A Puncher Goes for It

By Tom Callahan

The Heavyweight Championship of the World. It is as big as Primo Camera was big, as simple and, sometimes, as sad. But invariably special and occasionally alluring. Jack Johnson. Jack Dempsey. Joe Louis. Rocky Marciano. Muhammad Ali. Since caves, men have been awed by the enormous stature accompanying this title and attracted to its myth. Which is why in Las Vegas this week a $50,000 casino credit line is helpful in securing a reservation at Caesars Palace. The beautiful people are descending with their beautiful money, and so are the fight mob, the press corps and the crapshooters, all drawn to the enchantment. That too is why, across the U.S., lines are long wherever theaters are showing Rocky III, Sylvester Stallone's latest episode in the movie melodrama that exploits the mystique of the heavyweight championship (see CINEMA). Call it the days of wine and bloody noses, or a week of heavyweights real and imagined, but boxers are on people's minds. An old excitement is back.

It so happens that Larry Holmes is the undefeated heavyweight champion of the known (nonmovie) world, Gerry Cooney is the unbeaten No. 1 contender with an unknown wallop, and they are fighting each other this Friday night in a small ring out behind a large gambling lor for $20 million. Including ancillary payoffs, there may be as much as $50 million involved all around. The eyes of 32,000 people will glisten in the ring lights, and the blood of 2.5 million others will heat up in closed-circuit theaters, and much of the country, and some of the world, will be waiting to find out several things: whether Holmes, 32, was too old or Cooney, 25, too young. Whether the champion turned out to be too much boxer or the challenger did in fact catch him with his celebrated left hook. Mainly, whether Cooney has any ability, whether he is just heavy on personal bravery and promoters' ingenuity, whether he is just heavy, whether he is just white. Holmes is better known, or at least many think they know him; they may underestimate him. In the end both men might be known for this fight.

What makes the match so appealing, and makes Cooney the heart of it, is a memory of when heavyweights could hit and boxing matches could end abruptly. Holmes has the more refined ability, the broader experience, the odds going in and the championship; Cooney has the "big bat." Holmes has had 39 professional fights and has won 39, to pitifully small acclaim. The most damning thing that can be said of him is that he took on and defeated all of the "best" of his time: 29 knockouts, ten of eleven in defense of the World Boxing Council title he has held for four years. This is a record that might be associated with a puncher, but Holmes is a boxer. In the opinion of Ray Arcel, 82, the dappled sage in Holmes' corner, "there hasn't been a real puncher since Jersey Joe Walcott, who could hit you on top of the head and knock you out." The heavyweight champions Arcel is ignoring include Rocky Marciano, Ingemar Johansson, Sonny Listen, Joe Frazier and George Foreman. Of recent challengers, Earnie Shavers possessed the closest thing to the big bat. Holmes whipped Shavers twice.

Standing 6 ft. 6 in., Cooney is a great big amiable man with a tiny little engaging voice. He is a huge hitter with small hands, hatchet-faced but handsome. Bent noses can be very becoming on fighters. Although Cooney could reasonably shave every four hours, either he is too busy for that now or he does not trust himself at the moment around razors. His chin is heavily wooded with black stubble, making his eyes stand out browner and seem softer, less baleful. "This young man has the greatest left hook I have ever felt--and that includes Frazier's," says Joe Bugner, Cooney's most distinguished sparring partner. "He takes a good shot, Gerry does. He also delivers a bloody harder one. He wants to put it right through you."

Since turning professional five years ago, after an apprenticeship in club "smokers" on his native Long Island, Cooney has had difficulty keeping sparring partners in supply. One of the departees, Roger Troupe, took to strapping bath towels about his midsection in a protective cummerbund. Cooney likes to go to the body. He has done so ever since witnessing an alley fight in which his older brother Tom tendered only one punch to his opponent's gizzard. The grimace on the poor fellow's face, says Cooney, "stayed with me."

