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And a sad one, as Joe Bugner, the sparring partner, knows. Bugner is a congenial Hungarian giant, less innocent than Cooney. Twice Bugner went the distance with just about the best of Ali ("I'm so proud of that"), including 15 rounds for the championship in 1975. When Ali was brought to Cooney's Palm Springs camp several weeks ago to stir publicity, Cooney was taken aback by the husky raspiness of Ali's voice, the depressingly common effect of too many punches. "It scared me a little," Cooney confesses. Bugner sees it differently. "It's that Muhammad's down in the pits now," Bugner says quietly. "He can still raise his voice, but he's afraid to. The old Muhammad would have been shouting, This guy's an amateur and the other guy's my old sparring partner!' But he couldn't say three words." As Bugner knows, and Cooney will find out, and Holmes must suspect, the ending is usually sad.
The final night in Palm Springs, Cooney acknowledged that he had not looked very sharp sparring the past few days. "I don't know what's wrong with me. No boost. I'll snap out of it." Angry scrapes under his right eye and across the hump of his nose—from roughhousing in his hotel room, not in the ring—had obviously been hindering him. To protect against aggravating the cut and necessitating another postponement, he had to wear a cumbersome headgear with a blinding nose strip. He sometimes looked worse than slow, full of doubts.
But after a few workouts in Las Vegas he brightened. "I feel much better," he said. "I think I was over-rested." As the fight neared, he professed to have a good feeling. "You know what it is? We're all coming closer together, Hilly and everybody, pulling together, nice and warm. When the fight gets this close, you think about it less and less. You've already thought about it enough. You just go for walks and start to feel stronger."
The Heavyweight Championship of the World. "It's unbelievable, isn't it?" Cooney whispered. "The most prestigious thing there is in the world." In sports? "No, in the world." Just before he gets into the ring, his friends say, his eyes turn to ice. "In the Jimmy Young fight, it hit me right before they announced me. I guess it's a split personality. I'm myself again usually just after I knock the guy out. That's such a tremendous high, the next half-hour. The most terrific half-hour in the world." Then, because his fights are short, "I have to answer those same questions." Can he take a punch? Can he go the distance? Cooney is of the opinion that some questions are better left unanswered.
— By Tom Callahan