Cobb had participated in a fixed fight with Sonny Barch and had used cocaine with Barch and promoter Rick "Elvis" Parker before and after the fight. Cobb said the magazine libeled him, and he sued for US$150 million. In 1999, a jury awarded Cobb $8.5 million in compensatory damages and $2.2 million in punitive damages. However, the verdict was overturned in 2002 by a federal appeals court, which said that the article was not published with "actual malice". The magazine did not interview the referee and other ringside officials who were at the match, which tends to show that the magazine "might not have acted as a prudent reporter would have acted", the ruling stated. "But the actual malice standard requires more than just proof of negligence". Acting career As a Hollywood actor, Cobb has played a series of villainous roles in films such as Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol, Blind Fury, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Liar Liar, The Golden Child, Naked Gun : The Final Insult, Fletch Lives, and Ernest Goes to Jail. He has made guest appearances on several television shows, including Miami Vice, Highlander: The Series, Married... with Children, Moonlighting, Walker, Texas Ranger, MacGyver (as the character Earthquake), and The X-Files. Cobb's other appearances include the 1983 film Uncommon Valor, in which he played a rare heroic role; the 1987 movie Critical Condition, in which he plays a character in the psych ward who thinks he is a "brother" (an African American); The Champ, which referred to his boxing career by casting Cobb as a boxer who fights the title character, Billy Flynn; and Diggstown, in which he plays a prison inmate who fights at the behest of a con man. One of his more memorable roles is the menacing outlaw biker/bounty hunter Leonard Smalls in the 1987 Coen Brothers film Raising Arizona. Joel Coen later described Cobb as difficult to work with: "he's less an actor than a force of nature". On Late Night with David Letterman on January 7, 1987, he was asked how boxing compared to acting and said "In the last job I had, if you didn't do it just exactly right you got hit in the mouth. In this kind of job, the worst thing that can happen, I mean if everything in the whole world goes wrong, take two." In 1992, he appeared in Vince Gill's music video for his