In essence, Wicks was teaching his boys to behave like champions, to be not as other men. Henry quite saw the sense of this, as the little anecdote suggests, but it also hints that Wicks was a man possessed of a formidable personal authority. In truth it was never in Henry’s nature to while away afternoons propping up a bar, a fact that made his later friendship with Oliver Reed such a dangerous one, for there is perhaps a slight streak of the puritan in Henry.
Wicks really didn’t miss a trick. The more exposure, he reasoned, the more celebrity, and the more celebrity, the more money, both for boxing and for other activities. His fighters were not the first to perform a string of public relations exercises, and they were certainly not to be the last, but for Wicks all was one; he had a full agenda, and it was not totally concerned with boxing.
But the Coopers, of course, were not the only twins in boxing: there were the Krays, too. The Kray family hailed from Hackney, so they had no social acquaintances in common with the Coopers in their early years, but Jim Wicks knew of them through boxing, as both Krays had tried their hand at the professional game a year before the Coopers, albeit at a lighter weight. They were good, too, if hard to train properly, but had given the fight game up for more obviously lucrative activities in 1954, just as the Cooper brothers turned professional.
Interestingly, the Krays never really went back to it. Had they put their minds to it as a business activity, history might have been very different. Henry remembers them from the early days:
We got to know them quite well, in fact. I remember once – this was much later, of course, they called Jim to ask us if we could all go to a bash they were having. They had taken over Hackney town hall and when we arrived half the local CID were in there, all drinking in the mayor’s parlour. They had organized a trip for some pensioners somewhere and wanted to publicize it. They were always doing something like that, or presenting an old people’s home with a TV set. What they never said, of course, was that they had threatened to take some poor bloke’s ears off unless he gave them the set in the first place. They were OK, though – until they went mad.
So, even the Krays didn’t dare upset Jim Wicks, they always asked politely. But they also clearly had no particular interest in muscling in on boxing. They were frequently present at gyms as well as fights but really their primary motivation was publicity. If celebrities went boxing, so would the Krays.
‘I remember when the biggest thing on television was Sunday Night at the London Palladium, says Henry. ‘Almost every single American star who went there – and there were hundreds – wound up in some Kray night club or other having their picture taken with them. They just couldn’t get enough of that. They were basically publicity seekers.’
Under Wicks’s firm hand, Henry’s career started to build. There was no particular pressure but by 26 April 1957 Henry had an almost perfect record of nine victories out of nine fights, all but two inside the distance. His first defeat came that evening at the hand, or rather the head, of the Italian Uber Bacilieri at Harringay Arena. Henry sustained a badly cut eye – his first serious cut – in round two. The speed with which Wicks threw in the towel was startling but he knew full well that the identical twins had this potential weakness, if only because poor George was suffering badly from the same problem and had been stopped quite frequently.
Henry would get his own back on Bacilieri when he knocked him out in round seven of their rematch in September, after stopping Ron Harman in June. On 15 November 1957, though, he encountered Joe Erskine for the first time in the professional ring. The pair had fought as amateurs in the Army, as Henry recalls:
I first met Joe in the light heavyweight semi-finals of the ABA championships in April 1952. Already he was a good boxer technically, a good left jabber, a good mover and a hard boy to box. Whenever you thought you were out of distance, sure he wouldn’t sling a left hand, he did, the crafty so-and-so. And he had a poker face. You could hit him, and you could hurt him, and he would never show it. You’d wonder – have I hurt him? – and while you were thinking, he’d have recovered. He never showed any emotion in the ring.
Erskine as a professional was even stronger, despite his lack of a big punch, and he outpointed Henry at Harringay Arena in an eliminator for the British heavyweight title. It was a disappointing loss, but going the full ten rounds, even if he did lose the fight, marked the end of Henry’s apprenticeship.
All in all, in his professional career, Henry would fight Erskine five times, and if there was ever an opponent who had a psychological edge over him in their early encounters it was this one, but it is also fair to say that at each full-blown championship encounter the two men had, Henry was always able to reach deep and beat him.
