Play It Again Al | Al Bernstein Shares His Life In Show

  In addition to calling major fights for Showtime, the multi-dimensional broadcaster also sings and performs a variety show.

LAS VEGAS — Al Bernstein is a man of many microphones. He’s ubiquitous in the boxing space, analyzing major fights for Showtime. He makes other television appearances, while frequently appearing on radio stations and podcasts. And—this is the fun part—the man can sing.

Bernstein is part Bud Crawford, part Buddy Holly, part Leigh Wood (featherweight champion) and part Bernstein (as in the journalist).

He laughs into the phone on Tuesday when the subject of microphones comes up. Has he really held onto and spoken into one for more than four decades, in one way or another? He has, through job changes and shifts in medium, throughout his wife’s cancer battle, through hundreds and hundreds of fights, not to mention dozens of shows. The mic is his constant, a friend of sorts.

Believe it or not, Bernstein emphatically believes it’s easier to broadcast on television for millions of viewers than to perform his lounge act/variety show, like he did twice last week, back-to-back, two days before Crawford squared off with Errol Spence Jr. for the undisputed welterweight crown. Analyzing boxers and their match-ups is muscle memory for him at this point, and Bernstein likes to treat the cameras filming him like real people, like he’s addressing them directly. But actual real people? That’s a different story—one he’s telling in a different way.

It's all very boxing, in that there are characters involved; rich, multi-dimensional, cannot-be-boxed types. Bernstein is one of those, and his shows—a mishmash of signing, directing, interviews, a love story and boxing trivia—are very him. He’s the self-proclaimed third-best singer in his own family (after his wife, Connie, and their son, Wes). But he’s also a renaissance man of sorts, an actor and endorser as well as broadcaster and crooner (and, in former iterations, a writer and publisher and many other things).

So, yeah, that’s one of America’s most recognizable boxing voices on stage at the Tuscany Suites & Casino in Las Vegas. Boxing hardly comes up until the show’s second half. Music, instead, takes center stage, while the odd prospect of a singing broadcaster becomes less stunning with each song.

Bernstein grew up in a musical household. He first started listening to music as a child, in the mid-1950s, became obsessed with the Great American Songbook, immersed in numerous genres and found that notes and melodies, concerts and radio hits, symphonies and music scores all called like sirens to his soul. He came to adore country music and blues, above all others, and draws from both on this Thursday in Las Vegas.

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The crowd filters in early for the first show. All pass through the kind of just-off-strip casino where souls go for abandonment and last dollars are coughed up to the gambling gods. It’s brighter and cheerier inside the lounge where the broadcaster will belt out his setlist. By 8 p.m., the scheduled start time, the space is pretty much full. Cocktails have been ordered; cameras set up in the middle of the room to record. Several of Bernstein’s colleagues at Showtime Championship Boxing are in attendance, as are managers and promoters and publicists from the fight game.

The lighting dims. The band begins to play. And there it is, that silky smooth baritone deployed more often for its other applications, like that Saturday night’s Pay-Per-View telecast. Bernstein kicks off his show with a nod to his hometown, spinning through a rendition of “Sweet Home Chicago,” while audience members whistle and clap. “I know,” Bernstein quips, “when you think of blues artists, you think of me.”

Bernstein is dressed in all black, from suit to shoes, except for a crisp white dress shirt. He recalls a Sinatra-era singer: dressed up, in Vegas, amid a blockbuster fight week. If you didn’t know him, or what he did for his day job, you wouldn’t find him out of place in this particular setting. His wife watched, while sitting in a wheelchair, near the front. Connie was the family’s star singer, an actual performer, with enviable pipes.

He begins to tell a story that ties all the disparate parts of his life together. “And there’s my wife, Connie, who had a more than 35-year career in show business,” he starts. He cites one such show, when Connie and her sister went on just before Joe Frazier, at some sort of charity event. Connie held a comb in one hand, and she was walking down stairs, when her heel caught and she fell forward into Frazier, stabbing him with the comb. “He went down to one knee and uttered these immortal words: the b—h stabbed me.” Drums are banged to sell the joke. “So let me introduce you to the woman who did something even Muhammad Ali couldn’t do,” Bernstein says, as the audience breaks out in laughter. “She put Joe Frazier down. Connie Bernstein!” The roar grew. You should have seen the look on Connie’s face. Pure joy.

What a life. Bernstein transitioned from inked-stained newspaper man to burgeoning fight commentator with ESPN, starting in 1980. The classic bouts from that decade's welterweight heyday defined his start in a new field. By 2012, he had been inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

Even then, it’s a mistake to define him by boxing alone. “I’ve always been a person who wanted to do different things,” he says, before pausing the interview to tend to his wife in another room. Connie was diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer in 2003. Al watched her fight the disease with more fortitude than any in-ring classic he witnessed from the front row. That’s clear when he sings directly to her, selecting “If I Were You I'd Fall In Love With Me,” or trying to, as he struggles to finish the last verse. His eyes moisten as he looks at Connie in the audience, then, perhaps involuntarily, places a hand delicately over his heart.