I had just turned 25 when I got the job as the studio analyst on Friday Night Fights. Our first show was on October 2, 1998. I had graduated college (Columbia) in May of that year (it took me seven years to get my BA in history). In four months I went from furiously typing my final paper on Aristotilian influence on Medieval technology, to opining about boxing for a live national television audience.

Teddy Atlas also landed a gig on FNF. He was cast as the ringside color commentator. Teddy and I had already run into each other a bunch of times during boxing get-togethers at Jack Newfield's house. Jack was and is one of the best American journalist/social commentators of the last 40 years. He is also a huge boxing fan (among the books he has written is "The Life and Crimes of Don King," which was made into an excellent film for HBO).

Jack created this great boxing milieu over at his place. It's still going on. He assembles an eclectic group who find common ground in their interest in boxing. (He actually writes about this scene in his new book "Somebody's Gotta Tell It," which is a great read.) Among the crowd that would convene in his living room before the inception of Friday Night Fights were ex-champions and ex-mob bosses, politicians and writers, actors and directors and producers and boxing trainers, and a Columbia student who could not believe that he was sitting around a television set talking boxing with Teddy Atlas.

So when Friday Night Fights first started, I figured there would already be a certain degree of familiarity between Teddy and me, seeing as how we already kind of knew each other.

I was right about the familiarity. Teddy felt comfortable enough to belittle nearly everything I had to say, whether he agreed with my comments or not (and he usually basically agreed with me).

People often asked me in the beginning whether the friction on-air was real or fabricated. The truth is that in the beginning it was real -- especially from Teddy's point of view.

My introduction to boxing came at the age of 8 when my father took me down to a gym in what was then known as the "Hell's Kitchen" section of Manhattan. I fell in love with boxing, and when my mother would no longer allow me to go to the gym (she felt boxing was too dangerous), I sublimated all of that energy into following the sport.

When I was 16 I started a public access show called "Max on Boxing." When I was 18 and could do what I wanted I went to the gym and began training, but by that age I was not serious about my future as a boxer. I trained on and off at Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn until I was 21 or 22.

All Teddy knew was that I was some kid who had not paid his dues -- certainly not in the way Teddy had -- and yet I was given a platform to pontificate. He resented it. As much as his needling of me on the air owed to his intuitive understanding of a dynamic that would make for good television -- the grizzled veteran pot-shotting the young punk -- it was also the result of a resentment toward me and the position he felt I was unfairly given.

Teddy was also mistrustful of me. I remember an early phone conversation we had after I said something he felt was irresponsible on the show (something about a no-decision fight between Harry Greb and Gene Tunney as I recall). I finally told him that I was not one of these rapacious, backhanded types who was only interested in the advancement of his own career, even at the expense of honesty and integrity. Teddy responded to this by saying, "time will tell."

I was glad he said that and I told him so. I wanted time to tell. It is a bad feeling to know that someone you respect and admire does not reciprocate those feelings. And when you feel that you have the goods, you want time to tell.

Two weeks ago on Friday Night Fights I picked John Ruiz to beat Kirk Johnson. Teddy picked Johnson and made a bet with me on-air -- if Ruiz lost I would have to take off my shirt and shadow-box for the TV cameras the following show. That gave me one week to get into shirtless shape. He knows that I am least two weeks away from that kind of condition.

I turn 29 today. Nearly four years have passed since our first show. Teddy and I talked on the phone last night for about an hour and a half. We talk from time to time, often for hours on end. We talk about boxing, our professional lives, sometimes our private lives.

Yesterday we talked about what I have been up to. We also talked about Michael Grant and Teddy's strategy for bringing Grant along, hopefully back to title contention. Grant just knocked out Robert Davis on ESPN last Saturday and Teddy explained to me what he liked and what he did not like about Grant's performance. He took me through the whole fight just like he did after he trained Junior Jones for his epic battle against Paul Ingle. He told me that since Ruiz had won, I could take off the rubber suit and stop running off the weight. I told him that since I won the bet, he could keep his shirt on.

Max Kellerman is a studio analyst for ESPN2's Friday Night Fights.