War & Peace Quote by Gerry Cooney

Cooney is describing a career getting quietly shaped by a business model, not a punch. The line starts as a defense against a familiar sports-media narrative: if you are absent, you must be ducking. "They thought I should fight more" frames the criticism as superficial, built on appearances and rhythm rather than on the backstage reality of boxing. He is arguing that inactivity can be structural, not psychological.

Then he names the real lever: access. "I couldn't get the fights" is the key admission, and it lands like a shrug at first, until he adds the trapdoor clause: to fight "one of King's guys" meant effectively joining Don King. In boxing's 70s-80s ecosystem, King wasn't just a promoter; he was the traffic controller. Cooney's sentence turns a career problem into a labor problem: the cost of getting work was surrendering autonomy. It's not heroic resistance so much as a practical refusal to sign away control.

The subtext is about how the sport sells individual willpower while operating on cartel logic. Cooney's "I chose not to do that" is a small act of self-determination framed as a professional impediment, and the bad press becomes the enforcement mechanism. Public storylines (he's not active enough) discipline private decisions (he won't sign).

The kicker, "In hindsight, that might have been a mistake", isn't self-pity. It's the rueful recognition that principle doesn't always beat infrastructure. Boxing celebrates lone warriors, but Cooney is admitting the loneliest part is negotiating the system that decides whether you get to fight at all.