Word: cooney
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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...
...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...
...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...