I would have done exactly the same thing in his boots. There were no bad feelings between us after it was all over. I knew he didn’t mean half the things he said during the build-up to the fight. He was a master showman, and did his job in getting bums on seats. To be honest, I really liked the bloke and always found him amusing company. He called himself The Greatest, and for many people he was, but I think Joe Louis was probably the best heavyweight of them all. Clay or Ali, or whatever you want to call him, was certainly the greatest entertainer.
Thirteen years after the Cooper-Clay fight I spent three weeks with the by then Muhammad Ali, working as a publicist on his world title defence against Yorkshire lionheart Richard Dunn in Munich. He was a real charmer away from the microphones and cameras, talking not much above a whisper in head-to-head conversation as he gave me his view of the first fight with Henry:
I’d never been hit as hard as Henry hit me that night. Man, it really did shake up my ancestors in Africa. When I got up I didn’t know whether I was in London or Louisville, but I was a young man and had good recovery powers. I knew exactly what I had to do and went out and finished him in the fifth, just the way I’d planned. Jack Nilon, Liston’s manager, was at the ringside and that knockdown convinced him I’d be eaten by Old Sonny. B-i-g mistake! What it proved is that I could take a punch, because that would have finished off most opponents. Henry is a proper English gent and took his defeat like the true sportsman he is. I apologised for calling him a cripple and a bum. He knew I was just trying to sell tickets and it worked because that great stadium at Wembley was packed. Ninety-nine per cent of the crowd were rooting for Henry and wanted to see my big mouth shut. That made me all the more determined to win in style in the fifth, but the knockdown took the shine off my win. If Henry had not been a bleeder he might have done even better in his career, but he was champion of Britain, the Commonwealth and the whole of Europe, so I guess that was not bad. But I became champion of the w-h-o-l-e world, and that was even better!
Trainer Angelo Dundee told me:
Sure I deliberately made the split in the glove worse, but I was just doing my job as a professional and looking after my man. Henry was gracious enough to tell me some time later that given the same circumstances he would’ve expected his manager Jim Wicks to have done the same thing. Jim was big friends with my brother, Chris, and he asked him to pass me the message, ‘Tell Angelo he’s a rascal… but I would like him in my corner.’ Boxing’s a dog-eat-dog sport, and you have to be ready to use every trick in the book. It’s not a sport for priests and rabbis. You have to park your conscience and do what has to be done to get across that victory line.
The torn glove became the most famous in boxing and, a few days later, I saw it on display at the Soho betting shop run by the notorious Albert ‘Italian Al’ Dimes, a long-time pal of The Bishop through their gambling obsession. Jim always stressed that their friendship had nothing to do with Albert’s well-documented criminal activities, which included ruling the underworld turf later claimed by the Krays and a knife fight with his bitter rival Jack Spot in 1955 that has gone down in gangland legend. ‘Albert’s a pussycat,’ said Jim, looking as if butter would not melt in his mouth. ‘He only takes liberties against those who take liberties against him.’
Both gloves were later signed by Clay/Ali and Henry, and in 2001 advertising executive Trevor Beattie – who masterminded the FCUK campaign for French Connection – bought them at auction for £37,600. This was the little matter of £7,600 more than Henry earned for the fight. I can almost hear Henry saying: ‘Fcuk me!’
ROUND 7
WAR IN EUROPE
A lot of people thought Henry would retire after his almost glorious defeat by Clay. A lot of people were proved wrong. Those who thought he was set up for life had no idea of his tax liabilities and how the greengrocery business was draining his finances. He still had world title ambitions and there was the w-h-o-l-e of Europe to conquer.
By the time his eye healed after the bloody showdown with Clay, the European championship had become vacant following the retirement of Swede-basher Ingemar Johansson. Henry was matched with old foe Brian London for the European crown at Manchester Belle Vue on 24 February 1964 and he gave such a boxing exhibition that the fight could have been staged in the Tate Gallery. London was jabbed almost to a standstill on his way to a third defeat by the South London craftsman and the grounded Blackpool Bomber was sporting enough to say at the end of fifteen one-sided rounds: ‘Henry, you’ve won me outright and can take me home and put me on your mantelpiece!’
