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In a more or less square boxing ring strung by Tony out back, where a lopsided Everlast bag still swings from a tree, Gerry lost his first bout—to a girl. In a childhood cluttered with embarrassments, this was not an unusual event. "As a kid, I had so many complexes," says Cooney, tugging an ever present brown scalley cap over his eyes, giggling. "Skinny, knock-kneed—6 ft. 1 in., 130 Ibs.—pimples, big nose, big ears . . . What are you getting such a laugh out of?" He is still a kid.
The thrilling sight of his brothers in the amateurs began to attract him to the sport. "It was so great; I just thought it was so impressive . . . being a fighter." So he gathered his courage and went out for Golden Gloves. "When I won the first time [age 16, a lanky middleweight], it came over the announcements at school [Walt Whitman High]. Sitting in homeroom, I got goose bumps all over my arms and legs."
Sad songs of his father fill Cooney's conversations with strangers. His dearest recollections and direst regrets are open to everyone. In a conflict of stubborn wills, Gerry moved away from home at 18. "When I heard how he had gone around calling me 'my son, the fighter,' and how proud it turns out he really was of me, that really hurt, you know?" When he fell ill with cancer, Tony bought himself a motorcycle and made lonely journeys to Montauk, at the far end of Long Island, to look out at the sea. "What did he think of?" the son wonders. "The absolute worst thing in life is to be alone." On one car trip to the hospital for a cobalt treatment, Tony had turned to him and said: "I'd rather crawl to the hospital than ride with you if you won't live in our house." Now the scalley cap is pulled down because Gerry is crying. Tony died shortly after his son won a second Golden Gloves, as a heavyweight. Cooney might have tried for the 1976 Olympics, but says sullenly, "I lost my taste for fighting."
When he inexplicably found it again after about a year, two Long Island real estate men found him and began to manage and market the Irish puncher as, in the way real estate men would naturally put it, "a hot property." The phrase is more like Dennis Rappaport, 36, the gaudier member of the firm, than Mike Jones, 46. Both men seem curiously proud of the nickname, "The Whacko Twins," earned in a number of ways. When their first fighter, black Middleweight Ronnie Harris, converted to Judaism, they sued to allow him to wear his yarmulka in the ring. They lost. When not enough attention was being paid to Harris by the matchmakers at Madison Square Garden, they sent a man around in a gorilla suit. Their boxing backgrounds before 1976: as a child Rappaport was aced out for the boxing category on The $64,000 Question TV quiz show by Psychologist Joyce Brothers, who had memorized the Ring record book; and Jones is a former champion of Camp Chicapee in Penn sylvania. This is a funny business.