Whicker wins award for boxing journalism

FORMER Daily News sports columnist Mark Whicker has won the Boxing Writers Association of America's Nat Fleischer Award for excellence in boxing journalism.

"That's when and where it really started for me," Whicker said of his time spent in Philadelphia at the Daily News and now-defunct Evening Bulletin. "Bob Wright was the boxing writer for the Bulletin, and when I became a columnist I started going to fights with him.

"I remember the first fight I was supposed to cover; I was on a 76ers road trip. They wanted me to go to Vegas to cover Mike Rossman-Victor Galindez at Caesars Palace. But the fight never happened. There was a contract dispute that couldn't be resolved, or something like that. I thought, 'Well, this is an interesting situation.' Then the next fight I went to with Bob was 'No Mas' [Sugar Ray Leonard-Roberto Duran II, in New Orleans]. I said to myself, 'If I keep doing this, maybe I'll see a fight go the distance one of these days.'

"And then came Leonard-[Thomas] Hearns."

Whicker, 62, has worked in Southern California for nearly 28 years, first for the Orange County Register and now for the LA News Group, a network of eight newspapers whose flagship is the Los Angeles Daily News.

Whicker becomes the sixth Daily News writer to win the Fleischer Award, joining Tom Cushman (1978), John Schulian (1984), Elmer Smith (1987), Stan Hochman (1991) and Bernard Fernandez (1998).