Henry Cooper

by Norman Giller

  Then the daily newspaper boys arrived in the early afternoon and Albina would insist on cooking them lunch, or at the very least making them a snack meal. It was as if she thought she was still working in the restaurant.

  We talked boxing during all these meals and the only person who did not understand what we were on about was Albina. She quietly detested the sport and thought it was barbaric. Only once did she ever attend a fight night, when Henry challenged Ali for the world title. She spent the six rounds with the fight programme covering her face and sick to the stomach with nerves. ‘Henry knows how I feel about boxing,’ she told me. ‘But I wouldn’t dream of mentioning that I’d like him to retire; that has to be his decision. It would be out of order for me to even bring the subject up. I knew what he did and the dangers he faced when I married him, and I just make sure I’m always there for him when he comes home with his bruises and cut eyes. I feel his pain, but it’s his job and it’s not for me to interfere. We have complete faith in Mr Wicks to always make the right decisions. I would hate it if our sons wanted to box, but I wouldn’t stop them. Men must do what men must do, but I will be very relieved and happy when Henry does decide to hang up his gloves and lead a normal life.’

  Henry was besotted with Albina in what was very much a two-way love affair.

  I was the luckiest man in the world to find Albina. She had been under my nose for years without me realising the chemistry between us. She used to serve Jim and me at Mario’s from when she was sixteen, but it was all of five years before I thought to myself, ‘Aye aye, she’s a bit special.’

  I was not exactly a Casanova type and I clumsily started flirting with her. She was used to that sort of thing with customers and just took it as banter. I asked her out to the pictures one night and said I would collect her on the Saturday. She agreed, thinking that I was joking. But when I called into the restaurant to pick her up, she was in uniform and working. She had not taken me seriously and I don’t know who was more embarrassed when she realised I meant it. Anyway, we eventually got our wires uncrossed and – I don’t want this to sound too soppy – we just fell head over heels for each other.

  It was the best thing that ever happened to me. She has become not only my wife but my best friend and also organiser. Albina knows nothing about boxing, which is a good thing because it means I have something else to talk about when I get home rather than who was doing what in the fight game. People often comment that I am always immaculately booted and suited, and that’s the Albina influence. She has that natural Italian taste for all things elegant and stylish, and makes sure I am clothed just right for whatever charity or commercial job I’m doing or appearance I’m making.

  She has given me two wonderful sons and introduced me to the Italian family way of life. I’m very proud of our boys, Henry Marco and John Pietro, and they could not have a better mother. Thanks to Albina, I’ve discovered the contentment and fulfilment that the Roman Catholic religion can bring. I am the last person to try to push my newfound beliefs down other people’s throats, but all I know is it’s made me a better person and our family is built on a rock-solid foundation of love and faith.

  She was just the breath of fresh air I needed. I am a very lucky man.

  Helped by brother George, Henry put his plastering and building experience to work and gradually extended the Wembley house to a five-bedroom luxury home, with a huge new lounge and an extra bathroom. George even moved in with them until his marriage to his boss’s daughter, Barbara Reynolds.

  Those were the days when tax took a huge bite out of earnings and Henry found himself paying 16s 9d from every pound to the taxman. In modern parlance, he was left with just over 20p from each pound that he earned. Jim Wicks once showed me Henry’s tax slip: ‘Earnings for the year £36,000, tax bill £29,000’. This was why he rationed his ring appearances to two or three a year. For several years, Jim and Henry – supported by Scottish MP Tam Dalyell – fought to have sportsmen’s earnings assessed over a full year as with writers and artists, but that was one contest where they were always outpointed by the taxman. ‘We never dodged tax in our lives,’ said Jim Wicks. ‘But it is a system that makes people become fiddlers like that Yehudi wossisname.’

  To supplement his earnings from boxing, Henry later went into partnership in a greengrocery shop in Wembley. For once he cocked a deaf ’un to advice from Jim Wicks, who told him: ‘What d’you know about spuds or how long it takes for fruit to rot? You’re making a mistake, Enery. You’ve gone bananas.’

