Henry Cooper

by Norman Giller

  From the day I watched Patterson win the Olympic middleweight gold medal at the 1952 Olympics, I knew he had fast fists. In fact they were among the fastest in history. If he’d had a stronger chin and more belief in himself, he would have gone down in history as one of the all-time great heavyweight champions.

  My plan was to test his jaw with the good old left hook, but he was too shrewd to give me an opening, keeping his right glove covering his chin and countering from behind his famous peek-a-boo guard. Near the end of the third he let loose with a combination, finishing with a left hook, and I was forced to take a brief count.

  He had me over again in the fourth round with a flurry of punches that were just a blur. I got myself up inside the ten seconds but was not really in full control of my senses. Next thing I knew I had a crowd of anxious faces peering down at me and Jim was asking, ‘You all right, son?’

  I’d been knocked sparko by a cracking right out of the blue that landed so hard I turned over on my way to the canvas. I can only tell you all this because I later saw it on film. At the time I honestly did not know what had hit me. Didn’t see it, didn’t feel it.

  Patterson was a wonderful sportsman and was genuinely concerned for me, and I appreciated that. We are all warriors when the bell goes, but there’s no need for nastiness and boasting once a fight is over. You’ll be surprised at the camaraderie of old opponents. There is nothing like boxing for earning respect. Like me, Floyd had converted to Roman Catholicism and was a good and caring man. I might have fought him for the world title back in 1959 but politics got in the way and Brian London got the shot. Floyd knocked him out in eleven one-sided rounds, so he did a pretty good job on us Brits!

  It is pointless trying to make excuses because Floyd had beaten me good and proper, but we were concerned about the pain I was continually getting from my left elbow and I had lots of hush-hush specialist treatment to try to sort it out.

  Albina and I never talked boxing at home. Once the door was shut we got on with our family life, but for the first time she let on that she was worried sick about me and wanted me to pack it in. Jim got to hear about it and told her a bit too bluntly for Albina’s taste that she should keep out of it. That was a bit of a touchy time.

  Anyway, I gave it a few weeks and then after a long chat with Jim I decided to carry on because I still had my eye on a record third Lonsdale Belt and also the European title. And, let’s be honest, there was still good money to be earned. Albina was not best pleased, but she went along with it because it was what I wanted.

  Henry made his return to the ring at Leicester on 17 April 1967, and he gave one of his most lethargic performances on the way to an uninspiring ten rounds points victory over unranked American Boston Jacobs. This was planned as a warm-up for his next target: completing the two title defences he needed to win a history-setting third Lonsdale Belt. First up, Jack Bodell.

  Billed as ‘the chicken farmer from Swadlincote’, Bodell was one of the most awkward heavyweights ever to step into a British ring. A lumbering, thickset, craggy-jawed southpaw, he relied on bullying brawn over brain to get the better of intimidated opponents.

  He had biffed and bashed his way into the No. 1 contender’s role and so Jim Wicks had to reluctantly agree to the defence, providing one of his classic lines in the build-up to the fight: ‘Bodell and all them other southpaws should have been drowned at birth. They are a detergent to the fight game.’

  The contest was staged at Molineux, famous home of the Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club, on 13 June 1967, and the crowd of 10,000 got excited when their Midlands hero swarmed all over Henry in a wild first round. What his supporters failed to realise is that Henry had deliberately held back in the opening three minutes, letting his cumbersome opponent use up energy as he saved his big guns for the right moment.

  Bodell came charging out for the second round in his bull-in-a-china-shop style and this time, instead of retreating and defending, Henry stood his ground and caught him with a full-blooded left hook that knocked the suddenly stupefied Derbyshire giant back on to the ropes. The referee came to Bodell’s rescue as a follow-up attack knocked him through the ropes, his senses completely scattered. Henry’s hook had lost none of its raw power and potency. It had once been measured by scientists to travel at thirty miles per hour over a distance of six inches, landing with the acceleration equal to sixty times the force of gravity. At the climax of the fight, Jack Bodell was in no shape to do the maths.

