Henry Cooper

by Robert Edwards

  No one who reads this book will be remotely surprised when I say that I like boxing rather a lot. It is an interesting sport and I admire what fighters do very much. The fact that it has been, literally and metaphorically, ‘on its back foot’ for some time is a matter of great regret to me. I have also had a go at it myself; in the 1960s, when I was at school, it was considered morally compulsory to lace on the huge, ancient and iron-hard ‘mauleys’ (around the back of the bike sheds, usually) and square up in some grotesque and ill-supervised mismatch. I got soundly thumped, of course, and it hurt, rather a lot, as I recall. There is nothing quite like a good whack in the solar plexus before Latin to quite put you right off the subject. So, my admiration for most of the men who do this for a living knows few bounds.

  Although I well remember so many of Henry’s fights, it has been interesting for me to cross-refer to so many contemporary accounts of them from more seasoned observers than me who were at the ringside. By and large, but not exclusively, I have used broadsheet and specialist press coverage, for the simple reason that it is generally well written and concise, and lacks that ghastly sentimentality that seems to infest the tabloid world, although the opinion of that most accomplished writer, Peter Wilson of the Daily Mirror, is always illuminating. Similarly, the veteran observer Harry Carpenter’s insightful pieces, which he wrote so well for the Daily Mail, have been invaluable.

  Viewing contemporary footage of some of Henry’s encounters has also been revealing, if only because the flawed nature of some of my own recollections are revealed, but it is important to stress that the perspective of television or video is strictly two-dimensional and can be highly misleading; the view of a boxing match offered by being seated near the ringside is far removed from that offered by being seated on a sofa and watching from a distance, if only because the spectator at a live match can see (and hear) how hard these men actually hit each other. Television denies us this.

  Interestingly, even broadsheet coverage differed radically in its reportage of a given fight, even down to the details of times elapsed and relative points. This is not necessarily for reasons of professional sloppiness, merely an aspect of history. No two writers will ever see things in exactly the same way, which is why it is important to compare and contrast consistently. After reading the bulk of the broadsheet press, it seemed to me that the Daily Telegraph’s Donald Saunders and The Times’s Neil Allen seem to have been the most consistent, particularly in their pre-match assessments, which are a useful litmus test of the informed opinion of the day.

  It is not, of course, for me to make light of the efforts of any of the men in this book, no matter how they engaged with their subject, Henry Cooper. No man who boxed at this level for a living deserves anything but the total respect of any writer on the subject. Thus in drawing conclusions as to the relative abilities of certain fighters – putting them into context – I have relied either on Henry, the informed press, or what I think to be a workable consensus of contemporary opinion. But one thing I have learned is that statistics are seldom the measure of any man.

  For this aspect of sport is important: sportsmen operate strictly in their own context. We cannot evaluate any sportsman on an absolute basis, although we are always trying to do it, for the simple reason that conditions, most obviously the quality of opposition, are such a huge historical variable. With motor racing, or any sport that depends upon technology as much as nerve to take it forward, a driver can only be measured in his own time and this crucial aspect applies even to other more individual sports, such as mountaineering. What could Edward Whymper have accomplished with modern equipment? Boxing, however, is more fundamental, more basic. A fight staged sixty years ago, or even a hundred, would be quite recognizable now, and Tom Cribb would no doubt certainly appreciate the skills of Henry Cooper; whereas I cannot imagine what that brave driver Christian Lautenschlager would make of a modern Grand Prix car; he would probably love it, once it had been explained to him what it actually was.

