fighter seriously, nor were my editors. We didn’t even consider traveling to Sacramento to cover his first comeback fight, against someone named Steve Zouski, an undersized heavyweight who had already been knocked out by Tyson, Tony Tubbs, Marvis Frazier and even Lee Canalito, a bogus heavyweight managed by an even more bogus heavyweight, Sylvester Stallone. Nor did we travel to Oakland for his second, against an even smaller heavyweight, Charles Hostetter, although I did happen to witness this farce live, having coincidentally been in the Bay Area on vacation at the time. In fact, we didn’t hop onto the
up in much the same way Foreman was now being rebuilt, only without the big finish. The truth was, despite his impressive record, Cooney was a reluctant warrior who’d had just two “real” fights, against Larry Holmes and Michael Spinks, and was stopped in both. Still, he was big (6-foot-6) and comparatively young (33, as opposed to Foreman’s 41) and even the guys who beat him acknowledged he had a little somethin’-somethin’ on his left hook. Besides, Foreman hadn’t looked like anything but what he was – a fat, bald, lumbering middle-aged gent – in his now 19 comeback fights.
positively giddy over Cooney’s chances to beat Foreman. “I’ve never seen a guy so dedicated and who has worked so hard on a fight as he has,” Clancy said. “He’s a completely different fighter.” And watching Foreman’s training methods, which were unorthodox to say the least – he spent most of the time in his daily workouts facing the overflow crowds, arms on the ring ropes, doing his by-now standard fat old guy comedy routine – only further emboldened Clancy. “If George somehow pulls this off and wins this fight,” he said, “it will set back boxing training 100 years.”
George Foreman express until he took on Dwight Muhammad Qawi, the former light heavyweight and cruiserweight champion who as a heavyweight resembled Joe Frazier after a six-month food crawl. By then, George had stopped seven opponents, none of whom you could identify in a lineup and each of whom was significantly outweighed. And even after
But another observer, Mort Sharnik, a former TV executive who had briefly worked as Foreman’s publicist and knew his habits, told me, “This can’t be it. They’ve got to be having secret workouts somewhere.” Sharnik knew whereof he spoke. The night before the bout, I had dinner with Clancy at a restaurant on the Atlantic City boardwalk. Walking back through the
“Now get this right: I’m coming back for life, liberty and the pursuit of MY happiness.”
Foreman stopped a surprisingly resilient Qawi in seven rounds, it was hard to see his comeback as anything more than a traveling medicine show. Even Bob Arum, who once promoted a guy jumping over a canyon in a rocket- powered motorcycle, was calling it “a dog-and-pony show.” Foreman didn’t care. He kept rolling up the KOs against the type of guys whose names appear on the wrong side of the records of just about every top heavyweight. It wasn’t until his fight with Gerry Cooney, nearly three years into his comeback, that I began to think that maybe Foreman was onto something there. Not that I had any great respect for Cooney. As far as I was concerned, he was an artificially pumped-up heavyweight who because of his unusual size and the color of his skin had been sold to the public as some kind of monster. He had been built
And it didn’t help that I was close with Gil Clancy, who had trained Foreman for his 1977 fight against Jimmy Young, the defeat that sent Foreman into his spiral of despair for the next 10 years, and had witnessed the frightening scene in his dressing room afterward, when a hallucinating Foreman went berserk and needed to be restrained by several men. “He was like the Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull,” matchmaker Bruce Trampler, another witness, told me. “It’s the only time in my life I’ve seen a truly berserk person. Everybody was heading for the hills. He was, I believe, temporarily insane.” Foreman thought the episode was a message from God; Clancy said it was heat exhaustion. The two men had a falling out, and now Clancy was training Cooney. And Clancy, who had trained Emile Griffith to the welterweight title along with many other top fighters, was
hotel around 11 p.m., we heard what sounded like the thudding of a heavy bag. We followed our ears to a remote ballroom and, sure enough, there was the notoriously nocturnal and secretive Foreman engaged in an intense late- night workout. Clancy’s normally-tanned face went chalk white. He suddenly realized he had been had. As did Cooney the next night, when George starched him with an uppercut that could have dropped Andre the Giant. What impressed Clancy even more was the pinpoint- accurate five-punch combo Foreman landed to Cooney’s face a few seconds earlier. “I’ve never even seen Sugar Ray Leonard land a combination like that,’ he said.
Foreman ’ s second-round annihilation of Cooney was brutal.
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