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Pedro Fernandez keeps Ring Talk going 25 years
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Pedro Fernandez’s first San Francisco boxing talk show in 1988 followed a Filipino civic affairs program (starring Emil Guillermo). Now most of us are following and talking about Filipino boxers.
But if you’re the real deal, it isn’t all about Manny Pacquiao, and Fernandez has been showing his boxing range on the air for 25 years now, ever since he got his first show in Las Vegas.
The S.F. native, a former Golden Gloves champion and a former policeman, first got my attention when “Ring Talk” gravitated to KNBR (680) in 1992 as Tony Salvadore and Bob Agnew formed the all-sports format and put Pedro in a Saturday-evenings slot.
I was impressed with both his on-air aplomb and the caliber of his listeners, so I wrote about “Ring Talk” in my San Jose Mercury News “Sports on the Air” column. I wrote about him again when Pedro and KNBR parted ways for a while in a contract beef.
“Ring Talk” later resurfaced on KNBR’s weaker setting at 1050 and stayed there until fairly recent years. For some years Fernandez also was an adjunct reporter for HBO.
With the retirement in the 1990s and death in 2006 of his mentor, San Francisco Chronicle boxing writer Jack Fiske, Fernandez probably seized Fiske’s mantle of Bay Area pre-eminence more than anyone.
Nevertheless, Fernandez said, he started getting pre-empted and jacked around by KNBR-1050 after he was admonished for declaring on the air in 2003 that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and stating other political opinions. He has since gravitated to KTRB (860), where “Ring Talk” runs two hours weekly, usually on Sunday evenings.
I’d say he’s been validating the theory of evolution by adapting to the shifting tides of the boxing and radio worlds. He can rattle off ratings and revenue figures and trends enthusiastically, but he’s as jaded as one would hope where boxing itself is concerned. “Wisdom overcomes the rush,” he says. “There’s no longer a rush. I like to say I’m ‘boxing impotent.’ ”
That doesn’t mean he isn’t enthusiastic about, say, Nonito Donaire, Andre Ward and Robert Guerrero, three stars the likes of which the Bay Area hadn’t seen in our long lifetimes. “Not an understatement,” Fernandez agreed, also saluting their intelligence. “We’ve got three great fighters, and they’re not punchy-drunk.”
But the overall picture is more sleazy than ever, he proclaims, as power has shifted from promoters to hotel magnates and the like. “I despise 95 percent of the people in boxing,” he readily says. Like so many around the sport, he’s often on the verge of outrage, and it works for him.
In my line, they preach “write what you know.” That’s the spirit likely to keep Pedro Fernandez on “Ring Talk” for many more years.
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