The fight folk get impatient with writers using boxing as a metaphor. They’re likely to tell you, “Everything is like boxing but boxing isn’t like anything else.” Still, the year-long build up to the heavyweight title fight between champion Larry Holmes and challenger Gerry Cooney danced so blatantly on the racial divide that it was downright pathetic. This ran in Willamette Week on June 22, 1982.
Dear fat-headed America, the dreamer. Once again, logic drops right out of the ratings and magic gets the vote. Confess: you didn’t think Gerry Cooney could, should, or would win. You just wanted him to.
If you’ve paid off your bets, the hollow in your pockets is echoing with laughter. You dreamed a feast and woke up with pie on your mugs. That 50-1 shot in the quinella collapses in the first turn and rolls merrily in the dust, kicking and hiccupping with unbridled levity. But ask not at whom the horse laughs. He laughs at you.
Those who sneer at the “materialism” of the United States should take a close squint at the mystical undertow that was tugging on the levelest heads in the land before the Holmes-Cooney bout. Characters who certainly knew better lined up with wise guys and bimbos to lay out money on one of the dumbest bets in memory. And they celebrated as they did it.
It was party time that Friday night, June 11. In Portland alone, hundreds of brand new ON TV antennae had been installed just in time for the heavyweight title bout. The regular cable company sent bills for June that bore a printed apology because, having been outbid in the stratospheric finagling, they were unable to carry the event. The big dishes that scooped the fight out of the sky cost four to six times more than a ticket to the closed circuit viewing of the bout. Groups of five to fifty fans chipped in on the price and bickered about how many friends and relatives they could bring along and whether the freeloaders should be charged a six-pack or a full case each.
There were crowds in front of flickering screens in living rooms, basements, and parking lots all over town. They were not there hoping to see Larry Holmes get smashed. Nobody had anything much against Holmes, and the zest for the bout had nothing to do with him. Scarcely anyone expected it to be a “good fight,” but that was irrelevant. The bout’s magnetic appeal was something else entirely.
America has a thing about heavyweight boxing. The Big Man division is our turf. There have been occasional raids on the title from abroad, but the crown always comes home to God’s Country. The legend of the heavyweights is the myth of Hercules and Ajax. The good, big man can beat anybody smaller than he is. According to the mystiques, the heavyweight champion can beat anybody on the planet in unarmed combat.
Heady stuff as symbols go, and we were in a buying mood.
Things have been slipping so badly for so long that they’ve got us down in the mouth. We could use a bit of success, even third-hand. Gerry Cooney appears and a cockamamie hope flowers in our downtrodden dreams. Suddenly the heavyweight crown looks like the lucky rabbit’s foot we’ve been searching for.
A white champ, we suspect, would be proof that the good old flag isn’t finished yet. Somehow, in the murky recesses of our craniums, it seems that Gerry Cooney as champ could turn the whole thing around. A million new jobs would appear overnight. Detroit would unveil a new car that runs better, lasts longer and costs less than the best of the Japanese marauders. Our leaders would suddenly have haloes and high IQs. Johns Hopkins would publish research proving that five ounces of Irish whiskey per day prevents cancer, heart disease and radiation sickness. A dollar bill would buy 10 beers or 5 gallons of gas, and the cute little green things would breed in your pockets…. Of course, a wrong-headed bet for superstitious motives is not a sign of moral turpitude, but when a huge chunk of the population makes one simultaneously it’s a sign that the temper and digestion of the nation are not in good order.
We’ve lived high and grown soft, and the creeping stench of the second-rate is scary as well as offensive when it’s rising from our own doorstep. We have trouble remembering what it’s like to try harder, and we suffer from an insidious doubt that we can do it at all. Maybe we figured Cooney was, indeed, a soap opera hype and, since we were wondering about our own authenticity, we sent him out as point man. Let him draw the fire and we’ll see if hype jobs are surviving this season. Or maybe a depressed and deflated white America was just hungry for a symbol of its own vitality. If only Cooney could become the heavyweight champion of the world, it might be easier to believe that being a white American was something worthwhile after all.