  The years fall away, and I stand face to face with Sir Henry Cooper in his drawing room, deep in rural Kent. Patiently, he is demonstrating to me why it is that southpaws are so difficult to fight; why it is that they should all be ‘strangled at birth’, as he only semi-humorously puts it. In fact, I can see his point exactly. Southpaws, for a boxer of Henry’s polarity, are clearly very hard to hit properly if you engage with them conventionally and can be counted inconvenient at best, but when he switches to a regular stance and we are engaged normally, almost as if for a waltz, I glance down and see that huge, waiting left fist, its biggest knuckle almost the size and texture of a damaged golf ball. I realize that it is less than a foot away from my chin and that if that was what we were about, he could hit me before I could even consider blinking. I even know through which wall of his house I would probably travel. It is sobering. I begin to realize what the game is really about and hope that his well-honed instincts do not kick in; basically, I hope he likes me. A little homework has already revealed to me that it is this fist, which delivered the finest punch of its kind for a generation, could accelerate faster than a Saturn V rocket at full chat and, after travelling such a short distance, would connect with an impact of over four tons per square inch; the physics involved are quite ridiculous. I glance up at him, bathed in the light of final comprehension. The famous Cooper grin is followed by what I perceive to be a quick, knowing nod. He knows I understand. No words are really necessary.

  What is startling, I suppose, is the sheer intimacy which two fighters must share; there must be constant, 100 per cent eye contact, as Henry put it: ‘It’s all in the eyes; you can tell everything from the eyes. If a man is going to throw a punch, he telegraphs it with his eyes, and if you’ve hurt him, you just know it by looking at him.’

  Boxing is a sport driven by opportunity and is, perhaps more than any other sporting activity, a real mirror of life. The toe-to-toe opportunism of the fight itself, echoed by the deft opportunism of the promoters (and in some cases the managers) produces a rich cultural stew, which invites sampling with a very large spoon indeed. There have been many tragedies in the fight game – boxers who died in the ring – Benny Paret, beaten to death by Emile Griffith; Johnny Owen, who lingered six weeks in a coma before succumbing to the assault he had received from Lupe Pintor, and Jimmy Garcia, who died in 1995 following a brutal fight with Gabriel Ruelas. Then, of course, Gerald McClennan and Michael Watson, both damaged badly, McClennan sadly beyond repair. Also, consider the other casualties – Randolph Turpin and Freddie Mills, both suicides – not to mention so many others, their dreams of glory shattered as they died before their time in lonely rented rooms, unremembered. But I am afraid I still love it, or at least I love the idea of it.

  There are not many fighters whose reputations grow after they retire. I can think of Jack Dempsey, Max Schmeling, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali and Henry Cooper. All, bar Henry, were world champions, but that is not the point. When a genuinely confused Max Baer asked, after Henry had entered the rankings in 1958, ‘Tell me, doesn’t that guy ever get mean?’ he meant it quite seriously. Baer, a playboy by his own confession, was world heavyweight champion for 364 days after dropping the giant Primo Carnera and he simply could not understand why Henry Cooper seemed so placid.

  There is a powerful lobby that argues that boxing is primarily a matter of economics and Henry Cooper was actually one of them. There is a very ancient joke, which I suspect re-emerges from generation to generation, of the landed earl, who, while riding the bounds of his estate, discovers a trespassing vagrant, taking his ease in the shade of a tree:

  ‘What are you doing on my land?’ cries the toff.

  ‘Who says it’s your land?’ responds the tramp.

  ‘Well, I inherited it.’

  ‘From whom?’

  ‘From my father’

  And where did he get it?’

  ‘From his father.’

  Well, it all goes further back in similar fashion to some era near the t
hird crusade:

  And where did he get it?’

  ‘Well, he fought for it, actually.’

  ‘Right, you bugger,’ says the tramp, taking off his tattered coat, ‘I’ll fight you for it now’

  So, who are we to deny Sonny Liston, from his shoeless and unlettered childhood, his fine house in Las Vegas?

  Henry Cooper occupies a unique and enviable place in the contemporary British consciousness. The clear contrast between his public (and private) nature and the often grim business of prizefighting does not sit uncomfortably with anyone, even those who admired him as a man but detested what he did for a living – and there are, it must be said, many of those.

  The sheer inaccessibility of boxing rather defines it to most people; one can stage a pro-celebrity event in most sports after all, except these martial arts. It is sometimes tempting to suggest it, of course, and many of us might imagine that Mike Tyson vs Paul Daniels would be an entertaining event to watch, but that simple reality, that boxing is actually about hurting people, sometimes very badly, and sometimes with quite disastrous results, makes many turn away from it. How can one like a man who does this for a living? Quite easily, in fact.

