Henry Cooper

by Robert Edwards

  The venture had cost him in the region of £10,000; in reality, given that he was putting tax-paid cash into it, it was considerably more. Couple that with the opportunity costs created by simply being there, and the little venture had proved to be a very costly exercise indeed.

  But there was good news, too: Henry was awarded an OBE in the New Year’s honours list. It was a signal honour and, while it was the cause of several butterflies in the Cooper household, an experience to cherish. Henry, dressed perfectly, courtesy of Moss Bros., describes it:

  It was marvellous…The Queen looked round straight away as my name was called and she smiled a wonderful smile as I walked towards her. She knew about my boxing, because at the time I’d been having the knee trouble and she asked me about it. I told her it was a lot better and that I was back in training and she said, ‘It’s marvellous to see you again.’

  He would need the morale boost of his investiture, for scarcely a month later he was due to defend his newly won European title against the new challenger. It would be an evening to remember, and not at all for the right reasons.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CELEB

  EDITH SUMMERSKILL: Mr. Cooper, have you looked in the mirror and seen the state of your nose? HENRY COOPER: Well, have you? Boxing is my excuse – what’s yours?

  With that slightly ungallant and, it must be said, rather untypical riposte, Henry made his new role, as Britain’s leading apologist for boxing, quite clear. I asked him if he thought he had been rude. He replied: ‘Well, I thought it was fair enough really; I’d been a very good boy all the way through the discussion, even agreeing with her, and then she just turned round and ambushed me. Bless her, she was no oil painting anyway.’

  The occasion on which this lèse-majesté took place was a television debate on the sport in 1972. Henry recalled it as a ‘points win’. In truth, this was not a new debate as boxing had been mocked even in ancient times, and the nature of the previous Whig position on the sport of prizefighting had been rather focused on the harm it did to the fighters. The approach of Baroness Summerskill and her cohorts wasrather more holistic, if only in the sense that fighting was not only bad for the fighters, it was bad for the audience, too; she felt free to wag her finger at all involved. But to a generation of fightgoers and other citizenry hardened by their experiences in wartime, her view seemed quite ridiculous. To those architects of the nanny state, many of whom sat on her side in the House of Lords, it was not a campaign that was considered politically viable, given the number of potentially useful votes that would be lost if a ban was imposed. The man who had done more than most to make boxing so inordinately popular in Britain was now clearly the implacable opponent of the highly vocal campaign to ban it.

  For the politically motivated anti-boxing lobby, Henry was a formidable bundle of contradictions; he was a working-class hero, he was highly intelligent, he was honoured with an OBE, he had been a lunch guest of the Queen and, most difficult, he was clearly quite undamaged by his experiences. He was therefore a truly dangerous and highly popular opponent, as the exchange quoted above suggests. For the purely medical lobby, the situation was different, as the British Medical Association was attacking the sport not on a moral or ethical platform but simply on a physiological one. Edith Summerskill, polymath as she was, had a foot in both camps, which fact could, from time to time, appear to confuse her argument. Did she oppose boxing because it was medically dangerous and therefore immoral or was there a sinister Stalinist agenda at work? The British public, ever suspicious of politicians’ motives, affected not to care, but that public was by now also completely in love with Henry, which made for an even more uphill struggle for the anti lobby. It was all very well for Edith Summerskill to win a debate with Jack Solomons, who was both inarticulate as well as astonishingly rude (which rather served to belie his carefully constructed cheeky chappie image), as his motivations were merely and obviously financial, but Henry was a radically different prospect. Not only had he prospered as a boxer, but also, outrageously, he had even dared to enjoy it and was never bashful about saying so. And everybody loved him.

