Henry Cooper (2 page)

It is not, of course, for me to make light of the efforts of any of the men in this book, no matter how they engaged with their subject, Henry Cooper. No man who boxed at this level for a living deserves anything but the total respect of any writer on the subject. Thus in drawing conclusions as to the relative abilities of certain fighters – putting them into context – I have relied either on Henry, the informed press, or what I think to be a workable consensus of contemporary opinion. But one thing I have learned is that statistics are seldom the measure of any man.

For this aspect of sport is important: sportsmen operate strictly in their own context. We cannot evaluate any sportsman on an absolute basis, although we are always trying to do it, for the simple reason that conditions, most obviously the quality of opposition, are such a huge historical variable. With motor racing, or any sport that depends upon technology as much as nerve to take it forward, a driver can only be measured in his own time and this crucial aspect applies even to other more individual sports, such as mountaineering. What could Edward Whymper have accomplished with modern equipment? Boxing, however, is more fundamental, more basic. A fight staged sixty years ago, or even a hundred, would be quite recognizable now, and Tom Cribb would no doubt certainly
appreciate the skills of Henry Cooper; whereas I cannot imagine what that brave driver Christian Lautenschlager would make of a modern Grand Prix car; he would probably love it, once it had been explained to him what it actually was.

The years fall away, and I stand face to face with Sir Henry Cooper in his drawing room, deep in rural Kent. Patiently, he is demonstrating to me why it is that southpaws are so difficult to fight; why it is that they should all be ‘strangled at birth’, as he only semi-humorously puts it. In fact, I can see his point exactly. Southpaws, for a boxer of Henry’s polarity, are clearly very hard to hit properly if you engage with them conventionally and can be counted inconvenient at best, but when he switches to a regular stance and we are engaged normally, almost as if for a waltz, I glance down and see that huge, waiting left fist, its biggest knuckle almost the size and texture of a damaged golf ball. I realize that it is less than a foot away from my chin and that if that was what we were about, he could hit me before I could even consider blinking. I even know through which wall of his house I would probably travel. It is sobering. I begin to realize what the game is really about and hope that his well-honed instincts do not kick in; basically, I hope he likes me. A little homework has already revealed to me that it is this fist, which delivered the finest punch of its kind for a generation, could accelerate faster than a Saturn V rocket at full chat and, after travelling such a short distance, would connect with an impact of over four tons per square inch; the physics involved are quite
ridiculous
. I glance up at him, bathed in the light of final comprehension. The famous Cooper grin is followed by
what I perceive to be a quick, knowing nod. He knows I understand. No words are really necessary.

What is startling, I suppose, is the sheer intimacy which two fighters must share; there must be constant, 100 per cent eye contact, as Henry put it: ‘It’s all in the eyes; you can tell everything from the eyes. If a man is going to throw a punch, he telegraphs it with his eyes, and if you’ve hurt him, you just know it by looking at him.’

Boxing is a sport driven by opportunity and is, perhaps more than any other sporting activity, a real mirror of life. The toe-to-toe opportunism of the fight itself, echoed by the deft opportunism of the promoters (and in some cases the managers) produces a rich cultural stew, which invites sampling with a very large spoon indeed. There have been many tragedies in the fight game – boxers who died in the ring – Benny Paret, beaten to death by Emile Griffith; Johnny Owen, who lingered six weeks in a coma before succumbing to the assault he had received from Lupe Pintor, and Jimmy Garcia, who died in 1995 following a brutal fight with Gabriel Ruelas. Then, of course, Gerald McClennan and Michael Watson, both damaged badly, McClennan sadly beyond repair. Also, consider the other casualties – Randolph Turpin and Freddie Mills, both suicides – not to mention so many others, their dreams of glory shattered as they died before their time in lonely rented rooms, unremembered. But I am afraid I still love it, or at least I love the
idea
of it.

There are not many fighters whose reputations grow after they retire. I can think of Jack Dempsey, Max Schmeling, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali and Henry Cooper.
All, bar Henry, were world champions, but that is not the point. When a genuinely confused Max Baer asked, after Henry had entered the rankings in 1958, ‘Tell me, doesn’t that guy ever get mean?’ he meant it quite seriously. Baer, a playboy by his own confession, was world heavyweight champion for 364 days after dropping the giant Primo Carnera and he simply could not understand why Henry Cooper seemed so placid.