In all the time since May 25, 1980, when he dispatched elderly Jimmy Young in four rounds, Cooney has spent a total of 3 min. 43 sec. in rings, pensioning off other oldtimers Ron Lyle, 40, and Ken Norton, 36. His most recent fight, against Norton more than a year ago, lasted 54 sec. "I came over with a straight right to Norton's jaw, then dropped inside and hit him two hooks to the body, and I thought I hurt him a little," Cooney recalls. "I came in with another punch to the body, and I heard him gasp. Then I went upstairs. I don't know how many punches I threw, but it came over me that he was unconscious sitting there on the rope and I was still hitting him." The referee stopped it.

The dispassionate and detached way Cooney can look at this is an advantage of youth and a definition of innocence. It isn't that Cooney likes hurting people, just that he doesn't mind it. Twenty years ago, avenging a loss and a slur, former Welterweight and Middleweight Champion Emile Griffith fatally injured Benny ("Kid") Paret. Griffith continued to be a fine boxer for quite a while, but he was never much of a fighter after that, certainly not much of a finisher. In this area, inexperience is an asset. Cooney has come out of his 25 fights (22 knockouts) with no losses yet and no misgivings yet, just a bad left shoulder.

Because of a partial tearing of his bulky muscle fibers, this week's fight was postponed from March 15. Says Holmes' man Arcel: "In 1937, Barney Ross fractured a thumb right before getting in with Ceferino Garcia for the welterweight title. Barney just said, 'Hell, I can beat this guy one-handed,' and did." Cooney might have been willing to try Holmes one-handed, except the left happens to be his one hand.

"I'm not so sure," objects Muhammad Ali's old trainer, Angelo Dundee. "I think he may be bum-rapped as a one-arm bandit. He sets you up with the right. I give Cooney a good chance. They say he's clumsy. Well, a banger like that stressing power from the port side ain't going to look like no ballerina. Doesn't everyone know what's going to happen in this fight? Cooney's going to knock Holmes out early, or he's not going to survive the stretch. One way or another, it's going to be a knockout. Period." So that's the whole fight, though not the whole fury.

Deplorably but inevitably, the Great White Hope, sometimes pronounced Hype, has been made the theme of prizefights between blacks and whites as far back as barges. Cooney's handlers regularly bring up the issue to denounce it. Their slogan: "He's not the white man, he's the right man." Cooney seems to have an authentic aversion to the subject and generally says nothing. The way black Promoter Don King and Holmes talk, Cooney is just the same traditional white emissary who has been sent against the black savage since James J. Jeffries hurried out of retirement in 1910 to try to wipe the grin off the face of Jack Johnson. Rocky Marciano, who retired undefeated the year Cooney was born, was the last white American to wear the heavyweight crown. When Swede Ingemar Johansson shook Floyd Patterson loose from the title momentarily in 1959, Ingemar had one wonderful year to enjoy it. He was the last white champion. Since then, promoters have searched high and low, usually low, from Omaha to Bayonne, N.J., and found mostly inept white brawlers like Ron Stander and Chuck Wepner.

Ever resourceful, All, until 1964 Cassius Clay of Louisville, Ky., responded to the shortage of good white opponents by inventing black white hopes. (Before their fight in Zaire in 1974, he even tried to pass off George Foreman as a Belgian.) Yet he never sounded as mean spirited, as hateful and hurt, as Holmes does now. "If Cooney wasn't white, he'd be nothing," says Holmes. "I'm going to cut him, hurt him, open his lip, blacken his eye--for justice's sake. They talk about his great left hook. But what am I, a little child? He's two inches taller [maybe three or four]. Big deal. I'm going to carry him to punish him. And when the referee breaks us, I'm going to pop him and say, 'Here, take this with you.' You have to crawl before you walk. I crawled. Cooney didn't. He jumped ahead because he's white."

With a melancholy sigh, Arcel insists: "Holmes doesn't really think that way. He's a very decent guy." Mike Trainer, Welterweight Champion Sugar Ray Leonard's attorney, considers the White Hope demagoguery "bad basically, but also bad business. If you are going to promote a race war, you're going to discourage a lot of people from going to the closed-circuit theaters. I wouldn't take my wife to this fight."

