Henry Cooper

by Robert Edwards

  But his somewhat unsophisticated tactics of ridiculing the opposition could act like a boomerang. The insults which have poured out of the American’s camp might have changed Cooper from a comparatively mild Englishman into an angry fighter. And, unlike many boxers, who are most effective when they keep cool, the British champion is far more dangerous when his temper flares.

  In his last contest, for example, an exchange of punches with Dick Richardson after the bell so upset him that he stormed out in the next round and quickly knocked out the Welshman. If Cooper could reproduce that sort of mood tonight then perhaps Clay would be rather quieter than he has been so far for the remainder of his visit to Britain.

  Saunders was entirely correct; he, like many others in the sport, had spotted the same deficit of aggression, the lack of overweening ego that seemed to power so many sportsmen (and particularly fighters) but that seemed so entirely absent in Henry. When he became cross he was formidable, but, as Wicks had experienced, and Ingemar Johansson and Max Baer had already both observed (long before this fight), Henry was clearly slow to rile. As Piero Tomasoni would discover later, when its owner became angry, the Cooper punch assumed a life of its own. Getting Henry to a proper level of focused aggression was a long and frustrating process and it often actually took a fight to do it. This aspect of his character could make him a slow starter in a fight but it would also ensure him a reputation outside the sport which would endear him to millions.

  The psychological banter extended to the weigh-in at the London Palladium, where Clay’s weight advantage, 207lbs versus Henry’s 183½, was clear. Cassius had managed to excavate a theatrical crown from the back reaches of the props department when he went exploring and, needless to say, he would wear it into the ring. As well as serving to maintain the royal leitmotif, which had rather characterized his PR campaign, it also made him look even taller – and he was quite big enough already. The legend on his gown read modestly: CASSIUS THE GREATEST. The most famous fight in British boxing history – up to this point – began at 9.30 p.m.

  Wicks had realized that the exceptional training that Henry had done for this fight had fined his weight down to, observably, well below 180lbs. He reasoned that two can play at this game and he cleverly inserted two 2½lb lead plates into Henry’s boxing boots, and also slipped him a lump of lead to conceal in each hand. Only in this way did Henry even manage to register the weight that he did. It was a harmless ruse but, Wicks and Henry felt, probably a necessary one.

  But the tenacity and aggression that Henry would show in this fight had its roots in more than Clay’s banter. Henry was facing an opponent who enjoyed a 2 inch reach advantage, an inch in height and, if the real truth were known, over a stone in weight. Clay was not noted as a big puncher but his hard twisting jab was formidable. Above all, his speed was extraordinary. Not even his sparring partner Alonzo Johnson’s imitation of the Clay style had served to prepare him for the sheer pace of his opponent. Henry knew that he needed every ounce of his resources to make up the difference, so, he rather uncharacteristically ‘went for it’.

  Straight out of the corner, Henry attacked as he had seldom done before, catching Clay with two powerful lefts to the head, which clearly shook him. Close work by Henry in the clinches was very near the knuckle and elicited howls of protests from Cassius, if not his corner. Clay was simply not used to this style of fighting – also, a few seconds of protest buys valuable time if you have just received two massive blows to the head. The referee, Tommy Little, airily gave a general warning to both fighters but, as Henry confessed later: ‘When I caught him off the ropes and we went into a clinch he just held me, waiting until the referee said break. I tried to be as rough as I could inside. I really roughed him up. I belted him to the body, tried to uppercut him on the inside, pushed him, anything almost, except using the elbows.’

  Round one was definitely Henry’s. The BBC radio commentary, from W Barrington Dalby, ex-referee and boxing veteran, was appreciative:

  This is unbelievable. Cooper, always a slow starter, decided tonight he’d start fast and he started with a beautiful left hook that shook Clay and from then on that was exactly the stimulus that Cooper needed to make him wicked. Cooper, once he gets a man on the hook, very rarely lets him off and after that he chased Clay round the ring. Cooper’s certainly done a grand job on him so far. If only he can keep this up, well, we don’t have a thing to say.

