KEVIN ROONEY

Cus D'Amato's legacy...... pi$$ed all over.



http://timesunion.com/AspStories/sto...StoryID=543283


In the grip of his vices


By BRIAN ETTKIN, Staff writer
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First published: Sunday, December 10, 2006

CATSKILL -- Behind bloodshot eyes, fleshy folds of skin and alcohol-saturated breath stands the man who trained Mike Tyson 20 years ago, when Tyson became boxing's youngest heavyweight world champion. That guy was driven. That guy was disciplined. That guy was Kevin Rooney.
This man who asks at 10:40 a.m. if I'd like an adult beverage and drinks a screwdriver and then beer throughout our 4-hour visit, who throws a couple punches at the double-end bag in the gym he runs, then stumbles, dizzy and drunk -- staggering through life -- this is Kevin Rooney, too.

Cus would've never allowed this. If somebody had come to Cus D'Amato's gym drunk, he would've thrown him out like a stray dog. Show up drunk to train a fighter, to teach something positive when the example you set is so negative?

"Cus would not allow him in the gym," says Nadia Hujtyn, a trainer who was a student of D'Amato's when Rooney was. "He would definitely put him in a program, get him in a program and keep him in a program."

But the revered Catskill boxing manager and trainer who adopted Tyson and became surrogate father to Rooney and other young street punks who strived to better themselves through boxing died Nov. 4, 1985, at age 77. It is a parlor game in boxing circles to speculate how the tapestry of Tyson's life might have unfurled if D'Amato had lived to guide him longer.

One can't help to wonder if Rooney's life might have not unraveled if Cus had lived to mentor him longer, too. "Cus was above father figure," says Rooney's ex-wife, Bonnie. "A kid would argue with his father, a kid would get rebellious against his father. I don't think Kevin ever felt any of those feelings about Cus. Whatever he said went. Kevin didn't think to argue with it."

But whereas Tyson was a 19-year-old kid when D'Amato died, Rooney was 29 years old, married with two young children. Tyson experienced misery, unhappiness and depression in the subsequent years, much his doing. So has Rooney, who for most of the past two decades has abused alcohol and at times gambled compulsively.

He served five months and 10 days of an eight-month sentence in Greene County Jail in 2004 after violating probation following DWI and disorderly conduct convictions. Rooney's sister, Mary McLean, thought Kevin might hit rock bottom then, that he might seek treatment for his alcoholism instead of entering outpatient programs only when mandated by court order. About a week after his release, Kevin took the train to visit his family in Staten Island. When he knocked on his sister's door, she says, he was smashed.

"I couldn't believe here's the first time I'm seeing you, and you show up drunk," says McLean, the sibling to whom Rooney is closest. "I would've thought that taught a lesson, but no."

Rooney, 50, was arrested again in April and charged with driving under the influence and first-degree aggravated unlicensed motor vehicle operation, charges that were dismissed on Nov. 28. Yet when I recently visited, he walked down Catskill's Main Street with a plastic coffee cup filled with beer. A policeman striding toward us eyed Rooney suspiciously and swiveled his neck as he passed but said nothing.

Rooney reportedly earned as much as $5 million when he trained Tyson. But he filed for bankruptcy protection in 1990, in debt then for $1.299 million, including $499,999 owed to three Atlantic City casinos for gambling debts.

Rooney was awarded $8 million-plus in a breach-of-contract settlement with Tyson in 1998 and trained former world champ Vinny Pazienza (who legally changed his surname to Paz) for much of his career. Yet because of Rooney's gambling, bad investments and loans friends never repaid, he's spent several small fortunes, and a federal tax lien has been placed on his clapboard house with the chipped green paint, busted windows, sagging wood-slat fence and doorknob that falls to the porch if you pull too hard.

Inside, the sheet-covered couch cushions sink deep enough to give the appearance that any dropped loose change could fall to the center of the earth. There are dog bowls on the kitchen floor, though he hasn't owned a dog in years.

Seeing him here, it's hard to believe this is the guy who honed a raw thug into Kid Dynamite, that this is the man Atlantic City casinos would send helicopters or limos to pick up and comp his penthouse suites once he arrived. One time Rooney had $88,000 in chips on a roped-off craps table when a friend, Charlie Benton, persuaded him to stop while still ahead.

