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Then, along with the far less bombastic Mike Jones, Rappaport was half of the managerial duo labeled, first by Bruce Trampler as I recall, "The Whacko Twins." If memory serves,
Dennis was Whacko 1 and Mike was Whacko 2.
So Rahman was at a press conference months ago to hype the Maskaev bout when he said, "Rappaport, you're like Halley's Comet, you come around every 30 years."
They said the older folks in the crowd slapped their knees. Actually, Rahman's arithmetic was off because it is now 24 years since Cooney ran a respectable second to eight-year champion Holmes.
Tempus does fugit faster when you're over 50. I remember he had Dick Young tossed out of one his workouts I think for picking Cooney to win. Perhaps Holmes forgot that the only two boss scribes to pick ancient Muhammad Ali to beat Holmes were the clueless Young and the tennis maven Mike
Lupica.
I picked Cooney to win in Lou Sahadi's Boxing Scene, where I once penned 10 of the 11 monthly articles as editor Ben Olan made me pick about four nom de plumes. Cooney had a puncher's chance, especially early, and I was rooting for my own pocket because the Cooney Cult was strong in New York. So Holmes had security escort me out of one of his workouts too. I would've let boss Howard Cosell know but why have him flip his toupee over nothing?
The Cooney Express had long been ahead of itself. In my first stint at The New York Post, my boss, the legendary Jerry "Blackie" Lisker told me go out to the Cooney home in Huntington, L.I., and return with material for a five-part series on the local slugger. I think Cooney was about 24 then, not too long out of Walt Whitman High School. So how would I pad that out. Lisker had a plan.
"Part one is the future champ's infancy, throwing punches in the cradle up to first grade," Lisker said. "Then the formative years of five to 10. Then his father starts prepping him, ages 10 to 15."
It looked like the quotes for Part one would be mostly "goo-goo, gaga," I said.
"Exactly," Lisker said, "his very first words as mother Eileen looked into the bassinet. She heard him say, "gee," and Gerry's father, said, 'Gee, gee, get it? Golden Gloves. He will fight in the Golden Gloves.'"
Somehow, I milked the Cooney tale for a sizzling three-parter as I recall.
Back to the Whacko Twins.
Rumor was that Rappaport, and possibly Jones, had made a fortune by "blockbusting" in sections of Queens such as Cambria Heights. That was the awful practice of scaring nervous white people into selling their homes cheaply by making them think the area was about to turn not only all black. I came to know, respect and work with Jones and I hope he never engaged in such sickening behavior but I can't say for sure. The fleeing whites would take what they could get for their properties and hightail it out to Nassau or Suffolk counties where they figured to keep their enclaves extremely white.
Rappaport had enough "blockbuster nights" to put a lot of money in boxing. He and Jones were not without novel ideas. They managed black, Jewish southpaw Ronnie Harris, a slick boxer who could "stink out" any arena, and when they could not find him fights at boxing's Mecca, they picketed outside Madison Square Garden. "UNFAIR TO BORING AFRICAN AMERICAN, JEWISH SOUTHPAWS' or something like that their picket signs read.
Cooney came later as did the gold medalist, Howard Davis Jr., the Freeport kid who was on the awesome 1976 Olympic team that wowed them in Montreal. Cosell raved on and on about Sugar Ray Leonard, not without reason, but it was Davis who won the Games' Val Baker Cup as the best boxer in the competition.
They made what seemed like a decent deal with CBS but Leonard, ably advised by lawyer Mike Trainer, was a network free agent and jumped the TV dials with his fights and also stayed free of promotional entanglements.
Like Mark Breland later, Davis' amateur achievements were not equaled when he began punching for pay.
The Whackos actually handled Cooney adroitly but their own relationship cooled along the way, eventually resulting in a Whacko split. The biggest mistake they and Cooney made was his not getting back into the ring soon after the loss to Holmes. Personal and family issues swirled around Cooney and his career went steadily downhill.
Jones and Rappaport were different in many ways. It was Dennis, not Mike, who spoke about Gerry "winning for America" and making racial insinuations. It was Dennis, not Mike, who walked around chanting "tick, tick, tick" as though Cooney was a time bomb about to explode in Holmes' face.
Jones, who died young at 55, was probably happiest in boxing when overachiever Billy Costello won a junior welterweight title in 1984. Maybe his other favorite fighter was rugged Glenwood "The Real Beast" Brown. Jones loved punchers.
Jones almost became the manager of Whacko 1A, Mitch "Blood" Green, but
Green never showed up for their meeting at Green's mother's house.
He had a white heavyweight from Pennsylvania who had a glass jaw and brittle hands, a kid named Bobby Deitlmeyer. If he didn't have a heart attack that killed him in 1990, Jones had a good shot to manage a raw Canadian kid named Lennox Lewis. He had already bought and sent some furniture to the Lewis home in Kingston, Ontario.
But Jones is gone and Rappaport is in Vegas, trying to hit the heavyweight title jackpot that eluded him with Cooney. His handpicked manager for Maksaev is Fred Kesh, a former IRS employee (that can be valuable around boxers) who is also, if I get this right, is a brother of one of Rappaport's ex-wives. Get rid of the wife, keep the brother-in-law as the boxing manager. That probably really fries the ex-wife.
A classic Rappaport story came when he and Cooney were in a limo riding to a Manhattan courthouse one spring morning. Cooney was trying to ready my boxing column in The Post. Rappaport tried to distract him. Cooney got to the part where I revealed that, behind Cooney's back, Rappaport was also managing Tony "TNT" Tucker. Cooney threw an Irish fit and I don't think he ever looked at Rappaport the same way after that. Cooney felt his manager was disloyal. I think Rappaport said something like, "How about those Mets, Gerry."
It's two dozen years later and they are at the Thomas and Mack Center, not Caesars Palace, and Rappaport has the guy with a puncher's chance who owns one KO over the prohibitive favorite.
Tick, tick, tick. I can hear Mike Jones' high-pitched, excitable voice. He is cackling. What is Whacko 2 saying....
"Don't bet the Russian guy," Jones whispers. "Dennis can't do it without me. Hold your money for November 11 and lay it all on Shannon Briggs to knock out that Wlad Klitschko. That one will be just like Cooney-Norton. Briggs will be Cooney and Klitschko will be Norton. Bet the house."
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