The Harder They Fall (17 page)

I grew up in hell. My father was an alcoholic and my mother enabled him. He was a strong guy, physically very abusive. And I grew up basically learning five things: you’re no good, you’re a failure, you’re not going to amount to anything, don’t trust nobody, and don’t tell nobody your business. That’s
what I learned in my house growing up.

I swore I was never gonna be anything like him, and I became just like him. Except I wasn’t physically abusive, but boxing helped me out with that. I spent a lot of my childhood hiding in the basement, because if I hid down there he couldn’t see me and he wouldn’t hurt me.

I remember he wanted us kids to be marines, so one night while drunk he woke us up and shaved our heads. He would wake us up in the morning by pouring cold water over us, pulling us by the hair and ears, horrible things. I found out later a psycho does those kinds of things. So the last nine years of his life, he didn’t drink and I swear I’m never gonna be like him, and at age thirteen, I started drinking. Boone’s Farm apple wine. I used to hold my nose and drink it down. I liked how it felt. It took care of the hole that I felt. I had a deep hole here [pointing to his stomach], and those five things I learned growing up, that’s how I felt, how I learned to feel.

My dad wanted to control me I suppose, and that was a way to do it. Make me not feel. But when I drank, all of sudden I became attractive, I became funny, spontaneous—and I fit in. Once I had some Boone’s Farm apple wine … I remember getting so sick the first time I drank it. I was crawling around the backyard saying “I’m never gonna do this again.” But there was something about those five or ten minutes when I was alright with the world. I’ll never forget that, and so until I got sober and stopped drinking when I was thirty years old, I drank to get to that high. The bad part about my drinking was I was pretty good at it. I learned how to mix and match. I didn’t have to work, just train. I was a young kid. I didn’t have to train until three or four in the afternoon, so I would sleep until two, grab a bite to eat, and catch a train into the city to go spar. I always knew I was going to be a fighter.

At sixteen, I won the state championship in New York, in front of 21,000 people at the Garden on Saint Patrick’s Day. And then I won the New York Golden Gloves heavyweight title in 1976. My father got sick, so I didn’t go to the finals of the Olympic trials. I didn’t go because, you know, I say because my father was sick, but basically I had low self-esteem. I thought I wasn’t good enough—all those things had an effect on me. I really regret those days that I didn’t pursue the opportunity, even if I didn’t
succeed. I was afraid of looking bad—things that hit me at my core. I wasn’t worried about upsetting my father; I was angry at him. My father was a mean, nasty guy. It was his way or the highway. That’s how my life was around him.

In some ways, I think I became a fighter because he learned how to control life around him, and he was strong. I went to the gym to express my anger. Next thing I know my picture is in the newspaper, so I was somebody. I remember going to the store when I was sixteen and looking at that paper and saying, “That’s me!” Anger fed me and kept me alive. Amazing. I anesthetized the pain all those years, drinking and hiding and later with drugs and not feeling. You know, I say that if I would have not drank, I would have been heavyweight champion of the world. If I would have become the champ while I was drinking, I’d probably be dead today.

When I was young, every night there were parties to go to, different clubs to hang out in. I could drink pretty good and I could handle it pretty well, or so I thought. I didn’t have somebody in my life that would say, “Hey, Gerry.” They didn’t know how to reach me. You know, I try to work with a lot of guys now. You can tell them things, but most of them can’t hear.

Fortunately, boxing kept me in line. I did take halfway decent care of myself, but as I got older, I started taking less care of myself. After knocking out Kenny Norton in 1981, I don’t fight again for thirteen months, and in that period of time, I started drinking. I started doing some recreational drugs and then I’m fighting for the heavyweight championship of the world.

I lost to Larry Holmes in 1982. I think I drank and did drugs during this period of time to have an excuse in case I failed. I could blame the drink: “It wasn’t me.” Now I realize that in life I have to go for that nut. I got to do everything I can to get that nut. And if I don’t get it, it’s okay because I did everything I could.