  The issue over the morality, if not the legality of boxing was, of course, something of a press bandwagon, which was wheeled out after every disaster that befell a fighter. Regrettably, there were several, one of the most tragic being the fate of Gerald McClennan after he lost to Nigel Benn in February 1995. The fight had been broadcast to a TV audience of 15 million, and all who were able to bear to watch the whole event knew that McClennan was, on the morning after the fight, locked in the iron dark of a deep coma. Naturally, the mediafest contained the usual paradox of mawkish headlines, predictably illustrated by the most prurient of pictures available to them. Henry told the Daily Mirror. ‘Nobody makes men box – all boxers do it because they want to fight. We all know the possible tragic consequences, but we all pray its not going to be you. There are thousands of fights every year and it’s only occasionally where there is an unfortunate tragedy of this nature.’

  The debate will go on; the simple fact, that boxing is a blood sport, the only activity whose purpose is for one man physically to hurt another, is clear. What is more blurred is the morality that allows it to take place at all. The libertarian right would argue that if two men wish to train hard, climb into a boxing ring and seek to knock each other out, and millions of people will pay, in one form or another to watch that take place, then that is entirely their business and nobody else’s. The opposing view, that boxing falls into the same category as dog-fighting, perhaps misses the point made by Henry, that because the sport of boxing is a voluntary one then the issue is really one of civil liberty. Essentially, then, it becomes basically a political matter. The lentil-eating tendency will always oppose fighting, whereas libertarians will always prefer to allow it even if they do not follow it particularly closely. In Henry, the libertarian view has a powerful spokesman. The dice are clearly loaded in their favour because of that. Henry has survived and prospered and he is who he is primarily because of what he did for a living until 1971. But there was rather more to him than that, as the successive decades were to show.

  Initially, he recalls, his first impulse upon retiring was to become a trainer/manager. He had hoped to find a young heavyweight hopeful and bring him on in the way that he had himself been managed but to his regret, even now, there were few prospects. He had no particular hostility to Joe Bugner (although he never particularly reckoned him), indeed he offered his services only a few days after that fight to the Bugner corner when they were due to challenge Ali. But elsewhere it was a fruitless task. ‘There just didn’t seem to anyone around,’ he told me, still slightly regretfully. ‘I wanted to find a decent heavyweight – the bigger men think differently – and really bring him on, but I couldn’t really see anyone suitable.’ It was almost as if he had seen through the fog of hype that surrounded American boxing and understood that there were some unalterable fundamentals that a clever tactician could exploit. A singular and mighty punch, coupled with some plain old-world common sense, could perhaps drill down through the hype?

  There was some serious unpleasantness quite shortly after his retirement. He produced, in 1972, an extremely tactful autobiography, which rather walked on eggs, with the skilled assistance of John Samuel of the Guardian. That journal has, over the years, built up a well-earned reputation for the occasional misprint (the Grauniad, as it is known), but the error which was contained in Henry’s book was nothing to do with that. It was more a matter of an overenthusiastic sub-editor at the book’s publishers, Cassell. The issue was to do with the addition on Harry Gibbs’s scoring card during and after the Bugner fight. What Henry and Samuel finally produced, concerning the final assessment and scoring of the fight, read like this: ‘On Peter Wilson’s [of the Daily Mirror] score card I had won nine of the fifteen rounds, but Harry Gibbs had me losing by a quarter of a point.’

  Not a particularly sensitive matter, one might think, but when the book came out the p
assage read: ‘On Harry Gibbs’ scorecard I had won nine of the fifteen rounds but he had me losing by a quarter of a point.’

  Whoops. This well illustrates some of the perils that can be encountered as a result of sloppy proof-reading but Harry Gibbs sued Henry and the publisher for libel, and won. Damages were modest at £1,000 (Cassell quite properly paid them) but Henry was forced to make a slightly humiliating apology in open court for something that was in truth not his fault.

  Henry did have a grievance against Gibbs but the issue over the passage in the book did not express it; that was merely a simple publisher’s slip-up. Perhaps the fact that Gibbs sued so promptly was significant but unfortunately the laws of libel permit me to go no further. Gibbs is no longer with us, but others are. It was an unpleasant episode, which was clearly irreconcilable without recourse to a major investigation by the Board of Control, which never took place.