  Within three years Henry had lost what was then the huge amount of more than £10,000 on the business and he put up the shutters on the shop, paid off outstanding bills and concentrated full time on the thing he did best, boxing. It had been more painful than cauliflower ears.

  That was a very stressful time in our lives. On the surface it looked to outsiders as if the Coopers were doing well. A successful boxing career and a thriving greengrocery shop in Wembley High Street. In truth, the taxman was taking a massive bite of my boxing earnings and the greengrocer’s was a disaster.

  I went into it on the spur of the moment with a bloke I met on holiday in Las Palmas, who happened to be called Harry Cooper but was no relation. We got friendly and he told me he had a greengrocer’s stall in Holloway and was thinking of opening a shop in Wembley. One thing led to another and I suddenly got caught up by his enthusiasm and lobbed some money into the project and became a partner. The shop was in my name, so I got all the publicity – and all the flak from suppliers wanting payment when things went, excuse the pun, pear shaped. It was bloody ’orrible to go into the shop and have some old dear coming up to you and saying, ‘’Ere, Enery, those plums I bought here last week were hard and very sharp…’ I went into the business blind and came out nearly broke. As fast as I was earning in the ring my money was being drained by the shop. I started out as a sleeping partner, calling in a couple of times a week, but then found it was taking up four and five days as I tried to turn it around. You could say I paid for the mistake but learned from the experience. In future, I decided I would only put my money into things I understood.

  Sadly, as we will learn later, Henry did not listen to his own advice.

  The Bishop was concerned that married life was in danger of making Henry soft and he used to insist on him leaving home for five weeks before each fight to ‘get mean and lean.’ The boxing axiom has always been that home comforts breed soft fighters, all the way back to legends of the ring like Jack Dempsey and Joe Louis. They always went away to training camps to escape temptations and distractions. Fighters need to be single-minded and being pampered at home is known to take the edge off, particularly when the relaxation includes sexual diversions.

  By the time Henry was under orders to train away from home, I was writing a column for Boxing News called ‘Around the Gyms with Ross Martin’. Editor Tim Riley gave me my nom de plume, inspired by a case of Martini Rossi under his desk. I became a regular at Henry’s training sessions, watching him go through a regimented routine that for championship fights included daily sparring sessions against a parade of partners under instruction to adopt set styles. They got paid anything from £20 to £100 a round, depending on the size of Henry’s purse. His specially manufactured headguard had leather flaps to protect his vulnerable eyebrows.

  Nice guy Henry was mean in the gym and showed his sparring partners no mercy, while wearing well-padded 16-ounce gloves that protected his hands – and also saved his hired ‘opponents’ from serious damage. When fighting he would wear six-ounce, later eight-ounce gloves, and before every fight or sparring session he would spend thirty minutes carefully bandaging his hands. ‘I rarely take it easy against sparring partners,’ he told me. ‘That can breed bad habits, which you can take into the ring with you for the proper fight. We rarely get sparring partners volunteering to come back. They are well paid, but have to earn their corn.’

  Once Henry had established himself as a champion, he trained mainly at the Bull�
�s Head gymnasium in Chislehurst, briefly at the Fellowship Inn on the Bellingham Estate, then at the Clive Hotel in Hampstead and the Noble Art gym on Haverstock Hill. But none of them had the same spit-and-sawdust atmosphere of his original headquarters at the Thomas a Becket, where the nostrils were assaulted by the odour of embrocation, liniment, cigars and stale sweat mixed with the pungent aroma from the beer cellars, while the thud-thud-thud of the heavy bags and the rhythmic staccato of the skipping ropes provided a rich symphony of sound. The Cooper twins prided themselves on their pace and grace on the skipping ropes and used to compete with each other to see who could produce the fastest combination punches on the speedball. Spectators at the Thomas a Becket would often break into applause when watching the twins skipping in unison and the blur of fists as Henry and George punished the punchbag and speedball.

  I used to walk across Tower Bridge from my Cable Street home to the Becket in Old Kent Road, stopping en route for a slurp of tea on the Bridge with my policeman brother, George, the black sheep of our family, who was on security duty on the Bridge and had a sentry box with a Thermos flask tucked out of sight.

