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Following the workouts under the white tent, pretty girls and children queued up to sit on Cooney's broad lap and have their pictures taken with the bent-nosed Santa Claus. This silly sweet scene every day galled Hilly but delighted Cooney. "Little kids are the best part of being a celebrity," he said, bouncing a squirmy set of twin babies. "What good is this doing us?" Hilly fumed. As for the pretty girls, Cooney, a bachelor, regretfully subscribes to the boxing axiom that women have ruined more men than war and pestilence. He talks daily by telephone to one young lady friend recuperating from an automobile accident. But for months he has been celibate, admiring the poolside bikinis only from a distance. When he went swimming with a girl, she was 84-year-old Pearl Miller, who was a regular spectator at the workouts and who affected him like the twins. "Old people have so much to say," he says, "and no one to say it to."
Cooney is unafraid of sentiment. One of his old school friends, Gary Gladstone, sits in a wheelchair. They insult each other merrily all day. When Gladstone goes off to bed, Cooney murmurs: "God, what a fighter he is. Cancer, bone transplants, amputated leg, everything. Do you hear the way he jokes? It's like nothing to him. How much courage can you have?"
In the sense of bravado, Cooney was not a particularly courageous child. The first step to the heavyweight championship is always a dreary staircase to some cold, terrifying gym. He did not rush to the climb. "Boxing wasn't my dream," he says. "It was just a sport to me." To his father it was something more. Gerry enjoys likening the Cooneys to the Corbetts in the old Errol Flynn movie Gentleman Jim, and he approves of the nickname "Gentleman Gerry." Had Ward Bond portrayed the father, that would have been Tony Cooney. But Bond played John L. Sullivan.
To the common observation that a New York street background would bode better than a suburban Long Island one for a fighter, Gerry Cooney counters that there were bedrooms in his home as treacherous as some boroughs in the city. Four Cooney boys were at large in Huntington Station, and, until he died of cancer six years ago, one tough Irishman was in charge. Arthur J. Cooney ("Tony" was his fellow construction workers' misunderstanding of "Cooney") applied the two disciplines of his life, the Merchant Marine and ironworking, to rearing children. The amalgam amounted to walking a narrow beam at attention. Sometimes Eileen Cooney wonders if her sons did not see gyms as sanctuaries. The challenger's mother is a tall, robust woman, oldfashioned, sort of flusterable, and nice. Her grandmother was acquainted with Gene Tunney's family in Ireland and compelled her as a child to keep still whenever boxing was on the radio. (Today she keeps still when attending her son's fights, peeking up only when the crowd noises are favorable.)