  The controversy over the Bugner fight actually served an unforeseen purpose, which was to add an edge to Henry’s popularity. He and Gibbs would not speak for 15 years, in fact, and only did so when Henry, goaded by the offer of a large donation to charity, agreed finally to shake Gibbs’s hand at a charity boxing evening at the London Hilton: ‘Well, I was told that if I shook his hand, then at least £2,000 would go into the pot, and probably £20 each from all those present, so I did it,’ says Henry. ‘ I didn’t have to sleep with the bloke, or anything after all, I just had to shake his hand, so I did it. For charity.’

  I can well recall a rather bored, mainly student audience, slumped on a wet Saturday night in the dismal fleapit that passed as the local cinema in that jewel of Dyfed, Aberystwyth. It was 1975. A group of us had decided to inspect Royal Flash, the promising adaptation of George MacDonald Fraser’s reworking of The Prisoner of Zenda theme. It had been a first-rate book but the early stages of the movie were disappointing, despite the presence of Oliver Reed, whom we all rather admired. Then suddenly a scene arrived that called upon Reed, who played Otto Bismarck, to receive a boxing lesson from the retired prizefighter John Gully. When the audience saw who played Gully, as Henry Cooper turned to face the camera, a loud cheer erupted, which was an unusual event in that dismal little theatre, to say the least.

  Actually, Henry was probably the best thing in the film, and probably because in reality he was playing himself; we were not to know it but Royal Flash, in most other ways a disappointment, marked the start of a good friendship between Henry and Reed, but Henry told me that he learned quite fast to be rather wary of his new mate: ‘Ollie was a lovely bloke, but really dangerous. God, he drank!’

  Reed’s ability to get himself into alcohol-fuelled scrapes was legendary and he also sailed very close to the wind in terms of matters sexual. He had started his relationship with his second wife, Josephine, when she was suspiciously young; Henry and Albina encountered them on holiday in 1980:

  Oh dear. I told Albina I’d just go and have a quick drink with him before lunch, it was about 11.30, I think. One of his minders said, ‘Careful Henry, he’s been on tequilas since four this morning.’ Ollie then told his girlfriend exactly what he would do with her that night, right there in the bar! Well, I left as soon as I could, but when I got back to the room there was a phone call from the Mirror asking – was it true that Oliver Reed was there with his under-age girlfriend? ‘No, don’t be silly’ I said, ‘I’ve just seen him…’

  Reed admired Henry tremendously, as he admired most red-blooded males, but he could take his expression of this to toe-curling extremes. His habit of appearing on television when roaring drunk was an unfortunate one and invariably embarrassing for all concerned, no more so than when appearing with his hero Henry on a disastrous episode of Michael Aspel’s chat show. Reed had decided, clearly under the influence, that the most appropriate way to pay tribute to his hero would be to don shorts and gloves, ketchupped eyes and all, and simply punch his way through the studio scenery in order to reach the sofa. Needless to say, the show had to be cut, which was perhaps rather a pity. Reed would attempt a similar stunt when sharing a line-up with Billy Beaumont, with truly embarrassing results.

  Even without Royal Flash, which did relatively poorly, Henry’s place in the public eye was assured, if only as a result of his myriad television appearances. It seemed that not a week went by without him popping up somewhere. He had been an inaugural panellist on BBC’s A Question of Sport since 1969 and had starred in an extraordinary array of commercials, for Crown Paints, Shredded Wheat and, most famously, Brut aftershave, so his public profile was always going to be high. Only recently, as one of Britain’s favourite OAPs, he fronted the flu jab campaign. Another important job, though, had been to step into the BBC radio slot vacated by Barrington Dalby, who had retired from the role just before Henry had retired from his. Henry had to provide authoritative assessments of the state of various broadcast boxing matches between the rounds. He did this expertly with all the authority that only a 17-year career can provide. He had started working for the BBC before he had retired from the ring, in fact. The journalistic challenge was quite formidable – to provide a 30-second running commentary of how the last round had gone, an assessment that called for an extremely quick brain indeed, for the view of a fight from the ringside is a radically different thing from the perception offered elsewhere, particularly to a radio audience.

