A Quote by Gerry Cooney

The only regret I have in my career, is my managers wanted a big payday, and I wanted four or five more fights before going in with [Larry] Holmes. That would have made all the difference.
I got messed up between my fight with Ken Norton and my fight with Larry Holmes; I got messed up with alcohol. I needed at least a year more experience, with three or four more fights before I fought Holmes. But I couldn't get any fights. Don King had all the contenders, and unless I signed myself over to him, I couldn't get a fight.
Blessed with Mom and Dad's remarkable genes, raised on big words and big, iconoclastic attitudes, Larry and I, before entering kindergarten, knew who we were, what we wanted, and how we would get there.
At first I didn?t give a damn to go down in history. I wanted to win. But the more I won, the more I thought about leaving something behind. Yes, it's as important as hell to me. I want to leave something that people will remember me by. Of course, a lot of boxers want to do that. But it's not easy. Take Larry Holmes, he was the big man after Muhammad Ali, he wanted to emulate him, but for some reason the public didn?t take him like they did to Ali. I think people won?t fully understand what I contributed to the sport for years.
I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘OK, I’m looking back on my life. I want to minimise the number of regrets I have.’ And I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.
I was the kind of person who knew what he wanted to do; I wanted to write, I wanted not to be in school, and I felt that university would just be spending another four years of my life before I could write.
I felt (a) it was a great role and (b) I wanted to stay in town. I wanted to stop going to these four month and five month gigs up in Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver or down in Mexico. I wanted to be around my son, Max. This came along and I was like, 'I really want to play this guy!'
I felt so good when I fought Larry [Holmes]. When I fought Larry the first time, I mean, first time in my life, I mean, I could remember I wanted to fight.
But having more freedom she only became more profoundly aware of the big want. She wanted so many things. She wanted to read great, beautiful books, and be rich with them; she wanted to see beautiful things, and have the joy of them for ever; she wanted to know big, free people; and there remained always the want she could put no name to? It was so difficult. There were so many things, so much to meet and surpass. And one never knew where one was going.
I always knew that I wanted to work and I knew I wanted to be a singer and an actor. I knew that every choice I made would help me get to that point. So the better the choices I made, the more of a chance I would have to get to where I wanted to be.
As soon as I heard there were people in Germany who wanted to restore the old part of Dresden, I wanted to help. Even before the Nobel, I had started this group, the Friends of Dresden. The destruction of Dresden made a big impression on me when I was a child, and I wanted to do this.
Larry Page, co-founder of Google, is an unbelievable big thinker, and there was a saying in Google that if you wanted to know the future, go to Larry.
As far as I'm concerned, if you're only going to call managers who have won a trophy any good, then basically, you have four or five.
Since I was five or six years old, I just wanted to be a professional football player. I wanted to play against the best players. I wanted to play in big stadiums in front of big crowds, and I was desperate to play for my country one day, and thankfully, I was lucky enough that happened.
Anything that I wanted to do in my career that I wanted to do always worked out. The stuff I got talked into always failed. All the stuff I was talked into, by brilliant managers, because it always came down to, "Know how much money you'll make?" And then it would just fail.
'An Education' was a complicated piece of work because it came from a tiny essay, so it took me a while to find the story I wanted to tell and the characters I wanted to tell it about. That really only emerged after four or five drafts.
I went to Massachusetts to make a difference. I didn't go there to begin a political career running time and time again. I made a difference. I put in place the things I wanted to do.
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