Reading the Morrison v Damiani thread got me thinking about how the Italian would do against the hard hitting Cooney. I'd give Damiani a fifty /fifty shot at getting a decision over him but could easily end up with a similar ending to the Mercer fight.
I'd say that Damiani wins by knockout. He has to brave an early storm against Cooney, but I see him getting past it and turning it around quite quick on the Italian. Francesco just has to watch his nose.
Have to go with Gerry here. Damiani has an even shorter and less revealing resume than Cooney. He didn’t look that good against a well-past-it Greg Page, got KO’d by Oliver McCall and Ray Mercer exposed his glass proboscis. Cooney would cut this Italian pastrami in half at the waist with his wrecking ball left hook to the body. Plus, Francesco bears a strong resemblance to what an older version of one of the Boston Marathon bombers would look like. Gerry was a New Yorker through and through, but there’s a lot of Irish people in Boston and he’d definitely be reminded of that act of terrorism every time he looked at Damiani — so he’d be motivated to put Francesco down as revenge.
Francesco beat very serviceable versions of Biggs, Broad and DuPlooy, before any of them went truly south. He looked quite good on film. That said, pre-Holmes Cooney was just dumb enough to not know he was vulnerable, which made him extremely dangerous. Damiani didn't have the fortitude to survive that onslaught.
The win over a 10-loss Page was by virtue of two points deductions and otherwise would have been a draw. I don’t think Damiani looked good in that one. The Biggs fight was probably the best Damiani we got to see imo. He was motivated (rematch of the gold medal match) and pretty sharp, although Biggs found him easy to hit. Francesco won via a cuts stoppage in five, so it would have been more interesting had it not been for the premature conclusion. I also wonder with Tyrell being off for a year after Tyson before that with no tuneup and knowing Biggs’ drug history what kind of condition he was in (as in had he spent much of that time in rehab, was he clean, etc.). DuPlooy and Broad were gatekeepers. I don’t put a lot of stock into those wins. I do think Francesco had ability but wonder about his resolve. I agree that Cooney takes him, but with a different mindset perhaps Damiani could have really done something. I always kind of gathered he didn’t much care for boxing (hence his relatively premature retirement). It’s a shame he got hurt in training before he was supposed to fight Evander (Bert Cooper ended up being the sub there) as that could have been interesting. Ultimately, I think the Mercer and McCall bouts were revealing about where his ceiling was.
I have just fed this into my self-made AI program and it says there is a "99.5% chance that Damiani loses by a painful, flukish nasal injury that only happens once in a career of an Italian heavyweight."
