Henry Cooper

by Robert Edwards

  As he often did, Wicks handled the purse negotiations himself. He had always preferred to act as his own matchmaker rather than use Harry Levene’s own man, Mickey Duff. The two men had developed a profound dislike of each other, on Duff’s part because there was no aspect of the business of boxing where his knowledge outstripped that of Wicks, and on Wicks’s part because Duff did not necessarily always seem to understand that fact. To Wicks, Duff may have merely appeared to be just another flashy bagman for the promotion industry. Very few men ever managed to put one over on Jim Wicks and he was not about to let Mickey Duff even try.

  But the negotiations, when they took place, brought the full weight of Harry Levene’s extended organization into play and it became clear that for Henry this would be a very big payday indeed. The fight was scheduled for 21 May 1966 and would take place not at Levene’s favoured locale at Wembley but at Highbury Stadium, home of Arsenal football ground. It was the biggest event Levene had ever handled. He was, for events of this type, in partnership with Viewsport, the company created by Jarvis Astaire in order to exploit both satellite and closed circuit coverage. The arrangement enabled Levene to offer realistic guarantees to both the fighters and the hosts, Arsenal, who had cheerfully undercut the price of £25,000 offered by Wembley. Henry’s guarantee was £50,000, Ali’s £100,000, reflecting the fact that the last world heavyweight championship bout held in Britain had been in 1908. The last Brit to actually win it had been Bob Fitzsimmons, in 1897, so the significance of this event was lost on no one.

  Naturally, this was something of a media frenzy, assisted by every ounce of spin the promoters and Wicks could muster. There was, it was felt, a serious chance that Henry might pull it off; he was clearly at the top of his form, as he had demonstrated against the four Americans he had beaten in the previous calendar year. The hook that had dropped Ali in 1963 was clearly as strong, or even stronger, three years on.

  The popularity of this fight was such that the cash value of the ticket sales actually outstripped those for the Wembley World Cup Final of 30 July of that year. Arsenal’s stadium would be filled to its 55,000 capacity and even Albina consented, somewhat reluctantly, to attend. It would be the first and last fight she ever saw. But even she conceded that her husband deserved her support – this was, after all, the world heavyweight championship.

  The distance Henry had travelled since those days spent sparring with rolled football socks on the Bellingham Estate was vast, almost immeasurable; after two serious career dips, which had triggered such serious self-doubts, here he was, about to fight for what was, despite the widespread moral opposition to it, the greatest prize in individual sport. Even boxing’s most ardent opponents, apart from Summerskill, found themselves well able to put aside their moral scruples as they settled down to hear it on the radio, for it would only be screened in certain selected cinemas. This single fact caused a small but fairly public debate: was it fair that such an important fight should be only available to those who could afford it? The government was keen to be seen to promote the interests of ‘the ordinary viewer’ and a token round-table conference was held, hosted by Anthony Wedgwood Berm, to which all interested commercial parties were invited. Levene and Astaire pointed out that without factoring in the cash value of all the various ancillary rights, the title fight could simply not take place in Britain at all. After a protest for the record, the government turned its attention to other things, notably the World Cup Final.

  Since the retirement of Stirling Moss in 1962 Henry had probably become the country’s most well-respected sporting figure (although Jim Clark, of course, had come up fast) and it was a status all agreed he had earned. He was probably as important to sports fans in Britain as the entire England football team and as such a popular hero he had his political uses; the issue over his fans’ access to the fight was a clear opportunity to generate some useful brownie points with the electorate.

  Training for his promising encounter with Muhammad Ali was no different from any other preparation Henry had made before. The team stayed at the Duchess of Edinburgh in Welling, in Kent, where Henry, accompanied by George, did his early morning roadwork, whereupon, after a shower and a rest, they drove up the Old Kent Road, through Grandfather George’s old stamping ground, to the Thomas à Becket for midday sparring.

