Boxing's Al Bernstein is Getting Back to His Vegas Lounge Singer Roots

Al Bernstein has been boxing’s foremost commentator for three generations. He began calling fights for the nascent ESPN in 1980. At the time, boxing was the network’s biggest draw. and though Bernstein, a former newspaper man, was interested in covering other sports, the die had been cast. He had prominent ringside roles throughout boxing’s Golden Age of the 80s middleweights. He watched the relative nadir of the sport’s meandering slog through the late 90s and aughts and is still around now, analyzing the action through what he thinks could be another Golden Age.

With his resume, you’d be excused for only knowing Bernstein as The Boxing Guy. But to fans of jazz and “The Great American Songbook” living in Las Vegas, he is also known as a singer. I sat down with Bernstein over breakfast in Brooklyn just prior to a recent Showtime Saturday Night Fights gig at The Barclays Center. We talked about boxing, and even though he said he’s not the kind of guy to “sit down and ramble on about myself”—and I believed him—I got him to talk about music: how he got started as a singer, why he stopped, and the path that led him back to the stage.

His Vegas singing career began thanks to boxing.

“I was very frustrated at ESPN," he said. "They weren’t letting me do other sports. I’d covered the NFL Draft, I’d done some college basketball. They weren’t so anxious to have me do other things."

"Around 1987 (before Marvin Hagler fought Sugar Ray Leonard) I was having dinner with some executives at Caesars Palace. Just before that Barry McGuigan had fought at Caesars. And his father, who was a pub singer in Ireland, had done a couple nights at the Olympic Lounge at Caesars where he sang Irish tunes and it was great. It was a gathering place for people. So one of the execs says, ‘Don’t you sing?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I like to sing.’ And he said, ‘You gotta do what Barry McGuigan’s dad did.’ I said, ‘Okay.’

And so Bernstein went from ESPN commentator to Vegas lounge act.

"I didn’t have a band, I didn’t have an act, I had nothing. I had done some music in Chicago when I was younger but really nothing. And now I’m doing Caesars Palace as my first thing. I was too stupid to say no.”

Bernstein got a band and an act together and played three nights in the Olympic Lounge leading up to the highly anticipated Hagler/Leonard fight, also taking place at Caesar’s.

“I did it and it went well. I look out and I see all these famous people out there and I thought what the hell did I get myself into. It was standards and some pop. I have very eclectic taste. It was really good, really fun.”

I asked him if he thought it was a way to diversify himself personally since ESPN wasn’t letting him do it professionally.

“Yeah. I said, you know what I’m gonna do something else. And I really love music. If I’m well known enough to get a job then I should do it.”

Bernstein did several of these shows leading up to big bouts at Caesars over the next couple years. He loved it and wanted to keep doing it but because he was still doing 40-plus fights a year on ESPN, he couldn’t rehearse and couldn’t have a full time band. He wanted to keep performing so he and his writing partner Tony Rome put together a hybrid music/Q&A/monologue performance called The Boxing Party. The show included 5 or 6 original songs about sports. These songs would make up the bulk of Bernstein’s first album 1988’s “My Very Own Songs.”

By then he had moved full time to Vegas and was performing The Boxing Party all around town at Caesars and other venues like Mandalay Bay and the Riviera. It was a hit. Bernstein would continue performing throughout the early 90s and put out a second record in 1996 leading up to his coverage of the Olympics called “Let The Games Begin.” But then performances became more sporadic; the time between each stretching longer. Until, as he puts it, “The music went away.”

“I parted ways with the gentleman I was writing with and I didn’t want to use his music because I felt like that wasn’t fair. There were also some other things, but I don’t know. I just got away from music.”

It is not uncommon for people to be pulled away from their passions. Things happen in life that demand, or at least appear to demand, your full attention at the cost of something else. Enough time can pass that the old enthusiast becomes unfamiliar. A face you used to know, but just can’t place. But life also has a way of jarring you back into it. Life did this to Bernstein, though he prefaces the story with, “I don’t want to make this sound too introspective.”

“My wife Connie is a cancer survivor. She had stage IV breast cancer. We’ve had our twists and turns. You need something in your life that is nourishing. For me riding (Bernstein’s first extracurricular activity while at ESPN was the rodeo, but that’s for a different article) was always nourishing. I’m not a religious person but that was my religion. That, and I loved music. I got away from it, I thought about it a lot. I could never figure out a way to do it, and to enjoy it. It sounds crazy but they intertwine.

A couple years back my horse got sick and had to be put down. It was very sad. This was going on at the same time as my wife’s health problems. I couldn’t justify getting another horse and spending all that time. So for a few years there was a hole in my life.

We were out with my friend Clint Holmes and his wife was performing. He said to me, ‘Why don’t you sit in with her?’ He knew I used to sing and I said, ‘Ehh…. okay.’ So I sat in with her, did a couple tunes and I said to myself ‘Why am I not doing this? What’s wrong with me? So I got on it. And in the last year and a half I’ve really dug back into the music.”

I comment that music is unique to people because it can expand to fit nearly any size or shaped void that may exist in someone’s life.

“It really does. It’s meant to do that to people that listen to it and it’s meant to do that to people that execute it.”

Bernstein calls himself “the third best singer in his family.” His wife Connie was a performing singer for many years as part of a sibling duo called The Rocco Sisters and his 18 year old son, Wes, is a singer/songwriter. Despite that status he has taken to performing again on a somewhat regular basis.

He’s a frequent co-host of Kenny Davidsen’s show at the Tuscany, a spot he calls, “A really great Las Vegas room.” Judging by the website, the Tuscany’s old school, just-off-the-strip vibe suits his style. Davidsen’s MO is letting his co-hosts branch out into different styles (or in this case, vocations) than they’re used to. Getting people out of their comfort zones can chill even the most seasoned of acts but Bernstein’s approach to the show is similar to that of a workman middleweight with a good chin.

“I enjoy it. I try and do it well. I try not to embarrass myself. I stick to the material I know I can sing,” he says.

His version of Desperado is proof of his fight plan. The Eagles are one of Bernstein’s favorite groups and he delivers it with a combination of its original plaintive dustiness and his own Great Las Vegas Room Mojo. Bernstein is going to continue following music and its ability to fill out and brighten the corners of an already full life. The Tuscany gigs are making him feel like it might be time to return to his headlining roots.

“I’m edging towards the point where I’m going to start (putting on shows). I’ve got a couple different ideas that I’d like to put together. One is called ‘Al Bernstein Pays Tribute To The Champions…Of The Great American Songbook’ and the other is called ‘Going The Distance With Al Bernstein,’ which is going to be a combination of video from my career along with songs that fit the narrative. I think that will be the one that’s done more easily somewhere. I’ve even got a lot of good stories from the older shows that I can incorporate.”

Bernstein is not pursuing music to escape boxing, or change his image. Boxing, singing, riding, and family are all part of his persona and he’s not using one to distance himself from any of the others.

While he’s planning these shows, the International Boxing Hall of Famer is still ringside for every edition of Showtime Saturday Night Fights and all of their Pay Per View broadcasts. While we were talking about boxing he called 2017 “the best year of boxing that he has broadcast in 37 years, and the best year for boxing overall in that span,” and it didn’t strike me as hyperbole. The riveting fighthe would analyze two nights later in Brooklyn between Jarrett Hurd and Austin Trout would only burnish that proclamation.

As Bernstein takes on yet another new beginning, the only melancholy moment in our entire breakfast was about an ending. He’s sad that the band Heart has broken up. He pauses after we talk about it. He can imagine what they’ll be missing.