Instead of bringing them satisfaction, the European title gave Henry and manager Jim Wicks nothing but aggravation.
I was so proud to win the European title to go with two Lonsdale Belts outright, but sadly it was to prove a pain in the arse. My third fight with London was very nearly called off at the last minute. We had a right old bust-up with the British Boxing Board of Control officials in the dressing-room when they tried to restrict the amount of bandage on my hands.
It was the angriest I ever saw Jim. He blew his top and told promoter Harry Levene that we were not going ahead with the fight. They had sprung on us at the last minute that there was a new rule on how much bandage was allowed, but they had made a cock-up with the calculation and were trying to limit me to half the permitted length. A boxer’s hands are the tools of his trade and need protecting as much as possible. Levene, aware that he had a contract for the fight to go out live on BBC radio, measured the bandage himself and called the stewards every name under the sun because they’d got it wrong. The new length was much less bandage than we were used to and we banged up our left hand continually thumping it into London’s face, and when the glove was pulled off after the fight, my hand quickly blew up to twice its normal size.
Having the European championship quickly gave us problems. The European Boxing Union treated boxers like puppets, dictating who you had to defend the title against and where and when. If you didn’t jump – or fight – when they wanted you to, they’d have the title off you quicker than you could say Sugar Ray Robinson. In Jim Wicks they found a manager who would not just roll over and do what they demanded.
A problem at the time was that the main challengers for my title were all Germans and the top British promoters – Solomons and Levene – were not prepared to bring them over. In those days there were still some anti-German feelings about as a hangover from the war and the Jewish promoters were not going to be seen lining the pockets of German boxers and managers. So reluctantly we agreed to go back to Germany to defend the championship against southpaw Karl Mildenberger after the fight had been put out to purse offers by the EBU. Jim called them Effing Bleedingwell Useless.
When I started training for the contest, I felt a recurrence of the arthritic pain I often suffered in my left elbow. Two specialists told me I needed to rest it for at least two weeks. The German promoter, egged on by the EBU, was suspicious to the point of disbelieving. So we summoned him and an EBU representative to London and showed them X-rays and specialist reports. The promoter reacted by saying he would postpone the fight for two weeks, which was useless to us because it would have meant me going into the ring having lost two weeks’ vital training.
Jim exploded and told the promoter what he could do with his new date, and the EBU reacted by stripping us of the title. They nominated Mildenberger to fight for the suddenly vacant championship against a mediocre Italian called Sante Amonti, who was knocked out in round one in Berlin. Not long afterwards Mildenberger was injured when due to defend his title and he was given a month’s grace to get fit. So you can imagine why we were fighting mad with the inconsistent EBU!
Distracted by the verbal punch-up with the EBU, Henry was not in the right frame of mind for his next fight at the Royal Albert Hall on 16 November 1964 and he dropped a points decision to an ordinary American opponent, Richard Rischer, of whom Who’s Who said Who? He had been hand-picked to just give our hero a workout, but he came to wrestl
e rather than box and put Henry out of his stride with spoiling tactics that turned this into a mauling mess of a fight. Rischer’s points victory was jeered by a disappointed crowd and Jim Wicks was honest enough to admit: ‘We stank the place out.’ Then the inevitable malapropism: ‘We were very lackadaisy.’ And lackadaisical, too.
Henry returned to the scene of the ‘crime’ two months later and there was an improved aroma when he produced the trusted left hook to stop Dick Wipperman – ‘the wild buffalo from Buffalo’ – in five rounds.
The next stop: Wolverhampton Civic Hall, where on 20 April 1965 he knocked American Chip Johnson cold in the first round. This whirlwind victory gave Henry particular satisfaction, because it avenged a third round defeat of his brother George, who was so badly cut by Johnson’s fists that he decided to hang up his gloves and concentrate full-time on his trade as a master plasterer. He kept alive his interest in boxing by helping to train Henry and working in his corner.
