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"I'm not so sure," objects Muhammad Ali's old trainer, Angelo Dundee. "I think he may be bum-rapped as a one-arm bandit. He sets you up with the right. I give Cooney a good chance. They say he's clumsy. Well, a banger like that stressing power from the port side ain't going to look like no ballerina. Doesn't everyone know what's going to happen in this fight? Cooney's going to knock Holmes out early, or he's not going to survive the stretch. One way or another, it's going to be a knockout. Period." So that's the whole fight, though not the whole fury.
Deplorably but inevitably, the Great White Hope, sometimes pronounced Hype, has been made the theme of prizefights between blacks and whites as far back as barges. Cooney's handlers regularly bring up the issue to denounce it. Their slogan: "He's not the white man, he's the right man." Cooney seems to have an authentic aversion to the subject and generally says nothing. The way black Promoter Don King and Holmes talk, Cooney is just the same traditional white emissary who has been sent against the black savage since James J. Jeffries hurried out of retirement in 1910 to try to wipe the grin off the face of Jack Johnson. Rocky Marciano, who retired undefeated the year Cooney was born, was the last white American to wear the heavyweight crown. When Swede Ingemar Johansson shook Floyd Patterson loose from the title momentarily in 1959, Ingemar had one wonderful year to enjoy it. He was the last white champion. Since then, promoters have searched high and low, usually low, from Omaha to Bayonne, N.J., and found mostly inept white brawlers like Ron Stander and Chuck Wepner.
Ever resourceful, All, until 1964 Cassius Clay of Louisville, Ky., responded to the shortage of good white opponents by inventing black white hopes. (Before their fight in Zaïre in 1974, he even tried to pass off George Foreman as a Belgian.) Yet he never sounded as mean spirited, as hateful and hurt, as Holmes does now. "If Cooney wasn't white, he'd be nothing," says Holmes. "I'm going to cut him, hurt him, open his lip, blacken his eye—for justice's sake. They talk about his great left hook. But what am I, a little child? He's two inches taller [maybe three or four]. Big deal. I'm going to carry him to punish him. And when the referee breaks us, I'm going to pop him and say, 'Here, take this with you.' You have to crawl before you walk. I crawled. Cooney didn't. He jumped ahead because he's white."
With a melancholy sigh, Arcel insists: "Holmes doesn't really think that way. He's a very decent guy." Mike Trainer, Welterweight Champion Sugar Ray Leonard's attorney, considers the White Hope demagoguery "bad basically, but also bad business. If you are going to promote a race war, you're going to discourage a lot of people from going to the closed-circuit theaters. I wouldn't take my wife to this fight."