From the start of 1956 Henry’s work rate logically started to ease off. Having built his resume over a fairly intensive two years, and established that he was a formidable boxer, Wicks could now commence phase two of this great adventure, which was to gradually position his fighter for a serious crack at a national title: a Lonsdale belt. Henry had already popped his head into the higher reaches of the division with the match with Erskine and Jim Wicks’s job was now to ensure that he stayed there.
Pacing a fighter’s development is utterly critical to his future. History is scattered with examples of badly managed fighters of great talent (Erskine was one of them, Zora Folley another) who are brought to a peak too early. There is only a certain number of top level fights that a boxer is capable of delivering, as a sturgeon has eggs, and an unscrupulous manager, while he is constantly on the lookout for new talent, will exploit his seasoned fighters for his shareof their purses. It happened to so many in the earliest days of the ring, and was still happening when Henry commenced this vital part of his career, but more particularly in the USA.
Boxing may have been inordinately popular, but planning a fighter’s finances was a business fraught with practical problems. For a start, it was difficult for a boxer to live anything but a hand-to-mouth existence. It was inordinately hard for a fighter to get credit, for example, if only because there was a higher than normal risk that he would be incapacitated at any time, so the pattern of a fighter’s life tended to be fairly well circumscribed. Boxers simply did not live as other men and were in many ways totally dependent upon their managers as a contact point with reality and day-to-day business. Some were particularly unlucky or ill-advised in this respect. Henry was not.
Wicks was a patient man; not only was he fiercely protective of his fighters – he really cared about them – but he managed to disguise this behind a pink, scrubbed exterior mask of world-weary wit, which journalists in particular found extraordinarily attractive. The private face of Jim Wicks lived amid a frenzy of telephones in his ratty little office off the gym in the Old Kent Road, with its curling linoleum, cheap furniture and unmistakable ‘atmosphere’, whereas the public face of Jim Wicks was to be seen regularly in his favoured booth at Simpson’s restaurant (or one of a host of other venues) from where he handled the increasingly vital element of his portfolio of responsibilities – public relations. He was, happily for the twins, in the autumn of his life, so as the rest of his stable slowed down and retired, he did not replace them now. Soon he would be left with just the twins and, quite shortly after that, just Henry.
Harry Levene finally managed to promote a Cooper fight on 28 February 1956 but it was a charity event, at the Albert Hall, just prior to the re-opening of Wembley. The opponent was Maurice Mols, the French heavyweight champion. Henry totally outclassed him, putting the clearly overweight Frenchman down no fewer than four times in the fourth round. He accomplished this by a succession of sickeningly solid left hooks to the body, which caused referee, Tommy Little, to stop the fight and deliver Henry’s tenth win inside the distance.
Mols may not have been the classiest fighter Henry had faced (Erskine clearly was, up to then) but he was the first title-holder Henry had ever fought. The ease of the victory did not create an air of overconfidence, as Mols was c
learly overrated, but it was an important win, as it allowed Wicks to select and negotiate more selectively, as he understood that in boxing, like so many other areas of activity, a fighter will be commercially judged almost totally by his last effort, which is a phenomenon that naturally works both ways.
Next up was Brian London, who was unbeaten in 12 professional fights. In a sense, London, whose father, Jack, had been British heavyweight champion himself, was becoming the Henry Cooper of the North. He came from Blackpool and his family name was actually Harper, his father having changed it to reflect his admiration for the writer of that name, the author of Call of the Wild. London had fought as an amateur under the name of Harper, as had his brother, Jack junior. Henry had beaten Jack London as an amateur, whereas Brian had beaten George as a professional, so there was no lack of potential rivalry. Henry even went so far as to make a prediction. He was asked before the fight if he planned to knock his opponent out. He nodded. When? Eighth or ninth? He shook his head, holding up one finger. ‘Just one,’ he said, quietly.