  Henry had always eaten a high protein diet, albeit in rather more agreeable circumstances than many. The culinary rituals established by Wicks did not change particularly, partly for reasons of familiarity, partly for reasons of publicity. It was important to maintain a high public profile, which in turn demonstrated a higher level of confidence. So a regular intake of medium-rare grilled steaks, potatoes and green salad (no onions, they can cause burping) washed down with half a bottle of Fleurie were the order of the day at Simpson’s, osso bucco or veal escalope at Peter Mario’s, or some predictably exotic piscine confection at Sheekey’s, with the traditional Krug to go with it. Only in the last week did the diet become spartan; any sensible boxer, like any sensible racing driver, does his stuff on an empty stomach, for obvious physiological reasons. ‘It was important to be totally cleaned out,’ recalls Henry now.

  He had learned this painful lesson very early in his amateur career, when he had innocently downed a huge portion of Lily’s bread pudding before a fight, with predictably disastrous results. ‘You can’t fight on an empty stomach,’ she’d advised. Since that early fiasco he had learned that you have to do exactly that, and not just for speed, either. A full stomach is easily damaged.

  Despite the importance of this fight, the rituals of training were unaltered. For a man who enjoyed his creature comforts as much as many and more than most, it was the usual grind; he was only able to talk to his wife on the phone. ‘Obviously, if there was anything wrong at home, or a kiddie was sick, I couldn’t tell him anything about it, it would only make him worry, she recalls. ‘If Henry Marco had whooping cough or something else, I’d just have to cope with it.’

  Henry’s experience was very different of course: ‘Training camps are supposed to make you mean, by keeping you away from your wife. It’s not to do with the sex or anything like that, that never did anyone any harm, it’s just that away from the wife and family, you get mean.’

  Wicks’s deliberate policy, honed to perfection over the years, of dropping deliberately irritating remarks that were purely designed to nark, was another method of raising the volatile temperature, as Henry remembers only too well: ‘They would prod me on one or two little things to see me snap and lose my temper. Then they knew I was coming to my peak. I’m a very easy-going guy normally, but after four or five weeks of training Jim didn’t have to say much, just be a little argumentative, perhaps, and I’d bite his head off.’

  The opposing camp was much less vociferous than they had been three years before. The Muhammad Ali he was about to face was no longer the comical but likeable braggart – by contrast Ali was now a rather serious and tense young man (although still very handsome). Thanks to the attentions and priorities of the Nation of Islam he had, lost much of the bounce that had previously made him such a tolerated figure of fun. Under its tenets, he was supposed to behave himself. Of course, he had proved much – two defeats of Liston, despite the controversy of the second one, had made him a hero – but much of that glory had been offset by a truly brutal and unnecessary humiliation (entirely at the behest of the Nation) of Floyd Patterson the previous November, which had done much to drop his popularity quite off the chart. Patterson, who was widely liked by the establishment, had been unwise enough to ridicule his name change and Ali had punished him cruelly for it, torturing the insecure veteran (but without knocking him out) for 12 rounds, until the scandalized referee finally stopped the fight. It was a stunt Muhammad Ali would pull again within the year against Ernie Terrell, again under instructions from his new church. Ali, against a black opponent, could call upon vast reserves of subliminal malice via the Nation of Islam, but against Henry Cooper, Catholic nice guy, thi
s was worth less than dust. Despite the fact that Ali was accompanied almost everywhere by a coterie of sinister-looking Black Muslims, the movement held little credibility in London.

  And Henry already knew, instinctively, how to defuse this vaguely threatening situation. At midday, the time of the weigh-in at the Odeon, Leicester Square, the two men faced each other. This time Henry wore no boots containing any ballast but decided to adopt a trick taught him by Max Baer, who had lightened his weigh-in before he fought Primo Camera in 1934 by plucking hairs from the Italian giant’s chest while intoning ‘He loves me – he loves me not.’

