Henry Cooper (18 page)

And Henry already knew, instinctively, how to defuse this vaguely threatening situation. At midday, the time of the weigh-in at the Odeon, Leicester Square, the two men faced each other. This time Henry wore no boots containing any ballast but decided to adopt a trick taught him by Max Baer, who had lightened his weigh-in before he fought Primo Camera in 1934 by plucking hairs from the Italian giant's chest while intoning ‘He loves me – he loves me not.'

Unfortunately, Ali was not particularly hirsute, as Henry remembers: ‘I said, “Oh, look, he's a man all right, he's got a hair on his chest.” And I gave it a tweak. It brought the house down.' Ali himself remained unusually impassive.

Ali's long-suffering white Louisville backers, the same
syndicate that had supported him since he turned professional, were genuinely lowered at the prospect of the end of their relationship with him. The men could merely look on with nervous resignation. All this would end soon enough in any case; they sincerely prayed now that it would not end at Highbury. Despite his adopted (and clearly feigned) radicalism, they all rather liked him.

On the evening of the fight, the quiet sober routines of the previous five weeks' training were clearly over. A
Rolls-Royce
, theirs for the day, and which had taken him to the weigh-in, was courtesy of a local car hire firm. It arrived at the
Duchess of Edinburgh
to convey Henry, George, Holland and Wicks up to Highbury. The firm had been generous: no bill if he won, a 50 per cent discount if he didn't. There was no plan for an option C – all involved knew full well that this fight would be most unlikely to end in a draw.

The police escort which accompanied the Rolls into the stadium car park was something new as well. This was clearly building into quite an emotional occasion as the giant collective sympathy of the crowd started to build. Henry takes up the story of the most significant night of his career:

This was a ritual Henry had been through 44 times before and he performed it exactly as he had always done. But this was a big fight, with his wife in the audience for the first time:

As the warm-up fights came and went outside, the tension built, and the last well-wishers and visitors came and went – old schoolfriends, Harry Levene, Onslow Fane, Teddy Waltham. Finally, the referee, George Smith: it was a familiar litany, elements of which would be repeated in the ring before the opening bell:

It had been almost exactly a century since the Queensberry Rules had been written by Chambers and those few words uttered by Smith that evening say more about the long-term
objectives which had been behind them than any essay on the subject ever could. It was time…

The first thing that struck Henry, apart from the size of the crowd, was the size of the ring. Ali had wisely insisted upon the largest allowable, twenty feet square, which Levene had grudgingly financed as a one-off. It was huge. ‘It seemed to take ten minutes just to arrive at the centre of it,' says Henry. ‘You could have had three fights in there at the same time.' And if the huge emotional tug generated by the collective goodwill of the crowd hadn't quite unmanned him, then the National Anthem nearly did: ‘As I stood there, for the first time I can remember in the ring, I could feel a lump in my throat.'

His three biggest fans, the Welsh musketeers, Richard Burton, Donald Houston and Stanley Baker were all ringside, along with half the West End underworld and, of course, his family, including a quite terrified Albina. She had not been looking forward to this and was only present as an act of solidarity. ‘I didn't really see any of it,' she says. ‘I had my face buried in the programme for the whole time; I just couldn't bear to watch.'

It would not be a pretty sight, in fact. It was not entirely a rerun of the previous encounter – if anything, Henry looked stronger than he had before, whereas Ali, no doubt remembering his near humiliation in 1963, appeared reluctant to engage. He used the giant space available to him to dance away from Henry, who pursued his man relentlessly, trying to set Ali up for the left hook, and Ali clearly knew it. At the first sign of trouble when he closed in, though, Henry found himself enveloped in a vice-like bear hug, which allowed little rough and ready ‘inside
work'. As soon as Smith called for the break, Ali would leap back to avoid the left he clearly feared would pursue him like a sidewinder. By the end of round five, Henry was marginally ahead on points but he also realized that Ali, or at least Dundee, had learned a thing or two. The danger remained, though, from those long flicking jabs which could do enormous damage to Henry's eyebrows. He had, for five rounds, managed more or less to control his territory and avoid trouble. He had hit more than he had been hit and yet neither boxer had really inflicted any damage on the other.

