Henry Cooper

by Robert Edwards

  The second fight in this rather flurried and hasty comeback was arranged barely a month later, on 26 February, against the dentally challenged Wayne Bethea, whose features had been so comprehensively rearranged by Sonny Liston in August 1958. Bethea was by now well past his best and this fight was only possible because he was on a general European trip fighting purely for the money. History records that Henry scored a points win but oddly it is not a fight he remembers well now.

  On 2 April Henry fought Joe Erskine for the last time, defending his British and Empire titles. It was a bloody encounter, with Erskine’s puffy eyes offering an obvious target, and the referee, Frank Wilson, stopped the fight in round nine. It was to be Erskine’s last title challenge, in fact. Although he was (like Dick Richardson) the same age as Henry, he was tired. Despite unrivalled ability as a technical boxer, he had always lacked a seriously heavy punch, and the extra work he had been forced to do as a result had probably weakened him enough, never mind the machinations of his crooked manager, Jacobs. ‘I really think that if Joe Erskine had developed a really heavy punch and had had a decent manager, he would have been world heavyweight champion without a doubt,’ says Henry. ‘He was just a superb boxer. He gave me more trouble than Richardson, London and Billy Walker put together.’

  So, after another successful rehabilitation of almost unseemly haste, Henry had earned himself a decent layoff. He had hardly laid eyes on Albina and his son, Henry Marco, in four months, and now he would go back into regular training – just a day at the office, really – for almost a year, before another encounter with Dick Richardson. But there was plenty for him to do. Wicks, never idle and usually scheming something up, had had a rather good idea.

  Using the full breadth of his contacts, he was even able to secure a walk-on part in a Daily Mail cartoon strip, Carol Day, penned by David Wright, which had been run from 1956 and would carry on until Wright’s sadly early death in 1967. Actually, it was a baddie; Henry would model for the character of ‘Gene Miller’, an apparently ‘brutal’ boxer, who was one of the many and varied male friends of the eponymous heroine. The Miller character was actually rather well drawn, and was also very obviously Henry Cooper (or possibly even George, of course). It was this kind of trick, very contemporary now, that served to keep either the name or the face of ‘Our ’Enery, as the tabloids would impertinently christen him later, in the centre of the limelight.

  For a man who is naturally fit and enjoys being so, there are many worse existences than being a boxer in daily training, particularly if your manager is both a good friend and counsellor and a trencherman of London-wide repute. Wicks was approaching 70 years of age but was never to lose his appetite for the good things of life. He also eschewed any nonsense about ‘my body is a temple’, so the combination of hard training and workouts, coupled with a fairly sybaritic lifestyle in terms of food, made for a rather idyllic existence for both Henry and George. The lunchtime round, alternating between the Strand and Soho, continued, with the combination of the highest protein diet imaginable, washed down with some of the best wine these establishments could offer, was not by modern standards the height of dietary excellence but it seemed to work. Wicks’s main aim was to keep his senior fighter in a fit but relaxed state, just near enough to a peak of fitness that a gruelling five-week training camp could then bring to an acme of both condition and aggression. The problem with Henry was always going to be the second rather than the first. He had, since the early fights, quickly calculated that his optimum weight was exactly 13 stone 701bs, which, although there never has been a minimum weight for a heavyweight (anyone can have a go) would today put him in the lists as a cruiserweight, and a light one at that. This inability when fit to gain useful weight was always to handicap him.

  But, as the Wicks équipe maintained its stately progress around the West End of London, with ‘The Bishop’ holding court at a succession of favourite and pre-ordained tables, it was becoming clear that, serene though the outlook seemed to be, with the only thing concerning Wicks being perhaps his age, then the conflicts within the prize ring were as nothing compared to the conflicts outside it.

  If it was not clear to Jack Solomons that he was on the way out as Britain’s senior promoter, then it should have been. The writing had probably been put on the wall since the sale of Harringay Arena at the end of 1958, which had been London’s favourite venue, but Solomons did not see it. At the opening of the new decade Solomons was consistently attempting to underbid for fights, believing that his position was still that of a monopolist. A good example was the way he attempted to secure the services of Terry Downes, the British middleweight champion, for a relative pittance. In July 1960 Downes effectively jumped ship, accepting a fight in a Harry Levene promotion. Solomons’ response was to threaten, via his creature Sam Burns, that Downes would ‘never work again’.

