Henry Cooper

by Robert Edwards

  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 passage 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 o
ff 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.

  But a high public profile is no guarantee of popularity, as generations of third-rate comedians and politicians can testify; the public saw (and see) in Henry something rather different from other, rather run-of-the-mill manufactured celebrities. They see a fundamental decency – ‘a kindness’, as Albina calls it – about him, which they find irresistibly attractive, whatever they may think about boxing – assuming even that they have an opinion on it at all, for many are completely agnostic about the subject now. To a British public his appeal is, in my view at least, very much a nineteenth-century one, as if the public can make a direct connection with the prizefighters of the past, Caunt, Cribb and all the others. If he stood for parliament like John Gully had he would probably win, for example, although it must be said that Gully, who was not the gentle giant portrayed by Henry in Royal Flash, simply bought his seat according to the custom of the day.

  But it is for his charitable activities, many of them invisible, that he received his OBE, and a later, perhaps even more singular honour, which, while it means relatively little outside the Catholic Church, was nonetheless important. In June 1978 he was awarded the Papal Knighthood of St Gregory, which was bestowed upon him by the late, great Cardinal, Basil Hume. It must have given Hume a particular pleasure, as he was a keen follower of the fistic sport, another apparent inconsistency in what we must really start to regard as the mystery of boxing.

  If any proof were needed that boxing’s hasty exit, pursued by the law, into the music halls all those years before, an event which probably ensured its survival, then Henry’s role in the Variety Club of Great Britain offers it. He has been involved with it for nearly 30 years, and the now established charity golf tournaments to which he puts his name (he chairs the Variety Club Golfing committee) have raised millions, both for the Variety Club itself as well as other charities. His devotion to this cause is total. Every boxer must imagine what it must be like to be handicapped, and many of them, including Henry, know exactly what it is like to be poor. Despite his rather survivalist take on life, his efforts on behalf of the underprivileged are legendary and he remains a stalwart of many other charities. In short, he has put back into life far more than he has taken out of it. ‘When you’ve got healthy kids of your own, and you see all those physically and mentally handicapped children at a Sunshine coach presentation, well, I just knew I had to get involved,’ he said in 2000.

  And get involved he certainly did. He offers a living link between boxing, which is the most violent sport on the planet, show business, and one of the best-hearted and hardworking charity networks there is. Neither he nor anyone else sees any particular inconsistency in that; he draws the line at pantomime, though. Boxing and show business may be intimately connected, but there are limits, and he found them quite easily. Henry Cooper may be many things but he was never going to be a pantomime dame.

  In between our chats, I notice two still-life paintings, which are more than competent, hanging on his kitchen wall. They are signed ‘HC’ and I asked him whether he had painted them. ‘Well, I was a bit idle for a while,’ he says, ‘so I just bought a book, you know, How to Paint, or something, and knocked them out. They’re not very good.’

  Well, there is one of a trout, which does look rather surprised, but I have to say that I have seen much worse. But he doesn’t paint any more; there is perhaps something of the ‘been there, done that’ attitude of a man who seeks an experience but feels, internally, that he knows his limitations, even has a slight sense of insecurity. He took some serious risks in the ring, and is not averse to taking some now, but is swift to call a halt if the process seems to lead nowhere, rather like the Wembley grocery enterprise.

  Weather and reptiles permitting, golf is still his main hobby. ‘I like golf a lot, because you can happily play at your level for as long as you like,’ he says. ‘There aren’t many sports which let you do that.’

  A quite remarkable aspect of the Cooper phenomenon is the way he unconsciously engages people’s attention. Quite simply, total strangers think they know him. I recall, as this book was in the early stages of preparation, we were walking together down Shaftesbury Avenue; I was startled at the number of people who simply and cheerfully greeted him, ‘Morning, Henry’. I had never seen this before – dozens of, I am sure, perfectly intelligent people who had convinced themselves that this was quite normal behaviour. Whether they were surprised when he calmly greeted them back, treating this as an everyday occurrence, which it clearly is, I cannot tell, but I imagine they were not. It is as if he physically exudes an aura of accessible amiability, very similar to that perceived to radiate from the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, who was apparently an avid Henry Cooper fan.

  It is a matter of record that once he retired from the prize ring the audience figures for British boxing simply fell off the edge of a cliff. He still gets fan mail from fightgoers who gave up on the sport when he did and who have never returned to it; his presence had been the only reason for their being there, or even watching it on television. A similar phenomenon applied to Stirling Moss when he had retired nine years before Henry, but Stirling’s following was mainly among motor racing fans and was based
much more on vast respect for his phenomenal talents than anything else; they did not feel as if they really knew Stirling, whereas they just knew that they knew Henry, and they knew they also liked him. It was another example of British enthusiasts not necessarily demanding world championship status for their idols – British champion is quite enough, thank you; this also enables us to hang on to our heroes and not have to share them with the rest of the world.

  Very few men, and certainly very few boxers, accomplish this; the public does not appreciate the obsessive/compulsive disorder symptoms frequently exhibited by sports personalities, nor do they particularly like braggarts. In a sense, there is an innate disdain for the ethos of professional sport, which is why the only three men who spring to mind who might fit into the same category as Henry are Mike Hawthorn, who died in 1959, Denis Compton, who passed away in 1997 and Bobby Charlton, who is happily still with us. George Best we all like, particularly if we ever saw him play, but while we are distressed over his state of health, we tut-tut at his lack of discipline. We want it all.

  Sports stars make it look easy and in doing so they unconsciously remind us of our own shortcomings. When we discover, however, that what can make them outstanding competitors can also flaw them as men, we turn away. We are cruel to our heroes in many ways; we seek a perfection that cannot exist, an ideal that is both impractical and ephemeral. Actually, we might be said to prefer them to be dead so that the myths we weave around them can remain unchallenged by their subject. When it was realized that Nigel Mansell was a whinger, or that Jackie Stewart had his left jacket cuff made shorter than his right, in order to show off his Rolex, a company of which he is a (tax-exiled) director, or even that Lester Piggott had been economical with matters fiscal, we pause. Any single element, even unconnected with what they did for a living, can serve to make us forget those sublime moments those men offered up to us; the sheer balls-out courage of Mansell against Senna, or the sheer artistry with which Stewart triumphed, or Piggott’s astonishing record of over 4,500 wins. Really, we don’t deserve these people.