  So, Henry Cooper was different. Different also from other fighters in terms of the perception with which he has long been regarded. Those who admired Henry, what he did, what he became, are a different group perhaps from those who admire Chris Eubank, although to a fighter, all are one – as intelligent men (and boxers by and large are highly intelligent, they have to be) they share both a living and a vast mutual respect and seldom really despise each other, whatever they may say in public.

  His reputation is undimmed. For his fans, knowledgeable or not, he remains the man who asked Muhammad Ali, then called Cassius Clay, some questions to which the American (who seems now to be a global treasure) did not necessarily have a ready answer. To others, those whose interests occupy purely the British sport, he was the holder of no fewer than three Lonsdale belts, a record that cannot ever be beaten under current regulations, and when Henry was forced to sell them, the nation felt deeply for him, for they knew him to be a man who had started off in life with few material possessions, that these treasures, going under the hammer (or ’ammer, I suppose) at an obscure country auction, these trophies were objects for which he had fought, won for himself, literally taken with his own hands. He had not been born to them. This sorry spectacle was not that of some dissolute chinless wonder selling off his unearned and mortgaged inheritance, rather there was something almost biblical about it.

  But boxing audiences are also more fickle and more merciless than the wider public. It is almost impossible to believe it now, but on the evening of 5 December 1961, over 40 years ago, Henry Cooper, the man we revere so much now, was actually booed out of Wembley Arena after being dropped by a carthorse kick of a right from that same Zora Folley whom he had outpointed three years before. As one commentator, Robert Daley of the New York Times, put it sympathetically at the time: ‘Mercifully, he was probably too dazed to notice.’ How times change…

  In his professional career Henry Cooper fought 44 men on 55 separate occasions. He won 40 fights (27 of them inside the distance), drew one and lost the other 14. These are mere numbers, of course, but they make up, by my calculation, 371 rounds, or 18½ hours of competition (and punishment) at the highest level. Like many fighters, he would have been willing to do more, but unlike so many who sadly did just that, he came through the process completely unaltered.

  But that is surely what boxing is about. It is a bilateral interrogation. How fast, strong, clever or brave? What have you got in there? It lifts a very few men to heights of confidence quite unknown to most and the majority of fighters thus remain forgotten. Henry Cooper had been retired from boxing for over 30 years before his death in 2011, but he will not, I submit, be forgotten, because he quite simply survived the process. For this he thanked the quality of his management, for which read Jim Wicks, that avuncular but perhaps slightly sinister maestro from Bermondsey. The relationship between these two men was an exemplar of trust and understanding that is rare in any human activity, let alone sport, and well-nigh unique in boxing.

  That he survived so well, and that he demonstrated this so regularly by being such a public figure (and a knight, to boot) was the cause of much appreciation, both public and private. When I set out to explore the life of this professional fighter – this prizefighter, I did so with the knowledge that Henry’s personal appeal cut across anything so trivial as social class or, even more importantly, whether or not the Cooper fan is even a fan of the sport at which he excelled. No, it is simpler than that. People love Henry Cooper because he came unscathed through a process that would quite terrify any imaginative person. He put himself in harm’s way and came out on the far side of that quite unspoiled and clearly uncorrupted by a sport and a business that, by the time of his retirement, was becoming a byword for sleaze, a cipher for corruption. One can describe Sonny Liston (or Mike Tyson, for that matter) as a truly terrifying man, but that adjective comes nowhere near doing justice to some of those men who handled them and ran and damaged or destroyed their lives.

  The British sport was not, of course, quite as grimy as its American counterpart, mainly because of a more monolithic regime of regulation. The British Boxing Board of Control (BBBC) has had many criticisms fired at it, and indeed many of them are entirely justified, and it is an organization that certainly has its detractors now, but it is true to say, no irony intended, that by and large they made a fair fist of it, however shabbily they occasionally treated Henry. Of course, they were up against rather less than the fragmented American regulators, who were often taking on (and occasionally in the pockets of) the Mob – seriously unpleasant people. The British underworld is happily a pallid and feeble thing by comparison with the likes of the Mafia; in the USA, there were truly dreadful men like Frankie Carbo – here, we had those dismal fantasists, the Krays. Enough said.

