Henry Cooper (25 page)

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
:

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:

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:

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.

Henry, of course never made it look easy, but the gory sight he frequently presented was quickly offset by his unfeigned chirpiness only a few days after one gruelling encounter or another. In defeat he was gracious and in victory, modest, and invariably generous to his opponent.
We like that, if only because that is almost certainly not how we would ourselves behave in the same circumstances.

So, Henry Cooper, who had won his audience and following the hardest way, now found himself attracting a bigger one than he had enjoyed in the ring, for despite the fact that boxing has always been a minority sport when compared to football or motor racing, Henry’s appeal has always been wider than the orbit of his occupation, and all agree that he is very good indeed at simply being Henry Cooper.

It is a full-time job, and he is seldom at a loose end, but there is one sport that he is pleased he took up; if there is one activity apart from boxing about which he is passionate it is the ancient one of golf. ‘I think that without golf, Henry wouldn’t be the man he is today,’ says Albina. ‘It really gave him a new lease of life.’

But the combination of golf and his happy-go-lucky, optimistic attitude was nearly the undoing of him three years ago. He was playing golf in Buckinghamshire in the late spring. While looking for someone else’s lost ball (‘of course’, sighs Albina), he failed to observe an aggressive and healthy specimen of
Vipera beris
lurking in the rough and the adder bit him on the ankle.

Jim Wicks had been the man who had taken care so effectively of most of the multifarious other reptiles to have crossed Henry’s path in his previous career, so perhaps his reaction was both understandable and forgivable, if perhaps, in the light of hindsight, a little bit unwise. Typically, he made little of it and simply carried on playing, slapped a Band-Aid on the oozing puncture in the clubhouse and drove himself home. He explained that he had been
scratched by a thorn when Albina asked him about the plaster. ‘Well, I didn’t want to worry anyone,’ he says now. ‘Everybody knows they can’t kill you.’

They can, actually; an adder bite is no small thing, depending on the time of year. Unhappily, he was bitten in May, during the nesting season, when adders are at their most defensive and aggressive. Even when the bite refused to heal he was not overly concerned, and only seven months later, when a lump of medically interesting and clearly mortified tissue the size of a small walnut simply dropped out of his ankle, did he realize that something was seriously amiss, and he reluctantly revealed the truth, caught in the harmless fib. Albina resignedly sums it up: ‘There you are, that’s my Henry. I asked him if he’d killed it – “No,” he said. “She ran away…”’

So, that rather says it all: Henry Cooper, one time British, Empire and European heavyweight champion, the destroyer of Erskine, London, Richardson and Tomasoni, the owner and deliverer of perhaps the finest punch – God-given – ever to grace the British ring, couldn’t even bring himself to kill the snake that bit him. There is, I maintain, a great symbolic truth in this little anecdote.