There is a powerful lobby that argues that boxing is primarily a matter of economics and Henry Cooper was actually one of them. There is a very ancient joke, which I suspect re-emerges from generation to generation, of the landed earl, who, while riding the bounds of his estate, discovers a trespassing vagrant, taking his ease in the shade of a tree:

‘What are you doing on my land?’ cries the toff.

‘Who says it’s your land?’ responds the tramp.

‘Well, I inherited it.’

‘From whom?’

‘From my father’

And where did he get it?’

‘From his father.’

Well, it all goes further back in similar fashion to some era near the third crusade:

And where did
he
get it?’

‘Well, he fought for it, actually.’

‘Right, you bugger,’ says the tramp, taking off his tattered coat, ‘I’ll fight you for it now’

So, who are we to deny Sonny Liston, from his shoeless and unlettered childhood, his fine house in Las Vegas?

Henry Cooper occupies a unique and enviable place in the contemporary British consciousness. The clear contrast between his public (and private) nature and the often grim business of prizefighting does not sit uncomfortably with anyone, even those who admired him as a man but detested what he did for a living – and there are, it must be said, many of those.

The sheer inaccessibility of boxing rather defines it to most people; one can stage a pro-celebrity event in most sports after all, except these martial arts. It is sometimes tempting to suggest it, of course, and many of us might imagine that Mike Tyson vs Paul Daniels would be an entertaining event to watch, but that simple reality, that boxing is actually about hurting people, sometimes very badly, and sometimes with quite disastrous results, makes many turn away from it. How can one like a man who does this for a living? Quite easily, in fact.

So, Henry Cooper was different. Different also from other fighters in terms of the perception with which he has long been regarded. Those who admired Henry, what he did, what he became, are a different group perhaps from those who admire Chris Eubank, although to a fighter, all are one – as intelligent men (and boxers by and large are highly intelligent, they have to be) they share both a living and a vast mutual respect and seldom really despise each other, whatever they may say in public.

His reputation is undimmed. For his fans, knowledgeable or not, he remains the man who asked Muhammad Ali, then called Cassius Clay, some questions to which the American (who seems now to be a
global
treasure) did not necessarily have a ready answer. To others, those whose interests occupy
purely the British sport, he was the holder of no fewer than three Lonsdale belts, a record that cannot ever be beaten under current regulations, and when Henry was forced to sell them, the nation felt deeply for him, for they knew him to be a man who had started off in life with few material possessions, that these treasures, going under the hammer (or ’ammer, I suppose) at an obscure country auction, these trophies were objects for which he had fought, won for himself, literally taken with his own hands. He had not been born to them. This sorry spectacle was not that of some dissolute chinless wonder selling off his unearned and mortgaged inheritance, rather there was something almost biblical about it.

But boxing audiences are also more fickle and more merciless than the wider public. It is almost impossible to believe it now, but on the evening of 5 December 1961, over 40 years ago, Henry Cooper, the man we revere so much now, was actually booed out of Wembley Arena after being dropped by a carthorse kick of a right from that same Zora Folley whom he had outpointed three years before. As one commentator, Robert Daley of the
New York Times
, put it sympathetically at the time: ‘Mercifully, he was probably too dazed to notice.’ How times change…

In his professional career Henry Cooper fought 44 men on 55 separate occasions. He won 40 fights (27 of them inside the distance), drew one and lost the other 14. These are mere numbers, of course, but they make up, by my calculation, 371 rounds, or 18½ hours of competition (and punishment) at the highest level. Like many fighters, he would have been willing to do more, but unlike so many who sadly did just that, he came through the process completely unaltered.

But that is surely what boxing is about. It is a bilateral interrogation. How fast, strong, clever or brave? What have you
got
in there? It lifts a very few men to heights of confidence quite unknown to most and the majority of fighters thus remain forgotten. Henry Cooper had been retired from boxing for over 30 years before his death in 2011, but he will not, I submit, be forgotten, because he quite simply survived the process. For this he thanked the quality of his management, for which read Jim Wicks, that avuncular but perhaps slightly sinister
maestro
from Bermondsey. The relationship between these two men was an exemplar of trust and understanding that is rare in any human activity, let alone sport, and well-nigh unique in boxing.

That he survived so well, and that he demonstrated this so regularly by being such a public figure (and a knight, to boot) was the cause of much appreciation, both public and private. When I set out to explore the life of this professional fighter – this prizefighter, I did so with the knowledge that Henry’s personal appeal cut across anything so trivial as social class or, even more importantly, whether or not the Cooper fan is even a fan of the sport at which he excelled. No, it is simpler than that. People love Henry Cooper because he came unscathed through a process that would quite terrify any imaginative person. He put himself in harm’s way and came out on the far side of that quite unspoiled and clearly uncorrupted by a sport and a business that, by the time of his retirement, was becoming a byword for sleaze, a cipher for corruption. One can describe Sonny Liston (or Mike Tyson, for that matter) as a truly terrifying man, but that adjective comes nowhere near doing justice to
some of those men who handled them and ran and damaged or destroyed their lives.

The British sport was not, of course, quite as grimy as its American counterpart, mainly because of a more monolithic regime of regulation. The British Boxing Board of Control (BBBC) has had many criticisms fired at it, and indeed many of them are entirely justified, and it is an organization that certainly has its detractors now, but it is true to say, no irony intended, that by and large they made a fair fist of it, however shabbily they occasionally treated Henry. Of course, they were up against rather less than the fragmented American regulators, who were often taking on (and occasionally in the pockets of) the Mob – seriously unpleasant people. The British underworld is happily a pallid and feeble thing by comparison with the likes of the Mafia; in the USA, there were truly dreadful men like Frankie Carbo – here, we had those dismal fantasists, the Krays. Enough said.

Boxing, for very good reasons, has always had a whiff of corruption about it, whether justified or not, but despite the distaste with which it is often regarded, for a multitude of reasons, people actually rather like boxers. There is no particular paradox to this, no inconsistency; it is, I maintain, quite obvious. In spite of the fact that many of Sir Henry’s fans would really rather prefer him to have done something else for a living, they also realize full well that if he had, he would simply not be the straightforward, proud man whom they admire so much. Henry Cooper, nice guy plasterer, is not the same thing at all as Sir Henry Cooper, KSG, OBE, – prizefighter. The man who beat Brian London to a confused and bloody pulp and broke the brave Gawie de Klerk’s jaw
in two places before the fight was stopped is the very same man who also raised many, many millions for handicapped children and other good causes. That this fact may place the politically correct or the woolly-minded, bleeding-hearted liberal on the horns of a vast moral dilemma is, of course, less than dust to me – a mere rounding.

But it is interesting…

T
he pride of Eurydamus the argonaut and boxer, it is said, is so great that it compels him to swallow his broken teeth rather than spit them out and therefore show his pain. It is quite possible that he has been clobbered by his
co-adventurer
,

Polydeukes, who is a useful middleweight. Polydeukes and his brother Kastor, who is also an Argonaut, are, according to mythology, the twin sons of Leda and Zeus. Unfairly, Polydeukes was (is, I suppose) immortal, whereas poor Kastor is not. Their sister is Helen of Troy. According to a vase purporting to show Polydeukes at work (literally, putting up his dukes), his opponent is his twin, although Kastor, it must be said, enjoys more fame as a horseman. This pair, the
Dioskuri
, later become the
Castori
, the Gemini twins of Roman mythology and modern astrology, Castor and Pollux, so in a sense both achieve immortality.

Although there is evidence of fist-fighting from all over antiquity, it is generally accepted that it is fundamentally a Greek sport, a pas time that bored soldiery use to maintain both their martial skills and their aggression. It is quite distinct from wrestling. To save their hands and allow them to hit harder, Greek fighters wrapped them in
Himantes
, soft thongs of kid or ox hide, which protect the knuckle of the clenched fist (
pugme
, from puxos, a box), leaving the fingers free. The later (c400 BC)
Oxeis Himantes
, literally ‘sharp thongs’, are preformed mitts of cured leather, which give a harder edge to a blow. They are padded with an inner layer of wool to spread the force of a punch and protect the fist and are quite recognizable as boxing gloves, albeit cruel ones. Even later, studs (
myrmekes
) are added, but never, apparently, at the Olympic Games.

So not only do the Greeks invent the boxing glove (and indeed the bandages), they also seem to have developed the penalty tiebreaker. If a bout goes on too long, presumably when the audience become bored and start to throw things (it was ever thus), then a process known as a
klimax
is ordered, whereby one fighter will accept, quite undefended, a blow from his opponent and the favour will then be returned until the inevitable happens. Presumably this implies that there is no formal points system, as the strategy is clearly intended to create a knockout.

Low punches are expressly forbidden and rest periods are by mutual consent. There are no formal divisions by weight, so presumably there is a common-sense matchmaker in there somewhere, as well as a referee. There are certainly promoters; Homer refers to a fight, staged by that heroic thug Achilles during the siege of Troy, that takes place
between Epeus and Euryalus. Euryalus comes second but he still wins himself a drinking-cup for his efforts; for the winner, Epeus (appropriately enough for the man who designed, road-tested and built the Trojan horse), the prize is a mule.

Philostratus, writing much later, in AD 230, describes the ideal virtues of the good boxer, who should have ‘long and powerful arms, strong shoulders, a high neck and powerful and flexible wrists’. Handicaps are a thick shin (preventing agility) and a large stomach (preventing supple movements). In addition, the boxer should possess perseverance, patience, great willpower and strength. It is a fair description, this, and represents possibly the longest continuum of any sporting ideal. Fat is clearly a bad thing but, aside from the physical attributes to be treasured, Philostratus is also describing intelligence – the perfect bloke, in fact. He only neglects to mention the one element that is important to this book – durable eyebrows.

Predictably enough, the Roman version of boxing is even crueller and more gladiatorial than the Greek. The Romans, forever pushing outward the envelope of public decency, see a huge potential in boxing. The Latin equivalent of the Greek
pugme
is
pugilatus
. From the recognizable encounters of the ancient Greeks at the 23rd Olympiad in 688 BC, the sport has now become a fight to the death, not as an exercise of arms or skill, but simply an event to please the mob: organized murder. The
Oxeis Himantes
are now
Caesti
(from
Caedare
– the Latin verb ‘to hack down’) –
metal-studded
straps wrapped tight around the fist. The damage they can do is quite awful. They are in effect little more than crude knuckledusters. The loser earns no drinking-cup now
– he dies, and the winner merely survives. In short, it is little more than a slave’s activity.

After the abolition of the Olympic Games in AD 393, and shortly before the final collapse of Rome, we do not hear about boxing for nearly a millennium and a half. There are passing references to it from time to time, mainly as a pastime for soldiers, but culturally and socially boxing virtually drops from sight, a completely lost art, if art it could be called.

Unsurprisingly, it is in libertarian England, under the restored monarchy of Charles II, where we meet it again. It has not changed much from the free-for-all of the arena. The
Caestes
have gone; it is now a simple bare-knuckle affair, with kicking, holding, throttling and throwing all allowed. It resembles a degraded and hybrid oriental martial art (but entirely free of those ritual courtesies) crossed with a
tap-room
brawl as much as anything else, and one of the earliest recorded post-Cromwell bouts takes place in August 1681, when the Duke of Albemarle’s unfortunate footman is stopped by a butcher’s boy.

This encounter rather sets the tone of the development of the sport as a series of bored and dissolute aristocrats send their long-suffering servants out simply to beat each other up. The fighters are paid little but some of the side-bets are vast. It is a chaotic series of unregulated brawls. In 1719, though, it all changes when the terrifying James Figg, born in 1695 in Thame in Oxfordshire, declares himself ‘Champion of England’. Figg has certainly done enough work; he is a curiously contemporary and disturbingly familiar figure to us now. Figg is illiterate, swaggering and
shaven-headed and his modern equivalent can be found today in the cheap seats of any football ground, probably clutching a tin of high-octane lager. There is something faintly feral about him and he exhibits some distinctly criminal tendencies in matters fiscal. He will fight with anything, from cudgel to quarterstaff via fists and swords, and for anything – desiderata defined by him in 1727 as being ‘money, love or a bellyful’. Perhaps Figg reminds us, professionally at least, more than a little of Jack Dempsey. But he is also a first-class showman.

Figg makes friends and sponsors quickly, in fact. As a prototypical curiosity, who clearly generates a dreadful fascination, he is celebrated by the literary and artistic figures of the day. His career, brief as it is, creates a popular reverence for fighters that has never really left us. William Hogarth engraves his trade-cards for him
*
and both Alexander Pope (still the best translator of the
Iliad
, where we first encounter boxing) and Jonathan Swift count him amongst their close acquaintances, possibly even writing his letters for him. His patron is the Earl of Peterborough, who funds and founds ‘Figg’s Amphitheatre’ in the Tottenham Court Road, an ambitious project that is part duelling academy, part venue, part betting shop – it is London’s first gym. It flourishes and will accommodate over 1,000 spectators.

These earliest prizefights are chaotic, full-blooded
tear-ups
of quite astonishing violence, totally in the Roman
tradition. Kicking, eye-gouging, biting, butting and throwing are all permitted, indeed encouraged. Blood, teeth, sweat and snot, we can imagine, thicken the already smoky atmosphere in Figg’s Amphitheatre. A favourite manoeuvre is the cross-buttock throw, similar to the
O Goshi
hip-throw from judo, with the added refinement that the thrower lands – as hard as he can – on top of his opponent’s gut. Only a throw-down or a knockdown can end a round. The audience want blood and they usually get it. Deaths are frequent and Figg, unsurprisingly, does not live long. In 1727, for example, he fights – inconclusively – Ned Sutton, first with his fists, followed by a decider with cudgels – and he dies after a short, violent life in around 1734 (by some accounts 1740). His torch is taken up by a pupil and protégé, Jack Broughton, who apes Figg’s skinhead tonsorial style. Both men are shaven-headed purely from a practical point of view because being grabbed by the hair was an occupational hazard.

Broughton is from Bristol and has been spotted as a likely lad by the master as he completely savages some hapless foe (later fistic mythology terms this opponent, with commendable loyalty to Broughton, as a ‘bully’) in a welter of blood, snot and pain at a West Country fair. Figg, who I think we can safely assume is not a man to be easily impressed, has seen in Broughton a kindred spirit and the Bristolian is quickly taken up by the Duke of Cumberland, who does for Broughton what the Earl of Peterborough has done for Figg, and builds him a fine academy of his own. It abuts the late Figg’s Amphitheatre.

Broughton, though, is rather different. He affects disdain for the crudity of mere fighting and becomes perhaps the
first
scientific
boxer, developing and teaching techniques such as blocking and slipping, which are still recognizable today. In 1741 a seminal fight takes place – the encounter between Broughton and a coach driver from Yorkshire, George Stevenson. Unfortunately, Broughton kills him, breaking three of his ribs and probably puncturing a lung in the process. Poor Stevenson lingers on for an agonizing month, during which the somewhat guilt-ridden Broughton develops a great affection for him. By now lionized by an adoring public, the victor starts to consider his position.

On 16 August 1743, The ‘Broughton Rules’ are published, ‘
As agreed by Several Gentlemen at Broughton’s Amphitheatre
’. They represent the first serious effort at codifying the rules of engagement of boxing since the original Olympic Games. The seven rules have a limited set of objectives, and they are clearly intended to apply only to Broughton’s own establishment, but they are relatively enlightened and humane by the standards of the time. By their very introduction, Broughton writes himself into the history books as the father of English, and therefore world, boxing. Here they are in more or less modern English:

But as well as attempting a proper set of rules, Broughton makes another contribution, which will prove significant. He develops the modern boxing glove, the ‘muffler’, for use in sparring and more lily-livered amateur competition. His concern is purely cosmetic, to save his aristocratic students, who were his bread and butter, from: ‘The inconveniency of black eyes, broken jaws and bloody noses.’ Broughton’s rules survive for nearly a century, in fact, and it is only in 1838, perhaps in deference to the new Queen, that they are revised.

Broughton, unlike his mentor Figg, lives to a great age, possibly due to a relatively early and controversial retirement. The Duke of Cumberland, clearly still flushed with his success in the wake of the Battle of Culloden, wagers
£
10,000, at odds reputed to have been 10-1, that Broughton will beat a new challenger, the disreputable Jack Slack. Slack, ‘The first knight of the Cleaver’, is the classic bruiser (actually a butcher from Norwich), who insults Broughton one day at a race meeting. Broughton offers to horsewhip him but is prevailed upon instead to accept a formal challenge for his championship. The fight takes place on 10 April 1750 and, after a rather one-sided start, Slack lands a lucky blow, which (temporarily) blinds the champion. Cumberland, though, seeing his £10,000 – a truly colossal amount of money – rapidly disappearing, accuses Broughton of selling (‘swallowing’) the fight and, after the
ex-champion
’s seconds throw in the towel, he withdraws his
backing and even goes so far as to have Broughton’s academy closed down later on. It is a distressing end to a quite glorious career – Broughton has held the title for over ten years and his departure leaves something of a vacuum at the top of the sport. As Slack, seeing opportunities of a more commercial nature in prizefighting, reverts to his previous trade in Covent Garden with a sideline in training, fixing and bribing. He prospers.