Fax machines. That’s how we used to get updated records for boxers when I first started covering this sport. They were sent, for a charge, via fax.

The transmission method was right there in the name of the company, in fact: Fight Fax.

You don’t have to be all that new to the sport to know nothing of this era. BoxRec.com went live in 2000 as a pet project of British computer programmer John Sheppard, and within a few years, it was an integral part of the boxing ecosystem. So if you started following the fight game, say, 20 years ago, you have no memory of a world in which boxers’ full records weren’t right there at your fingertips.

But I do. For I have been doing this boxing media thing for a long time. For a couple of years, I was the youngest person on press row at every fight I attended, but now I’m the exact age lovable grandpa George Foreman was for his final fight – for which I happened to be ringside in Atlantic City, two months into my first full-time job.

Yes, I am in my 27th year covering boxing. For the first seven years, I was an editor at “The Ring” magazine. And for the first three or so of those, there was no BoxRec. Then, for the next three or so, we weren’t sure if we could trust BoxRec. Somehow, we wrote articles about this sport and edited articles about this sport without access to a website that is now a constant necessity for anyone trying to write or speak in an informed manner about boxing.

We may as well have been cavemen. The amount of time it took to gather the necessary information on a fighter – only to sometimes get that information wrong because the resources we were using weren’t necessarily up to date – is mind-boggling when viewed through a prism of how things work now.

At “The Ring” office, before BoxRec, we had a few resources we used for looking up records.

For older records, there was the complete (I think) collection of the annual “The Ring Record Book,” loaded with records of all the active fighters from that particular year. So, if you wanted to check Denny Moyer’s final record, you tried to guess what year he last fought in, so maybe you cracked open the 1971 book, showing records through 1970, and he was still in there, so then you tried ’74, and he was in there too, so then you tried ’77, and he wasn’t in there, so you tried ’76, and there he was – that, we would think, must be his complete, final record.

For active fighters, the place to start was the annual “Fight Fax Record Book,” a paperback behemoth that resembled a phone book. (Sorry, kids, I’m not explaining what a phone book is.) If it was January or February and you had the new book, you were golden. But if we were a couple of months or more into the year, well, the boxer you were looking up might have fought once or twice beyond what was in the book.

Fortunately, we kept a three-ring binder filled with pages for every active titleholder and we added hand-written results on those when they fought.

We just had to hope we hadn’t missed a result somewhere along the line. More than a few times, we had.

Now, if it was, say, July, and we needed a record of some non-champion – perhaps, for our “New Faces” department, a 12-0 prospect whose record in the Fight Fax annual was 9-0 and which we hadn’t kept track of by hand in their three fights since – then it meant calling the fine folks at Fight Fax and putting a charge on our tab (if memory serves, it was $9) to get the full line-by-line record faxed over.

Unfortunately, if that fax showed that Fighter X’s last fight, the one that got him to 12-0, had come against Fighter Y, who came in with a record of 20-6, I couldn’t click Fighter Y’s name to see any of the details about whom he fought and how he got to 20-6. All I had was what was on the page. Just the fax, as it were.

Nearly every assignment, as a writer or an editor, was outrageously time-consuming. And that’s to say nothing of the extra time devoted to fielding phone calls from our freelance writers who didn’t own their own copies of all the record books and would ask the editors to look up various details for them.

BoxRec has legitimately shaved hours off the time it takes to write some articles, and has made the research we’re able to do before beginning to write so much more comprehensive.

Journalism is but one of many possible careers one can pursue within this sport. And it’s far from the only one made infinitely easier by, and now downright reliant on, BoxRec.

BoxRec also changed the lives of boxing’s matchmakers.

“In terms of the information and the immediacy of it, there’s no comparison to the way it used to be,” said Eric Bottjer, who first got into boxing as a writer but has been a matchmaker since before I was hired by “The Ring,” working for everyone from Cedric Kushner to Don King to Lou DiBella to his current gigs with Jake Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions and Larry Goldberg’s Boxing Insider Promotions.

“BoxRec, it’s still evolving,” Bottjer continued. “They still are making constant tweaks and changes to add information to make it more valuable to people in the business – whether you’re a commission or a promoter or a fighter or a manager or a matchmaker. They’re starting to do the amateur records now. They’re starting to put notes in there on fights. They just keep adding and adding and adding.

“I can see the scores of the fights, the judges and the referee. I can see the suspensions. I can click on the actual show file and I can see who the promoter was, I can see who the matchmaker was, I can see who the commission people were that worked the show. The more information that’s on there, the more valuable the website has become.”

And what a difference from the Fight Fax days, not just because of how much more info there is on every boxer and every card, but also because it’s available all day, every day, and all night, every night.

Getting records after hours or on weekends was irrelevant to me at “The Ring” in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, but for a matchmaker, it was problematic for Bottjer not to be able to access records late at night as he was working to put a card together or scrambling to find a replacement opponent.

Bottjer also noted that BoxRec is now used to streamline communication between matchmakers/promoters and state athletic commissions that need to approve fights.

“Most commissions now have the system of ‘Don’t email us the fight proposal, post it on BoxRec. We will look at it and then we will indicate on that show page on BoxRec whether we approve it or not, whether we give it the green check mark.’ Which, that’s the way it should be done. So I will know much more quickly if my fight is approved or not, and the commission will know more quickly when I’m submitting to them. It’s better for them. It’s better for the fighters. It’s better for the promotion.

“And it’s common sense. We have the ability to do this in rapid time, we should take advantage of our ability to do it.”

Back in 2005, I interviewed Sheppard for a sister magazine of “The Ring,” right around the time he decided he was earning enough money from the advertising and the fees that managers paid to list their contact information on the site to make it his full-time job.

Sheppard commented on how BoxRec was, at the time, improving life not just for the writers and the matchmakers but for the fans as well.

“I truly believe that BoxRec is one of the things that’s going to save boxing,” he told me. “The promoters know they can’t put their fighters in with bums all the time, because the fans are more educated now. They log on and look up the records when the opponents are named. This site helps the sport. It helps the fans decide what fights they think are worth paying to see.”

This is Part 1 of a two-part article series; Part 2, exploring the impact of YouTube on writers and matchmakers alike, will follow later in the week.

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, Ringside Seat and “The Ring” (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted “The HBO Boxing Podcast,” “Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney” and “Ring Theory,” and currently co-hosts “The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney.” He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with “The Ring,” Grantland and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s “The Moneymaker Effect.” He can be reached on X or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.