Michael Katz, a feisty Hall of Fame sportswriter who brought a deft touch, a caustic wit and a deep understanding of fighters and trainers to his coverage of boxing for The New York Times and The Daily News, died on Jan. 27 in Brooklyn. He was 85.

Nick Black, his son-in-law, confirmed the death, at a rehabilitation facility. He did not cite a cause, but Mr. Katz had had various ailments over the years, including diabetes, kidney failure and a brain tumor.

Mr. Katz’s combative style emerged most clearly during his 15 years as the boxing columnist for The News. Shortly after Mike Tyson’s 91-second demolition of Michael Spinks in their heavyweight title fight in 1988, Mr. Katz excoriated Tyson for betraying people in his camp, including his manager Bill Cayton, whom he sued on the day of the bout. (Tyson said that he would not have signed a contract that year if he had known that his other manager, Jimmy Jacobs, was dying. Mr. Jacobs died that March.)

“You’ve turned your back on too many people who were kind to you, who got you out of the ghetto and tried to get the ghetto out of you,” Mr. Katz wrote in a column published on Tyson’s 22nd birthday. “You call them ‘Jews in suits,’ which offends me, though I seldom wear suits.”

Mr. Katz was one of the country’s leading boxing journalists during a vigorous period for the sport, from the mid-1970s until the early 2000s. He wrote about remarkable high-profile fighters like Muhammad Ali, Larry Holmes, Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Oscar De La Hoya and Tyson, and promoters like Don King and Bob Arum.

“Boxers have a hard exterior, but there’s a softer side to them,” Tim Smith, who succeeded Mr. Katz as The News’s boxing columnist in 2000, said in an interview. “Mike had a way of chipping away at that hard outer layer and getting to the essence of the men.”