Michael Katz wasn’t one to sugarcoat things.
Not in real life, and not in his writing.
Even those who loved Katz described him as a curmudgeon whose feistiness fueled his larger-than-life personality.
Those qualities served Katz well during his decades-long run as one of the country’s premier boxing journalists.
Katz, whose Hall of Fame career included 15 years with the Daily News, died this week at age 86, leaving behind a legacy that featured tireless coverage of all-time greats including Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield and Larry Holmes.
“In an era when sports was controlling the access to players and managers and coaches, boxing was the wild west,” said Daily News sports media columnist Bob Raissman, who covered boxing with Katz during the 1990s.
“You could walk up to someone and sit down and talk to fighters. I swear this worked out for Katz, because he was a guy that you wanted to talk to. Fighters would sit down with him, and he’d get to know about their personal lives.”
Born in the Bronx, Katz got his start as a stringer with The New York Times, paying his dues during the early 1960s before moving to the newspaper’s sports desk. He held numerous jobs at the Times, including as their international edition’s sports editor, before becoming a full-time boxing writer in 1979.
In 1985, Daily News sports editor Vic Ziegel hired Katz away from the Times — a coup so significant that it warranted a commercial.
“He was the everyman,” recalled Tony Paige, a longtime WFAN host and boxing commentator, who was the Boxing Writers Association of America’s president from 1993-96.
“Whether you were a hot-shot promoter with millions of dollars on the line or just Joe Blow from the Bronx or Brooklyn, everybody read him because he was informative and it was stylistic.”
Katz remained a must-read author with The News, where he started as a general sports columnist before shifting his focus back to boxing.
His work stood out during a golden era of boxing in which newspapers in New York and beyond competed for stories, devoting significant resources to their coverage.
“He loved the fighters, but he would look out for them in his own way while he wrote about the promoters and the bad deals involved in boxing,” Raissman said.
But Katz, whose beret and neck brace gave him a distinctive look, wasn’t only a fearless reporter. He was an adept writer, too, whose Times background served him well during his tabloid battles as a Daily Newser.
“Boxing is the toughest deadline in sports journalism,” Raissman said. “You would get these fights that would start at 11 o’clock New York time, and that was obviously before the internet.
“You’d have to have it in for your final [edition] by one in the morning. You’d always have to write while the fight was going on. It was so hard to do, and he was writing the main story, which sometimes could be anywhere from 500 to 1,000 words, and he would make that s–t sing on deadline. I was probably the most amazed by that part of his work.”
Katz left The News in 2000 for HouseofBoxing.com, a website that would later turn into MaxBoxing.com. It was a bold move for a newspaper stalwart during the early stages of the internet.
But everything about Katz’s career was bold. In 2012, he was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
“In a business of curmudgeons and contrarians, he was the king,” Raissman said. “He was the king of them all because he covered one of the most corrupt sports in the world. It still goes on today, but he covered it with passion, with heart.”