Henry Cooper

by Robert Edwards

  If Henry’s first encounter with Clay had been the most famous fight of his career, and his second the most disappointing, then this one with Bugner was certainly to be the most controversial, the more so because it was also to be his last.

  The referee was Harry Gibbs, from Bermondsey. Gibbs had been having a little trouble with the BBBC the previous year; he had felt, possibly accurately, that he had not been receiving his fair share of top division fights. But perhaps there was a reason for that, which he could not acknowledge. A semi-official rota existed within the Board of Control, the sort of Spanish practice with which Gibbs, as a docker, was entirely familiar, and he asserted his rights, as he saw them, regularly. He was also quite litigious. But he had also been responsible for some controversial decisions, once against Henry in the Amos Johnson fight, but more notably against Billy Walker when he fought Midlander Johnny Prescott and again (by some verdicts) Walker once more against Northerner Brian London a little later. Not all these verdicts necessarily sat well with other commentators and quite possibly had led to his joining the back of the queue with the Board of Control, which situation had, according to Gibbs’s own memoirs, led to him to consider resigning. Perhaps he had a point to make.

  No one, least of all in the Billy Walker camp, had ever complained about these potential lacunae, however much they may have disagreed with them, but the faint suspicion does rather emerge that Gibbs tended to overcompensate for his impeccably London origins when calling a tight decision in the favour of an ‘outsider’. He also clearly relished being controversial as well as being in control; there was something of the loose cannon about him. Under the UK rules, of course, the referee enjoys total autonomy in coming to his decision and there is no element of external control. This was to be a fight that stretched the limits of that rule.

  Gibbs’s verdict in the Cooper/Bugner fight was and is quite inexplicable, even at this distance, and it still causes controversy to this day. He himself would also wince a little at its impact, both at the time and later. I recall this fight very well, especially as it was one of the first things I saw on a colour television. It was a great scandal at the time and I contend that it remains one today but not, of course, through any fault of the challenger. Even my late grandmother, admittedly no great expert (and a committed Cooper fan, it must be said, despite his defeat of her two favourite boxers, Erskine and Richardson), thought it grotesquely unfair.

  It was an interesting fight, if relatively dull by comparison with certain others. Henry, conceding all that height, weight and reach to a man who was also 16 years his junior, gave a quite magnificent performance. On the other hand, Bugner displayed an observable reluctance to risk damage, which made his efforts seem pedestrian by comparison and this was a tendency that rather typified his later career. If anything, he looked nervous. Perhaps he had read Neil Allen that morning in The Times ‘If he gets too rattled this evening, young Bugner may find himself on the floor.’

  Interestingly, Danny Holland was now in Bugner’s corner as cut-man; he knew Harry Gibbs very well, having trained him in 1946, before joining Wicks, when Gibbs had actually fought briefly (but quite successfully) as a professional heavyweight.

  Wicks, presiding over what he knew to be their final appearance – at least in the ring – announced: ‘We are not hanging around. We have a commercial TV appointment after the fight so we might be in a hurry.’

  This was not to be a fight characterized by knockdowns, dramas or even particularly heavy punches. Neither fighter seemed in any serious danger, it was merely 15 rounds of faintly repetitive boxing, and clearly hard work for both men. Peter Wilson reported:

  It was a good, sensible first round with both men feeling each other out and Cooper learning just how strong was this nearly 16 year-younger man, weighing 15st. 2lbs. to his 13st. 7lbs. No one could claim any real advantage in the first three minutes.

  But Cooper must have realized that it was going to take a long time to chop down the young giant whom he could not move around, as he would have liked to, in the clinches. After four rounds, in which no really serious damage had been caused, Cooper was slightly ahead.

  On Gibbs’s card, Bugner was a half point ahead. Wilson continued:

  In the fifth and sixth, despite Bugner’s occasional big, single blast, usually to the body, we saw the older man going further ahead. Indeed, in the sixth, the 21 year-old began to look thoroughly ‘moithered’ as though things were going too fast for him. And one left hook from Cooper nearly drove the Hungarian born boy’s nose through the back of his head.

  Gibbs scored round five to Henry and round six to Bugner. Wilson takes up the story:

  Bugner rallied in the seventh. He started Cooper bleeding again slightly from the left eye and he also registered a graze under the Champion’s right eye. The eighth round was the fulcrum of the seesaw. They had arrived at the halfway stage.

  For Gibbs, round seven was even. Wilson continues:

  [Henry] was moving nicely, not in-and-out like a tram on rails, but breaking up the pattern of Bugner’s straightforward advance by switching from side to side. In the eighth, he gave Bugner a boxing lesson.

  But for Harry Gibbs, round eight was a draw as well. Wilson’s infuriated comments continue:

  Bugner took the ninth, really hurting Cooper with a body blow and shaking him with two of the most uninhibited punches he had so far let go. The tenth seemed to give the inevitable march to victory for Cooper. He brought off one of his more effective ploys when he pushed Bugner back into the ropes and then, timing the rebound perfectly, caught him as he bounced off. From then on…Cooper went further and further ahead. His best round of all – some good judges gave it to him by half-a-point, was the thirteenth. In the fourteenth, Cooper toyed with his man, mostly with the left, but using one overhand right.