  Henry and Albina’s second son, John Pietro, arrived on 5 August 1967 to complete the happy Cooper family, and no sooner had Henry Marco got used to having a little brother than their dad was off again training for his next fight. Waiting in the opposite corner at Wembley Arena on 7 November 1967 was the Blond Bomber from West Ham, Billy Walker.

  Billy was, to use an East Endism, ‘as game as a bagel’. Those many mimics who did me the honour of impersonating me always used my old line, ‘He’s a good strong boy.’ That really summed up Billy, who never minded taking two, three or four punches to get one in of his own. He fought a bit too much with his face for my taste, but there is no denying that his biff-bang-wallop style won him many fans.

  They dubbed him the ‘Golden Boy’ of British boxing and there was nobody to touch him as a ticket-seller. His name on the bill almost guaranteed a sell-out at any London venue. He was brilliantly guided by his brother George, a former light-heavyweight title challenger who invested all the money they earned with such vision that he became a high-powered City tycoon with his fingers in worldwide business ventures.

  Along with everybody else, I liked Billy. He was a smashing bloke with tons of charisma. Advertisers also liked him and he had a glamorous image that brought him endorsement contracts for things like clothes and hairdressing cream. I asked Jim if he could get me a sponsor for the polishing of bald heads. Jim had a lovely bald dome, while my hair was receding so quickly I couldn’t even do a Bobby Charlton comb-over.

  Though I couldn’t compete with Billy in the barnet department, I frankly didn’t think he was in my league as a fighter and I was convinced I would have the beating of him in a fight that was billed as: ‘Who’s the King of the Cockneys?’

  Billy and I got on fine in the build-up to the fight, managing to stay reasonably pleasant for two blokes about to try to knock each other’s block off. But The Bishop and George Walker disliked each other on sight. They kept sniping at each other, George seeming to think he could wind me up by getting at old Jim, who was by then well into his seventies. Jim had seen it all and done it all, and gave better than he received in the verbal exchanges, and they were still going at it just before the bell rang to start the real fight.

  My plan was to soften Billy up with left jabs for the first half of the fifteen-rounder and then open up with my heaviest artillery from about the seventh round. I had used similar tactics against Johnny Prescott with good effect. Walker and Prescott had knocked hell out of each other in two back-to-back battles in 1963 and I don’t think either of them was ever quite the same force after they had severely punished each other. Johnny was the better boxer, but Billy was the more dangerous puncher and could really take a whack on the jaw.

  I knew it was pointless trying to knock Billy out early doors. I just might have banged up my hands trying to finish him, so I concentrated on boxing him and making sure I didn’t get caught by one of his famous haymakers. The trouble for Billy was you could see his big right-hand punch coming a mile away. He used to telegraph it and it was easy to step inside or block it, and to counter with a left to his unguarded head. He might just as well have announced over the ring microphone, ‘I’m about to throw my right hand.’

  Everything went perfectly to plan. I kept pumping out the old trombone left and Billy kept eating it up. His defence was all over the place and every time he set himself for one of his roundhouse rights, I just knocked him off balance with a left lead.

  A lot of the newspaper experts had predicted that Billy would cut me
up with his rough, tough tactics, but ironically it was the East Ender whose flesh was weak. I opened an inch-long slit over his eye and in the eighth round I landed a stream of left jabs on the injury. I was making the eye the target. I know that sounds terrible, but boxing’s not a game, it’s a business – a bloody hard business often with the law of the jungle. I was doing exactly what Ali had done to me in our two fights and the referee stopped it in the eighth, with Billy in a right old state.

  It was a victory that gave me huge satisfaction because I was now the proud owner of a record three Lonsdale Belts.

  Henry now reigned supreme over British heavyweights and had seen off the cream of the crop (Hungarian-born Joe Bugner had just left school). Jim Wicks said: ‘There’s nobody left in Britain for us to beat. Time for us to go back into Europe, Enery.’

  Another European adventure was about to start. ‘Yeah,’ agreed Henry. ‘Let’s go for it.’ All right, it wasn’t exactly Napoleonesque, but Our Enery was much more of a Wellington.