Henry returned to the Midlands on 15 June 1965 for an openair fight at Birmingham City’s St Andrew’s football stadium that captured the nation’s interest. In the opposite corner was local hero Johnny Prescott, one of a queue of good-quality British heavyweights chasing Henry’s title in the 1960s.
He was nicknamed the Beau Brummell of Birmingham because of his good looks, sharp dress sense and his liking for the ladies. Johnny was often photographed with the notorious Mandy Rice-Davies wrapped around him and I used to wonder how he ever got the energy for fighting. Well, I would think that, wouldn’t I?
Mind you, I reckon Johnny deserved any luck and good times that came his way after the lousy hand fate had dealt him in his early days. When he was just two, his father died on the Dunkirk beaches while serving with the Tank Corps and his mother was killed in an air raid. Johnny was sent to an orphanage until he was thirteen, when an uncle took him into his home.
He started taking boxing seriously while doing his National Service in the army as a physical training instructor and he boxed for England as an amateur in 1961 before turning professional. In his first two years punching for pay, Prescott racked up a score of victories including eight clean knockouts. He had been beaten just once in twenty-three starts when in 1963 he came up against the first of his Coopers – George/Jim, who destroyed him in two rounds.
Three months later Prescott had an even bigger disaster when his former sparring partner Alex Barrow, a big-punching Nigerian, pulverised him in just 100 seconds.
Prescott got another hiding when he returned to the dressing-room, this time from his veteran manager George Biddles, who went at him hammer and tongue. He told him: ‘You’re paying the price for being too much of a good-time Charlie! If you want to get anywhere in this business you had better start becoming less of a ladykiller and more of a killer in the ring.’
The Biddles broadside had the desired effect and in his next fight Prescott avenged the defeat by Barrow. He followed this with two memorable battles against the highly touted new ‘Golden Boy’ of British boxing, the Blond Bomber from West Ham, Billy Walker. Prescott was stopped in the tenth and last round of their first thrilling fight and then got off the canvas to win the return on points.
Biddles then kept up a non-stop publicity campaign to get Henry to put up his titles against Prescott. ‘Britain needs a new, young heavyweight champion,’ he said over and over again like a broken record. ‘The boxing public is fed up with the Cooper-Erskine-London monopoly of the championship.’
I guess Biddles had a point. I had made five successful defences of the British and Commonwealth titles since taking them from Brian London in 1959. Three had been against Joe Erskine, another against London and I had knocked out Dick Richardson.
I was now an ‘old man’ of thirty-one and I was itching for a first notch on a third Lonsdale Belt when Biddles got his wish and steered Prescott into a challenge against me. He had managed to make 27-year-old Johnny sound like a fresh, young challenger. It was spin worthy of The Bishop.
Our fight at St Andrew’s was delayed for two days because of torrential rain. I was more anxious than I would normally have been because I was carrying the secret that Jim had started negotiations for me to challenge Muhammad Ali/Clay for the world championship. I knew I dare not let Prescott win because it could wreck the plans and the chance I had dreamt of since I was a kid pretending to be Joe Louis.
Johnny had been specially coached for the fight by the great Jack Hood, a pre-war European welterweight champion whose ring skills had been legendary. Never saw Jack fight, but it was claimed he could go through an entire round without an opponent laying a glove on him because of his feints, clever footwork and speed of thought and movement. His speciality was catching punches on his gloves and then countering. Johnny had learned his lessons well: for the first third of the fight his defensive work was excellent and he stopped me landing any really telling blows.
But then, when I switched my point of attack from the head to the body, he started to visibly slow and I could hear him grunting as my punches sank deep into his midriff. ‘Aye aye,’ I thought, ‘perhaps Johnny is still being a good-time Charlie.’
