Word: cooney
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From the start, Staff Photographer Neil Leifer's idea had a nice ring to it. With the film sequel Rocky III scheduled to open at about the same time that the long-awaited heavyweight fight takes place between Gerry Cooney and defending Champion Larry Holmes, Leifer proposed to exploit the coincidence by having Cooney and Actor Sylvester Stallone pose together. Leifer asked Stallone, who lives in Los Angeles' Pacific Palisades, to fly East. Meanwhile, Leifer booked a suite at the Concord Hotel in the Catskills, where Cooney was training. Stallone slipped into the hotel by a back door...
...Dutka talked to Stallone twice-in New York and with his wife Sasha in their West Coast home. Recalls Dutka: "I was immediately struck by Stallone's intelligence and capacity for self-mockery." Sportswriter Tom Callahan (210 Ibs.) and Reporter-Researcher Jamie Murphy were assigned to the Holmes-Cooney confrontation. Callahan set up camp in Palm Springs, Calif., to watch Cooney's final prefight training. One night Cooney looked over at the shaggy-haired Callahan and offered to administer an on-the-spot haircut. Says Callahan: "I figured I'd go along with the joke...
...happens that Larry Holmes is the undefeated heavyweight champion of the known (nonmovie) world, Gerry Cooney is the unbeaten No. 1 contender with an unknown wallop, and they are fighting each other this Friday night in a small ring out behind a large gambling lor for $20 million. Including ancillary payoffs, there may be as much as $50 million involved all around. The eyes of 32,000 people will glisten in the ring lights, and the blood of 2.5 million others will heat up in closed-circuit theaters, and much of the country, and some of the world, will...
What makes the match so appealing, and makes Cooney the heart of it, is a memory of when heavyweights could hit and boxing matches could end abruptly. Holmes has the more refined ability, the broader experience, the odds going in and the championship; Cooney has the "big bat." Holmes has had 39 professional fights and has won 39, to pitifully small acclaim. The most damning thing that can be said of him is that he took on and defeated all of the "best" of his time: 29 knockouts, ten of eleven in defense of the World Boxing Council title...
...sure," objects Muhammad Ali's old trainer, Angelo Dundee. "I think he may be bum-rapped as a one-arm bandit. He sets you up with the right. I give Cooney a good chance. They say he's clumsy. Well, a banger like that stressing power from the port side ain't going to look like no ballerina. Doesn't everyone know what's going to happen in this fight? Cooney's going to knock Holmes out early, or he's not going to survive the stretch. One way or another, it's going to be a knockout. Period...