  Evidence of the speed with which boxers have to think is to be found in conversations held with them. Albina describes for me some of the frustrations of conversing, particularly about a topic in which Henry has a special interest: ‘He will keep interrupting! He won’t let someone finish their sentence before he butts in.’

  Clear evidence, in my opinion, that he probably already knows where the conversation is going; time to move on, but his speed of conversational riposte, as Edith Summerskill had discovered, is astonishing, both witty and well timed. The latter we should expect from a boxer, and Henry’s commentaries for BBC radio were a rich seam of swift, accurate and pithy inputs. Even if his assessments of the relative merits of the fighters to each other, or to people whom he had fought himself, were low, he was never rude about them, however scathing his inner view may have been. That would change, though, as he found himself more and more disconnected from boxing. An encounter with the singular Christopher Livingston Eubank illustrates this:

  EUBANK: Mister Cooper, I’ve heard you don’t like me.

  HENRY: No, I don’t; I think you’re bloody weird.

  As the game of boxing changed, with the arrival of Eubank, Naseem Hamed, Frank Bruno et al, he was distressed by the deterioration of his beloved sport into what he viewed as an unseemly and undignified three-ring circus. He hid his frustration well, until 1996, when so exasperated was he at the sheer vulgarity of what was going on, he resigned from the BBC. He told Frank Keating of the Guardian:

  Since they’ve allowed all this crazy hype, to be honest with you, the whole scene has been getting on my nerves for the last couple of years. I’ve always disliked with a passion those American wrestling shows on television with rivals threatening, shouting and mouthing off at each other. And I’m sad to say that’s what boxing here has become in many ways. It’s crazy. In their fight, it took Bruno and McCall 45minutes just to arrive in the ring before they could start to fight.

  They had fireworks – the whole place was covered in smoke – they had singers, a band, dancers, coloured laser beams. To me, that’s not boxing. Other times, they have fighters come down on Harley Davidson motorbikes [Eubank] or on cranes. It’s like a circus. Some fellow will soon come in on an elephant. I’m just disillusioned with it.

  He further thinks that the ritual abuse, which had become the norm, was distasteful in the extreme, and drew a very fair comparison with Ali:

  Ali was different. He did it with some wit for a start. And he knew that you knew that his antics were just a way of scoring a psychological point. He always did it with a twinkle in his eye. You could always see his tongue in his cheek and he meant you to
.

  But now fighters actually mean their nastiness. It’s much more than a bit of growling to sell tickets. It’s so distasteful, as a former boxer, to see current fighters personally deriding opponents, even having scraps outside the ring.

  But, given the astonishing volume of ticket sales and the resultant huge purses, it seems that few agreed with him. But his point was well made and well taken, at least by those who respected his right to have a developed view.

  Politically, boxing politics and ability aside, he is quiet. He is a man mildly of the libertarian right but does not make a particular issue of it; politics to Henry is a private thing, rather like religion, which is probably best left alone. He becomes rather more animated when dis cussing sports, though. He has a quite encyclopaedic knowledge of sport and, of course, understands its motivations intimately. Interestingly, he feels that professional boxing has a very limited future and he thinks it may simply wither on the vine:

  When you think about it, boxing’s roots are basically economic; it’s a sport of poor people. The more prosperity there is the less men will need to box. If you look now in America, most of the up and coming fighters are Hispanic and Mexican; the gyms are full of them, and I also hear that there are plenty of Russians who are quite useful…You wouldn’t want to have economic decline just to save boxing, now, would you?

  Well, I know one or two people who probably would, but he makes a fair point, even though, if he had his time over again, there is very little he would seek to change because he also realizes that had he been born into more affluent circumstances he would have been most unlikely to have boxed, and would, upon reflection, probably feel the lack of that unique experience. He knows that it is boxing, as well as his attitude to it, characterized by a realistic but slightly sardonic humility, that has made him so popular. In that sense, he remains our senior link to the Colosseum and is clearly as popular as any gladiator.