  The second round started well, as Henry banged three assertive lefts into Clay’s face in quick succession, but Cassius showed remarkable powers of recovery and delivered a short right-hand counterpunch, which nicked Henry under the left eye, offering Cassius a clear and obvious target. He went to work and, by the end of the second, the eye was bleeding. At the interval, Danny Holland, well prepared as usual, went to work. The BBC continued: ‘Well, Clay managed to wriggle off the hook. He was boxing better in that round but it was Cooper’s round very clearly. Now Cooper has a slight cut under his left eye but nothing very serious.

  Dalby spoke a little too soon, for in the third, although Clay’s punch rate dropped and Henry’s increased, the eye started to look worse and worse. The impression given by the commentary, however, is that Henry was comfortably ahead on points on the basis of the number of blows he was managing to land on target, despite rapidly occluding vision. So bad was it that he even led off with his seldom-used right and caught Clay twice.

  At one point in this round Clay dropped all pretence at fighting, to the extent that William Faversham, head of the Louisville group, bawled at Dundee: Angelo! Make him stop the funny business!’

  In fact, as Clay said later, he was merely trying to keep out of the way and conceal the damage he had sustained. He was not, contrary to appearances, enjoying this fight; he had never been hit more often, and harder, than on this June evening. It was a sobering experience, but he was as good an actor as he was a boxer. He certainly fooled Jim Wicks who, Henry recalled, was tempted to throw in the towel during the third round.

  Now the whole stadium had also started to realize that, despite Holland’s marvellous work with the adrenalin and Vaseline, not to mention the damage Henry was doing, there had to be some doubt about whether he could now go the distance. Dalby commented: ‘That was Clay’s best round, but he still didn’t win it. Now I think Cooper’s judgement of distance is faulty because of the certain amount of blood running into his eye and he’s probably worried about that. Clay was able to be rather cheeky about that.’

  Round four was the one that nearly changed the course of boxing history. While Cassius carried on working on the eye, using his trademark long, twisting, flicking jab, Henry tried to keep out of trouble. He was three rounds up despite the cut but he desperately needed to survive. His eye was now pouring blood and the situation was becoming quite critical. Five seconds from the end of the round, Henry finally found his distance and delivered an absolutely perfect left hook, which simply pole-axed Clay: Henry recalls:

  …it was now or never…At times, I left myself exposed, but that was the chance I had to take. I went after Clay, throwing as many left hooks as I could, hoping that one would land. Suddenly, I had him. I jabbed once, twice, three times. Every time, he went back, back, back. But now he was right back on the ropes – he couldn’t go any further. The fourth punch hit him, a genuine left hook, a more curved punch than the jab, which went from out to in, with all my power behind it.

  An appreciative Robert Daley described the moment:

  The punch came from a long way back, with Cooper lunging forward as hard as he could. Cooper put everything into the punch. It caught Clay on the side of the jaw and Cassius went over backwards through the ropes.

  He rolled back into the ring then got dazedly to his feet. He was gazing off into the distance again, this time starry-eyed. He wobbled forward, gloves low. He started to fall, but his handlers caught him.

  Henry takes up the story:

  …there was a count of five, Clay started to get up and then the be
ll went. For Clay to get up like that was really a classic boxing error which he was lucky to get away with. It’s a mistake a guy can make who’s never been on the floor before.

  When you are down, you should stay down for as long as possible. Your head may clear, but you have to consider your legs, as well, and the longer you rest, the more the strength will come back into them. It’s what the old-timers mean by taking the long count. Clay wanted to prove that he hadn’t been hurt, but he walked back to his corner like a drunk.

