Gerry Cooney

Could not agree more.

Cooney was better than any of the belt holders that came along. Dokes, Weaver, Witherspoon, Page, Tate, Berbick,Thomas...all of them! Gerry was better because he stood out. Gerry was the second best heavyweight in the world when he fought Larry Holmes.

What hurt him was inactivity and Don King. The opponents Gerry needed were controlled by Don and he would not put them in with Gerry.. so Cooney went into the ring against Holmes with less than one round of fighting between October 1980 and June 1982. In the same time Larry fought 39 championship rounds against Snipes, Leon Spinks, Berbick and Muhammad Ali.

Can you imagine how much better Gerry might have been with two ten rounders against Berbick or Snipes under his belt in preparation for Larry?

So not only was his chances destroyed by inactivity going into that fight, but the ordeal of the fight itself, which was a brutal war, meant his career was never to ever recover from it.

Gerry Cooney might have been the second best heavyweight champion of the 1980s.

 

Like this guy said from an older thread.. Michael Spinks forever under appreciated. I thought it was funny that this thread about Cooney inevitably moved towards, he should’ve beat Spinks.

 

By the time the Cooney fight came up Michael Spinks was already about five times the fighter Cooney ever was pound for pound imo. Though I didn't like Michael at heavyweight (to be frank, I think he sucked at that weight), as a light heavy even the relatively short time he was there he was phenomenal imo (and keep in mind I was for a time a diehard Saad and Mustafa Muhammad fan back then).

 

Cooney was a very flawed fighter with practically no defensive skills, but damn was that left hook ever brutal. I think his left hook was even better than Frazier's.

 

good read dbblechin!

 

“Sucked” I think that’s a leap to far don’t you?? So Holmes had slipped, but he was still 48-0!!! And Spinks beat him. Plain and simple. Holmes would still be a force way later on into the 90’s. Beating Mercer, giving Holyfield and McCall tough fights! To say Spinks sucked is incorrect. Spinks clearly won the first fight, the rematch could’ve gone either way, I scored it a 1 point win for Michael. A blowout over Tangsted and Cooney and then Tyson. Tangsted and that version of Cooney are probably on Par with a few of Wilders lesser title defenses.

Sucked at Heavyweight, no.

 

Spinks was still a good fighter at heavyweight but the massacre by Tyson has forever damaged his heavyweight rep with fans especially casual fans.

 

And neither of them beat Young as emphatically as Cooney did. Nor did Tony Tucker and a list of guys who fought Jimmy afterwards.

I agree Lyle was probably as meaningless as Archie Moore was on Muhammad Ali’s record. Still, it’s an emphatic win. The kind of win that gets a prospect noticed. It would have been a whole lot more meaningless if Cooney laboured with the old stager for the full rounds. I am not convinced every top prospect could have emulated that kind of excitement beating that opponent.

Norton was also at the end of the line. Cooney only duplicates a Shavers win, one that got Shavers a shot at the title in 1979. The thing is, Don King was not letting any of his fighters meet Cooney. Everyone was on standby for a title fight. Old man kenny Norton was available. At least Gerry did the business on him. Respectable fighters like Ledoux and Cobb certainly didn’t. What exciting wins were any of the others producing? Page was losing to Berbick on points. Tillis was losing to Weaver on points. Snipes was beating Coetzee on points.

I don’t know about that. All that can be said about Dokes was He landed a fight with Weaver.

And who was Weaver but a guy Larry already beat? The title weaver had was bogus anyway. After controversially beating Weaver, Dokes blew the rematch then lost to the guy Weaver already beat!

Sure Norton, Young And Lyle seriously were yesterday’s news but at least they were sensational wins. Dokes did nothing sensational at all. And neither did any of the lost generation of kings Merry men.

 

would have oved to see Cooney/Dokes!!!

 

You and Dubblechin make excellent points

 

Great post. Very educational

 

Clooney's worse enemy was his own mind. He had the weight of All of White American placed on his broad shoulders and when he failed , White American turned on him, called him A bum. Cooney is one of the most underrated contenders in history. Even on this site, he gets sold short by plenty of posters. Most see the losses to Spinks, and old Foreman as some indication he wasn't very good. And that's wrong. His career was basically over after the Holmes fight. He didn't recover from the loss , and "got back on the bike". Big punchers are usually mentally very fragile, and once their broken mentally they usually fade. See Mugabi, Foreman, Tyson, etc. That's what happened to Cooney. But make no mistake. Cooney was one of the scariest punchers in boxing history, and if he had the mentality of Holyfield , he wins the Heavyweight Championship after the loss to Holmes.

 

yes ultimately he failed but his failure was an orchestrated failure because he didn’t get the fights he needed between Norton and Holmes to stay fresh or progress before the title shot.

I think everyone else given a serious chance against Holmes apart from Ali, were much more active and better prepared for a title fight.

I think the Holmes fight ruined him. There were a lot of head shots, it was a real to and fro war from round 7 onwards, and of the two of them, only Larry was prepared for that.

although Snipes decked Larry, and it was a scare, I think Renaldo was taking a beating in almost every other moment of the fight. Berbick offered resistance but I don’t think he took Larry into quite as deep water as Cooney did. Sure Larry wasn’t close to losing to Gerry, but he was taken to greater depths. Weaver certainly came back from a beating (where Holmes nearly shot his bolt trying to finish him off) to trouble Larry, I will give him that. But Larry started way too fast. foolishly pushed himself to near exhaustion only because he didn’t respect Weaver enough in the first place. Once he recovered he whupped Weaver as much as he was in the beginning. It seemed a misjudgment. For Cooney, Larry was much more wary. Because I think he knew Cooney was a better fighter.

yes this is true. You are correct in that Cooney ultimately is a “never was”. But potentially he was more of a champion in the making than a lot of so called belt holders of that time. Holmes would get a lot more credit from beating Gerry Cooney if we could have seen what Gerry would have done had he fought more often against the other guys. At the same stage he beat Norton I would pick him over Page, Weaver, Dokes or Tate. But that’s just me. I cannot prove anything.

But I fully accept he didn’t beat those kinds of guys and therefore cannot rate as high as any champion.

He had more going for him than somebody like say, Cleveland Williams.

 

Page called him out after Young.