"He would've stayed there until it was gone," says Benton, a retired state correction officer. "That was one of the few times I remember him coming home winning."

But he never particularly cared about money. Rooney says, "The gym is my whole life. And drink."

The gym, above Catskill's police station and firehouse, is where D'Amato trained Tyson, where Hall of Famer Wilfred Benitez once sparred with a young welterweight named Kevin Rooney and where Rooney trained Paz. But Rooney trains only two fighters now, super middleweight Lenord Pierre (18-3, 13 KOs), who has lost his past two fights, and light middleweight Jay Krupp (9-1, 3 KOs).

When Rooney trains them at the gym, he might be sober.

"There have been times where he has (been intoxicated)," Krupp says. "But lately he's been real good."

"They know they deserve better, but by the same token neither (fighter) wants to work harder," says Hujtyn, a Columbia-Greene Community College employee. Kevin Rooney to become a millionaire by age 30, not for the money but the achievement. He was the second-youngest of five children, reared by Irish-American Catholics in a house on a cobblestone hill in Staten Island's Stapleton neighborhood. Daniel and Mary Rooney were alcoholics, their children say, and when Daniel would drink he became verbally and occasionally physically abusive.

Once as a young teen, Kevin says, he tried to defend his mother from his father, who dropped him with a punch to his solar plexus.

Another time, Kevin swung a baseball bat and broke his father's elbow. Kevin claims he was defending his mother; Mary says her brother wanted the car keys when he was stoned, though he wasn't yet 16. Kevin never made peace with his father before he died. "Kevin has a deep-rooted anger that he has just not learned to live with," McLean says.

He gambled young, throwing craps at age 12 or 13 in an alley as classmates looked out for their teachers at Immaculate Conception School.

By the time Kevin was 16, he lived on his own, hung out in a drug-ridden neighborhood on Broad Street, got into fistfights and was the lookout guy for friends who robbed cars.

Boxing saved him. Boxing would wake him at 5:30 a.m. to run hills and instill discipline in the midst of chaos. He'd win the 147-pound, sub-novice New York Golden Gloves Championship in 1975, defeating Kevin Higgins of West Point in the finals. And he'd leave New York at age 19 to come train here and live in D'Amato's Victorian mansion on a bluff overlooking the Hudson. D'Amato's fighters stayed for free in exchange for performing household chores.

D'Amato, who had trained world champions Floyd Patterson and Jose Torres, told Kevin he should take classes because there wasn't anything to do when not training, so Kevin earned his GED, then an associate's degree from Columbia-Greene. Cus valued discipline, so Kevin, who loved ice cream and could eat a half-gallon of coffee or vanilla and almonds at a time, gave it up for a year just to prove he could.

"When I put my mind into something," he says, "that's it."

He was street-smart, blunt and charismatic. At Columbia-Greene, he starred in a play for the first time, "A Streetcar Named Desire." Rooney played Stanley Kowalski.

"He was very good," Bonnie Rooney says. "Nobody could've done better."

Rooney would win 21 of his 26 pro fights, with seven knockouts, draw in another, and get knocked out in the second round by the great Alexis Arguello. But as his boxing career neared its end, Rooney struggled to give it up, even as D'Amato groomed him to train Tyson. Whenever Rooney talks about Cus, he speaks reverently. He laments that nobody has written a biography on D'Amato, a member of the International Boxing Hall of Fame who stood up to mobsters and the corruption that besmirched his sport. Cus' integrity was beyond reproach. The apple didn't fall out of sight of the tree.

"I met probably three people, maybe four people in the business who had any integrity whatsoever," says Steve Lott, Tyson's former assistant manager.

Lott's friend, Kevin Rooney, was one of them.

Like D'Amato, Rooney has never charged people to work out at the gym. He once volunteered time to train prisoners at Greene Correctional Facility in Coxsackie.

Now he doesn't help himself. He'd rather live in the past instead of confronting his present. When he plays a videotape of his Golden Gloves finals victory, it is as if this is an out-of-body experience, in which he's a spectator watching himself fight live.

"Look at that," Rooney says, his volume rising, "BOOM, BOOM. This is before I came under, BOOM, a street kid, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM."