  Gibbs allowed Henry a quarter point win in the thirteenth. By now most observers felt that Henry was comfortably ahead. Peter Wilson had him 9-4 up and Donald Saunders agreed, with Henry ‘several rounds ahead’. (It must have been one of the few occasions on which the Daily Mirror and the Daily Telegraph have ever agreed about anything.) Desmond Hackett of the Daily Express rather concurred, indeed he made Henry 10-4 up going into the last round.

  But on Gibbs’s card the fighters were exactly even going into the last and it is probably safe to say that the last round was Bugner’s, although even the Guardian disagreed about that. But, when Henry confidently offered his hand to Gibbs, he was startled when the referee showed him his back and stalked over to Joe Bugner. Raising the clearly surprised blond giant’s hand, Gibbs gave him the verdict.

  There were perhaps three heartbeats of disbelieving silence – and then followed complete uproar. Henry’s corner had not witnessed any thing like this since the near riotous conditions of the Piero Tomasoni fight. Debris poured into the ring as the stunned crowd gave vent to a vast collective roar of outrage.

  Henry predictably behaved with great dignity. He sighed and tousled Bugner’s hair almost affectionately. However unfair he thought the decision, it was clearly no fault of Bugner’s, who had done his best, however modest his efforts had been according to the crowd. Henry recalls:

  All my friends and family were there, with Albert’s [Dimes] crew sitting ringside. The situation was getting quite ugly and the last thing I wanted was to have a fight break out – I’d already been through one, after all. If they started throwing bottles, I have no idea what would have happened.

  Naturally, it is very easy to confuse a profound sense of dismay with mere sentimentality, an emotion with which the boxing ring has always been liberally drenched. Henry was inordinately popular with the London crowd but there were other, more neutral observers, such as Joe Frazier’s manager, Yancy Durham, who felt that Henry had won quite comfortably. On the other hand, both Boxing News and The Times scored the fight exactly the same way that Gibbs had. Seldom had a fight been scored so differently by such a range of experienced observers. A discreet file of policemen
gathered to escort Gibbs down from the ring (and out of the reach of Jim Wicks) and out into the limelight of British boxing history.

  For Henry’s fans in the press corps, his next words, to the saddened assembly in the dressing room after the fight, were lowering but inevitable: ‘Well, gentlemen, that’s my lot. It’s a choker having to go out like this. It was close, but I thought I did enough to clinch it. I want to thank the public and everyone else for all the wonderful years. I don’t regret one moment of it. I’d do it all over again.’ He meant it, too.

  Wicks, completely empurpled with indignation, was rather more forthright, if inaccurate: ‘It was a diabolical decision. Henry Cooper retires today – Harry Gibbs retires tomorrow.’

  He, of course, did not retire. The two men, Wicks and Gibbs, who had never been particularly close in the first place, never spoke again. For Albina, though, the final announcement of Henry’s retirement was a godsend: ‘It was lovely – one of the greatest gifts ever bestowed on me, like a great weight lifted. When he retired, it was wonderful; I started to feel like a different person.’

  British boxing rapidly felt rather different, too. Suddenly it seemed that Henry had been around for ever and his retirement, however inevitable, was to create a huge void in the heavyweight division, even in the wider sport as a whole. For his friends and allies in the sport, it came as a blessed relief that he had finally decided to stop. All who knew him closely realized that the sheer work involved in achieving and maintaining the levels of fitness required to shine against younger men was taking a lot out of him. Between the Tomasoni fight in 1969, and this last fight with Bugner, he seemed to have aged rapidly – he was suddenly looking much older than 36. The last thing anyone wanted was the ignominious spectacle of a public decline. The loss to Bugner, was, they reckoned, as good a reason to stop as he had ever had.

  But if Albina Cooper thought that retirement from the ring meant that she would start to see as much of her husband as other wives saw of theirs, she was to be mistaken, for the groundwork undertaken by the Wicks organization prior to Henry’s retirement had prepared him for a life in the public eye the like of which no British sportsman had ever experienced before. While his training schedule was sharply curtailed (he found it hard to give it up completely) he still kept in shape, not because he ever seriously contemplated a comeback but because the sudden cessation of training for a man as fit as he was could be extremely dangerous; ask any befatted ex-swimmer. Instead, Henry the Ninth, as some of the press now referred to him, had rediscovered golf.

  It had been 30 years before, on the wartime Beckenham course, that the brothers Cooper had first dealt in ‘rescued’ golf balls, but Henry did not take up the game until 1970, when he joined Ealing Golf Club. He became as hooked as any unwary fish as he started to discover the pleasures and torments of this unique game. It would start to redefine him in his boxing retirement and would become a vehicle for some of his best work.

  Of course, his temperament was perfect and he recalled being pleased at having taken it up so relatively late in life because he came to it without any particular preconceptions – no baggage. His previous career had been one of a series of 10 or 15 violent and tiring rounds, with communication with his opponents being defined by a series of unrepeatable grunts punctuated by heavy punching. Now, over 18 holes and a pleasant chat, he could finally allow his innate personality to actually complement his new sport, as opposed to act against it, as it had done for 17 years as a professional fighter.

  Further, because it would not be his living, he was able to pace himself. He was pleased to learn that the unfairness of life, that some are athletes and some are not, is a natural opposition for which the game of golf has a ready answer. The handicapping system, he realized quickly, meant that he would not be condemned to playing only with rabbits.

  But, passionate about it though he would become, it was not a living. That, he would have to do in other ways.

  PART THREE

  WHAT ON EARTH DOES A RETIRED BOXER DO?

  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 was rather 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 si
mple 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?