  When I told The Bishop that my brother was a City policeman who guarded Tower Bridge, he announced to the gym: ‘Careful what you say, we’ve got an Old Bill snout in our midst. He’s a regular Miss Marble.’

  I was a real mug for Jim’s leg-pulling stories and he once almost had me printing a piece in my gossip column that he was going to give all his boxers the sort of controversial monkey gland injections that the Wolves players had had before the 1939 FA Cup final. As I took down copious notes, Henry whispered: ‘Jim’s making a right monkey out of you, Norm.’

  The Bishop was an affable, jovial man, but rival promoters Jack Solomons and Harry Levene both found him a Rottweiler when it came to negotiating. His one objective was to get the best possible deal for his boxers. Levene, himself a mean miserly man when negotiating (as I often discovered to my cost when asking for my wages as PR for his boxing shows), once told me: ‘That scoundrel Jim Wicks should wear a mask and carry a gun the way he bargains for his boxers. He gets away with robbery.’

  During purse negotiations, Solomons used to yell at him: ‘I thought we were supposed to be friends.’ Jim, holding all the cards, would reply: ‘This isn’t about friendship, this is about business and I’m here representing my boy.’

  That neatly tees up a true story that entrepreneur Jarvis Astaire told Henry and me during a charity dinner at the London Hilton: ‘Elvis was at his peak and had never performed in Europe. I was determined to bring him to Britain and I phoned his manager, the notorious “Colonel” Tom Parker. I offered him £2 million for Elvis to perform in London. That was an astronomical amount at the time. The Colonel pondered for a while, and then replied: “That’s a very generous offer. Now, what about the boy…?”’

  I think it fair to say that Jarvis was all shook up.

  Our hero Henry must have been one of the best-fed boxers in history. As well as the dishes beautifully prepared by Albina, when he was not in training The Bishop would take him every week to Simpson’s in The Strand on Mondays, where they were famous for their roast beef, Peter Mario’s on the Wednesday for their Italian cuisine, and always fish on Fridays at Manzi’s in Leicester Square or Sheekey’s just off Charing Cross Road. They were the ‘in’ places to be seen and Jim was always keen for Henry to keep a high profile. ‘It’s all about putting bums on seats,’ he explained. ‘The more people see Enery around, the more they’ll want to come and see him box.’

  Henry had one fight in 1960 that failed to get into the record books. Perhaps ‘fight’ is a bit of an exaggeration, because there was only one blow thrown. Driving home from a lunch celebrating the twins’ twenty-sixth birthday on 3 May, Henry inadvertently cut up a cyclist after overtaking him. As he pulled into the kerb, the cyclist deliberately rode his bike into Henry’s car and bashed on the side. Henry wound down the driver’s side window to ask what was occurring and the man – middle-aged, no more than 5ft 5in tall and a bantamweight – leaned in towards him and cracked him on the nose with a back hander. Henry, George and Jim Wicks immediately climbed out of the car, surrounding the assailant. ‘You cheeky little so-and-so,’ Henry said, or words to that effect. The diminutive cyclist looked up into Henry’s face and said: ‘You feel brave ’cos there’s three of you…’ The twins and Jim Wicks collapsed laughing and the aggrieved man, not seeing the funny side, got on his bike and rode off, muttering to himself.

  Now back to the real boxing. After a ten-month lay-off that included a honeymoon in Italy, Henry had his first fight as a married man against the high-ranking Roy Harris at Wembley Pool on 13 September 1960. Born in the town of Cut ’n’ Shoot, Texas, Harris had gone twelve rounds in a world championship challenge against Floyd Patterson in August 1958 before his corner threw in the towel.

  Harris had clearly been warned about Our Enery’s left hook and spent almost the entire fight backing off to his left as Henry jabbed his way to a comfortable ten rounds points victory. In the build-up to the contest, the Texan talked like a man who had swallowed a dictionary and it was no surprise when upon retiring from the ring he became a lawyer. ‘He had a brain like wossaname, Adolf Einstein,’ said The Bishop. ‘But he was a pretty dumb fighter.’

