Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Meet Henry Jones

Winner of the Georgia Boxing Championship Lifetime Achievement Award, Henry Jones is now a DC Boxing Hall of Fame inductee. This may seem like no big deal unless you know the history of Henry Jones and why this man is a legend as a boxing ring announcer.
In 1988 his career started as the first ever black boxing ring announcer. He said he "didn’t even consider ring announcing at the time because he had never seen a black man famous for it." Jones started his career by doing the announcing for free just to get his name out there. He steadily earned a good reputation. But he feels he did not get the start he thought he should of got because of the color of his skin but in 1998 the first black World Flyweight Champion Mark Johnson demanded in his contract that Jones serve as his announcer in a fight that was going to air on ESPN. But sadly the discrimination continued, in 2008 he claims that even HBO Sports president Ross Greenburg discriminated against him. Even with tons of emails asking for Jones, Greenburg said he "was not interested" and asked Jones to tell people to stop sending emails because they were jamming his inbox. Eventually Jones replaced DJ Ed Lover as the announcer of HBO's "KO Nation" because Lover did such a poor job.
This is a very great story about doing something that you love doing and not giving up because somebody tells you that you can't do it. Sadly this also shows that discrimination still occurs today which is also we were taught on April 5th and 7th in class. As hard as it is to do, this world will always have some form of discrimination and the only way to try to cure this problem is in education. People need to learn that no matter what we look on the outside, we are all the same on the inside. We are all human beings.

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