I watched this. Tex really was a legitimate contender during a good era. Larry was just another level. And as one sided as their fight was, Tex was in it. Put it this way, Holmes knew not to stand in front of him. It was not the beating Cosell made it out to be even if Larry won every moment of the fight..there have been way worse beatings than that. As Larry said “no matter what I did to him, he was still trying to win”. Tex was a big man. He could compete today.
I gotta see this. I met Tex more than 20 years when we were both living in Nashville. He even invited me over to his condo (his wife at the time, maybe it was gf, can’t recall) was a music producer, which is why they relocated to Nashville) and he was a big coffee shop guy (before you had these Starbucks and specialty shops) and one time we met at a Perkins restaurant (think something like Denny’s) and he drank I kid you not SEVEN pitchers of coffee (the smaller ones with 2-3 cups they put on your table) in the couple hours we sat there while he told stories. He was very proud about retiring Howard Cosell, haha.
have always wanted to see Cobb v Bernado Mercado, theres a short clip in this documentary , wonder why its not available anywhere
One of Tex great one liners was in the Earnie Shavers fight. Tex came back to the corner & George said" Dont worry Tex he's not hitting & hurting you" Tex said " Well you'd better watch out for that ref then cos somebody is" lol Tex said Earnie was the only man that hurt him enough he thought about quitting
That was Tex's wife Sharon. Did she ever tell you about a rap record they made of Tex Earnie & Michael Dokes ? Funny enough Tex & Michael did good but Earnie was struggling , Sharon went to next studio said to the guy recording in there "Come & show Earnie what hes doing wrong". Guy said "Sharon I love ya to death but if you think I'm going to tell Earnie ,a man that could wreck the place with his bare hands, he's doing it wrong I'm not that stupid " LOL. I wonder what happened to it I never did get to hear it
No, I met her briefly once, maybe twice. She was working with Lou Rawls at the time IIRC. I can tell you another story that tangentially involves Randall. So there was this kind of punk-ish band, The Grinning Plowman, in Nashville. They were drawing good crowds, did a lot with projections and props and stuff and had a bit of a following. (One show went bad when they planned to do two women wrestling in oatmeal in an inflatable pool and they made the oatmeal but it soured and the smell was just horrid, but that’s the kind of thing they’d go for). I went to the band’s shared house a couple of times with a friend. He ended up being their sound guy. And it was kind of cultish. People would sit around and the band leader, Mike Ake (IIRC, like ache) would walk in the room and you quickly got the message that everyone was supposed to be quiet until Mike decided what he wanted to talk about … and he’d go on and on about his (shallow) philosophies and eventually people were ‘allowed’ to join the discussion … if they stayed on his topic. I didn’t really play that so I’d just ask him questions about other things and he’d get kind of sulky. So I was never told I wasn’t welcome but that was the vibe I got. Well, anyway, story goes (the part involving law enforcement is verified, the backstory comes from my friend) that one day Mike came home unexpectedly and caught his wife (who was also in the band) on her knees in an, um, intimate act with one Randall Cobb (who probably thought it was funny). He turned and left and got the school bus (bought at auction, still a yellow bus with the black stripes just with the band’s name where the school would be, which they used when they toured) they owned and drove off. Apparently, as you’ll see, completely off his rocker. Well ol’ culty boy Mike got hisself arrested when he pulled that easily identifiable bus up to a rural pizza joint, walked in with a gun and pulled an armed robbery. They emptied the register, waited for him to drive off and called the police and told them the robber was driving a school bus and, turns out, it’s not hard to find a school bus on a rural road in Tennessee. So Mike did some time, the Grinning Plowman was no longer grinning and broke up and that’s all I know about that. (This part all happened after I moved away, maybe 6-12 months later).
Funny Tex Cobb Quote was at press conference where Don King got up and said Tony TNT Tubbs is on a mission and has a “short fuse” Tex Quipped “no he ain’t, I shared a dressing room with that boy, He sure ain’t got no Short Fuse!”
Tex on learning right away that Philly was a fight town: “I saw two winos fighting on the street and they were hooking off the jab.”
