MICHAEL WELCH

The fact that Mike Welch was born blind, in no way hindered his interest in the sweet science. As a child, he would regularly harass his father to let him box, despite his glaring physical disadvantage. As Mike recalls it, “finally my father had enough of my pestering. He let me put on the gloves. To no one’s surprise, except myself, I took a pretty bad pasting at the hands of my opponent.” “Now today, some might call that child abuse,” Mike recalls with a chuckle, “but I think it was pretty good parenting.”

Mike’s ring experience led to an even greater admiration of prizefighting and boxers. With the days of radio broadcasts waning, his father would give him blow-by-blow accounts of Televisions’ The Fight of the Week broadcasts. However, one radio broadcast – Patterson-Johansson III captivated Mike, and he made it his mission to collect every boxing radio broadcast he could find.

After obtaining a college degree,(and making 80 parachute jumps in an unsuccessful bid to join the US Army!), Mike began his boxing radio collection in earnest during the 1970s. Trading 10 radio shows for just one boxing radio program, his collection was hard earned. Thirty years later it culminated in one of the world’s largest. His greatest joy, Mike explains, is tracking down fighters and giving them their fights. “I found Rex Layne in nursing home and when I gave him the broadcasts of several of his fights, he was elated. No one in the home believed that Rex was really a famous fighter. With the tapes I gave him, he became a hero once again.”

Mike still treasures the sport of boxing, and is always on the lookout for that great or unique radio broadcast he does not have in his collection. The Boxing Genome has given Mike a chance to make yet another contribution to boxing, as an initial depositor of radio fights for the Radio subsection of the Genome’s Media Archival Division. Mike may be reached by contacting the Genome Project, “attention Mike Welch.”