  But the rise of Harry Levene, in concert with Jarvis Astaire’s newly established Viewsport operation, now served to put Solomons under great pressure to bid, and bid high, for fights. This period marked the peak of the competition between the two men and Wicks was now beautifully positioned to take advantage of it. His willingness, on the part of his fighters to be quite ruthless about matters of money on behalf of his fighters did not endear him to the promoters nor, in particular, to the matchmakers employed by them.

  It was Wicks’s practice to ‘make the matches’ himself. Despite the fact that the name of Mickey Duff would always appear on the fight programme as being the matchmaker of record when Harry Levene promoted a fight with Astaire’s cooperation, this was not actually so. If Henry was top of the bill, then the promoter’s matchmaker (whoever it was) would be responsible only for the supporting bouts – the under card, as it is dismissively referred to, and this was a matter of great frustration. But Wicks did not care. At his age he was a man with few ambitions left and even fewer illusions. He was thick-skinned enough not to bother.

  Jim Wicks had moved with the times. Even though he had originally had a far better relationship with Solomons than with Levene he had neatly managed to step between the intense commercial (and personal) rivalry with them and play a pivotal role in his fighters’ careers, over which, when all was said and done, he held an iron grip, operating almost in loco parentis for a much younger person. His uncompromising attitude was total. ‘I often wondered why Henry senior didn’t resent Mr Wicks,’ Albina told me. ‘I know that a lot of other fathers would have done.’

  For Albina, who had yet to witness a fight, the strain and worry, despite Wicks’s confidence, were vast. She was buoyed by the knowledge that Henry’s career would not last forever and that she would have him back one day but she was also imaginative enough to realize that he could be hurt or, God forbid, even killed at any moment. The long break after that final Erskine fight was a godsend to her and, although Henry trained, she was more or less able to put boxing out of her mind. Pleasing to her was the sound of the Alfa Romeo arriving back after another hard day’s work at the Thomas à Becket. ‘Once the front door was closed, there was no talk of boxing,’ she says. ‘I didn’t like it and Henry knew that I didn’t like it, but I also knew that it was his living.’

  But after a fight she would pitch in professionally. Although Henry’s metabolism meant that he was generally struggling to put weight on rather than take it off, he had little trouble with that awful risk that has damaged so many boxers: pre-fight dehydration. It is the curse of the lower weight divisions and one of the main reasons why the casualty figures are so high. A boxer under pressure to meet a lower weight will, like a jockey, run the risk of dehydration, which can affect the brain’s ability to absorb punishment. If anything, Henry had the opposite problem: ‘I could lose five to six pounds easily during a full-distance fight, and feel terrible afterwards, so Albina always had two huge jugs of orange juice ready in the fridge when I came home. The first thing I’d do would be to sink them both as fast as I could.’

  Disapprove as she might, Albina was very good
at coping with the results of her husband’s uniquely dangerous career. She was pleased, though, that he healed so quickly.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THAT FIGHT

  ‘Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.’

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Julius Caesar, (1599).

  The embarrassing chaos at the top of the US (and therefore the world) heavyweight division was gradually resolving itself. The remorseless Liston had finally achieved a match with Patterson, held on 25 September 1962. Patterson’s acceptance of the bout had led to an emotional split with the nervous Cus d’Amato but the philosopher/manager was still loyally present in the champion’s corner to witness the total humiliation of his protégé. As is traditional before a fight, champions past and present, as well as current contenders, were introduced to the crowd. All the hopefuls were cheered heartily. All, that is, bar one.