  Boxing, for very good reasons, has always had a whiff of corruption about it, whether justified or not, but despite the distaste with which it is often regarded, for a multitude of reasons, people actually rather like boxers. There is no particular paradox to this, no inconsistency; it is, I maintain, quite obvious. In spite of the fact that many of Sir Henry’s fans would really rather prefer him to have done something else for a living, they also realize full well that if he had, he would simply not be the straightforward, proud man whom they admire so much. Henry Cooper, nice guy plasterer, is not the same thing at all as Sir Henry Cooper, KSG, OBE, – prizefighter. The man who beat Brian London to a confused and bloody pulp and broke the brave Gawie de Klerk’s jaw in two places before the fight was stopped is the very same man who also raised many, many millions for handicapped children and other good causes. That this fact may place the politically correct or the woolly-minded, bleeding-hearted liberal on the horns of a vast moral dilemma is, of course, less than dust to me – a mere rounding.

  But it is interesting…

  PART ONE:

  THE BOXING TWINS

  PROLOGUE

  ‘Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes, Men would be angels, angels would be gods.’

  ALEXANDER POPE, Essay on Man, (1733).

  The pride of Eurydamus the argonaut and boxer, it is said, is so great that it compels him to swallow his broken teeth rather than spit them out and therefore show his pain. It is quite possible that he has been clobbered by his co-adventurer,

  Polydeukes, who is a useful middleweight. Polydeukes and his brother Kastor, who is also an Argonaut, are, according to mythology, the twin sons of Leda and Zeus. Unfairly, Polydeukes was (is, I suppose) immortal, whereas poor Kastor is not. Their sister is Helen of Troy. According to a vase purporting to show Polydeukes at work (literally, putting up his dukes), his opponent is his twin, although Kastor, it must be said, enjoys more fame as a horseman. This pair, the Dioskuri, later become the Castori, the Gemini twins of Roman mythology and modern as
trology, Castor and Pollux, so in a sense both achieve immortality.

  Although there is evidence of fist-fighting from all over antiquity, it is generally accepted that it is fundamentally a Greek sport, a pas time that bored soldiery use to maintain both their martial skills and their aggression. It is quite distinct from wrestling. To save their hands and allow them to hit harder, Greek fighters wrapped them in Himantes, soft thongs of kid or ox hide, which protect the knuckle of the clenched fist (pugme, from puxos, a box), leaving the fingers free. The later (c400 BC) Oxeis Himantes, literally ‘sharp thongs’, are preformed mitts of cured leather, which give a harder edge to a blow. They are padded with an inner layer of wool to spread the force of a punch and protect the fist and are quite recognizable as boxing gloves, albeit cruel ones. Even later, studs (myrmekes) are added, but never, apparently, at the Olympic Games.

  So not only do the Greeks invent the boxing glove (and indeed the bandages), they also seem to have developed the penalty tiebreaker. If a bout goes on too long, presumably when the audience become bored and start to throw things (it was ever thus), then a process known as a klimax is ordered, whereby one fighter will accept, quite undefended, a blow from his opponent and the favour will then be returned until the inevitable happens. Presumably this implies that there is no formal points system, as the strategy is clearly intended to create a knockout.

  Low punches are expressly forbidden and rest periods are by mutual consent. There are no formal divisions by weight, so presumably there is a common-sense matchmaker in there somewhere, as well as a referee. There are certainly promoters; Homer refers to a fight, staged by that heroic thug Achilles during the siege of Troy, that takes place between Epeus and Euryalus. Euryalus comes second but he still wins himself a drinking-cup for his efforts; for the winner, Epeus (appropriately enough for the man who designed, road-tested and built the Trojan horse), the prize is a mule.