Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game (25 page)

Having paid his dues, Holmes broke out in verbal hives at the sight of the young, white Gerry-come-lately upstaging him on the cover of national magazines, and getting parity on the pay night, despite the fact that this Long Island honker had been an awkward kid in the Golden Gloves when Larry was punching and getting punched for a living from San Juan to Manila.

Holmes got even in that pivotal fight with Cooney five years ago, jabbing him mercilessly (though whoever heard of a merciful jab?) and setting him up for the straight right hand until
after awhile Gerry’s face became a sickeningly easy target for the champion’s right-hand rifle shots.

Anyone who questioned Cooney’s readiness to climb through the ropes against Holmes was on solid ground. Less solid were those who questioned Cooney’s heart. Heart, or courage, or bottom as it used to be known in the bareknuckle days, is a necessary ingredient of every sport. As they sang in
Damn Yankees,
“You gotta have heart … miles ’n’ miles ’n’ miles ’n’ miles of heart …” But since boxing is the most personal, naked, one-on-one sport (“a chess game with blood,” we once described it), heart, grace-under-pressure, true grit are not only exposed but revealed on a giant magnifying glass under blinding lights. And so in this intensely personalized sport/combat, the contestants are more inclined to hypersensitivity than most athletes in other fields.

In a lifetime of watching and knowing professional fighters, I’ve been struck by their kinship with poets rather than tobacco-chewing outfielders from Georgia or teenage wonders at Wimbledon. “I’m not hurt, just embarrassed,” a friend of mine told me after the referee stepped in to save him from further punishment. In the dressing room at the Garden, Archie McBride, a heavyweight I co-managed, stared at the floor after being stopped by Floyd Patterson in seven and mumbled, “I’m okay. I’m okay. I just feel bad you and all your friends had to see me like that.”

When Floyd Patterson lost his title to Liston in the most humiliating way a champion can, KO’d in one, he donned a disguise complete with false beard and sneaked out of Chicago like a serious bank thief on the lam. Losing fighters have been known to go out and get drunk, or in these days snort a line, or hole up in a brothel or a monastery.

So what Gerry Cooney did after the Holmes fight, after his corner decided to abort Larry’s moving in for the
coup de grace
in the thirteenth, wasn’t a total break with boxing tradition. Gerry went off and hid.

After the Holmes fight, Cooney wanted to be alone or with his in-group high school buddies. He felt he had let the “Cooney-Country” people down. He brooded, he drifted, a fistic Hamlet asking himself into the night, “To fight or not to fight?” And getting no answers. He was famous, even in defeat, and an overnight millionaire, but—son of tough Tony Cooney, who had trained him and his older brother, Tommy, to be fighters before their teens—he didn’t know where he was going, or who he was.

His sabbatical from boxing went on for months, and months that grew into years. His diehard fans began to wonder—was Gerry Cooney hanging them up at age twenty-eight? Was the last White Hope (although that peg truly revolted him) packing it in because he had enough bread and couldn’t get his head together after losing to Holmes? Some boxing writers were on his back, and some of the Cooney-lovers were losing patience, too. He could have challenged Mike Weaver for the WBA title, or Dokes, when “Dynamite” or “Cokeamite,” took Weaver by a suspicious one-round KO and then “successfully” defended that title via a highly questionable draw. Into such bathos had the once-vaunted heavyweight crown descended. Gerry would have been a lively candidate to pick up the pieces. But it seemed as if the heart that had carried him through thirteen bruising rounds against the crafty and vengeful Holmes was no longer where his hard-minded father had wanted it to be—in the prize ring.

And when, after twenty-seven months, he finally decided to put on the gloves for real, it was only half for real. It wasn’t against Snipes or Berbick or even a Quick Tillis. No, for this auspicious comeback, his cautious manager Dennis Rappaport and his surrogate father, trainer Victor Valle, chose a former sparring partner, Phil Brown, whose main interest in the fight
seemed to be what corner of the ring would be most comfortable for a declining figure. And when even that “fight” was postponed again and again, due to well-publicized and chronic injuries to knuckle, shoulder, and eye, the Anti-Cooney Club grew rapidly. Nor did things improve when Cooney made short work of another journeyman, George Chaplin.

