Did Mills Lane and the temperature during Holmes/Cooney affect the outcome?

Would have loved for Cooney to face Snipes or Berbick as prep for Holmes but the hype machine meant contenders would ask for too much money to face the new hope.

 

For a fighter who didn't get enough seasoning because of facing such soft opposition before get a title shot, Gerry Cooney did quite well against Larry Holmes.

- Chuck Johnston

 

If Cooney had Gil Clancey as his trainer / Mgt he would beaten Holmes in 84-85 and would have been the 1st 100 million fighter..... What could of been sadden's me.....

 

Cooney was pushed along as quickly as possible to cash him in on a big payday.

No version of Cooney...no matter how well prepared would have beaten Holmes.

 

He'd probably loose to both K brothers, though we haven't seen Vitali for a while so can't say.

He'd beat every body else.

And he had the tools to beat Holmes.

Two times out of 10, maybe.

 

Cooney did well in the first 4 rounds he won #1 was winning #2 but suffered the knockdown and won #3 & #4. After that I had him winning just 2 rounds I believe. In Vegas they scored on aggression a lot and that had some (not all) to do with why Cooney was close on two of the 3 judges cards as he was clearly the aggressor.

Bottom line is Victor Valle's gameplan for that fight was awful Cooney has said he was also over trained (The fight was originally scheduled for March of '82 not June) but Cooney was 'injured' and the fight postponed and he ended up having something like a 22 week camp total for the fight.

Cooney's only chance was to blast Holmes out of there in the first 5 rounds but he stayed back and tried to outbox Holmes for some idiotic reason :roflatsch

The fight pretty much had to be outside as there were not many arena's at the time that could hold 32,000 people maybe the Astrodome or Super Dome but they would not have paid the huge site fee that Caesars in Vegas did.

Huge event and a pretty good scrap that unfortunately was mired by Don King and Dennis Rappaport's racist rhetoric to hype the fight.

 

I heard Cooney say that he really wanted to go out hard for the KO in the first few rounds but Rappaport wanted him to box for the later the rounds or the distance. Not the best idea against Holmes.

 

I watched this bout live. The scoring by the two judges who had the bout ckose is well known to be an utter disgrace. Nobody scored this fight close. Holmes had cooney on the canvas...two point round ...plus three points were deducted from cooney for low blows. AP. Ring. BI. Ko magazine. Ny times all had holmes comfortably ahead at fights end.....as I also did.

 

Jerry Roth had 115-109 Holmes that scorecard was pretty indicative of the fight and the point deductions. Duane Ford and Dave Moretti had it 113-111 at the time of the stoppage. I have a copy of the fight were after the rounds all 3 judges give the scoring. Seems Ford and Moretti kept mentioning Cooney coming forward and being the aggressor. Either way their cards were off.

 

Have seen several interviews with Cooney where he says he fought the wrong fight and if he had it to do over again he would pressure Holmes and not sit back and box in the early rounds. Said he was trying to prove he could go the distance.

 

Mills Lane had previously refereed Muhammad Ali-Bob Foster, Holmes-Norton, and around ten other high profile bouts during the late 1970s and early 1980s. But it was really his conduct of Holmes-Cooney which established his reputation as a referee that started him on the road to Canastota. Not a flamboyantly physical referee like Larry Hazzard, this former WW maintained control of the action despite being dwarfed by the participants.

It was only later that he became more of the trademarked "Let's get it on!" type caricature, although he did use that line before Holmes-Cooney and Holmes-Norton in a less affected manner. [You only see him mouth those words to Holmes and Norton though. If it was an ABC broadcast with Cosell announcing, you could be sure that Howard would be chattering incessantly over it.] He finished his pre-fight instructions more generically for Ali-Bob Foster in 1972, with a traditional "Good luck to both of you, shake hands now, and come out boxing!" However, even then, these two legends weren't staring each other down or trying to psyche each other out, and Ali's not trash talking as he often did at those moments. Both are paying attention and listening intently to Lane, whose voice and words were as clear and commanding then as they were when he became much more famous over a decade later.

Funny, how a simple catch phrase can capture the public imagination and makes one who uses it become a household name.

In 1984, Michael Buffer started announcing, "Let's get ready to rumble," in an understated tone on ESPN's weekly Top Rank Boxing shows as a tribute to Sal Marciano, who originally used it during those broadcasts as a preamble to the main event of the evening. Buffer had begin his ring announcing career in 1982, and was well established as ESPN's house ring announcer by then.

Sal Marciano's intended catch phrase was an excited, "Good Night Sweet Prince!" whenever a full ten count was completed over a fallen competitor, but it never caught on as intended. As one scribe pointed out at the time, Shakespeare's Horatio didn't speak it to a sleeping Hamlet, but a dead one. Sal wasn't the quick witted wordsmith legendary ESPN colleague Chris Berman had already instantly become.

Nobody was going to compete with Berman's incredible litany of parodical nicknames, dramatically satirical recaps, and Cosell aping "He...Could...Go...All...The...Way!" voice overs of touchdown replays for attention. There was nothing like the freewheeling and novel ESPN of the early 1980s, with "Sultans of Swing" playing as background music while Berman did his crazy baseball recaps. I've never been a baseball fan, but Chris Berman's rundowns with Dire Straits as his backup group were essential with the morning coffee, just to hear what nicknames he'd come up with. [To this day, I can never hear "Sultans of Swing" w/out also the Berman earworm, "Jim 'Love Me Two Times' Morrison catches the fly ball to end the inning for the White Sox!" Ah, good times!]

So while Marciano's affected "Good Night Sweet Prince" fell flat, and he became a sportscasting footnote, the line he gave away to Buffer in 1984 was federally trademarked by 1992, a line which Wikipedia and all sources I've read on line wrongly credit Buffer for creating. But everybody who remembers the early days of ESPN with Sean O'Grady and Al Bernstein as his sidekicks before Buffer started ring announcing on ESPN knows that Sal Marciano was the true originator of that proclamation as Buffer trademarked it over a decade later. I wonder if Buffer would even acknowledge Sal Marciano as his inspiration for that success today.]

For Holmes-Cooney, Mills Lane was cited by critics as exemplary in his actions deducting points from Gerry for those low blows. I don't recall a single negative comment from the press about how he handled matters. Lane not only refereed Larry's first title win, he also refereed the last against Carl Williams, as well as Berbick, Marvis, Witherspoon, Michael Spinks II and Holyfield.

Holmes-Cooney did for Mills Lane what Manila did for Carlos Padilla [who himself refereed four of Larry's title bouts]. It shifted his officiating career into high gear, all because Gerry repeatedly punched Holmes low to force his hand. As with Buffer, the evolution and rise of his own "Let's get it on!" trademark was made possible by the attention he was given after his handling of Holmes-Cooney.

 

Are you asking if the events that unfolded during the fight had an effect on it? Indubitably.

If a frog had wings, he wouldn't bump his ass a-hoppin'.

 

Excellent post, Anubis!