Fight game’s pain resonates in song

"Hurry home, early. Hurry on home. Boom Boom Mancini's fighting Bobby Chacon."

Repeat.

That's the chorus of one of my favorites songs about boxing. It was called — straightforwardly enough — "Boom Boom Mancini." It was written and performed, now and then, by Warren Zevon, who sometimes would pinch hit for Paul Shaffer as bandleader on the "Late Show With David Letterman."

You may remember when Dave requested that Zevon sing about Boom Boom Mancini and Bobby Chacon — and Arturo Frias and Alexis Arguello and, of course, Doo Koo Kim, who also are mentioned in the lyrics. You also may remember that when Warren Zevon died of cancer, Dave got emotional when he and Paul talked about it on the show.

Anyway, 21 boxing people — 22 if you count local gym owners Pat and Dawn Barry as separate boxing people, though it's hard to consider those two as anything but a single entity — were inducted into the Nevada Boxing Hall of Fame at Caesars Palace on Saturday night.

Warren Zevon was not one honored, though he also mentioned Las Vegas in that song about Ray Mancini.

I heard that song on one of the XM Radio channels the other night.

And then one of the disc jockeys on the '60s channel — or maybe it was Little Steven's "Underground Garage" — said in a little while that Hal Blaine would be dropping by, or they would be replaying an interview from him, and Blaine would talk about how they got those awesome drum sounds in "The Boxer" by Simon and Garfunkel onto the record.

There have been lots of great songs written about boxing — Bob Dylan's "Hurricane" about Rubin "Hurricane" Carter; "No Mercy" by Nils Lofgren of the E Street Band; the ubiquitous "Gonna Fly Now," aka the theme from "Rocky," and the iconic blare of trumpets orchestrated by Bill Conti.

In time, I would come to prefer "Going the Distance" from the original "Rocky" soundtrack to "Gonna Fly Now."

Remember the fight montage scene, where Apollo puts Rocky on his keister with a vicious right hook, and Mickey is telling Rocky to stay down, and Adrian can't bear to watch — but Rocky gets up? And then as the round ends, Rocky starts ripping Apollo with body shots that lift Apollo right off the canvas?

The dramatic music in the background, building to a crescendo of tympani and bells, is called "Going the Distance."

It still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

A couple of years ago I saw a singer-songwriter named Paul Thorn, the son of a Baptist minister from Tupelo, Miss., perform at the Hard Rock on the Strip. Thorn sang a cool song called "Hammer and Nail." It's about him fighting Roberto Duran, which Thorn did in 1988. This is an experience to which Elton John simply cannot relate.

All of these songs about fights and fighters were profound, and I'm sure there are many others. But "The Boxer" remains my favorite song about pugilism, or at least Paul Simon comparing his life to that of a pugilist.

In the opening lines, Rhymin' Simon explains that he is just a poor boy, and his story is seldom told, and he has squandered his resistance for a pocketful of mumbles …

And though I'm not quite sure what mumbles are, and how many constitute a pocketful, this seems a great song lyric. And then comes the "lie-la-lie" part, which originally was just a holding place for another one of Simon's lyrics. When he couldn't come up with one, they just left it in.

The "lie-la-lie" part is awesome. It's the reverberation of Hal Blaine's snare drums that make it awesome. The drums sound thunderous, like cannonballs detonating. I imagine this is what you would hear — and feel — were somebody like Sonny Liston to punch you in the nose during the 1960s.

Blaine was a renowned drummer for The Wrecking Crew, an equally renowned session group of musicians. The Wrecking Crew made Gary Lewis and the Playboys and The Monkees and so many others sound like real bands. A couple of years ago they made a documentary about these session players, which is thoroughly enjoyable and will have you snapping fingers.

Anyway, when they made "The Boxer," the producers had Blaine set up his drum kit alongside an elevator shaft at the Columbia studios on 52nd Street in New York City. This was on a Sunday afternoon, when nobody was using the elevator. That Sonny Liston cannonball sound came from Blaine beating on the snare in close proximity to the open elevator shaft.

Hal Blaine talked about that on the radio. The pocketful of mumbles did not come up, and if there was a come-on from the whores on Seventh Avenue, he didn't mention it.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him: @ronkantowski