Demagoguery is a staple of boxing and a specialty of King's, a wild-maned former Cleveland numbers runner who served four years in the Ohio Penitentiary for killing an associate. King got into boxing with a lovable little Damon Runyon-type character named Don Elbaum, who once made a flourish of presenting Sugar Ray Robinson the first gloves he ever wore at Madison Square Garden; Robinson was moved to tears, until both gloves turned out to be righthanded. "Confusion is a promoter's plight and his ally," says King, who is co-promoting the show with Sam Glass and Tiffany Promotions from Cooney's side. "There's something you should know about boxing: lying is commonplace."

For being in such a harsh business and around such hard men, most boxers are incongruously gentle, including Larry Holmes. He is a child of both Cuthbert, Ga., and Easton, Pa. The seventh of Flossie Holmes' dozen children, he grew up lisping when he talked and lashing out when he was frustrated. One of his strongest motivations for not losing is the thought of the schoolyard taunting that he fears would await his children. He left school in the seventh grade, the year his father, a manual laborer, left home. Holmes laments his lack of education. In a dream he had before his 1980 fight with Ali, he is in the ring fighting when he hears the voice of Howard Cosell droning "Holmes is throwing a profusion punches." And panic seizes him. He does not know what profusion means.

Since the days when he was a sparring partner for Ali, Holmes has mimicked Muhammad, intentionally or not. "He even tries to talk like him," says Angelo Dundee, "but he can't." As Arcel puts it, "He has lived in the shadow of Muhammad Ali's mouth." When not trying to sound like Ali, Holmes sounds kinder. In his guttural, good-humored speech, he declares, "I'm the baddest thing since peanut butter and jelly," and laughs lightly. Then he stops laughing. "Earnie Shavers and Renaldo Snipes may have knocked me down, but I got up and took care of business. I'm proud. A lot of people want to know if I'm in the tank for this fight"--boxing's enduring charm, the suggestion of a fix. "That hurts me."

Accepting pay equal to the challenger's does not please him. Holmes Holmes and Cooney are are said to be collecting $10 million each. (Since "lying is commonplace" in boxing, their guarantees are probably considerably less, but their percentages may actually bring the amount to more if the sale approaches the buildup.) Technically, Holmes is only the master of all that the World Boxing Council surveys. Boxing titles flow from two Central American offices: the W.B.C. in Mexico and the World Boxing Association in Panama. However, by farsightedly knocking out W.B.A. Champion Mike Weaver before Weaver happened to win his title, Holmes eased the confusion.

Cooney began to work for his $10 million in toasty Palm Springs, Calif, (to simulate the dry, hot climate of Las Vegas), under a gleaming white tent pitched behind the Canyon Hotel. At suppertime the parking lot was still steaming. The challenger appeared for his ring work every evening at 5 o'clock, to a tape of George Benson's mellow ballad The Greatest Love of All. Said Cooney dreamily: "Listen to the words." As his dainty hands were being double-bandaged by Trainer Victor Valle, the fighter sang along: ". . . Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be . . ." Sonny Liston skipping, sparring and sneering to Night Train it was not.

Showtime and for Valle, a come showy easily to man, was a pitty-pat exercise in which Cooney fended off the trainer's slapping hands to the tempo of the spectators' building applause. Cooney is devoted to Valle. When he appears, Cooney exclaims: "There's my man!" Says Valle when he hears this: "Boy, that puts strength in me to teach this kid." Valle's task may be more awesome than Cooney's: going up against Holmes' wise old trainers Arcel and Eddie Futch.

"Gerry has learned to be mean inside," says Valle, who taught him and had to teach him, since Cooney did not always care for the sight or smell of blood. "Savageness means a lot in the ring. Then, outside it, gentleness means almost as much. If the crowded senses gentleness, it will be for you, and that will give you a feeling of strength. The minute Gerry stretched his hand across the table to me five years ago, just the way that boy smiled at me, it was like God put us together. Destiny."

