Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game

  Before I began writing this requiem, Joe Louis was wheeled down the aisle to ringside. The bell for Round 1 of Holmes-Ali was yet to ring. Here are my notes, verbatim: “Joe Louis wheeled in—mouth hangs open—eyes staring—what is he seeing? He holds his head in his hands. An attendant wipes spittle from his mouth. His head sags. He sees nothing. The crowd cheers as Ali comes down the aisle. Louis doesn’t see him. Doesn’t hear the cheers.”

  Our Joe Louis, the greatest before “The Greatest,” destroyer of Billy Conn and Maxie Baer and Max Schmeling, slumped beside me in his wheelchair. After the early rounds of the fight last night that Louis was attending without seeing, a fight in which Larry Holmes established immediate dominance and exposed Muhammad as an old man, we found ourselves calling on the Lord of this cruel sport to spare us the sight of a wheelchair for Ali.

  If the live gate was a record 6 million, with another 45 million in theaters around the world, the paying customers, many of whom felt they were rope-a-doped, were cheated of the most furious exchange of the evening.

  From where I sat near Ali’s corner—by coincidence in almost the same relationship to his corner I enjoyed in his victory over Liston in Miami sixteen years ago—it looked as if Angelo Dundee wanted to stop the fight when he saw that Ali was no longer able to defend himself. Another round or two and this prideful warrior might have been as damaged as his ex-doctor Ferdie Pacheco thinks he already is. The faithful Bundini Brown backed Ali’s wish to go on with the ordeal. Bodyguard Pat Patterson tried to separate Angelo and Bundini. Then Patterson looked down at Herbert Muhammad, sitting directly in front of me. Herbert had not been able to watch the fight for at least the previous two rounds. Herbert gave Patterson a little hand signal and then buried his head in his hands.

  The Holmes-Ali fight was over and so was Bundini-Dundee.

  In the silence of the crowd, subdued by the disappointing spectacle, Sylvester Stallone, a rocky-eyed optimist, found something glorious in the effort Ali made and in the glory that had come to Larry Holmes. While I pretended to agree with him, because he spoke dramatic logic, my heart still belonged to the old music. That music had stopped now. Holmes and Stallone were dancing to a different bongo. And while we look before and after, and pine for what is not, is it not time to welcome new champions who pay their dues?

  [October 1980]

  The Welterweights: Sugar Ray and “Hitman” Hearns Walk with Legends

  THESE WERE GLADIATORS WHO climbed through the red, white, and blue ropes, before a star-studded crowd, in the shadows of the pretentiously, but aptly, named Caesar’s Palace. Only Sugar Ray Leonard and Tommy Hearns, two welterweight champions determined that there should be only one, were gladiators with a difference.

  Thanks to the technology explosion, the wonder of the satellite beaming a prize fight to almost 300 cities, 55 countries, and—they say—250 million people (grossing a possible $40 million), our modern gladiators were paid way over gladiatorial scale—$8-to-10 million for the winner and now undisputed champion Sugar Ray Leonard, with an estimated $6 million to console poor Tommy Hearns as he heads back to Detroit’s Kronk Gymnasium to nurse his wounds, rethink his mistakes, and plan his revenge.

  A title once held by fighters of legend like Henry Armstrong, Barney Ross, and Ray Robinson was claimed last night by a worthy successor in a fourteen-round battle of wills and skills that ranked with the great ones we’ve seen in this division over fifty years.

  As these two young men of contrasting backgrounds, styles, and personalities climbed through the ropes in a burst of energy and showmanship, the tension at ringside was almost unbearable. If there was a tension scale like a Richter, this was a 10.

  Music from Rocky blared, Caesar’s Palace flags waved, and an expectant crowd almost evenly divided cheered their champions, tall Tommy Hearns in a robe of white satin; the graceful, now revved-up Sugar Ray, dancing around the ring. Music up. Then silence. The bell. An animal roar, and The Showdown—as it had been hyped and indeed turned out to be—was our only reality. Nothing in sports equals this moment when two perfectly matched athletes—after months of sparring, running, bag punching, calisthenics, and tactical planning that prepare young bodies and minds for this terrible test—move toward each other at last.

  For round after early round, Leonard gave a credible imitation of Ali on defense in his prime. Desert heat still lingered in the dusk, and Hearns, who never had gone more than ten rounds (and only three times, at that) in his short but explosive career, tested his suspect stamina. Leonard’s strategy was dance and move away, side-to-side, in a boxing ballet meant to frustrate his tall, baleful, dangerous, but less experienced opponent. Hearns’s face—long and angular, Aztec in its impassivity, lack of expression becoming an expression to remember—was a study in combative concentration as he pursued the elusive Sugar, using his freak seventy-eight-inch reach to score with whipping jabs and occasionally crisp right crosses.

