Henry Cooper (14 page)

The crowd who had cheered him in five minutes before now booed him out, as an anxious George escorted his brother from the ring. ‘I didn’t see the punch at all,’ said 
Henry later. All I remember was Folley coming close to me and I found myself on the floor. I suppose I shall have to start all over again.’

As for Folley himself, perhaps to balance the truly appalling behaviour of his seconds, who had openly sneered at the dazed loser, he said gracefully, almost in implicit apology:

Well, history shows that he never got the chance to fight Patterson, as the champion finally had no option but to give Liston a shot at the title, with famously embarrassing results. In fact, Folley would have to wait six years for a title fight, and it would be against Muhammad Ali, not Liston, by which time he too, partly as a result of over-fighting to feed his large family, was past his best. Ironically, after all Zora Folley’s hard work, Henry would get his own crack at the title ahead of him.

Generous though Folley’s offer of a rematch was (and the cause of much appreciative comment), Henry’s fans, the more informed of whom had been nervous about this fight in the first place, were appalled for him at the disaster.
Boxing News
wrote: 

Others, including Donald Saunders, estimated that a fight with Patterson for the title would have netted him even more but, of course, neither man would get the opportunity.
Boxing News
, however, offered some sensible advice as well as a good and relevant parallel:

But whatever the level of the opportunity cost involved, this unnecessary defeat was a huge setback for Henry, both personally and professionally. He had made the classic and clear mistake of under-training for the fight, thus effectively
committing the cardinal error of underestimating his opponent. Quickly, another bout was arranged, for 23 January 1962. The opponent was to be Tony Hughes, who was something of an unknown quantity, save that he was the protégé of Rocky Marciano, who had retired as undefeated heavyweight champion in 1955. Marciano, with some justification, had been just as feared as Liston, so there was a buzz of anticipation, firstly at the prospect of actually seeing this great but terrifying man in the flesh, as well as evaluating his presumably promising prospect. A man like Marciano, it was reasoned, would surely only sponsor someone cast completely in his own image, if that was possible.

After the disaster of that second Folley fight, Henry and Wicks had sat down to have a serious talk about the issue of training; Henry had ruefully agreed that to attempt to work at home was a mistake that had cost him dear, so this time round he threw himself into it with great intensity.

Henry was fascinated to meet Marciano, whom he had long admired, but never particularly wished to fight. In 1952 Marciano had knocked out champion Jersey Joe Walcott with a terrifying punch that had famously been caught on camera and it had appeared that poor Walcott’s jaw had almost become detached by it. Marciano had christened this punch the ‘Suzy Q’ and Henry was quite interested to meet its owner. ‘He was the quietest, most softly spoken guy you could ever wish to meet,’ he remembers.

The fight with Hughes itself was a straightforward and inelegant brawl, which took place at the Olympia Circus Arena, complete with caged animals nearby. ‘God, they
stank the place out,’ recalls Henry but, in the parlance of the game, so, alas for him, did Hughes. Happily, he possessed neither a ‘Suzy Q’ nor great abundance of either discipline or ability. Straight from the bell he windmilled away at Henry for four rounds before being caught by a left that put him down at the end of the fourth. In the fifth, spectators witnessed a rare sight: Henry attacking with both fists in equal measure. It certainly worked, and a dazed and bleeding Hughes was forced to retire.

The use of the right hand was, however, significant. Henry had started to suffer from that dreaded puncher’s ailment, bursitis, an inflammation of the knuckles caused by calcium deposits and exacerbated by judicious ‘management of the glove’. Given that he used the left approximately 30 times more often than the right, and didn’t even brush his teeth with his right outside the ring, it was the left hand that was starting to deteriorate into a truly dreadful condition. His left elbow was not much better, and it was now starting to hurt in the days that followed these fights. The knuckle damage went back to his Army days, when Henry had banged the top of Joe Erskine’s very hard head.

The knuckle had been split and swollen but little had been done about it. Now, ten years later, the (already big to begin with) joint was severely calcified and enlarged to the size of a golf ball and, despite treatment in 1955-56, it was still giving trouble, and always would. Hot wax and massage treatment helped to disperse some of the deposits but it remains to this day an interesting sight.

The second fight in this rather flurried and hasty comeback was arranged barely a month later, on 26 February, against the dentally challenged Wayne Bethea, whose features had
been so comprehensively rearranged by Sonny Liston in August 1958. Bethea was by now well past his best and this fight was only possible because he was on a general European trip fighting purely for the money. History records that Henry scored a points win but oddly it is not a fight he remembers well now.

On 2 April Henry fought Joe Erskine for the last time, defending his British and Empire titles. It was a bloody encounter, with Erskine’s puffy eyes offering an obvious target, and the referee, Frank Wilson, stopped the fight in round nine. It was to be Erskine’s last title challenge, in fact. Although he was (like Dick Richardson) the same age as Henry, he was tired. Despite unrivalled ability as a technical boxer, he had always lacked a seriously heavy punch, and the extra work he had been forced to do as a result had probably weakened him enough, never mind the machinations of his crooked manager, Jacobs. ‘I really think that if Joe Erskine had developed a really heavy punch and had had a decent manager, he would have been world heavyweight champion without a doubt,’ says Henry. ‘He was just a superb boxer. He gave me more trouble than Richardson, London and Billy Walker put together.’

So, after another successful rehabilitation of almost unseemly haste, Henry had earned himself a decent layoff. He had hardly laid eyes on Albina and his son, Henry Marco, in four months, and now he would go back into regular training – just a day at the office, really – for almost a year, before another encounter with Dick Richardson. But there was plenty for him to do. Wicks, never idle and usually scheming something up, had had a rather good idea.