  Correctly, Little carried on the count until the bell went, which nobody heard, such was the uproar, at which point all hell broke loose in Clay’s corner, where Dundee had some serious work to do. The use of smelling salts – carbonate of ammonia – was and is expressly forbidden under the rules of the BBBC but Dundee did not hesitate to use them to bring Cassius round, while slapping him hard around the face. He certainly needed to; he further drew attention to the small tear in Clay’s left glove, near the thumb. He was later to admit quite cheerfully that he made it worse by jabbing it with his finger in order to buy time. The glove was not changed, for the simple reason that there were no spares. The manoeuvre with the glove was the mere gamesmanship of a trainer with few options open to him – furthermore, the use of smelling salts was blatantly illegal but probably saved the day.

  Dundee recalled to Thomas Hauser in 1991:

  He’d split his glove on the seam near the thumb. Actually it happened in the first round. I spotted the tear then and told him, ‘Keep your hand closed.’ I didn’t want anyone to see it, because everything was going our way, if you know what I mean. Then, at the end of the fourth round, he got nailed. And Cooper could do one thing; he could whack with that left hand. Cassius was hurt, no doubt about it. He got hit with that hook right on the button. So when he came to the corner I gave him smelling salts. Then I helped the split a little, pulled it to the side, and made the referee aware there was a torn glove. I don’t know how much time that got us – maybe a minute – but it was enough. If we hadn’t got the extra time, I don’t know what would have happened.

  Actually, subsequent analysis of the film of the fight, and indeed the radio commentary, put the extended interval at 66 seconds. To normal men, six seconds is nothing; to a fit heavyweight boxer, particularly one made groggy by one of the hardest punches in the sport, it is a vast amount of time.

  So, revived and fortified by the smelling salts and the vital extra few seconds of rest, Clay went out into the fifth round in an instinctive flurry of savage jabs, most of which were aimed at the eye. The stuffing now coming out of the glove served to increase the abrading quality of his flicking jabs.

  The New York Times’s Robert Daley, ringside, was sympathetic to Henry’s plight: ‘In two minutes 15 seconds, he nearly tore Cooper’s head off his shoulders. Few men have absorbed such a beating in so short a time. Blood was everywhere; it was now gushing out of Cooper’s wounds.’

  But, as the appreciative crowd and commentators pointed out afterwards, despite the apparent punishment Henry received in that shortened fifth round, he stayed on his feet.

  Suddenly, Clay was not clowning any more. It did not take long to reopen the wound and two minutes into the fifth, Henry was quite a dreadful sight, with blood pouring down the left side of his body. The crowd, clearly distressed at Henry’s plight, collectively moved by his courage and upset at his lost opportunity, roared at Little to stop the contest, throwing their newspapers and programmes into the ring. Fifteen seconds later, Little finally obliged. Clearly, the damage was so bad that it was beyond even Holland’s skill to repair it. Quite unable to see clearly, Henry had absorbed more than enough punishment.

  Clay may have done massive damage to Henry’s eye but in the process he had learned that while he himself clearly didn’t have a glass jaw (he received several such lefts in the earlier rounds) he had discovered a few things about punching and in-fighting that he clearly hadn’t known before. In his career to date he had simply never experienced a punch like this one. The bragging stopped as he realized how lucky he had been not to lose this fight; only the intervention of Dundee with his chemistry set had saved him.

  Curiously, Little did not disqualify Clay for Dundee’s tactics though he would have been quite entitled to do so. This fight has always been controversial from the point of view of the attempt by Dundee to exaggerate the tear in the glove rather than for anything else and, while Dundee makes mention of the smelling salts cheat in his recollection of the fight, time has served well to obscure it. But watch the fight and it is clear that technically, by the letter of the regulations, Henry should have won it, for that infringement alone, as Clay was clearly quite out of it as he reached his corner.

  So it was a relieved and subdued Cassius Clay whose hand was raised in victory; there was no clowning, bar a wordless gesture of five fingers once the gloves were off, and the crown stayed firmly in the corner. Afterwards, he said of the fight: ‘Cooper was great, the toughest I have met by a long, long way. I wasn’t clowning; I was trying to conceal how much damage his punches were doing. The punch which put me down at the end of the fourth was the hardest one I have ever taken. He shook me up – he hit me harder than I’ve ever been hit.’