When Gerry followed up that stirring victory not with a challenge of a top-rated contender but with yet another retirement, even the most loyal Huntingtonian was taking down the green flag and hoisting the white. “Forget Cooney, he’s got his millions, he’s in the disco, he’s a joke,” a bartending ex-boxer exploded at the mention of his name.

A few weeks ago, at a spacious but Cooney-cluttered condo at the brand-new super-yuppie spa at Great Gorge in upper New Jersey, Gerry nodded philosophically at the criticism that’s shadowed his curious career since the Holmes fight, just three bouts (lasting less than seven rounds) in five years. In that same period Spinks has fought fifty-three rounds, including two fifteen-round razor-thin wins over an aging Holmes, eight with the hard-hitting Jim MacDonald and three years ago a bristling twelve for the light-heavyweight title with our ring-wise Long Islander Eddie Davis.

“Did you see what one of the columnists wrote about me the other day?” Gerry said softly. “That if I were George Washington we’d still be part of the British Empire because I’d have said it’s too cold to fight in winter? That hurt. And I said something to the writer I shouldn’t have said. I guess I shouldn’t let it get under my skin. But in a lot of ways, while it may have looked as if I just took the money and ran, these have been tough years for me. They can laugh at the injuries and the postponements, but the knuckle problems and the shoulder weren’t excuses. They were frustrating and they took time. Training, and then having to stop and heal and then start again, and stop again—it can drive you crazy. I’ll admit I had moments when I started asking myself, ‘Maybe I wasn’t meant to be a fighter.’

“And there were so many other distractions. I honestly think if I had won the Holmes fight I wasn’t ready for it. I was still a kid—it’s taken me these years of frustration and trouble to grow up and feel like a man. The writers, they have a right to write whatever they please, but sometimes they just ask the obvious questions they already know the answers to, and don’t take the time or the trouble to go deeper.”

Back in his condo after a hard run, Gerry didn’t hide from a hard question about his brother.

“Okay, my brother. It’s easy to write a line about having family problems. That goes in one ear and out the other. But I wonder how well the writers would be doing their job if their brother was on hard drugs—if it was driving their family crazy—if they opened a restaurant-bar where the brother would go to the cash register to put in his arm. When you’re in training for a fight that’s all you should think about. But even getting ready for the Holmes fight—the night my father would’ve dreamed about—that’s when my brother Tommy got into the heavy stuff.

“I know they keep saying, ‘Excuses, excuses,’ but how can you keep your mind on fighting when your brother comes into the house we grew up in, wants money again, and in front of our own mother, goes in the kitchen, gets a knife, and slashes his wrists!” Gerry puts his head down and relives it. “It was a nightmare. I had to call the police. He’s in a rehab now and doing okay. But it’s tough, it’s tough, I hope he’ll be okay. But those things take energy, the energy you need to be a fighter.

“Another thing. Fighters who get into big money aren’t prepared. So many things come at them. So many distractions. I think there should be some kind of education for fighters, so they know what to do with the rest of their lives.

“And there’s so much b.s. in the fight game. Like King trying to corner the market on the heavyweights. Witherspoon fights Smith and Carl King manages one of them and co-manages the other. But King doesn’t control Spinks, Butch Lewis does, and Dennis [The Menace] Rappaport kept me independent. Believe me, I like boxing. I love to fight. I really wanted Holmes again—I learned a lot in that fight, what not to do, and press him more when I had him hurt, like in the tenth, and how to move away from the right hand.

“They say all things come to those who wait. I was overconfident for Holmes. Now I’m confident in a more mature way. I’ve got to win this fight. Winning now means more to me than it did then. So it isn’t Holmes, but it’s Spinks who beat Holmes. And if Holmes was the champion, no matter what all those commissioners say, then it’s not just hype to consider this a fight for the heavyweight championship. I’ve got to win this fight.”

“And Mike Tyson?” (Now the WBA-WBC champ.)

There is a pause. “Tyson can punch. I’m still not sure how well he takes a punch. But first things first. I’ll make my statement with Spinks. And then see what happens.”

In the plush ring at the Spa, where Yuppies commute fifty miles in their Mercedes to get expensive, carpeted health, Cooney goes ten rounds with three willing but run-of-the-mill sparring partners. He strolls the ring between rounds and, contrary to some reports, he’s sweaty and a little bloody but not winded forty minutes later. Only one of the sparmates does a partial simulation of the smaller, much more mobile Spinks, and Gerry is not the most fleet of feet, though his hand speed is there, and the dangerous left hook, and the determination to prove he’s more than hype and hoopla and soon-to-be $2.5 million richer.

