Cooney wants to keep current role
TRENTON, N.J. -- Former heavyweight Gerry Cooney, who was in the running to be New Jersey's next boxing commissioner, has taken his hat out of the ring.
Cooney, 48, would rather hang on to speaking engagements and keep working with a group he founded to help ex-fighters get on with their lives than become chairman of the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board.
"He would have had to give up everything," said state Sen. Raymond Lesniak, a close friend. "He decided he couldn't."
Cooney, who founded Fighters' Initiative for Support and Training after retiring from the ring in 1990, could not be reached for comment. A telephone message left for him at FIST's office was not immediately returned Tuesday.
The $80,000-a-year job has been vacant since last March, when Chairman Gerard Gormley was forced to resign for giving free fight credentials to friends and family members.
Gormley, the brother of state Sen. William L. Gormley, R-Atlantic, held the job for 18 years, most of that time as a $10,000-a-year, part-time chairman.
In 2002, the salary was boosted to $80,000 and the job was made a full-time one. But Gormley lost it after an ethics probe found that he had given out 227 free passes for fights in Atlantic City. He was forced to resign and ordered to pay $14,000 in fines.
Now, lawmakers are considering returning the job to part-time status, a move endorsed by Athletic Control Board Executive Director Larry Hazzard.
Hazzard, who handles day-to-day operations including the licensing of boxers, inspection of training facilities and fight regulations, complained in a recent discrimination lawsuit that his duties were taken away and given to Gormley.
The suit, which names state Attorney General Peter Harvey, said Harvey and other had unfairly diminished Hazzard's role as executive director, a job that pays $105,000 a year.
Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press