  Unfortunately, Ali was not particularly hirsute, as Henry remembers: ‘I said, “Oh, look, he’s a man all right, he’s got a hair on his chest.” And I gave it a tweak. It brought the house down.’ Ali himself remained unusually impassive.

  Ali’s long-suffering white Louisville backers, the same syndicate that had supported him since he turned professional, were genuinely lowered at the prospect of the end of their relationship with him. The men could merely look on with nervous resignation. All this would end soon enough in any case; they sincerely prayed now that it would not end at Highbury. Despite his adopted (and clearly feigned) radicalism, they all rather liked him.

  On the evening of the fight, the quiet sober routines of the previous five weeks’ training were clearly over. A Rolls-Royce, theirs for the day, and which had taken him to the weigh-in, was courtesy of a local car hire firm. It arrived at the Duchess of Edinburgh to convey Henry, George, Holland and Wicks up to Highbury. The firm had been generous: no bill if he won, a 50 per cent discount if he didn’t. There was no plan for an option C – all involved knew full well that this fight would be most unlikely to end in a draw.

  The police escort which accompanied the Rolls into the stadium car park was something new as well. This was clearly building into quite an emotional occasion as the giant collective sympathy of the crowd started to build. Henry takes up the story of the most significant night of his career:

  I was in the main Arsenal dressing room and Ali was in the bum’s room. I hadn’t seen anything of him or his entourage and hadn’t even seen the arena. But I could hear the roar of the crowd, and Jim and George went out to have a dekko. ‘Looks marvellous,’ they reported, ‘a wonderful crowd.’

  While I started to change, Jim Wicks opened the telegrams. There were all the regulars, all the restaurants I visited regularly, like Simpson’s and Sheekey’s. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Donald Houston, they were all wishing me well. Jim would never let me open the telegrams or letters on the night because you do get the cranks.

  …Danny meanwhile cut the tapes provided by the Board of Control steward. We would need nine three and a half inch strips to go across the hand, then a long piece of about eight inches which he would cut into three to go between the fingers. No two boxers tape the same way. Taping is not to make your hand any harder so that you can knock your opponent out more easily, but to protect your hand…That night, in the Highbury dressing room, I taped as I had always done – I put the plaster against my skin in cross fashion, three slanting across the knuckles one way and three the other. Then I bandaged around the thumb and hand just below the knuckle. I put three strips through the fingers and the tape I had left I bound around to keep it all in and cover the knuckles. The steward stamped the hands with an ink stamp, and after that you couldn’t add any more.

  This was a ritual Henry had been through 44 times before and he performed it exactly as he had always done. But this was a big fight, with his wife in the audience for the first time:

  Taped in my left boot were religious medallions which people who meant a lot had given me. One was from Albina. Another was from her aunt, Maria Rizzi. I would always put them under the tapes which I put under the bootlaces to stop them coming undone. Last of all, I put my shorts on, and then I started warming up.

  I always said a little prayer before I left the dressing room, and made the sign of the cross. I didn’t say, ‘Please let me win,’ it was just asking God to watch over me and keep me safe, thinking really of the family. And you asked that you would be able to do your best and put up a good performance.

  As the warm-up fights came and went outside, the tension built, and the last well-wishers and visitors came and went – old schoolfriends, Harry Levene, Onslow Fane, Teddy Waltham. Finally, the referee, George Smith: it was a familiar litany, elements of which would be repeated in the ring before the opening bell:

  I want a clean fight. When I say break, I want a clean break. I want both of you to take a step backwards. I want no rabbit-punching. You must punch correctly with the knuckle of the glove. I won’t be giving points if you’re slapping. If one man goes down the other must go into a neutral corner, and I won’t start counting until you’re there. All the best, and may the best man win.