  He appeared cross with Tommy Little, though: ‘He’s a dirty referee and I’m telling the world. Henry Cooper hit me on the break and the referee wasn’t doing anything about it.’

  Little hadn’t done anything about the smelling salts either, but naturally no one mentioned that, not even the supine Board of Control.

  Clay’s split boxing glove, liberated from the ring by some enterprising agent of his, appeared the very next day in the window of Albert Dimes’s betting emporium in Soho, from where it soon disappeared. No doubt it (or something resembling it) will turn up one day. It is more likely, realistically, that at least four of them will.

  Aside from the eye damage, which was hideous to behold, Henry was not, despite Robert Daley’s concern, particularly hurt, as he explains: ‘When I fought Clay, even the second time, after he’d changed his name, he was never really going to hurt anyone. He had this long, flicking punch which was very fast, and it could damage an eye, but it wouldn’t actually hurt.’ That statement, of course, is entirely relative: ‘But oh, he was fast, you’ve got to give him that. He was the fastest heavyweight I’ve ever been in a ring with, there’s no doubt of that.’

  Certainly he had impressed. He had even used his right fist to good effect and, although Wicks was probably relieved that his fighter was not going to be obliged to take on Sonny Liston, Henry himself, who had little say in the matter at the time, recalls: ‘The press, particularly the American papers, had really built up Liston to the point where he might as well have had four arms and two heads. He was a good boxer, Liston, but a bit crude. I’d have fought him if I’d had the chance; better him than Marciano.’

  Of course he never would; Clay’s next fight was against Sonny Liston for the world title. It took place on 25 February 1964, and famously Clay, having taunted and mocked the champion for weeks beforehand, totally outwitted him. At the opening bell of round seven Liston quit while still on his stool, a thing that had not happened since Jess Willard had done it against Dempsey in 1919. But as we have seen, Willard had a rather better excuse.

  But with that victory over Liston, the legend was born. To the infuriation of many, black and white alike, Clay promptly confirmed the open secret: that he was already a member of the Nation of Islam and would be henceforth known as Cassius X. Shortly afterwards he would accept the name Muhammad Ali.

  * There had been a fighter called Charles ‘Sailor’ Liston who had fought before the war – it has been assumed from time to time that they were one and the same. Birth records in certain parts of the Deep South were approximate at best.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘OUR ’ENERY’

  ‘Unhappy the land that has no heroes!’

  BERTOLT BRECHT, (1939).

  Although Henry had been sto
pped by Clay, that encounter, still the most famous in the history of the post-war British ring, did more than perhaps any other to boost his career, particularly after the humiliation of that second Zora Folley fight. ‘’Enery’s ’ammer’ had now passed into the lexicon of sport, indeed of the nation, as having a personality of its own, at least among those who had not been clobbered by it. The Clay fight created a huge interest in him among a wider circle. He had long enjoyed a huge popularity among boxing aficionados but now his appeal was apparently countrywide. He would appreciate this soon.

  The defeat had not been a personal disaster; neither had there been any particular shame in losing the fight on the basis of a bad cut, and everyone knew it. As Robert Daley had been quick to point out in the New York Times, the ‘Badly cut Briton was never floored’. The post-match endorsement of Henry supplied by Clay, a complete volte-face from his pre-fight histrionics (and not a policy he would adopt often again), had actually served rather well to boost Henry’s stock.

  However near he had come to glory, though, there was still the small matter of earning a living. His near knockout of Clay (and the American’s victory by dint of the clear cheating in his corner) had ensured that his value as a boxer was as high as it ever had been and would go higher still. His fight against Zora Folley in 1958 had (at the time) seemed just as important a match, with Folley as senior contender for the world championship. Now that Henry had shown that he could, up to a point, handle cuts – unless they were as bad as the one he had suffered here – his value was assured. No British fighter would, during Henry’s career, earn more from the ring than he did, even though the income tax situation was crippling, and would get even worse.