  And a certain German champion was about to meet his Waterloo.

  ROUND 10

  EUROPEAN EMPEROR

  Belted in the nicest possible way, the Cooper-Wicks team switched their sights from the domestic scene to a European path they had trodden before with a mixture of triumph and frustration. It still got under their skin that the EBU had taken the European title away from them without a punch being thrown and had virtually handed it to the Dortmund southpaw, Karl Mildenberger.

  Come September 1968, Mildenberger was still the title-holder and once Henry had recovered from a knee cartilage operation, promoter Harry Levene buried his anti-German feelings to coax the champion to come to Wembley Arena for a long-awaited showdown with the British and Commonwealth king.

  I asked Levene how he had reconciled paying a purse to a German boxer, having refused to even consider it in the past. ‘Believe me, I don’t like paying this Kraut,’ he told me, ‘but I know I am going to have the satisfaction of seeing Henry give him a bloody good hiding.’

  Levene got a shoal of hate mail from the Jewish fraternity, who considered it disgraceful that he was lining the pocket of Mildenberger and many regular Jewish ringsiders boycotted the fight. Henry always remained above politics and just got on with his job.

  Mildenberger was a hefty and powerful all-rounder who could box cagily from long range and also thump hard with follow-through lefts after finding the range with his southpaw right lead. He had proved a handful for Muhammad Ali before being stopped in the twelfth round of a world title bid in Germany in September 1966, following Ali’s successful title defences against Cooper and London during a mop-up of European challengers.

  A victory over Henry would have given Mildenberger a record seven consecutive successful defences of the European title, but he came up against a Cooper in dominating form and not at all ring-rusty after his long lay-off because of a dodgy knee.

  Henry gave him quite a pasting – or perhaps a plastering – for eight rounds, dictating the pace and pattern of the fight with a left jab that was rarely out of the German’s reddening and rapidly swelling face. Most boxers would look to use the right hand as the main weapon against a southpaw, but by clever use of the ring Henry was able to stop the German’s advance with his awesome left.

  Mildenberger got as frustrated as a bluebottle hitting a window as he continually failed to land any of his big bombs and he started to get reckless with his head. Henry came out of an eighth-round clinch with a gash over his eye and the Italian referee Nello Barroveccio – to the surprise of many – instantly disqualified the protesting German for butting.

  I met up with Karl while working as a PR on the Ali-Dunn fight in Munich in 1976 and he told me: ‘Henry was the best European opponent I met and he deserved his victory over me, but not in the way it finished. I did not deliberately catch him with my head, as was suggested: the cut was caused by my left hand, but it was on the blind side of the referee and I will never know how he managed to see it as a butt. I don’t think he would have disqualified me anywhere else but in England. But I had no complaint against Henry. He was a true English gentleman and a good advertisement for boxing in the way he conducted himself, in and out of the ring.’

  It was to prove Mildenberger’s final fight and he hung up his gloves with the satisfaction of knowing he had been Germany’s most successful heavyweight since the halcyon days of the legendary Max Schmeling.

  Henry’s year had got off to a proud start when he was awarded an OBE in the New Year’s honours list. He drove himself to the Palace for the investiture in his favourite car, a Bentley Continental. This was his one selfish possession and a sign of how far he had come since his first car, the second-hand Ford Prefect he and George had bought for £100 in 1954 and in which they had had the frightening collision after the Joe Erskine fight of 1955. Henry admitted to being a car crank, getting a better and more powerful vehicle virtually after every major fight victory. He looked on it as a sort of reward, and his accountant cleverly (and legally) made it a business expense. His parade of cars over the years included top-of-the-range Ferraris and a Jensen Interceptor. Henry loved driving, and often motored to Italy through the Alps in France and Switzerland with Albina and the boys. He was close friends with former world F1 champion Graham Hill and was trained by him to take part in celebrity races, driving the Brands Hatch circuit at terrifying speeds. Henry said he got an even bigger adrenaline rush from the high-speed driving than from fighting.

