New York City journalist Vic Ziegel has passed away at the age of 72. Ziegel, who was a columnist for the New York Daily News and The New York Post, won the Nat Fleischer Award for boxing writing in 1983. He is survived by his wife of 34 years Roberta and daughter Katy, and a sister Shelly Goldfeder.
Mr. Ziegel was a fixture on the New York sporting scene for four decades and was a cherished press room friend to many writers, as he frequently attended various sporting events and enjoyed to share some of his stories. One of the last times I spoke with Mr. Ziegel was at a New York Giants NFL game at Giants Stadium and he told one of his memorable moments of covering Mike Tyson: “Did you ever pick a winner off what you saw at a press conference? In Japan, for the Douglas fight, Tyson, who was never very good at press conferences, was especially bad at this one. Pretending to be asleep, lazy answers, etc. Buster, though, was terrific. After coming out of the room, I asked the other writers, If you didn’t know one of these guys was a huge underdog, who would you pick in this fight based on what you saw and heard back there? To a man, they answered, Buster.”