OCR Text |
Show Five thousand boxing fans filled the Exhibit Hall in the Salt Palace Center Friday for the Larry Holmes-Gerry Cooney World Boxing Council Heavyweight Championship bout and sitting in seat number 12, row eight and section G was this reporter, Aldon Rachele of Roosevelt. Owners of tne tickets for seats number 10, 11 and 12 dished out their cash for their seats during dur-ing different visits to the ticket office and lo and behold the ticket owners were Aldon Rachele, Brad Monks and Jay Gates of Roosevelt. The room was jammed packed with 5000 fans and most of the fans were complete strangers to each other, but this was not the case among the fans sitting in seats 12, 11 and 10 in the eighth row in section G as all three were Roosevelt boxing fans. Larry Holmes knocked down Cooney in the second round, almost knocked him out of the ring in the sixth and battered bat-tered him into submission in the 13th to retain the World Boxing Council Heavyweight championship. Holmes landed nine straight right hands to Cooney, then an uppercut in the 13th round. He landed several more shots to the head as Cooney reeled back to the ropes and began to fall, keeping himself from going completely down when he caught a strand of the ropes. Then referee Mills Land stopped it as Cooney's trainer, Victor Valle, jumped into the ring. In the ninth round after a hard right to the head by Holmes, Cooney landed a hard punch that bent the champion over. Lane then stopped the bout for about a minute to give the champion time to recover and deducted two points from the challenger. Lane, who warned Cooney several times for punching low, deducted another point in the 11th round. After Holmes landed a number of good right hands, including two before the bell ending the 12th, the 32 year old champion, who has risen to the occasion occa-sion so many times in an unbeaten 40 bout career, ended it at 2:52 of the 13th. The crowd in the Salt Palace Center was pro-Cooney as they shouted, "Cooney, Cooney, Cooney," when he appeared on the screen before the fight and during the fight. Holmes received many boos, but he also had many fans in the Salt Palace and his fans jumped for joy and blocked the screen when Holmes was declared the winner. Most of the boxing fans were hoping that the scheduled 15 rounder would at least last ten rounds so that they would get their money's worth. Holmes started circling to his left and nullified Cooney's hook. Holmes sneaked in a good right over a Cooney left hook and the challenger went down. It appeared that the fight was going to end early and thus the fans wouldn't get their money's worth, but Cooney was game and his right wasn't as bad as had been reported and he gave the fans 13 rounds of exciting boxing action. Cooney could demolish opponents with his left, but he couldn't get the big punch home because Holmes followed the elementary rules of boxing, of going away from an opponent's power. Holmes quit circling and fought square away later in the fight and that gave the fans' their money's worth as the fighters provided a couple of rounds of great give and take punching. The fans had a fight of their own as they had to fight the darkness in order to find where their seats were located. Ushers with flashlights guided the fans to their seats, but sometimes they guided guid-ed them to the wrong location and the fan was forced to move to another spot. The fans would look for their seats and the fans who had found their seats would shout, "Sit down so that we can see the fight." The fans, who were looking look-ing for the seats, would usually invite the upset fan to a live fight in the Salt Palace. One fan found out that he was sitting in the wrong chair and he moved to the right one, which wasn't all right as some careless fan had spilled a drink on the chair and thus the chair was moped up by a pair of pants. T r " - 1 Y . - t . , ..... : - ' " ' 4 , 1 J. : f u f ' N X M ; X. ' ' t ' ; - - ;i L - f ' . v -1 . ! N fi ".,- - X --v.. ' ''V.'W ! I - l' - ; ; ; J i- "' I : ( , v - r ' ' ... 1 ' ' SECOND BASE is captured by the Giants' Larry Murray as he ' arrives at the bag before shortstop, Lee Schulz, gets the -baseball under control. ' ' |