Glory days forever ago. the span of years, life hit Rooney with several combinations -- Cus' death, a separation and subsequent divorce from Bonnie, Tyson's dismissing him when he chose Don King's management.

But don't blame these events entirely for Rooney's spiral. He drank when he trained Tyson, too.

"It wasn't a daily problem then, but a problem enough," Hujtyn recalled. "There were enough times when he didn't come to the gym. 'Tell the boys I'm not going to be there today. I don't feel well.' "

"Kevin wanted to go and be among the people and feel this (Tyson) thing and enjoy it," says Bonnie, a hair salon owner in Hudson. "I kind of wanted to nest in and become reclusive with my two young children."

Newspaper clippings of their children's achievements are taped to Rooney's refrigerator. Amber, a salutatorian at Hudson High, graduated cum laude from New York University. Kevin will graduate this month from Fordham, earning his bachelor's degree in less than four years, as his sister did.

"He did love them. He did love them," Bonnie says. "And I think they both knew it. I'm sure they both knew it."

"My niece, she keeps a distance," McLean says. "I think my nephew really thinks he can save him, I really do. ... Kevin will make a point of going over to visit his dad and call him on a regular basis, whereas not so with Amber. Amber will do the holidays; Amber has a very low tolerance to his drinking."

Neither of his children returned phone messages to comment for this story. a time in which pervades the heavyweight division, Rooney dreams of training its next great one, and if he had left Catskill as friends and family urged him, if he had opened a gym in New York City ...

"That was probably the most important decision in his life, staying in Catskill," Lott says. "No matter who passed away, no matter what relationships he had or didn't have, Kevin's choice was to stay in Catskill. If he had moved to a ghetto area in Brooklyn or Manhattan or the Bronx, he'd have had to turn guys away. In 10 years, he'd have had two or three champions. The numbers are on your side in the ghetto.

"No one's going to move to Catskill to box."

Few do, though Rooney is one of the few trainers schooled in D'Amato's peek-a-boo style, in which boxers use constant head movement and hold their gloves high, behind which they slip and weave and throw punches. He's esteemed enough that promoter Dino Duva and manager Ivalyo Gotzev earlier this year flew Rooney to Las Vegas, the home of their fighter Samuel Peter, the WBC's No. 1 heavyweight contender, to discuss Rooney possibly training him.

The night Rooney arrived, he had dinner and drinks with Duva and Gotzev, and they played blackjack. Rooney didn't get to meet Peter the next day, nor was he hired. Rooney says his drinking and conduct didn't influence their decision.

"He's got tremendous ability and talent as a trainer, but his problems have gotten in the way of him getting back to the top of the game," says Duva, a recovering drug addict. "That's stopped him and prevented him from getting back to the top again, but that's not to say it's too late." we stand in the gym, a wall that's plastered with newspaper stories on D'Amato and a sign that reads, CUS WE REMEMBER HIM WITH HONOR GRATITUDE RESPECT & LOVE, Rooney says, "If you were his friend, he'd be there forever. I miss Cus every day. Every day."

Rooney insists he doesn't have an alcohol problem and could quit drinking anytime he chooses. Many of the 17.6 million adult Americans who abuse alcohol or are alcoholic say that, too. How do alcoholics most often cope with their life-threatening disease? Through denial.

If Rooney regrets or is unhappy with his life, he denies that, too.

"I'm a happy person," he says, though he admits, when drinking, "I can be angry. I can be a little mean."

"Kevin's not a happy drunk," McLean said. "There's people that drink, they laugh, they tell you a joke. ... We figure he drinks to feel better, to forget. It must be the only way he can function. This way you don't have to dwell on all the negatives that are going on."

Rooney is asked how he can help young fighters drawn to his gym when he's unwilling to help himself.

"I may not be the greatest one," he replies, "but my door is open."

He is asked what Cus would think if he saw him at the gym slurring his words, his days full of missteps.

"I think he would help," Rooney replies, sounding wounded. "I don't think he would think any less of me."

But know this -- if Cus still ran the place, if he saw this Kevin Rooney, until he sought treatment and sobered up, the door would stay closed.

Brian Ettkin can be reached at 454-5457 or by e-mail at bettkin@timesunion.com.