. He is one of the most respected boxing writers in the world and has won a slew of awards for his work.

Boxing, said Dahlberg, provides better story lines for a writer than any other sport.

"Boxing is the most basic of sports, and the human element comes out more than in any other sport," said Dahlberg, a Las Vegas native who worked for the Review-Journal from 1976 until he joined the AP in 1980. "I like boxers because they're so human. They express themselves so much. You ask them a question, they'll give you an answer.

"They all have stories and they're all characters. It's a lot more fun to write about guys who have something to say and who are characters than a bunch of guys on a baseball team who always refer you to their agents."

Dahlberg's interest in the sport led to his book, "Fight Town," which is published by Stephens Press. The idea was hatched several years ago during a round of golf at Las Vegas Country Club with Review-Journal publisher Sherman R. Frederick.

When Frederick broached the idea of a boxing book, Dahlberg said he already had a name for it in mind: "Fight Town."

The book, he said, is not designed to be an encyclopedic history of Las Vegas boxing but a chronicle of some of the most interesting fighters and fights he has seen and/or covered. There are chapters on Ali, on former champion Sonny Liston, on the great middleweight battles of the mid-1980s and on the night when former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson bit off a chunk of Evander Holyfield's ear during a fight.

Dahlberg said the night Tyson twice bit Holyfield on the ears, the second time tearing the top off, remains one of the most surreal events he has covered. A near-riot broke out in the arena and there were reports of gunfire in the MGM Grand's casino afterward.

He was sitting at ringside next to longtime AP boxing writer Ed Schuyler Jr. and said neither was sure what had occurred when Holyfield reacted to the first bite.

"I looked at Eddie and he looked at me, and we both were kind of trying to figure out what was going on," Dahlberg said. "Nobody knew what happened, but Evander was leaping around the ring in pain. Then, word started circulating around that Tyson bit him. Of course, we were stunned because who expects one fighter to bite another?

"When it happened the second time, the whole place erupted. What I'll remember most is the next two weeks, there was so much worldwide attention on Las Vegas. You had the Tyson apology, the hearings, all the protests. It was a crazy night and a very interesting couple of weeks."

Dahlberg won the Nat Fleischer Award in 1999 for excellence in boxing journalism as voted upon by former winners. He also has won the Will Grimsley Award the past two years for the best body of work by an AP sports writer.