Word: cooney
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...