Using the full breadth of his contacts, he was even able
to secure a walk-on part in a
Daily Mail
cartoon strip,
Carol Day
, penned by David Wright, which had been run from 1956 and would carry on until Wright’s sadly early death in 1967. Actually, it was a baddie; Henry would model for the character of ‘Gene Miller’, an apparently ‘brutal’ boxer, who was one of the many and varied male friends of the eponymous heroine. The Miller character was actually rather well drawn, and was also very obviously Henry Cooper (or possibly even George, of course). It was this kind of trick, very contemporary now, that served to keep either the name or the face of ‘Our ’Enery, as the tabloids would impertinently christen him later, in the centre of the limelight.

For a man who is naturally fit and enjoys being so, there are many worse existences than being a boxer in daily training, particularly if your manager is both a good friend and counsellor and a trencherman of London-wide repute. Wicks was approaching 70 years of age but was never to lose his appetite for the good things of life. He also eschewed any nonsense about ‘my body is a temple’, so the combination of hard training and workouts, coupled with a fairly sybaritic lifestyle in terms of food, made for a rather idyllic existence for both Henry and George. The lunchtime round, alternating between the Strand and Soho, continued, with the combination of the highest protein diet imaginable, washed down with some of the best wine these establishments could offer, was not by modern standards the height of dietary excellence but it seemed to work. Wicks’s main aim was to keep his senior fighter in a fit but relaxed state, just near enough to a peak of fitness that a gruelling five-week training camp could then bring to an acme of both condition and
aggression. The problem with Henry was always going to be the second rather than the first. He had, since the early fights, quickly calculated that his optimum weight was exactly 13 stone 701bs, which, although there never has been a minimum weight for a heavyweight (anyone can have a go) would today put him in the lists as a cruiserweight, and a light one at that. This inability when fit to gain useful weight was always to handicap him.

But, as the Wicks
équipe
maintained its stately progress around the West End of London, with ‘The Bishop’ holding court at a succession of favourite and pre-ordained tables, it was becoming clear that, serene though the outlook seemed to be, with the only thing concerning Wicks being perhaps his age, then the conflicts within the prize ring were as nothing compared to the conflicts outside it.

If it was not clear to Jack Solomons that he was on the way out as Britain’s senior promoter, then it should have been. The writing had probably been put on the wall since the sale of Harringay Arena at the end of 1958, which had been London’s favourite venue, but Solomons did not see it. At the opening of the new decade Solomons was consistently attempting to underbid for fights, believing that his position was still that of a monopolist. A good example was the way he attempted to secure the services of Terry Downes, the British middleweight champion, for a relative pittance. In July 1960 Downes effectively jumped ship, accepting a fight in a Harry Levene promotion. Solomons’ response was to threaten, via his creature Sam Burns, that Downes would ‘never work again’.

But the rise of Harry Levene, in concert with Jarvis Astaire’s newly established
Viewsport
operation, now served
to put Solomons under great pressure to bid, and bid high, for fights. This period marked the peak of the competition between the two men and Wicks was now beautifully positioned to take advantage of it. His willingness, on the part of his fighters to be quite ruthless about matters of money on behalf of his fighters did not endear him to the promoters nor, in particular, to the matchmakers employed by them.

It was Wicks’s practice to ‘make the matches’ himself. Despite the fact that the name of Mickey Duff would always appear on the fight programme as being the matchmaker of record when Harry Levene promoted a fight with Astaire’s cooperation, this was not actually so. If Henry was top of the bill, then the promoter’s matchmaker (whoever it was) would be responsible only for the supporting bouts – the under card, as it is dismissively referred to, and this was a matter of great frustration. But Wicks did not care. At his age he was a man with few ambitions left and even fewer illusions. He was thick-skinned enough not to bother.

Jim Wicks had moved with the times. Even though he had originally had a far better relationship with Solomons than with Levene he had neatly managed to step between the intense commercial (and personal) rivalry with them and play a pivotal role in his fighters’ careers, over which, when all was said and done, he held an iron grip, operating almost
in loco parentis
for a much younger person. His uncompromising attitude was total. ‘I often wondered why Henry senior didn’t resent Mr Wicks,’ Albina told me. ‘I know that a lot of other fathers would have done.’

For Albina, who had yet to witness a fight, the strain and worry, despite Wicks’s confidence, were vast. She was
buoyed by the knowledge that Henry’s career would not last forever and that she would have him back one day but she was also imaginative enough to realize that he could be hurt or, God forbid, even killed at any moment. The long break after that final Erskine fight was a godsend to her and, although Henry trained, she was more or less able to put boxing out of her mind. Pleasing to her was the sound of the Alfa Romeo arriving back after another hard day’s work at the
Thomas à Becket
. ‘Once the front door was closed, there was no talk of boxing,’ she says. ‘I didn’t like it and Henry knew that I didn’t like it, but I also knew that it was his living.’

But after a fight she would pitch in professionally. Although Henry’s metabolism meant that he was generally struggling to put weight on rather than take it off, he had little trouble with that awful risk that has damaged so many boxers: pre-fight dehydration. It is the curse of the lower weight divisions and one of the main reasons why the casualty figures are so high. A boxer under pressure to meet a lower weight will, like a jockey, run the risk of dehydration, which can affect the brain’s ability to absorb punishment. If anything, Henry had the opposite problem: ‘I could lose five to six pounds easily during a full-distance fight, and feel terrible afterwards, so Albina always had two huge jugs of orange juice ready in the fridge when I came home. The first thing I’d do would be to sink them both as fast as I could.’