Then, early in the sixth, the bad thing happened – ‘the disappointment of my life' as Henry later recalled it. Ali let go a right hand punch, which he shortened into a slashing, chopping blow, which landed above Henry's left eyebrow. Immediately, Henry realized he was in trouble. There was no pain, merely a stinging sensation followed by numbness, but he could feel the blood pouring down the entire left side of his body. It would not be long before he would be unable to see. Tommy Smith, who had stood by, quite amazed, when Henry had demolished Jefferson Davis so comprehensively, and may well have been looking for more of the same here, called a halt for a quick inspection then dubiously said, ‘box on'. But after another frenetic assault by Ali on the eye, he finally stopped the fight.

This was a huge deep cut, worse than he had ever experienced, and right down to the bone. So bad was it that the Board of Control doctor counselled no immediate treatment but suggested plastic surgery as soon as possible. He wrote down the telephone number of Guy's Hospital and gave it to Wicks. After the unique build-up to this fight, with all the emotional goodwill that had drenched Henry as
thoroughly as the cut had, there was very little left to say. He had done his best, and had, in the opinion of many,
out-boxed
and even out-psyched his man, but against those damaging jabs, relatively painless though they were, he had little defence once he was cut.

The surgery took place the very next day, after Henry had spent a quiet and gloomy night at home. The objective was to excise old, encysted scar tissue, which had developed under the surface, and then repair both the outer and inner layers of the cut, the inner layer being treated with tiny, almost invisible stitches, which would dissolve of their own accord. In this way the eyebrow would in all probability be stronger even than when it was new; certainly, that world championship fight was the last encounter that Henry would lose to a cut eye, which made him regret that he had not sought this course of action before, although his next fight would provide an experience of rather deeper impact.

F
loyd Patterson was by any measure an unusual and interesting man. He was the first heavyweight champion to lose a world title and then win it back. He was also the youngest heavyweight champion ever, until the arrival of Mike Tyson more than 25 years later. Patterson had first wrested the title from a doddering Archie Moore in 1956, a fight that was only possible upon the retirement of Rocky Marciano, and he won it with no particular difficulty: Patterson knocked Moore out in the fifth round. It was and is said that Moore had ‘taken a dive’ against Marciano in their last fight together but Moore’s loss to Patterson triggered the end of his heavyweight career, although he remained light heavyweight champion, his proper weight, until 1961.

It was almost as if Patterson could scarcely believe his
own luck. Always a man short on self-confidence, he had been discovered and trained by that Svengali of the boxing world, Cus d’Amato, who would, many years later, also discover little Mike Tyson as a confused, abused and tearful teenager. Patterson had, embarrassingly, lost his title to Ingemar Johansson, who had stopped him quite luckily in June 1959, and he had recovered it a year later by knocking Johansson out. He had defended it twice more, once more against Johansson and then against Tom McNeeley, before being destroyed twice in quick succession by Liston.

Those two defeats by Liston, which were followed by that brutal humiliation at the hands of Ali in November 1965, which had ruined any popular following enjoyed by the champ, had not done anything to assist his already atrophied sense of self-regard. Essential pieces of kit for Patterson as he prepared for a fight included a hat, as well as dark glasses and a false beard. One of the first details he always needed to know – really needed to know – at any venue which was new to him was the direction of the exit, so total was his sense of humiliation at even the prospect of defeat. Patterson was a man with the foetid breath of his Bedford-Stuyvesant origins forever blowing on the back of his neck. Failure, for Patterson, would consign him back from whence he had come, just another young black man from a crowded cold-water walk-up and cursed forever by a criminal record. Such was Patterson’s innate humility that the prospect of loss clearly terrified him. Such insecure fighters were as putty in the hands of subtle motivators like d’Amato, and under certain circumstances they would pay a price for that, not least a financial one. In Patterson’s case, so badly did he even take the prospect of defeat that, as we
have seen, d’Amato had been, even by the extreme standards of the heavyweight division, ludicrously over-protective of his fighter, and not merely to keep him out of the clutches of the forces of darkness as he identified them.

But despite his psychological handicaps and nervous disposition, Floyd Patterson had at his disposal a bewildering arsenal of punches, manoeuvres and combinations thereof – a great coffer of imaginative alternatives to which only he and d’Amato had the keys. They all had codes, too; d’Amato would shout them out from the corner and Patterson would obediently deliver them. One of his most dangerous weapons, if only because of its weird unpredictability, was the ‘kangaroo’, a whirling, leaping confection, really rather more African than Australian, which surprised his opponents as often as it stunned them. The Cooper left hook was a relatively simple and straightforward thing by comparison. But Patterson also had extraordinarily fast hands, very much faster than Muhammad Ali’s, although Ali’s speed around the ring, his main means of defence, was quicker. Patterson seemed to still be operating at the same extraordinary fast-forward rate that had made him stand out at Helsinki in 1952, over a dozen years before. Henry remembers, with feeling: ‘God, he was quick; he didn’t move around as fast as Ali did, but his hand speed was just ridiculous. He was a fantastic puncher, hard and fast. He and Cus d’Amato worked by numbers, and you just didn’t know which one was coming up next.’

