Word: cooney
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
Heavyweight Challenger Gerry Cooney quotes its lines with fervor. Olympic Figure Skater David Santee trained to its triumphant sound-track music. Its plot is adapted by feature writers and by coaches for locker-room pep talks. At V.F.W. halls, in cocktail lounges, and surgical scrub rooms, Americans on any occasion of victory or defeat, no matter how evanescent, are liable to exclaim, "It's just like Rocky!" The story of the virtuous and vulnerable heavyweight, Rocky Balboa, the Philadelphia club fighter who "went the distance" (Rocky, 1976) and battled to the championship (Rocky II, 1979), has become...