By Benny Ricardo: The pipes were clear; the energy
through the roof and the main event took place right where he likes it, in his
kill zone area. The Colonel, Bob
Sheridan, was back on the air calling another championship fight that is rapidly
nearing the thousand mark. Top
Rank’s Director of TV production, Marty Corwin told the Colonel “You were in
mid-season form, it was like you never left.”
A legendary announcing career that
dates all the way back to his call of the “Rumble in Jungle” between Ali and
Foreman, at the Mai Stadium in Kinshasa, Zaire back on October 30, 1974, was
back on the air. Only this time The
Colonel’s journey to announce a fight was longer than any he had ever had for
this itinerary transcended life and death.
Saturday night from the Home Depot
Center in Carson, California, the main event of Brandon Rios and Urbano Antillon
was the kind of fights the Colonel loves to call. It took place in the zone he likes to
call “The Kill Zone”. It’s that
zone where boxers enter inside arms length where angles, waist and head
movements are vital for survival. It is the kill zone because a fighter enters it willing to pay the price
of knowing it is kill or be killed.
Rios was magnificent as was
Antillon in bringing the fight to each other, it was one of those great fights
where the ebb and flow had the Antillon and Rios fans seemingly doing the wave,
taking turns jumping up and down. But even if it would not have been that great a fight, no problem. The
Colonel has been known to use his pipes and rhetoric to make an ordinary seem
extraordinary.
As the Colonel likes to describe
his craft “I’m an entertainer, not a journalist and I am having fun calling the
fight.” Nobody has had more fun in
life than the Colonel but when faced with death he realized “Dying is easy,
living is the hard part.”
Back from 30 days in a coma with
fluid in his lungs, pneumonia, major back surgery and a rehab program that was
24/7 for over 6-months, The Colonel is back and there is no ten count to be
heard for him, just his booming voice and passion for the sport he loves.
It was as if the Colonel’s beloved
friend, ring announcer Jimmy Lennon announced the verdict of it all, “And still…the heavyweight champion
announcer of all time…The Colonel, Bob Sheridan.
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