Welcome to the fight with Teddy Atlas. I'm Ken Rideau joined as always by my partner

Teddy Atlas. Today's episode is going to be a quick one. We wanted to give our condolences on the

passing of one of the greatest light weights in the history of boxing.

Pernell Whitaker, I know Teddy you have some thoughts on the subject, I want to turn it over to you take it away.

Yeah he was I'm very careful about making comparisons in the different eras.

And I'm very respectful of all errors,

and maybe especially sort of the golden age of boxing

when the sport was the biggest sport in the country

bigger than baseball and there were clubs all over the country.

You can go into any city in there,

it could be two, three, four major cities anyway.

Four, five, six clubs, boxing clubs,

where you could get action, where there could be fights

where fighters could hone their skills

and that's why you had so many fighters and so many good fighters and you had real trainers too.

You had more desperate times. You had a lot of things, things were different in a lot of crafts and a lot of areas in the world, in the country.

No different in boxing. You had a people that were climbing out of their difficult

places through the sport. Sometimes baseball but boxing was to sport.

The immigrants come into this country, all of them.

It was their opportunity to get to that next place to climb up,

coming to a boxing.

So you had some of the greatest fighters from you're talking about the

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