Henry remembers Brian London in the early years as ‘…a surly so-and-so, never smiling in his pictures, and a difficult man to get along with. From his attitude at the weigh-ins there was no love lost between us. He could be quick-tempered in the ring, too…’
The two men were very different. Henry, whose sunny disposition was already making him inordinately popular, was up against a man whose dour disposition made him exactly the opposite, at least in the South. The match took place at the Empress Hall on 1 May. It did not take long. Henry whacked London onto the ropes in round one with a rare right hook to the body. As London dropped his guard, Henry moved in with the rapidly developing left and delivered it serially to London’s jaw. The referee, Tommy Little, leaped in and stopped the fight after 2 minutes 35 seconds of the first.
This had been a startling and accurate performance, as important for Henry it was a heartbreaker for London. The aggression Henry had shown, not to mention his ability to fight two-handed, was appreciated. Suddenly, after that fight, he was a name to conjure with, particularly for Jim Wicks. Winning fights at this senior level with such apparent ease as well as such versatility was vital for him. He was not yet at the level where Wicks could charge whatever he wanted for Henry’s professional services, but he was already getting close to it. He would fight Brian London twice more, in fact, and always beat him, but not necessarily with the same ease.
After such a brief fight, which had caused no damage whatever to Henry’s eyebrows – London had barely landed a single blow – there was no need for a sustained layoff, and less than two months later, on 26 June, he fought the ungainly Giannino Luise, of whom he had never heard (and would never hear again). It was a relatively pedestrian fight until Henry landed a hard, hacking left to his opponent’s liver, which stopped the fight in the seventh round.
With three such authoritative victories in a row – Mols, London, Luise – and a career now fully launched, Henry had every reason to believe that those vague ambitions of childhood, those images of Joe Louis, were leading to something. Everything seemed to be cruising along, going exactly to plan, without any clouds on the horizon. Life was good.
* In the spirit of enthusiastic research, I have tried this brew – it is quite disgusting and cannot have helped Henry’s gout, from which he sporadically suffered.
CHAPTER FIVE
INTO THE ABYSS
‘Cheer up! The worst is yet to come!’
PHILANDER CHASE JOHNSON, (1920).
If Henry thought that his straightforward stopping of Giannino Luise was a portent for the future, he was to be sadly mistaken. Statistics are seldom the measure of a man but a glance at the record book suggests that there is an exception to every rule. In Henry’s case the signs of trouble ahead were certainly not clear at Belle Vue, Manchester on 7 September 1956 when he put Yorkshireman Peter Bates down with a massive left hook to the mouth for what might well have been added to his resume as a first-round knockout. Bates stayed down for a nine count (not tactically – he was severely dazed) but then, amazingly enough, got to his feet. The next four rounds were all Henry’s, despite a small smear of fresh blood on his left eyebrow.
In the fifth, though, a concerned Wicks saw from the corner that ‘coming out of a clinch’ (as one report had it) there was a very serious cut over Henry’s right eye as well, probably the worst cut that he had received so far. In a situation like this a boxer needs a fast knockout but Henry simply could not land a repeat blow to the one he had produced in round one. Without further ado, Wicks threw in the towel at the end of the fifth. It was not a particularly important fight but, while Henry was well ahead by five rounds to none, the damage was severe; he was cut to the bone, but there was clearly nothing wrong with his boxing.
A disappointment, to be sure, but not a catastrophe; boxers get cut all the time. After a five-month layoff, Henry faced Joe Bygraves, the muscular hard man from Jamaica, all 15 stone of him. This Earls Court fight, on 19 February 1957, was an important one, for the British Empire heavyweight title no less, which Bygraves had seized in June of the previous year.
Henry had beaten Bygraves before, of course, but at the weigh-in he found that he was now only a pound short of 14 stone, which for Henry was an unheard-of bulk. He had discovered that his ideal fighting weight was exactly 13 stone 71bs; the difference may not sound much, but over a prizefight, the extra baggage always shows. In fact, under modern divisions, Henry Cooper would be a cruiserweight.
