Gerry Cooney Quotes

I've been boxing for 25 years and I need exciting fights.

Kids always used to come up and ask me if I ever fought Mike Tyson, and I used to tell them that we couldn't because we were in different weight classes.

I grew up in a gym in Miami, the one where Muhammad Ali trained. I had 142 amateur fights and lost three.

But as an amateur, the highest level you can box at is the Olympics. I did that at 18 and felt it was time to move on to other challenges as a professional.

I've been at super middleweight for a long time.

Yeah, I thought I could be heavyweight champion of the world when I was working with Ali and Joe Frazier and Earnie Shavers and all those guys. Because they were older than me and I was doing my thing.

I'm not going to say that I'm the best, we respect our champions. Floyd's been doing this a lot longer than me, he's been a lot of mega fights and I won't dare say that I'm better than Floyd Mayweather.

I started boxing when I was eight. Me and my brother Rafael started boxing in amateur tournaments when I was 13. My father was an ex-pro boxer.

Fighters with 13 fights are winning world titles, and of course they don't know how to behave.

I think on balance, Don King has been bad for boxing. I think he's done some very good things and I think he did a heck of a job of promoting Ali but I think I could have promoted Ali.

I'm a free agent. I haven't allowed any promoters to have exclusive options on my fight. I don't need a promoter.

My father was a boxer, though. So, I have a particular interest in Ray Mancini, I think.

Don King is my promoter, and I want to fight for him. I want to fight in the big fights, and hopefully he can see by me promoting my own show, beating a quality opponent, and bringing a crowd in, that he needs to use me again. The end goal is I want to be thrown in the deep end by Don King. If I'm not good enough, let's find out.

If you look at my career, towards the end you will see I was fighting like once a year. I was not part of the Don King top heavyweights, so I was kind of kept out. His guys were getting three to four fights a year and I could only get one.

Bernard Hopkins? He fights scary dirty. I mean, he did what he had to do in his career.

Muhammad Ali was unquestionably one of the greatest boxers of the 20th century and a sincere advocate for his religious beliefs. In his life, he defeated the best professional boxers of his era, some of them more than once, which meant he was easily forgiven the excesses of his ringside braggadocio.

My fifth pro fight, I got my first title fight.

I got the who's who in the boxing world; I've been training with the Lomachenkos, the Terrence Crawfords.

When I was 17 or 18, I realised I could do something with boxing.

Boxing has been good to me and I believe I have been good for boxing.

I have experience of boxing. I know what it is like to be hit. Half my life is boxing. I start fighting when I am 16.

I've had over seven thousand pro fights.

I have been very busy having so many fights since I turned pro. To have 13 in little more than two years is a lot by modern standards.

I just want to fight the best guys that there is in the world and make the most money out of it.

I fought Sugar Ray six times. Pound for pound the greatest fighter who ever lived.