  He needed a safety belt when he made the next defence of his European title against notorious Italian wild man of the ring Piero Tomasoni, who was fittingly nicknamed ‘The Axeman’ because he used to swing his punches as if trying to chop down a tree. It was staged at Rome’s Palazzo dello Sport on 13 March 1969 and developed into the most turbulent fight of Henry’s career.

  I had a worrying time throughout much of the late 1960s with a knee that gave me some terrible pain and prevented me from getting in my usual quota of road running. A cartilage operation seemed to have sorted it out and I went to Rome confident I could see off Tomasoni, a roughhouse fighter who didn’t believe in taking prisoners. What I didn’t realise is that he was not only a hard nut but also something of a nutcase!

  Tomasoni had knocked out Jack Bodell at the Albert Hall earlier in the year, so we knew he could bang a bit. They’d had a real rough and tumble, and according to reports the Italian had been even more awkward than Bodell, who was hardly a ballet dancer of a fighter. So I should have known what to expect, but nobody could have planned for what happened in the ring that night.

  The Palazzo dello Sport is an incredible arena. The stands climb up fifty feet in the air and making my entrance with the capacity crowd jeering and whistling made me feel as if I was entering a cockpit. I must have looked like a midget to the spectators up in the gods and the atmosphere was the sort they must have had in the old Colosseum.

  Our tactics were to let Tomasoni burn himself out before we opened up. That meant tucking my chin in and keeping my left in his face, unbalancing him. He was a real shortarse, four inches shorter than me, and so I had to punch down all the time, which reduced my power.

  All my fight plans went out of the window after I’d floored him in the first round with my first real hard left hook, delivered off a jab. From then on it was bedlam. When he got up he just went berserk and charged at me with his head down, using it like a third glove, throwing punches from all angles and without caring where they landed. Some were as low as my thigh, others landed on the back of my neck and in the kidneys. I looked to the Dutch referee Ben Bril, but he was in no mood to upset the screaming Roman fans. We felt as if we’d been thrown to the lions.

  Tomasoni came roaring out of his corner at the start of the second round like a maniac and one right hand landed so low that it dented my aluminium cup guarding the family jewels. If I’d not been wearing the protection, I reckon I’d now be Miss Henrietta Cooper! I went down on my knees with my eyes watering and my unmenti
onables aching. I couldn’t believe it when the referee started counting over me. Jim Wicks was up on the apron demanding that Tomasoni should be disqualified, but quickly got down when the fans started pelting him with rubbish.

  I dragged myself up and started to unload my heaviest punches on a squat opponent who seemed as wide as he was tall. He was rushing at me like a wild bull. In the fourth round I caught him with a left hook and, as he fell down, he grabbed me and took me with him. Jack Solomons was sitting at the ringside and was brave enough to stand up and shout to the referee to at least warn Tomasoni, who was completely out of control.

  As I regained my feet, he pulled himself up by hanging on to my waist, then immediately threw another low blow, which at last brought a warning from the referee. This was the signal for the fanatical Roman crowd to launch fruit, rotten tomatoes and lumps of salami into the ring, a lot of it coming from the top tiers way up in the sky. They must have thought I was a hungry fighter. Italians! Don’t you just love ’em?

  Blimey, I thought to myself, I’d better get this over quick because it will be their seats being thrown next. I finally managed to end Tomasoni’s all-or-nothing challenge in the fifth round with a full-power left hook that lifted him off his feet before he slumped to the canvas, his eyes rolling. Somehow he got up as the count reached nine, but he was in no position to defend himself and the referee signalled a knockout before steering him on unsteady legs back to his corner, not knowing who or where he was. Jim Wicks leapt into the ring and said: ‘Let’s scarper as quick as possible. I think they want to lynch us.’

  But funnily enough, once the fight was over the crowd suddenly swung their support to me and gave me a great ovation, perhaps remembering that I had an Italian wife. A pressman got hold of Albina soon after and told her how I had been hit low and roughed up before knocking out Tomasoni. She said she was so relieved and happy that I had made him pay for the foul punches and that he had brought shame on Italy.