I remember the old guys in the gym telling me, “Don’t get caught up,” and I’d say, “Thanks, but it’s not going to happen to me” and then everything happened to me. The thing about life is that it keeps repeating itself.

You know, I do a lot of work in prisons and with troubled kids and
gangs, and I’m thinking, “Am I really helping anybody?” And somebody told me that if you help one person and that person doesn’t go back to jail, he changes the lives of many people. Like in
It’s a Wonderful Life
with Jimmy Stewart. And that’s a great way of looking at things.

I go to an orphan program a couple times a week and work with kids and I love ’em, but they’ve been mistreated for so long that it’s hard for them to open up. Just like me as a kid. I can relate to them and talk to them in a language they can understand ’cause I was there.

Anyway, going back to my career, I used to drink after every fight and would go wild. In 1981, I fought Kenny Norton and knocked him out in fifty-four seconds of the first round. That night was the first time I did some cocaine, and I started drinking twice as much as usual. Coke numbed me out and covered the hole up. Coke also helped me reach my bottom a lot quicker, so I’m grateful for that.

The pressure was building. Here was a kid with my background on the cover of
Time
magazine and
Sports Illustrated
. Everyone was focusing on me, and it was a very frightening thing, especially with the set of tools I had. No skills. The only thing I knew was not to trust anybody. I couldn’t trust my father, my mother, anybody. So there I am, in the spotlight. I go from “You’re no good. You’re a piece of shit” to “Everybody loves Gerry Cooney.” What the hell is that all about? I couldn’t understand or trust it.

My old man died in 1976, but he never learned how to live. He never enjoyed his life. I went through life with blinders on till I stopped drinking. Then I could finally see. I’d fall down, dust myself off, and move on.

The night I fought Larry Holmes for the championship, I had a phone line to President Reagan installed in my dressing room. If I won the fight, the president would call to congratulate me. It was unbelievable, but I was so afraid of failing. So in the fight, I got stopped in the thirteenth round. Now, I want to tell you, during this time I got all this shit going on. My managers hate each other. They are also fighting with my trainers. I have this high level of insecurity, dysfunction. Chaos is everywhere, and I’m trying to deal with it all.

I had this girlfriend at the time who got into a terrible car accident. It was very depressing. I felt some guilt about it because the day of the
accident we were supposed to go out, but I was drunk and didn’t show up. She goes out and gets in a car wreck. Alcohol was perfect for me, helped me get rid of the guilt. All these things, you know …

I went to a party in the penthouse of Caesars Palace hotel. Everybody I ever wanted to meet from sports, movie stars, Frank Sinatra was there for
me
. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Muhammad Ali, everybody. I was on top of the world and I couldn’t feel a thing. Couldn’t feel it. ’Cause I knew it could be taken away from me.

I think I was overtrained for the Holmes fight. I had a trainer who was a good trainer, a good man. I love him, but I trained a little too much. I learned since being sober: balance, work hard, but play. So I worked too hard for the fight. It was 115 degrees in Vegas. I got every kind of excuse you can imagine. Holmes was a great fighter. That was my biggest excuse! He was a great fighter. The press kept telling me I couldn’t go the distance with him, so I tried to go the distance instead of just go out and fight. And you know, Holmes is ranked the fifth greatest heavyweight in history, and that’s the guy I had to fight that night. I hadn’t fought in thirteen months ’cause Don King wasn’t letting me. King owned everybody, and I wasn’t signed with King, so he was keeping me out. He didn’t want me to gain the experience I needed in order to beat Holmes ’cause I wasn’t signed with him. So I was only fighting once a year. Not nearly enough.

This fight was the first time that I wasn’t nervous. I just wanted to hit him. I’ll tell you a story: I’m fighting Jimmy Young in Atlantic City, and I’m in my dressing room on the third floor, all by myself, and I’m thinking, “This guy’s gonna kill me.” So I start thinking about jumping out the window, but I didn’t. I went out and beat him. Knocked him out in four rounds. Flash forward … 1981, I’m fighting Kenny Norton, and three nights before the fight, we’re on
Warner Wolf Show
. Warner says, “How you feelin’, Gerry?” Kenny is sitting next to me, and I look at him and say, “I wish I was fighting you right now!” I was full of shit, you know what I mean? I couldn’t wait the three days? See, I had that fear, but in some ways it made me work so much harder. They made me out to be a monster, but I was just a man.