He’ll have to jab and hook, think and move to catch Spinks. I watched Cooney with three illustrious veterans, the slippery Tippy Larkin, the tough/smart Fritzie Pruden, and the old Jersey middleweight, once Marlon Brando’s double in
On the
Waterfront,
now a U.S. marshal, Billy Kilroy. While diplomatically critical of his footwork, the consensus was that if Cooney can catch him and bang him to the body, Spinks will be hit harder than at anytime in his unbeaten career. “Holmes wobbled him,” said one of the three, “and Gerry can topple him.”

That just could happen in an early round, as Spinks has always been a slow starter, and Cooney has to go after him. He has to jab and remember to move his head to the right, so it won’t be an inviting target for Spinks’s right hand. Victor Valle seemed to be still teaching his almost thirty-one-year-old student that bit of wisdom in their workouts at the Spa. Both fighters are curiosities. Cooney the banger whose hands are faster than his feet but who fights back when stung or hurt. Spinks who seems neither boxer nor slugger, who doesn’t move side to side with the grace of a Holmes or Ali or the earlier Ezzard Charles, but gives you lots of jerky movement, an unorthodox busybody who boxes to his own drummer, and that drum has a disconcerting way of changing rhythms. It’s Cooney’s left hook predictability against Spinks’s constantly shifting and awkwardly clever unpredictability.

Cooney could knock him out, he’s so much bigger and stronger. Spinks could jiggle and flurry, gadfly and busy his way to a decision. Spinks could punch and slice and accidentally butt Cooney’s Irish version of a Roman nose, as a sparring partner did. The Cooney punch, plus Spinks’s shifty experience, would make one helluva fighter.

But they’ll be
two
fighters in Mr. Trump’s ring tonight, Cooney with his place in boxing history on the line, and Spinks with his nontitle title at risk. Cooney and Spinks have both said they can’t wait to get it on. I wish I knew who was going to win, so I could tell you in advance.

Our hunch is with the punch. But, unlike his brother Leon (to whom Ali once loaned the title for six or seven months), this Spinks thinks. Even without Howard Cosell, it could be a Monday night to remember.

The title of the fight—since fightbiz and showbiz are more and more interchangeable—was “The War at the Shore.” Only, just short of five rounds of nonstop, nonclinch, take-no-prisoner intensity, a new title popped up on our screen for Michael Spinks’s dramatic victory over the greatest heavyweight to fight out of Long Island since John Morrisey tried it in the nineteenth century.

So credit the winner-and-still-champion Spinks the Jinx with writing a new title to the unexpected five-round war:
Requiem for a Heavyweight.
And, putting vanity aside in this moment of emotion, after watching the brains and heart of a true fighter overcome the size and starboard power of an almost, a Could-Have-Been, and now it never will be the War at the Shore wound up with Cooney at the Shore retitled
The Harder They Fall.

Boxing may be the most misunderstood of all sporting events. It would seem, unlike baseball or basketball or even water polo, that it is a confrontation of brawn, physical brutality, matter over mind. Wrong. Victory is not to the strongest or to the fleetest, it is to the man who has the unique gift of matching brain to body and hand movement, who is able to think two or three moves beyond his hurt. That ability separates the men from the boys, and in the climactic meeting between the ongoing Spinks and the no-going Cooney, it was the two-hundred-pound Spinks, the punching man’s thinker and finally the thinking man’s puncher, who proved himself the man, and Cooney, who should have destroyed him in four, finding himself outfought, outmanned, alas no longer a contender but a six-foot-seven boy suddenly over his head at the shore.

Now, with philosophy behind us and the technique of a very interesting contest ahead, let’s, in the style of that extravagantly paid sports commentator, “go to the videotape.” The picture we see shows a scowling and very serious Gerry Cooney going forward and pressing, jabbing, but (in the notes of this ringside table) “not too effectively.” He’s throwing lefts, but Spinks is moving smartly away from them and then, deciding he has to do something, moves in and smacks Cooney’s still inviting jaw (the same one that appealed to Larry Holmes five years ago). Round 1 to Huntington, but this is no Ken Norton, no standing target like Eddie Gregg. Ringside reporters turned to each other in agreement: “This is a fight.”