LARRY & GERRY
IT WASN’T supposed to be like this. The racial divide was meant to play the fighters off against one another. The insults, the stirring, the hostilities, the privileged, the resentful and the overlooked were multiple sides of the same toxic coin.
It wasn’t a grudge, it was war. It wasn’t sport, it was politics. It wasn’t the best boxing could offer, it was the worst. Battle lines weren’t just drawn when Larry Holmes and Gerry Cooney met in the sweltering heat and toxic pressure of Las Vegas 40 years ago, racial lines were.
Yet here, 40 years on, following 13 rounds that delivered an unexpected and thrilling violence that saw both men emerge with a lifetime of credit, Holmes and Cooney sit before me and they laugh together.
They smile for cameras, they raise one another’s spirits, they crack the odd joke at each other’s expense and they finish each other’s lines, like a couple ageing gracefully.
Over the years, their double act has acquired a high-mileage. They’ve done dinner shows, autograph signings and joint appearances, despite all the rubbish that hovered like a poisonous cloud over the pre-fight promotion, none of it matters now. For Larry Holmes, former heavyweight champion, and Gerry Cooney, well-regarded former heavyweight contender, are great friends. As much as I’d like to share anecdotes of tables being flipped, chairs flying, and even of me being left with a cut lip like Howard Cosell was when he tried to intervene between Holmes and Cooney many moons ago, I can’t. There is no such story. Holmes and Cooney struck up a 40-year friendship after their fight, after that manic night in the Caesars Palace car park in Sin City, when their souls were fused by electricity and ferocity.
There weren’t many who were not guilty of pushing the racial overtones of the 1982 showdown. Even this publication headlined, with a picture of