  Cassius Marcellus Clay, 20, light heavyweight gold medal winner at the 1960 Rome Olympics, was dutifully booed by the press corps as he climbed through the ropes to take a bow. Many of the hacks were literally on the payroll of Norris’s IBC and Clay’s independence from that organization was awkward, to say the least. He was managed by Angelo Dundee, the brother of Liston’s one-time promoter Chris but, more importantly, he was financially supported by an 11-strong group of local worthies from his birthplace, Louisville, Kentucky, each of whom had lobbed in a tax-deductible $3,000 a year to have a stake in their local boy and keep him from the clutches of the Mob’s regiment of obedient shadow managers. Cassius Clay was guaranteed a living, and a good one, until 1966. Each of the Louisville Sponsoring Group, as they called themselves, was probably as wealthy as Norris, so Clay was in good hands. However, his reputation as a loudmouth sat ill with the world of boxing writers; that, they reasoned collectively, was rightfully their job. White to a man (and some of them more redneck than many) they took the view that if Floyd Patterson represented the ‘good’ (cooperative) Negro then Liston was therefore the ‘bad’ (downright dangerous) Negro. Clay, at that stage in his career, was merely the ‘noisy’ (uppity) Negro, quite outside the script of this cynical morality play and reckoned to be a thoroughgoing nuisance of dubious (professionally, at least) fistic quality.

  Famously, Liston demolished Patterson in 2 minutes 6 seconds, and if this spectacle gave Clay pause for thought it didn’t show much. This handsome young man (already known as ‘gaseous Cassius’) was, at the time of Liston’s first destruction of Patterson, the victor of 15 professional fights out of 15. His opponents had not been in perhaps the top ranks (with the possible exception of Alonzo Johnson), which is why he was scheduled to fight Archie Moore in November. This was to be a rite of passage, a normal and even faintly honourable transaction of boxing, that moment when the newcomer beats the established master, to which he looked forward. Moore had also helped to train him before Angelo Dundee had taken over in early 1961 and, despite his persistent disobedience, Moore had a great affection for him. The pair amused themselves by ‘doing the dozens’ in public – demonstrating by verbal sparring that they both had adequate supplies of ‘mother wit’. Clay would knock ‘the old Mongoose’ over in the fourth round. It did not go unnoticed that Moore was approaching 50 but then by some calculations so was Liston.*

  Henry, meanwhile, had recovered well from the defeat by Folley with his pleasing succession of four wins. He had secured his first Lonsdale belt as a result of the Erskine fight and had, it seemed, thoroughly reconciled himself to the burdens of training as against the responsibilities of fatherhood and marriage.

  The Clay fight was arranged for Waterloo Day, 18 June 1963. It would go down in history as a most important encounter because the winner would almost certainly face the winner of the Liston/Patterson rematch, a contest scheduled to take place barely a month later, which may have given Jim Wicks some mixed feelings. It was generally held, correctly as it transpired, that Liston would steamroller Patterson once again.

  As a sparring partner, Wicks had hired the gifted Alonzo Johnson, who had gone the distance but been narrowly beaten by Clay two years before. Johnson therefore had an agenda of his own, valuable experience and a great talent for aping Clay’s style, which was blindingly quick if somewhat unorthodox. Clay actually moved like a middleweight. For his input, Alonzo Johnson was paid his fare, board, lodging and food, and $500.

  As for Clay, who arrived in Britain three weeks before the fight, he worked out at White City, at the Territorial Army gym. For publicity purposes he was chauffeured every morning at 5.a.m. to do his roadwork up and down Pall Mall. It made for a good picture – a bowler-hatted Cassius metaphorically knocking on the door of that ‘swell pad’, Buckingham Palace. He would take this regal imagery even further later on.

  Cassius Clay had a lot of ground to make up, in fact. His previous encounter, with Doug Jones, had not been an impressive affair, at least from Clay’s point of view. He had both outreached and outweighed Jones but the more experienced man, actually a light heavyweight, was consistently able to sneak inside Clay’s huge reach and counterpunch him very effectively. For his part, Clay certainly didn’t hurt Jones and the crowd were unappreciative of the points verdict in Clay’s favour, so much so that they bombarded the ring with any piece of rubbish that came to hand. They were not happy.