I didn’t have that fear when I fought Holmes. I wish I had! I just
wanted to hit him. I didn’t like him as a man. So I go twelve rounds with him. I get three points taken away for low blows. I go out for the thirteenth round saying, “You can’t hurt me.” And I let him hit me instead of saying, “Let me go out there and take him out this round.” Then he knocked me out.

After that I really crashed and burned. That was really a tough time, for a couple of years. I didn’t want my mother worrying about me, so I’d go over to her house once a week, sit in front of the television for a couple of hours, then leave.

I kept thinking of John Lennon’s “I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round.” That’s where I was at the time. I regret it. Nobody cared about me and I didn’t care about them. I was just existing, surviving, and that’s what my old man did. Paid bills, drank when he wasn’t working, and drank while he
was
working, and so I didn’t have any options. I couldn’t stand my managers. They hated each other. I was the hero to my family, so I’m fixing everybody with money: “Let me fix this problem, let me fix that problem.” It got to the point where my family expected it, and so I finally had to cut them out of my life.

So I needed to go through all of that. I had a couple friends I stayed in touch with, but that was it. I also stayed close to women. They would hold me and tell me I was okay. And even that eventually stopped working. Then I don’t fight for a bunch of years. All of a sudden Spinks beats Holmes and they’re calling me to see if I want to fight Spinks, and I say, “I’ll take it tomorrow!” So I go to training camp and the fight doesn’t happen for two years. I’m in training camp for two years for a fight that’s supposed to happen in six, seven weeks. It was postponed ’cause of this lawsuit or that thing. So I start drinking again. “This fight ain’t ever gonna happen,” I tell myself. It’s on, it’s off. Even when I’m walking into the ring I’m thinking, “This ain’t gonna happen.” I was drinking right up to the night of the fight. Not taking care of myself. And I got stopped in the fifth round.

I was fed up. It’s all bullshit. That’s the only fight that I really regret. Spinks didn’t belong in the same ring with me. And I cut him up pretty good. If I cut someone, he’s finished, but I was a walking dead man that night and didn’t know it.

I did know it, I did know it. I remember telling a friend of mine before the fight, “I don’t know what I’m doing here.” And so that was the beginning of the end. I moved out to East Hampton, and I met this old guy out there, and we went and drank every day. One day I woke up and said, “I got to give this shit up. Who’s in charge, man? What’s going on?” The next day I woke up the same way. I turned on the TV and there just happened to be an infomercial for this rehab out there. I call them up and say, “Listen, I might have a problem,” and they say, “Why don’t you come on down?” So I go see this guy and he walks me around the place and says, “You don’t have to stay here, but if you can’t make it out there, you can come back.” I’m thinking, “I don’t want to be here,” so I gave it up. I just gave it up on my own. No rehab.

I remember someone telling me, “You got to be careful. You get three, four, five months, you’re gonna think you’re all better,” and I said, “Not me, man, not me.” And two months later I’m back out there drinking again. For me it was the best thing that could have happened, because it had to be proved to me that I was not in control. So I drank for two months, and then one day I’m going to my office. I say, “Let’s go have breakfast,” and I see an IHOP over there. This guy I knew was there and we start talking. He tells me he hasn’t had a drink in three years, and that’s when I heard it. That was sixteen years ago, and I straightened out right then. April 1988.

It’s been a long journey. I tell this story all the time. You can be anything you want, but you have to put your hand out. It’s been a miracle, magical. I’ve been to Africa, watched the sun rise from a hot air balloon, sailed to Central America on a giant sailboat, traveled through the rain forest, been to Trinidad, to Europe on my honeymoon, and I live “one day at a time.” And I love my life.