We bunched hopefully around the flat screens like the blacks who, in 1937, gathered around radios from Harlem to Watts to listen while Joe Louis fought for this same crown. Like them we were looking for a sign. We wished. And to make the magic work, we threw money into the well.
There were 40 guys in that living room to see the fight, and three of them were for Holmes,” said a witness at one party. “To begin with everybody claimed they weren’t betting, but as the prefight interviews went on, the money started flying. The three guys who bet on Holmes walked out after the bout with well over $1200 between them.”
That was just one room out of hundreds, in one town out of thousands. Cooney, a big, homely kid who hadn’t fought in a year and whose professional experience was laughable to begin with, stepped into the ring with the highly skilled, perfectly conditioned, seasoned and proven Champion, Larry Holmes, and it was Cooney who was the odds-on favorite to win. Ridiculous.
And what exactly were we banking on? A lucky punch. As far as most of us knew, that was Cooney’s only chance. It’s rather magnificent in a way, like the Children’s Crusade or the jungle suicides in Jonestown.
But the gods must love America. They didn’t give us what we wanted; they gave us what we needed. They picked our pockets, as we deserved, but they also saved us from our fantasy binge. The Fates were evidently in the mood for mercy rather than for justice. Everybody won that night.
Cooney is not the champion. We would have backed him if he had been a total clod, and we backed him with no evidence that he was anything much. The fact that he is tough, gritty, and a far better fighter than we had any reason to expect exonerates us from our idiocy. Despite having been denied practical experience by his looney-tune managers, Cooney is good enough to hang our white hopes on for years to come. He has a future, and that future belongs to us.
Strangely, like birthday presents for naughty kids, we also got our champion. We molded him ourselves with the chill of our rejection and denial, and with the hungry heat of our need for the other guy, the white guy. We pushed Larry Holmes. We drove him. During the long year that the hype for this fight has been building, while Holmes worked and trained, he had to feel that yen growing in the whole nation, pressing in on him, crowding him out. He was willing to be the champion of everybody, but we didn’t want him. Toward the end, the pressure must have been like living at the bottom of the sea.
A lesser man would have crumbled in defeat before he ever set foot in the ring. Holmes hardened and purified and pushed through. He fought Cooney courageously and with complete conviction. He fought brilliantly, drawing on a dazzling arsenal of versatility. But, there was more. Holmes came off the screen that night and grabbed us. If we had never really looked at him before, he forced us to see him then.
He wasn’t just fighting Cooney. That night Holmes took on the whole nation. We were all there in the ring against him. The judges themselves, the whites who didn’t want him, the blacks for whom he had never been champion enough. And he won.
Then he cried. Nobody seems to be mentioning those brief seconds after Holmes’ hands were raised in victory. We all saw it, and yet, because it isn’t mentioned we begin to wonder if it actually happened. There was Don King, master of the absurd, with his arms around the champ. And tough Larry Holmes, who unflinchingly absorbs legendary blows, who gets hurt and comes back as a matter of course, this same Larry Holmes laid his big head on King’s shoulder. The screen was filled with the huge face of the world’s champion crumpling and sheeting with tears. He cried. It had been a brutally painful bout, and there was pain in his face. But he cried from joy because he had beaten us all and if nobody else in the world knew it, he did. And he cried in relief, because his own need to win had been an enormous burden.
It lasted only a few seconds. Then Holmes snapped back and was a pro again, the gracious champion. Interviews taped the following day reveal a different Larry Holmes, temporarily drained, exhausted, but calm. He has found his rock and his dignity. He was always a decent palooka, but if he was not a great man before this fight, he is now, and he knows it. He doesn’t need us any more, which is ironic. Because now, at last, slow dim ninnies though we are, he’s got us.