By the end of the tenth round he had taken three counts and was shifting a lot of punishment, and George Biddles wisely retired him despite Johnny’s protests. I couldn’t believe it when his fickle fans jeered and booed the decision to pull him out of what had become like a torture chamber for him and I gave them a rollocking on the MC’s microphone. ‘You should be cheering, not booing,’ I told them. ‘Johnny’s a game boy and has taken a lot of punishment. He’s done himself proud.’
As I finished speaking, the heavens opened up again and it started bucketing down with rain. If it had started half an hour earlier we would not have got the fight finished. Mind you, ‘young’ Johnny would have been in danger of drowning.
Much to the disgust and dismay of his former bookmaking associate Jack Solomons, Jim Wicks was working in harmony with Jarvis Astaire, Harry Levene and Mickey Duff to try and set up a world title fight with the former Cassius Clay, now demanding to be known as Muhammad Ali. Solomons got to hear about it on the boxing gossip-vine and called Wicks a traitor and a turncoat, or words to that effect. ‘I’m doing what I think is best for Enery,’ The Bishop said. ‘If Jack wants to come up with something better, he knows my telephone number. In fact, he’ll need to talk telephone numbers if he wants to improve on the deal we’re getting.’
In a rage, Solomons instead started negotiating a world title challenge for Brian London. It was a hot-headed decision that would cost him a small fortune.
Henry carelessly dropped a ten rounds points decision to American journeyman Amos Johnson at Wembley Pool on 19 October 1965. While a lacklustre performance, it strangely worked in Henry’s favour. It convinced the Ali/Clay camp that he would be easy to take out in a world championship defence.
Henry was still the king of British boxing and he was honoured with a lunch at Buckingham Palace with HM The Queen and the entire Royal Family. An unashamed royalist, Henry described it as one of the proudest days of his life and he was able to give Prince Philip the exclusive news that a world title fight with Ali/Clay had been all but arranged for the spring of 1966.
‘This Clay chappie,’ Prince Philip asked, ‘is it right his great-great-grandfather was a white Irishman?’
‘So the story goes, sir,’ said Henry. ‘He has certainly got a lot of blarney about him.’
Rubbing shoulders with royalty and celebrities was the cream of Henry’s life, but boxing remained his bread and butter and he was working harder than ever in the gymnasium in the knowledge that a world title shot was just around the corner. Jim Wicks always kept Henry up to speed with his negotiations and told him he had been assured by Ali’s new masters – headed by National Islam leader Elijah Muhammad – that the title fight was on Ali’s agenda.
Henry comfortably won back-to-back fights against Americans Hubert Hilton (a tenth-round stoppage) and Jefferson Davis (first round knockout)
early in the New Year to clinch the fight night of his life.
Cassius Clay was coming back to town, only this time answering to the name of Muhammad Ali. And that was not blarney.
ROUND 8
ALI AND THE UNKINDEST CUT OF ALL
To convey the compelling story of the most important fight night in Henry’s career, I retreat to a neutral corner and let Henry take over. This was how he described the build-up to the second Clay fight – or perhaps that should be the first fight with Muhammad Ali…
Cassius Clay or Muhammad Ali – to be honest, I didn’t care what he called himself as long as he was there to answer the first bell and give me a shot at his world title. The fact that I was on a nice little earner was a bonus, but I would have fought for peanuts for a chance of getting my hands on the championship.
Clay’s name – or rather, Ali’s – had become like poison to many people in the United States. Since we had last fought he had publicly announced his allegiance to the Black Muslims and was refusing to be drafted into the US Army for war duty in Vietnam, citing his religious beliefs.
I admired his principles but struggled to understand his logic. By brilliant self-projection, showmanship and superb boxing skills he had made the name Cassius Clay known throughout the world. Now he disowned the identity because it had belonged to a white plantation boss who had enslaved his ancestors. I thought at the time that he had as much chance of becoming known and recognised as Muhammad Ali as I had of being called Shirley Temple.
But it shows how wrong you can be because within a year or so he was universally known as Muhammad Ali and now – all these years on – I come across youngsters who think that Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali were two different people. Call me Shirley.
Henry Cooper Page 8