  It had been almost exactly a century since the Queensberry Rules had been written by Chambers and those few words uttered by Smith that evening say more about the long-term objectives which had been behind them than any essay on the subject ever could. It was time…

  The first thing that struck Henry, apart from the size of the crowd, was the size of the ring. Ali had wisely insisted upon the largest allowable, twenty feet square, which Levene had grudgingly financed as a one-off. It was huge. ‘It seemed to take ten minutes just to arrive at the centre of it,’ says Henry. ‘You could have had three fights in there at the same time.’ And if the huge emotional tug generated by the collective goodwill of the crowd hadn’t quite unmanned him, then the National Anthem nearly did: ‘As I stood there, for the first time I can remember in the ring, I could feel a lump in my throat.’

  His three biggest fans, the Welsh musketeers, Richard Burton, Donald Houston and Stanley Baker were all ringside, along with half the West End underworld and, of course, his family, including a quite terrified Albina. She had not been looking forward to this and was only present as an act of solidarity. ‘I didn’t really see any of it,’ she says. ‘I had my face buried in the programme for the whole time; I just couldn’t bear to watch.’

  It would not be a pretty sight, in fact. It was not entirely a rerun of the previous encounter – if anything, Henry looked stronger than he had before, whereas Ali, no doubt remembering his near humiliation in 1963, appeared reluctant to engage. He used the giant space available to him to dance away from Henry, who pursued his man relentlessly, trying to set Ali up for the left hook, and Ali clearly knew it. At the first sign of trouble when he closed in, though, Henry found himself enveloped in a vice-like bear hug, which allowed little rough and ready ‘inside work’. As soon as Smith called for the break, Ali would leap back to avoid the left he clearly feared would pursue him like a sidewinder. By the end of round five, Henry was marginally ahead on points but he also realized that Ali, or at least Dundee, had learned a thing or two. The danger remained, though, from those long flicking jabs which could do enormous damage to Henry’s eyebrows. He had, for five rounds, managed more or less to control his territory and avoid trouble. He had hit more than he had been hit and yet neither boxer had really inflicted any damage on the other.

  Then, early in the sixth, the bad thing happened – ‘the disappointment of my life’ as Henry later recalled it. Ali let go a right hand punch, which he shortened into a slashing, chopping blow, which landed above Henry’s left eyebrow. Immediately, Henry realized he was in trouble. There was no pain, merely a stinging sensation followed by numbness, but he could feel the blood pouring down the entire left side of his body. It would not be long before he would be unable to see. Tommy Smith, who had stood by, quite amazed, when Henry had demolished Jefferson Davis so comprehensively, and may well have been looking for more of the same here, called a halt for a quick inspection then dubiously said, ‘box on’. But after another frenetic assault by Ali on the eye, he finally stopped the fight.

  This was a huge deep cut, worse than he had ever experienced, and right down to the bone. So bad was it that the
Board of Control doctor counselled no immediate treatment but suggested plastic surgery as soon as possible. He wrote down the telephone number of Guy’s Hospital and gave it to Wicks. After the unique build-up to this fight, with all the emotional goodwill that had drenched Henry as thoroughly as the cut had, there was very little left to say. He had done his best, and had, in the opinion of many, out-boxed and even out-psyched his man, but against those damaging jabs, relatively painless though they were, he had little defence once he was cut.

  The surgery took place the very next day, after Henry had spent a quiet and gloomy night at home. The objective was to excise old, encysted scar tissue, which had developed under the surface, and then repair both the outer and inner layers of the cut, the inner layer being treated with tiny, almost invisible stitches, which would dissolve of their own accord. In this way the eyebrow would in all probability be stronger even than when it was new; certainly, that world championship fight was the last encounter that Henry would lose to a cut eye, which made him regret that he had not sought this course of action before, although his next fight would provide an experience of rather deeper impact.

  * Although this episode is cited in Grigg’s obituary – he died in 2001 – Henry does not recall it. It is quite likely that he may have said something privately and Wicks, seeing an opportunity, spun the tale out of all proportion.

  CHAPTER TEN

  FINALLY, FLOYD

  PATTERSON

  ‘To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive…’

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, Virginibus Pueresque, (1881).