Smiles and laughter come easily to Cooney, who is absurdly cheerful and regards life with mischief and amusement. In place of the customary toadies, moochers and other pilot fish that hang on to fighters for dear life, Cooney has surrounded himself with old grade school playmates. If he grows officious, they bluntly tell him off and he laughs appreciatively. In the evening they would assemble in his room as in a clubhouse, play poker or watch a movie like Arthur and compare each other's impersonations of Sir John Gielgud. "Georgie here is a Cooney-come-lately," Cooney said, introducing George Munch. "Fourth grade. Now Hilly and I, we go back to second grade."

Hilly is Hilton Cohen, who fought under the name Hilton David Cohen until his nose started to resemble a mine cave-in. Together they ran in the mornings. "Hilly had all K.O.s in the Golden Gloves one year. I said, 'Listen, Hilly. Don't expect to knock everyone out.' I was trying to give him my experience, but he took it wrong. Thought I was jealous. We had a big argument, and he went out and lost. Hilly doesn't know how to talk to people, but he's my friend."

Following the workouts under the white tent, pretty girls and children queued up to sit on Cooney's broad lap and have their pictures taken with the bent-nosed Santa Claus. This silly sweet scene every day galled Hilly but delighted Cooney. "Little kids are the best part of being a celebrity," he said, bouncing a squirmy set of twin babies. "What good is this doing us?" Hilly fumed. As for the pretty girls, Cooney, a bachelor, regretfully subscribes to the boxing axiom that women have ruined more men than war and pestilence. He talks daily by telephone to one young lady friend recuperating from an automobile accident. But for months he has been celibate, admiring the poolside bikinis only from a distance. When he went swimming with a girl, she was 84-year-old Pearl Miller, who was a regular spectator at the workouts and who affected him like the twins. "Old people have so much to say," he says, "and no one to say it to."

Cooney is unafraid of sentiment. One of his old school friends, Gary Gladstone, sits in a wheelchair. They insult each other merrily all day. When Gladstone goes off to bed, Cooney murmurs: "God, what a fighter he is. Cancer, bone transplants, amputated leg, everything. Do you hear the way he jokes? It's like nothing to him. How much courage can you have?"

In the sense of bravado, Cooney was not a particularly courageous child. The first step to the heavyweight championship is always a dreary staircase to some cold, terrifying gym. He did not rush to the climb. "Boxing wasn't my dream," he says. "It was just a sport to me." To his father it was something more. Gerry enjoys likening the Cooneys to the Corbetts in the old Errol Flynn movie Gentleman Jim, and he approves of the nickname "Gentleman Gerry." Had Ward Bond portrayed the father, that would have been Tony Cooney. But Bond played John L. Sullivan.

To the common observation that a New York street background would bode better than a suburban Long Island one for a fighter, Gerry Cooney counters that there were bedrooms in his home as treacherous as some boroughs in the city. Four Cooney boys were at large in Huntington Station, and, until he died of cancer six years ago, one tough Irishman was in charge. Arthur J. Cooney ("Tony" was his fellow construction workers' misunderstanding of "Cooney") applied the two disciplines of his life, the Merchant Marine and ironworking, to rearing children. The amalgam amounted to walking a narrow beam at attention. Sometimes Eileen Cooney wonders if her sons did not see gyms as sanctuaries. The challenger's mother is a tall, robust woman, oldfashioned, sort of flusterable, and nice. Her grandmother was acquainted with Gene Tunney's family in Ireland and compelled her as a child to keep still whenever boxing was on the radio. (Today she keeps still when attending her son's fights, peeking up only when the crowd noises are favorable.)

In a more or less square boxing ring strung by Tony out back, where a lopsided Everlast bag still swings from a tree, Gerry lost his first bout--to a girl. In a childhood cluttered with embarrassments, this was not an unusual event. "As a kid, I had so many complexes," says Cooney, tugging an ever present brown scalley cap over his eyes, giggling. "Skinny, knock-kneed--6 ft. 1 in., 130 Ibs.--pimples, big nose, big ears . . . What are you getting such a laugh out of?" He is still a kid.

The thrilling sight of his brothers in the amateurs began to attract him to the sport. "It was so great; I just thought it was so impressive . . . being a fighter." So he gathered his courage and went out for Golden Gloves. "When I won the first time [age 16, a lanky middleweight], it came over the announcements at school [Walt Whitman High]. Sitting in homeroom, I got goose bumps all over my arms and legs."