  Next up on 6 December 1960 was the hefty Argentine Alex Miteff, who had pulled out of the fight with injury when Zora Folley substituted. Henry was completely in command but got careless in the tenth and last round and walked into a swinging right hand, taking a nine count. ‘That last round wasn’t good for the old ticker,’ said white-as-a-sheet Jim Wicks. ‘I almost had a cardigan arrest.’ Henry dedicated his points victory to his newborn son Henry Marco.

  On 21 March 1961, Henry won his first Lonsdale Belt outright when he stopped a completely outgunned Joe Erskine in five rounds at Wembley, and the air was now thick with talk of a world title challenge against Floyd Patterson after his three-fight saga with Ingemar Johansson. The Bishop had direct talks with Floyd’s manager Cus D’Amato, but put them on hold when Henry’s left shoulder started to give painful problems. He went to leading orthopaedic surgeon Bill Tucker for treatment and was told that his left arm, gnarled left hand and shoulder – overworked in plastering and boxing – were as worn as those of a sixty-year-old man.

  Meantime Sonny Liston took over the world title assignment and blasted Patterson to defeat in one round. ‘Told you he was a bloody animal,’ said The Bishop.

  Following a nine-month rest after his latest demolition of Erskine, Henry took a rematch with Zora Folley and for once in his life failed to prepare properly for a fight. He talked Jim Wicks into letting him stay at home, going to the gym daily for his sparring and then returning to Albina’s loving arms. Instead of the mean lean fighting machine, he became a big softie and was far too relaxed as he climbed into the Wembley Pool ring on 5 December 1961 to take on one of the classiest box-fighters never to win a world title. He paid the price for his rare lack of professionalism when Folley fired in a short right to the jaw in the second round that knocked him spark out. When his senses cleared, he agreed with his manager’s collective decision: ‘We will never train at home again.’

  It was important for Henry to get his confidence back as quickly as possible and five weeks later they brought over another Texan in the bulky shape of Tony Hughes, whose main claim to fame was that he was the protégé of ring legend Rocky Marciano. Hughes was not nearly as formidable as his master and the Rock pulled him out of the fight after Henry had pummelled him for five rounds.

  We were more interested in meeting and talking to Rocky than his young prospect. He had been one of our heroes when we were kids and he won the world championship the year we retained the ABA light-heavyweight title.

  What a shock we got when we met him at the pre-fight press conference. We expected some sort of a monster, but he was quietly spoken, very modest and a proper gentleman. It was the complete opposite to the way he was in the ring, when he re
sorted to the rules of the jungle. I’ll never forget the brutal way he beat our local hero Don Cockell in a world title fight in San Francisco. He did everything but hit him with the corner stool. He committed so many fouls that if it had been fought in Britain he would have been slung out after a minute. I would have hated to fight him. He was always all over his opponents, bashing them with his elbows, head and a right hand that could have sunk a battleship.

  I don’t mind admitting that I cried the day he was killed in an air crash the day before his forty-sixth birthday. His real name was Rocco Marchegiano and he was idolised by all Italians. Shortly before he died he featured in a computerised fight with Muhammad Ali, and they released a film showing Rocky stopping Ali late in the fight. Years later, Ali told me that they had filmed three endings: one with Rocky winning, another with Ali winning and a fifteen-round draw. It was better box office to release the version with Rocky winning. Ali, of course, had an opinion on that, ‘Couldn’t have a black man –’ he used the N word ‘– beating the greatest white heavyweight in history.’

  Fast forward to 1987 and a series I created for ITV called Who’s the Greatest? We matched Ali against Rocky, with a jury of twelve members of the public listening to the arguments put by Eamonn Andrews for Rocky and, for Ali, actor Dennis Waterman, whose brother Peter was an exceptional British and European welterweight champion. Eamonn called Henry as his witness, and Waterman summoned Brian London. My dear pal Brian Moore was the judge.

  After listening to each case and watching videos of the action, the jury voted 9–3 for Ali.