clarinews@clarinet.com (FRED LIEF, UPI Assistant Sports Editor) (01/15/90)
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (UPI) -- George Foreman fights Gerry Cooney Monday night in a bout that should carry a public warning: dangerous to health. Print the warning on tickets, which sell for $400 ringside. Plaster it over television sets wired for the pay-per-view broadcast. Post it on the door of every gym and saloon. Cooney is 33 years old and hasn't fought in more than 2 1/2 years. He is a recovering addict and faces the demons of drugs and drink every day. His voice is eerily beginning to resemble Mike Tyson's. His diction will win no prizes in elocution contests. Yet Cooney may be in the bloom of youth compared with his opponent. Foreman just turned 42. He is big and bald and slow. His weight has soared past 300 pounds and he is now fighting at what he believes is a svelte 250. Foreman took a decade off from boxing. He has fought a succession of palookas in his bid to regain the heavyweight championship. He can still throw a punch but moves with all the alacrity of a water buffalo plowing fields. He wants his comeback to serve as an inspiration to people over 40. That is all well and good. The aging champion summoning strength for one last run is always a fine thing: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar throwing in a sky hook, Nolan Ryan ripping off a third strike, Chris Evert taking aim at the U.S. Open, Bill Shoemaker kicking home one more winner, Mark Spitz making plans for another dip in the pool. Nor, as Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney have shown, is there any reason to hang up the guitar when 40 comes. So it is the seniors circuit is suddenly the rage. Arnold Palmer and Lee Trevino walk the fairways forever young, and baseball players, stomachs hanging over their belts, romp in the Florida sun. But boxing is different. It is the only sport in which the stated intention is to injure one's opponent. And you don't have to be a neurologist to know that at 40 the body was not meant to take such punishment. This is not news to Dr. Ferdie Pacheco. He is a general physician who has been involved in boxing for more than 25 years and served as Muhammad Ali's doctor. He is speaking by telephone from his home in Miami. He says he has just gotten out of the tub and has been thinking about Foreman-Cooney. He calls it a ``carnival geek show.'' ``I think it's a reckless disregard for the safety of boxing,'' he says. ``It makes a burlesque of the process by which contenders vie for the title. Quite simply, there's a real possibility of acute injury and a certainty for chronic injury.'' Pacheco has seen finer physical specimens than these two fighters. ``Cooney's in Alcoholics Anonymous,'' he says. ``And that's what he looks like -- dried out, withered, drawn, taut. He's got gray hair. He's certainly not the picture of beaming health. ``George is admittedly 250 pounds, which is way over what he should be, and he's 42 and didn't fight for a number of years. Anyone who's 42 and that much overweight and competing in the most strenuous sport there is has great potential to injure himself.'' Pacheco says the two are at the ``end of their rope'' and that Foreman has ``misjudged his capacity to be in a serious fight.'' He says if either fought Tyson it would be tantamount to ``rapid execution; bang bang -- goodbye.'' He recently watched another geek show -- Leon Spinks against Tex Cobb. Pacheco says that sort of fight between equals, in which the fighters slap each other around, is more dangerous than a one-sided quick knockout. The brain tissue takes a more sustained beating. Pacheco says the possibility of death from bouts of that kind is not altogether remote. ``It could happen,'' he says. ``If they don't die in front of you, you can at least go to the bank knowing they'll have brain damage that'll last.'' Pacheco opposed last month's showdown between Sugar Ray Leonard and Roberto Duran, as well as the last fights of Ali and Larry Holmes. He says he is troubled by the way Joe Frazier now talks. He thinks 35 years old should be the limit for boxers. He says he understands the public's appetite for headline performers, but he reminds that 10 rounds in the ring is far different from a concert by a raspy Frank Sinatra. ``He's not getting hit in the head,'' Pacheco says. Pacheco is a longtime boxing television analyst. He was under contract with the Showtime cable network to serve as commentator for this fight but refused to work. He describes his position on boxing as one between the ``harsh'' stance of the American Medical Association (which wants an outright ban) and the ``criminal neglect of boxing people.'' He says boxers must be saved from themselves. ``There isn't a boxer alive who doesn't think he can't get back in the ring and do it,'' he says. Put Foreman and Cooney among them. Foreman has said age 40 should not be a death sentence. For all concerned, let's hope he's right.
clarinews@clarinet.com (FRED LIEF, UPI Assistant Sports Editor) (01/16/90)
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (UPI) -- George Foreman, driven by visions of
another heavyweight title and fortified by vats of ice cream, is
boxing's Ponce de Leon.
And win, lose or draw, Monday night's heavyweight bout with Gerry
Cooney at the Atlantic City Convention Hall brought Foreman no closer to
the fountain of youth than was poor, misguided Ponce centuries earlier.
Foreman last held the heavyweight title in 1974. He fought a few
more years and then took a sabbatical for a decade before embarking on a
comeback that has had all the dignity of a roller derby collision.
He says he is 42 now. Elsewhere he is listed as 41. Some dispute
this discrepancy as if it held the key to great truths.
This is all part of the mystique of the thick waisted, bald-headed
preacher on the road back, and all part of the sweet science of hype for
boxing's latest -- and surely not last -- tawdry venture.
Foreman weighed in Sunday night at 253 1/4 pounds. This was
practically anorexic considering he once topped 300 pounds and was
better suited for a trucking weigh station than a doctor's scale.
The weigh-in at Caesars was actually televised live by ESPN.
Apparently, the network could not find a tractor pull competition to
fill the programming slot.
So there was Cooney in a black robe waiting his turn on the scale
while the crowd at Circus Maximus Theater, drinks in hand, howled for
the gladiators. Cooney checked in at 231, cracked a contorted smile and
stepped aside.
Foreman was next. He discarded his red-hooded robe and was
proclaimed fit at more than one-eighth of a ton. All the while, Roman
centurions stood guard in the wings while promoter Bob Arum and scores
of handlers and cameramen patrolled the stage.
``Who would pay to see this fight?'' asked one woman on her way up
the escalator leading to the Circus Maximus Theater.
It was a question well worth asking. The Convention Hall received
an extra 1,500 seats to raise capacity to 13,000. Arum said he was
``sure'' the bout would sell out. How many seats the casinos bought to
fill the house remained to be seen. Tickets ranged from $50 to $400, and
if ever evidence was needed that the dollar doesn't buy what iIt'l` be very food
5ntertainment.''
We are not exactla talking rUfindd entertainment here.
Cooney has had proble-s with t(e bottle and drugs but says he's
clegn now. He has not fought in more than 2 1/2 years. He ha3 not won a
Vight for almost four years.
/ Conpider that`Foreman's last four opplnents zerd against such
luminaries as Everett Martin, Bert Cooper, J.Balarming state of the heavyweight division is such that the
winner of Monday night's bout moved into position to face Mike Tyson for
t