Was Eddie Gregg Gerry Cooney's biggest career win ?

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His father was really bad apparently.

 

Too lazy to look it up but who did eventually succeed in becoming the next white heavyweight champion?

 

Gerry Cooney hit hard but that's it.
He came along at the right time with the right managers to have the hype taken seriously.
Being white, "Irish", New Yorker with a big punch. That was marketable as gold in the post-Ali HW era.
That was even better than Greg "the next Ali" Page coming out of Ali's hometown Louisville with his amateurish showboating act. They were both exposed on the same night, Cooney losing to Holmes, Page losing to Berbick on th undercard. At least Page went on to beat a couple of contenders and briefly held a trinket when they weren't exactly hard to come by, which is a level about Cooney still. Cooney just stayed fighting in he lower leagues, and that includes Eddie Gregg, and was thrashed when he stepped up against Spinks.

 

Coetzee was white and won a WBA belt in 1983. But he wasn't American.

Damiani (Italy) in 1989 and Morrison (USA) in 1993 held the WBO title but that wasn't taken seriously, the WBO belt had no credibiliy at that time at heavyweight.

Probably the Klitschkos !

 

Cooney really lost to all the guys who were big fights for him at all. Hard puncher but not very skilled or experienced. They rushed him to fight Holmes.

 

Eddie Gregg hovered at around #15, getting up to #13 on a couple of occasions, in Ring's ratings between the summer of 1984 and the spring of 1986. A couple months prior to the Cooney bout Gregg fell out of Ring's ratings, though he hadn't lost since the Broad fight a year and a half before, he wasn't the most active of fighters.

I'm not sure where the other mags rated him. I'd like to have that information but I don't have it available. Perhaps the WBA/WBC/IBF rated him in the top 10, but at this point in history I don't give the organizational ratings much credence. Edit - Watching Cooney-Gregg on YouTube I see that the WBA had Gregg in at #3. Ugh.

Gerry Cooney fell out of Ring's ratings in the summer of 1985. His win over Gregg did not put him back in their top 15, so Cooney was unranked by Ring going into the Spinks bout.

As for the Cooney - Gregg fight, at the time I thought of Gregg as a solid near-contender after seeing a few of his bouts on TV and was surprised when Gerry blasted him out so early.

Now I feel like Gregg was tailor-made for Cooney to look good. Cooney's management was very good at finding Gerry opponents like that.

Cooney's best wins? Young (Ring ranked #12 going in) for beating a cagy veteran and looking good in doing so ... Norton (Ring #9 going in) due to cultural impact... Eddie Lopez for getting a solid 8 rounds in against a tough fighter and a future top-15'er... George Chaplin for a quick win over a name near-contender... Gregg, same reason... Dino Denis, for a quick win over a motivated near-contender...

Cooney's biggest win, by far, was having a management team who marketed him well, put him against low-risk opponents (I think they even thought of Michael Spinks and George Foreman as sure-things going in), and getting him BIG BIG money.

 

Have we already forgotten the titanic Botha Schulz title match?

 

Good call.