Veteran boxing writer Michael Katz dies at 85

Michael Katz, an award-winning writer for The New York Times, New York Daily News, MaxBoxing and others, has died at the age of 85.

Remembered by peers as much for what might generously be described as a cantankerous nature as for his considerable writing ability and his unsparing journalism, Katz largely retired from full-time boxing writing in the early 2000s. At the time of his death, he had been living in a residential facility in Brooklyn.

Katz worked his way up from a job as a copy boy at the Times to become a news assistant, a sports editor and, by 1966, sports editor of the Times international edition. That latter position saw him move to Paris; while in Europe, he traveled to Stockholm, Sweden for his first heavyweight title bout, between Floyd Patterson and Jimmy Ellis.

In 1979, he became the NYT’s full-time boxing writer, moving in 1985 to the Daily News, before becoming one of the first boxing writers to embrace the internet, moving to HouseofBoxing in 2000 and then MaxBoxing.

He won the Nat Fleischer Award for Excellence in Boxing Journalism from the Boxing Writers Association of America in 1981. He was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2012.