  Five rounds with Leonard hardly throwing a punch—was he giving the fight away? His answer was abrupt and violent in the sixth round. In a dramatic shift of gears, he was on the offensive now, reverting to the style of the first Duran fight in Montreal, catching Hearns with furious left hooks and left-right combinations. Big rounds for Ray. It is Hearns who is going backward now, eyes weary and worried. He’s ahead in rounds, but Leonard the boxer is outslugging him. Hearns is jarred and staggered.

  You could almost hear the frantic instruction from Hearns’s corner. “Now you dance and box, don’t let him nullify the physical advantage. Make distance your ally. Jab, jab, time the distance, shoot the right to the bruised left eye.”

  Thus the battle swings back to Hearns. There are brilliant, brutal exchanges, but Tommy has the range and has regained poise and confidence. With only three rounds to go, he’s at least two points ahead, possibly three, and the damaged eye of Sugar Ray Leonard is beginning to offend the squeamish.

  And then, just as in the movies (maybe they hadn’t played that Rocky theme for nothing), a desperate but self-composed—make that self-possessed—Sugar Ray reaches down as all the great ones do and comes up with an explosive rally that turns the tide one more time. Vicious lefts to the jaw and body, combinations that buzz-saw a tiring Hearns into the ropes. Terrible punches that make us tremble. Valiant but overwhelmed, Tommy Hearns is falling out of the ring. When he climbs back, the eyes are glazed. Queer Street they call it in the cruel vocabulary of pugilistica. Hearns fights back, but the air is out of the balloon. Leonard smells blood, smells victory, moves in. Hearns is about to fall when a referee more merciful than most moves in to grab the wounded Cobra. When he turns to raise the hand of the best welterweight in the world today, those in the $500 seats knew they had gotten their money’s worth.

  Old-timers were comparing it with Robinson-Basilio. New-timers were looking forward to Leonard-Hearns II. It could be World War III.

  [September 1981]

  The Gerry Cooney Story

  Black Day for White Hope

  WHEN I FIRST MET GERRY Cooney, he was a kid, an overgrown twenty-four-year-old who had won his battle with adolescent acne and knock-kneed awkwardness. He was an odd mix of shyness and teenage prankishness, with a dark Irish ambivalence toward the public recognition thrust upon him after he cast a white shadow on the black world of heavyweight champions.

  Since the Joe Louis-Ezzard Charles-Joe Walcott days, there have been only two Caucasian interruptions to the steady march of Afro-American heavies—the indestructible Rocky Marciano and the not-so-indestructible Ingemar Johansson. Along came Patterson, Liston, Ali, Foreman, Frazier, Norton, Holmes, Weaver, Spinks, and Tyson. Even the contenders, the overweights, the momentary champions were black—Page and Thomas, Witherspoon and Tubbs, Berbick, Tucker, and Dokes.

  For a generation, honkies have been relegated to trial horses and rugged losers like Jerry Quarry and George Chuvalo. White Hopers barely had time to learn his name before Duane Bobick was exposed in less than a round by Ken Norton.

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p; So, in a sports/business that has never outgrown its traditional ethnic rivalries, there is still an appeal to primitive emotions most fans have overcome in baseball and football. Cooney, in the early eighties, was a very hot ticket. On the eve of the Norton fight in the Garden, sensing the left hook would do to this aging Kenny what it had already accomplished with two other prestigious senior citizens—Jimmy Young and Ron Lyle—we talked about the fame and fortune that was about to descend upon him like a flash storm.

  One day he’s just a big kid commuting from what was then blue-collar Huntington to the traditional grime of Gleason’s Gym in downtown Manhattan. But before his fast-talking manager could say “God bless America,” Gerry is training in posh Palm Springs, with movie stars taking the place of the beery aficionados who had seen the good ones come and go at the old gym that stank so sweetly of blood and sweat and dead cigars.

  Almost before he knew what hit him—because he hadn’t been hit that hard or that often in an upwardly mobile career that had never taken him beyond Round 8, with nineteen of his twenty-five fights not even going four—the six-foot-seven-inch boy-next-door was in there for a mere nine million bucks with Larry Holmes, a true heavyweight champion. Holmes had gone fifteen with a vintage Norton, a punishing twenty-three in two bouts with Shavers, who had been left for dead by both Weaver and Snipes, and had proved himself a fistic Lazarus who could not only rise from the dead but bury them in his place.

  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.

  Cooney Questions Career After Losing to Holmes

  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.”

  Brotherly Love Takes Its Toll

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sp; 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.