The extra poundage certainly showed as this fight got under way. Henry was the slowest he had ever been and looked it, even against Bygraves, who was not the fastest mover in the division. Bygraves took the fight to him and Henry seemed unable to make any impression at all. Of more concern was a cut to the left eye (round three) and a haematoma under the right, which burst messily.
The end, when it came, was humiliating. In round nine Bygraves landed a crushing punch to the solar plexus. Winded, Henry just man aged to beat the count but as soon as he arose Bygraves simply did it again. This time Henry simply could not get up and was counted out. Henry’s friend Danny Cornell, who went to the dressing room, accompanied by Derek ‘Del’ John, the lightweight boxer from Catford, describes the scene:
The place looked like a morgue. Cooper, bruised and bitter, sat on the edge of the rubbing table, while Danny Holland worked on his face. Then, looking up, Henry spotted Del: ‘How’s the nose, Del?’ Del had broken his nose a week earlier in a bout at the National Sporting Club. It impressed me that he could be that considerate about a friend at such a moment.
In the audience was Ingemar Johansson, who, since September 1956, the month of Henry’s misfortune with Bates, had been the holder of the European heavyweight title after taking it from Franco Cavicchi. Three months after that, Johansson had dispatched Peter Bates in two rounds, breaking his jaw in the process. He had actually thought that Henry had boxed well, in fact, but he needed to find out what he might be up against, for Jim Wicks had, as soon as Johansson had taken the title, put Henry’s name forward with the European Boxing Union (EBU) as a contender. Ambitious, perhaps, but he had faith in the emerging Cooper left hook, which was developing into a punch of awesome stopping-power, even if it was not yet fully formed. It was merely fearsome, if not the devastating blow it would become. Certainly, it had been noticeably absent against Bygraves. But Wicks was philosophical. ‘Have a couple of months out,’ he wheezed. Which Henry did, before challenging Johansson for the European heavy-weight title in Stockholm on 19 May 1957.
Johansson was not actually best pleased at the prospect, as he recalled in 1961:
The EBU instructed me to defend my title against Henry Cooper. We were not especially happy. Cooper had been knocked out by Bygraves in London. It was one of those things which can happen. Cooper… jumped on a punch. From the public’s point of view it didn’t look good, but Edwin [Edwin Ahlqvist, his manager] chose Johanneshov [the stadium in Stockholm] and figured that Cooper woul
d draw a full house in Stockholm in spite of everything.
Ahlgvist was right – 10,000 baying Swedes turned out, along with a few cautiously optimistic British scribblers. Lainson Wood of the Daily Telegraph wrote: ‘Cooper is certainly keyed up for the fight of his life and I do not think he will let Britain down. He is a better boxer than Johansson. Let’s hope he pulls it off.’ And the view of the Boxing News was not dissimilar: ‘…on paper, this is the most open fight imaginable…’
But there was more to this than pure boxing. Johansson was not technically an inspiring boxer but he was possessed of a truly terrifying right -’The Hammer of Thor’ as he later called it. Anyone who got in its way was almost certainly going to go down, and hard, as poor Cavicchi had recently discovered when it had connected with his midriff, ‘dropping him like a log’, as one rather uninspired report had it.
Henry, though, had not actually lost very much weight; he was still 13 stone 121bs, and, in an attempt to shed some avoirdupois, he went running, accompanied by an extremely fit and cooperative waiter from the hotel where he was staying.
The fight was staged in the open air, on a fine early summer afternoon. ‘It was really bright,’ says Henry, ‘and there was muggins, sitting in the corner with the sun right in my eyes.’
It was in truth a fairly plodding and uninspiring contest, and Peter Wilson of the Daily Mirror scored the first round even, with Henry perhaps marginally ahead in each of the following three, but by the tiniest margin. In the interval, after round four, Wicks advised Henry to take the fight to his opponent. Both men were nervous about the attitude of the crowd and, ever mindful of the fact that Johansson had been thrown out of the 1952 Olympic Games for ‘not trying’, it seemed logical to introduce a little ginger. This was a mistake, as Johansson recalls:
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