  For a fighter with an agenda like Clay’s, this was disconcerting, to say the least, but any shortcomings he was exhibiting in the ring (and he was) were in large measure offset by his pre-fight antics. In Las Vegas Clay had encountered a professional wrestler, George Wagner. Wagner was 46 and had carved out an interesting niche for himself as ‘Gorgeous George’. He was the first wrestler to address himself entirely to the opportunities offered by the media. His long blond hair and narcissistic manner – he has been memorably described as ‘a Liberace in tights’ – were balanced out by a bloodcurdling litany of pre-match threats. A fairly typical offering would be something like: ‘I’ll tear his arms off! If this bum beats me I’ll crawl across the ring and cut all my hair off! But that ain’t gonna happen, because I’m the greatest wrestler in the world!’

  Cassius loved it as much as the little blue-rinsed old ladies who made up the bulk of George’s fan club did. He had first come across Wagner when the pair shared a radio show and, given that he had been coming up with this nonsense for years, and had clearly prospered from it, Cassius listened to him.

  ‘A lot of people will pay to see someone shut your mouth,’ he is alleged to have counselled told Cassius, ‘so keep on bragging, keep on sassing, and always be outrageous.’

  That the stadium was full, that the capacity crowd could witness the destruction of this middle-aged mediocrity, was lost on no one, least of all the impressionable Cassius.

  Sledging the opponent is as old as boxing, of course; as far back as 1748 a fighter called Ned Hunt had advised his prospective opponent, William Cutts to ‘bring his coffin with him’, when he turned up to fight in some unremembered field, but Cassius Clay brought the art to new heights, in boxing terms at least. His training sessions were actually rather popular and as he would spar up to five rounds he would turn to the audience and say: ‘This is the magic round. This is the round of the annihilation of Henry Cooper.’ Obediently, the spectators lapped it up. It was observed that Clay’s sparring was somewhat one-sided. He had three sparring partners, one of whom, Don Warner, he slugged quite happily and the other two, his brother Rudolph and their friend Jimmy Ellis, he simply dodged. This was, to say the least a little hard on Warner, who was scheduled to fight George Cooper on the same billing at Wembley.

  In conversations with journalists, Clay showed himself to be a faux angry clown. On paper his remarks about his latest opponent were astonishingly rude. In reality they were delivered with an impish charm (or as impish as someone who weighed in at 14 stone 12lbs could be), which quite captivated some and left others, who did not necessarily appreciate the verbal legacy of George Wagner, totally cold. ‘Henry Cooper is a bum
and a tramp,’ he announced with a twinkle in his eye on the eve of the fight. ‘He has no right to be in the same ring with me.’

  For British observers this was something rather new, although the tabloids lapped it up; 40 years on we are quite used to such prattle from boxers but in Clay’s case it was as light-hearted as it was rude. Partly, perhaps, such clowning served to bleed off inevitable tensions as well as carrying on the contest at a different, if experimental, cod-psychological level. For on the day before the fight he changed his prediction of victory from five rounds to three or even to one. It rather depended on whom he was talking to, as well as whether he could manage to find a rhyme, for he had taken to extending Wagner’s repertoire somewhat, to versifying – of a kind. He also affected to be offended by the fact that the British media had not wholly embraced him and his truly dreadful doggerel, complete with dodgy scansion:

  This will be an annihilation.

  If the bum don’t fall in five,

  I won’t come back to this nation.

  Pure ‘Gorgeous George’. Well, he was only 21, but this was possibly the most excruciating verse in English since the days of William McGonagall. Holding court over dinner in a Soho restaurant, Clay, surrounded by his entourage, announced: ‘I’m real mad, the way I’ve been received. I stick to all I’ve said about Cooper.’

  Henry, on the other hand, was calm, philosophical. He said to Jack Wood of the Daily Mail, also on the eve of the fight: ‘I appreciate what Clay’s done for the box office, but tomorrow night at 9.30 we’ll be equals. Before the night is much older I expect to prove that the Lip is a better talker than a fighter.’

  He meant it, too. Because, even at this distance, the fight that put Henry Cooper on the path towards the state of grace he would achieve so far as Britain was concerned was characterized by an astonishing and quite untypical display of early aggression from him. If Clay had been seeking to rattle Henry’s cage, then he may very well have succeeded, but he would wince at the outcome of this strategy, which came very close to changing boxing history. Donald Saunders pointed out, cautioning Clay: