Henry Cooper (10 page)

Mols may not have been the classiest fighter Henry had
faced (Erskine clearly was, up to then) but he was the first title-holder Henry had ever fought. The ease of the victory did not create an air of overconfidence, as Mols was clearly overrated, but it was an important win, as it allowed Wicks to select and negotiate more selectively, as he understood that in boxing, like so many other areas of activity, a fighter will be commercially judged almost totally by his last effort, which is a phenomenon that naturally works both ways.

Next up was Brian London, who was unbeaten in 12 professional fights. In a sense, London, whose father, Jack, had been British heavyweight champion himself, was becoming the Henry Cooper of the North. He came from Blackpool and his family name was actually Harper, his father having changed it to reflect his admiration for the writer of that name, the author of
Call of the Wild
. London had fought as an amateur under the name of Harper, as had his brother, Jack junior. Henry had beaten Jack London as an amateur, whereas Brian had beaten George as a professional, so there was no lack of potential rivalry. Henry even went so far as to make a prediction. He was asked before the fight if he planned to knock his opponent out. He nodded. When? Eighth or ninth? He shook his head, holding up one finger. ‘Just one,' he said, quietly.

Henry remembers Brian London in the early years as ‘…a surly so-and-so, never smiling in his pictures, and a difficult man to get along with. From his attitude at the weigh-ins there was no love lost between us. He could be
quick-tempered
in the ring, too…'

The two men were very different. Henry, whose sunny disposition was already making him inordinately popular, was up against a man whose dour disposition made him
exactly the opposite, at least in the South. The match took place at the Empress Hall on 1 May. It did not take long. Henry whacked London onto the ropes in round one with a rare right hook to the body. As London dropped his guard, Henry moved in with the rapidly developing left and delivered it serially to London's jaw. The referee, Tommy Little, leaped in and stopped the fight after 2 minutes 35 seconds of the first.

This had been a startling and accurate performance, as important for Henry it was a heartbreaker for London. The aggression Henry had shown, not to mention his ability to fight two-handed, was appreciated. Suddenly, after that fight, he was a name to conjure with, particularly for Jim Wicks. Winning fights at this senior level with such apparent ease as well as such versatility was vital for him. He was not yet at the level where Wicks could charge whatever he wanted for Henry's professional services, but he was already getting close to it. He would fight Brian London twice more, in fact, and always beat him, but not necessarily with the same ease.

After such a brief fight, which had caused no damage whatever to Henry's eyebrows – London had barely landed a single blow – there was no need for a sustained layoff, and less than two months later, on 26 June, he fought the ungainly Giannino Luise, of whom he had never heard (and would never hear again). It was a relatively pedestrian fight until Henry landed a hard, hacking left to his opponent's liver, which stopped the fight in the seventh round.

With three such authoritative victories in a row – Mols, London, Luise – and a career now fully launched, Henry had every reason to believe that those vague ambitions of
childhood, those images of Joe Louis, were leading to something. Everything seemed to be cruising along, going exactly to plan, without any clouds on the horizon. Life was good.

I
f Henry thought that his straightforward stopping of Giannino Luise was a portent for the future, he was to be sadly mistaken. Statistics are seldom the measure of a man but a glance at the record book suggests that there is an exception to every rule. In Henry’s case the signs of trouble ahead were certainly not clear at Belle Vue, Manchester on 7 September 1956 when he put Yorkshireman Peter Bates down with a massive left hook to the mouth for what might well have been added to his resume as a first-round knockout. Bates stayed down for a nine count (not tactically – he was severely dazed) but then, amazingly enough, got to his feet. The next four rounds were all Henry’s, despite a small smear of fresh blood on his left eyebrow.

In the fifth, though, a concerned Wicks saw from the
corner that ‘coming out of a clinch’ (as one report had it) there was a very serious cut over Henry’s right eye as well, probably the worst cut that he had received so far. In a situation like this a boxer needs a fast knockout but Henry simply could not land a repeat blow to the one he had produced in round one. Without further ado, Wicks threw in the towel at the end of the fifth. It was not a particularly important fight but, while Henry was well ahead by five rounds to none, the damage was severe; he was cut to the bone, but there was clearly nothing wrong with his boxing.

A disappointment, to be sure, but not a catastrophe; boxers get cut all the time. After a five-month layoff, Henry faced Joe Bygraves, the muscular hard man from Jamaica, all 15 stone of him. This Earls Court fight, on 19 February 1957, was an important one, for the British Empire heavyweight title no less, which Bygraves had seized in June of the previous year.

Henry had beaten Bygraves before, of course, but at the weigh-in he found that he was now only a pound short of 14 stone, which for Henry was an unheard-of bulk. He had discovered that his ideal fighting weight was exactly 13 stone 71bs; the difference may not sound much, but over a prizefight, the extra baggage always shows. In fact, under modern divisions, Henry Cooper would be a cruiserweight.

The extra poundage certainly showed as this fight got under way. Henry was the slowest he had ever been and looked it, even against Bygraves, who was not the fastest mover in the division. Bygraves took the fight to him and Henry seemed unable to make any impression at all. Of
more concern was a cut to the left eye (round three) and a haematoma under the right, which burst messily.

The end, when it came, was humiliating. In round nine Bygraves landed a crushing punch to the solar plexus. Winded, Henry just man aged to beat the count but as soon as he arose Bygraves simply did it again. This time Henry simply could not get up and was counted out. Henry’s friend Danny Cornell, who went to the dressing room, accompanied by Derek ‘Del’ John, the lightweight boxer from Catford, describes the scene:

In the audience was Ingemar Johansson, who, since September 1956, the month of Henry’s misfortune with Bates, had been the holder of the European heavyweight title after taking it from Franco Cavicchi. Three months after that, Johansson had dispatched Peter Bates in two rounds, breaking his jaw in the process. He had actually thought that Henry had boxed well, in fact, but he needed to find out what he might be up against, for Jim Wicks had, as soon as Johansson had taken the title, put Henry’s name forward with the European Boxing Union (EBU) as a contender. Ambitious, perhaps, but he had faith in the emerging Cooper left hook, which was developing into a
punch of awesome stopping-power, even if it was not yet fully formed. It was merely fearsome, if not the devastating blow it would become. Certainly, it had been noticeably absent against Bygraves. But Wicks was philosophical. ‘Have a couple of months out,’ he wheezed. Which Henry did, before challenging Johansson for the European
heavy-weight
title in Stockholm on 19 May 1957.

Johansson was not actually best pleased at the prospect, as he recalled in 1961:

Ahlgvist was right – 10,000 baying Swedes turned out, along with a few cautiously optimistic British scribblers. Lainson Wood of the
Daily Telegraph
wrote: ‘Cooper is certainly keyed up for the fight of his life and I do not think he will let Britain down. He is a better boxer than Johansson. Let’s hope he pulls it off.’ And the view of the
Boxing News
was not dissimilar: ‘…on paper, this is the most open fight imaginable…’

But there was more to this than pure boxing. Johansson was not technically an inspiring boxer but he was possessed of a truly terrifying right -’The Hammer of Thor’ as he later
called it. Anyone who got in its way was almost certainly going to go down, and hard, as poor Cavicchi had recently discovered when it had connected with his midriff, ‘dropping him like a log’, as one rather uninspired report had it.

Henry, though, had not actually lost very much weight; he was still 13 stone 121bs, and, in an attempt to shed some avoirdupois, he went running, accompanied by an extremely fit and cooperative waiter from the hotel where he was staying.

The fight was staged in the open air, on a fine early summer afternoon. ‘It was really bright,’ says Henry, ‘and there was muggins, sitting in the corner with the sun right in my eyes.’

It was in truth a fairly plodding and uninspiring contest, and Peter Wilson of the
Daily Mirror
scored the first round even, with Henry perhaps marginally ahead in each of the following three, but by the tiniest margin. In the interval, after round four, Wicks advised Henry to take the fight to his opponent. Both men were nervous about the attitude of the crowd and, ever mindful of the fact that Johansson had been thrown out of the 1952 Olympic Games for ‘not trying’, it seemed logical to introduce a little ginger. This was a mistake, as Johansson recalls:

His knockout record was 10 out of 16, in fact. After 2 minutes 47 seconds of the fifth round, the punch that Henry never saw coming landed on his chin. It was a classic left, left, followed by a blinding right cross and Henry became Johansson’s seventeenth victim. Peter Wilson wrote sadly:

Yes, quite a punch. ‘It was so quick, I didn’t see it coming,’ said Henry. ‘Dat’s de whole idea,’ artlessly responded a justifiably smug Johansson. But as Henry would discover again, you never do.

Actually, Ingemar Johansson rather liked Henry, as he recalls in his memoirs:

All in all it was a rough day for the brothers Cooper. George, Henry’s main sparring partner, was disqualified against Albert Finch, Johansson’s sparring partner, for an alleged low punch, although Sydney Hulls of the
Daily Express
, perhaps trying to salvage something constructive from such a dismal day, rather plaintively disagreed: ‘I did not think Cooper’s two-fisted spasm of body punches had landed below the belt. The blows appeared strictly and energetically on the target area.’

But that opinion was little consolation as the lowered little team flew back to Blighty. Two title fight losses for Henry – Empire and European – in depressingly quick succession. Wicks, however, had kept the faith, for he had already made his plans clear in Stockholm. ‘First Henry needs a couple of fights at home to get back his confidence,’ he’d gurgled to a depressed and more than slightly sceptical press corps.

What Wicks actually had in mind for his slightly reduced fighter was another crack at Joe Erskine for yet another championship, the British one. If this seems a rash policy with the gift of hindsight, then it should be borne in mind that Erskine, although a supreme tactician, was not a particularly strong puncher. Conversely, whatever he lacked in brake horsepower he made up for in guile. Joe Erskine really was a very fine boxer indeed and any deficit he suffered in the ability to create a punch was further offset by his ability to take one, as he himself was to find out.

In truth, the action outside the ring was almost as interesting, and serves as an exemplar of the seamier side of the sport. Joe Erskine had discovered that his manager, Benny Jacobs, had, not to put too fine a point on it, been stealing money from him. The two men were by now communicating only through the medium of Erskine’s trainer, Archie Rule. It seems that Jacobs had a severe gambling problem and was not above being economical with the truth concerning – ahem – the exact amount of Erskine’s purses. Erskine fired him on the eve of this fight. He would re-engage with him later but on the night of his fight with Henry, he was, to say the least, understaffed. But it didn’t show.

The attention span (and collective memory) of a fight crowd is astonishingly short; the bout went down in history as being supremely dull but the first seven rounds were, in fact, swift and rather full of action, including a warning to Henry in round four for ‘steadying’ the back of Erskine’s head before punching him. Henry, in fact, landed at least three crushing lefts, one of which nearly dropped his opponent, but Erskine responded with strong (but not debilitating) body punches and from round eight the chubby Welsh fighter simply plodded back to win narrowly on points. Harry Carpenter calculated the margin to be a quarter of a point, the smallest possible.

For Henry, this marked his fourth defeat in a row: Bates, Bygraves, Johansson, Erskine. If this continued, it was going to become hard to make a living. There was always plastering, of course, but plasterers did not as a rule eat lunch at Simpson’s in the Strand or, indeed, wear hand-made
suits. The nagging self-doubt that invariably accompanies such a string of defeats was growing to such an extent that he seriously considered quitting.

One of his main difficulties, which first arose with the Bates fight, was the vulnerability of his eyes to damage, which, while it was relatively painless, invariably laid him open to defeat. He had started to become defensive, a tactic which, while it certainly served to make him a technically far better boxer later on, was not what was required now if he was to take full advantage of his rapidly developing left hook, which, when all was said and done was, apart from his agility, the main weapon in his armoury.

Wicks’s counsel on using the hook was quite subtle. He held that there was actually no need to connect with it all the time; for some opponents its mere existence would be enough to threaten and compromise their mental composure. ‘Just let them feel the wind of its passing, son,’ he told Henry, ‘just the wind of its passing. Just let them know it’s there.’

Meanwhile, Wicks took the view, as he always did, that Henry should get on with his business and his corner men should be allowed to get on with theirs. It was something of a pet theme of his, this tidy division of labour. Danny Holland had developed a novel approach to dealing with cuts: an adrenalin compound, mixed with Vaseline, ensured that the astringent chemical, which served to neatly close off broken blood vessels, could be applied using his own
hand-made
swabs, and be expected to last most of a three-minute round. It worked well as a tactic, for with less than a minute to repair such debilitating damage, speed was of the essence. The British rules did not permit some of the more exotic
substances commonly used in America, which were little more than crude hard-setting fillers for cuts, and which had contributed to the ruination of many a fighter’s eyebrows, and therefore their careers.

But now, after this little string of defeats, Henry’s commercial value was suddenly very little, at least domestically; his stock was at a very low ebb. Other fighters who found themselves in a similar position always ran the risk of being ‘overboxed’ in ludicrous mismatches by cynical managers, so that at least they would earn something out of them before moving on to other hopefuls. Wicks, it must be said, was not cut from that cloth; he was fully convinced of Henry’s long-term value and while he was concerned at his boy’s plummeting morale, the pair maintained their agreeable routine. At a time when self-doubt was nagging Henry, Wicks was a rock of stability.

Given the iron grip exerted by Jack Solomons and Harry Levene on the promotion of the sport in Britain, there was a small gap in the market: Germany. The clear reluctance of the two main Jewish promoters to accommodate German fighters meant that boxing in Germany was developing on a separate but parallel path from that in Britain, cut off from it by both culture and recent history. To be sure, the purses were smaller, as neither Marshall Aid nor the ludicrous exchange rate seemed to have had the same effect on boxing as it had on BMW, but at that stage Henry was still faced with the simple imperative of rebuilding his resume and the money was really quite secondary. There was also the possibility of exacting some sweet revenge for the near miss from that doodlebug in 1944.