Sad songs of his father fill Cooney's conversations with strangers. His dearest recollections and direst regrets are open to everyone. In a conflict of stubborn wills, Gerry moved away from home at 18. "When I heard how he had gone around calling me 'my son, the fighter,' and how proud it turns out he really was of me, that really hurt, you know?" When he fell ill with cancer, Tony bought himself a motorcycle and made lonely journeys to Montauk, at the far end of Long Island, to look out at the sea. "What did he think of?" the son wonders. "The absolute worst thing in life is to be alone." On one car trip to the hospital for a cobalt treatment, Tony had turned to him and said: "I'd rather crawl to the hospital than ride with you if you won't live in our house." Now the scalley cap is pulled down because Gerry is crying. Tony died shortly after his son won a second Golden Gloves, as a heavyweight. Cooney might have tried for the 1976 Olympics, but says sullenly, "I lost my taste for fighting."

When he inexplicably found it again after about a year, two Long Island real estate men found him and began to manage and market the Irish puncher as, in the way real estate men would naturally put it, "a hot property." The phrase is more like Dennis Rappaport, 36, the gaudier member of the firm, than Mike Jones, 46. Both men seem curiously proud of the nickname, "The Whacko Twins," earned in a number of ways. When their first fighter, black Middleweight Ronnie Harris, converted to Judaism, they sued to allow him to wear his yarmulka in the ring. They lost. When not enough attention was being paid to Harris by the matchmakers at Madison Square Garden, they sent a man around in a gorilla suit. Their boxing backgrounds before 1976: as a child Rappaport was aced out for the boxing category on The $64,000 Question TV quiz show by Psychologist Joyce Brothers, who had memorized the Ring record book; and Jones is a former champion of Camp Chicapee in Penn sylvania. This is a funny business.

And a sad one, as Joe Bugner, the sparring partner, knows. Bugner is a congenial Hungarian giant, less innocent than Cooney. Twice Bugner went the distance with just about the best of Ali ("I'm so proud of that"), including 15 rounds for the championship in 1975. When Ali was brought to Cooney's Palm Springs camp several weeks ago to stir publicity, Cooney was taken aback by the husky raspiness of Ali's voice, the depressingly common effect of too many punches. "It scared me a little," Cooney confesses. Bugner sees it differently. "It's that Muhammad's down in the pits now," Bugner says quietly. "He can still raise his voice, but he's afraid to. The old Muhammad would have been shouting, This guy's an amateur and the other guy's my old sparring partner!' But he couldn't say three words." As Bugner knows, and Cooney will find out, and Holmes must suspect, the ending is usually sad.

The final night in Palm Springs, Cooney acknowledged that he had not looked very sharp sparring the past few days. "I don't know what's wrong with me. No boost. I'll snap out of it." Angry scrapes under his right eye and across the hump of his nose--from roughhousing in his hotel room, not in the ring--had obviously been hindering him. To protect against aggravating the cut and necessitating another postponement, he had to wear a cumbersome headgear with a blinding nose strip. He sometimes looked worse than slow, full of doubts.

But after a few workouts in Las Vegas he brightened. "I feel much better," he said. "I think I was over-rested." As the fight neared, he professed to have a good feeling. "You know what it is? We're all coming closer together, Hilly and everybody, pulling together, nice and warm. When the fight gets this close, you think about it less and less. You've already thought about it enough. You just go for walks and start to feel stronger."

The Heavyweight Championship of the World. "It's unbelievable, isn't it?" Cooney whispered. "The most prestigious thing there is in the world." In sports? "No, in the world." Just before he gets into the ring, his friends say, his eyes turn to ice. "In the Jimmy Young fight, it hit me right before they announced me. I guess it's a split personality. I'm myself again usually just after I knock the guy out. That's such a tremendous high, the next half-hour. The most terrific half-hour in the world." Then, because his fights are short, "I have to answer those same questions." Can he take a punch? Can he go the distance? Cooney is of the opinion that some questions are better left unanswered.

-- By Tom Callahan

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