Jim Wicks was a little wary of matching Patterson with Henry, the main reason being not that Patterson was particularly dangerous, but that Henry’s left elbow was
giving him more and more trouble now. Because Henry had a slight height advantage, he would have to punch downwards, which would put an unnatural strain on the elbow joint – every seriously good punch has something of the uppercut about it, otherwise the strength in a fighter’s legs becomes irrelevant. The elbow problem remained a well-kept secret as there were plenty of boxers who knew very well indeed how to take advantage of such a weakness (not that Patterson would be one of them – he was simply too polite) but this was also the reason why Henry’s virtually pristine right had also started to come more to the fore. Pleasingly, it was rather better than he thought it was, although the sudden shift in polarity went quite against all his instincts. God forbid he should ever contemplate actually leading with it: the inexperienced spectator might even mistake him for a southpaw.

The fight was generally forecast to be a trade-off between two potential weaknesses: Henry’s eyebrows against Patterson’s rather suspect jaw, a target that Johansson had first identified. Donald Saunders said: ‘This is a fight that should have taken place seven years ago,’ forgetting perhaps that in 1959, while defeating Patterson may have yielded the world championship to the winner, had anyone been able to get to him, the price to pay for that would be facing Sonny Liston, the most feared heavyweight ever.

The Patterson fight – actually the American’s British ring debut – was arranged for 20 September 1966 at the Empire Pool, Wembley, and initially it seemed as if Henry might even be in the ascendant. For two rounds he attacked with remarkable aggression, trying hard to connect with Patterson’s only known (physically at least) weak point, his
jaw. But by the third round, Patterson had found his pace and started to retaliate with his famous combination punch flurries. He caught Henry full in the face at the end of the round and put him down for a short count but appeared to have done no serious damage. Henry recalled later: ‘I tried to fight him as I did Ali. Patterson was a counter-puncher…’ Like a fool I took the fight to him, and though I did hurt him once or twice to the body, I didn’t connect to the chin.’ And in round four, Henry was on the receiving end of what he still claims was the finest punch he ever took. It came after a dazzling left/right combination to the face put him down again, and he wisely took a count of nine, giving a confident nod to his corner, but when he rose, Patterson let rip with another right/left, which Henry, still according to some observers not fully recovered from the knockdown, simply didn’t see coming. ‘Suddenly, the lights went out,’ says Henry. ‘He had a hell of a good punch, Patterson.’

Typically, Floyd Patterson helped a dazed Henry to his feet and cradled him back to his corner, all the while consoling the loser. Spectators were moved: ‘Floyd wanted to help him to his feet and later cuddled him, and tried to console him,’ wrote the
Boxing News
, sadly. Joe Louis, seated ringside, quietly nodded his approval as Henry dropped, briefly but totally disconnected from the world. This was complete anaesthesia. There was no pain.

And no ignominy, either. There was no shame in losing to a fighter of the quality of Floyd Patterson; indeed, Henry almost looked upon it as a privilege and, despite the murmur of unease, that perhaps he was carrying on a little past his sell-by date, he was and is unrepentant:

There was another little matter, of course, that of the prospect of a third permanent Lonsdale belt, which, if it was not necessarily as important as a world, or even European title, would only require two more defences of his British one after his win against Prescott. One owned belt was a fine thing, two were remarkable, but three would be unique. He properly felt that he could deal with the obvious contenders for the British title (and he was right) and so retirement at this stage would have been both unnecessary and even hasty. More importantly, he wanted to take this decision himself. Henry liked the press but he was fully aware of their need to build a story, and Wicks, his conduit with Fleet Street, was frankly running out of them.

Henry was certainly to prove his point against Jack Bodell in June but only after he had delivered a curiously lacklustre performance against another American, Boston Jacobs, in April, shortly after his old opponent Zora Folley finally had his long awaited crack at the world title and Ali had knocked him out. Jacobs gave a good account of himself on the night and appeared to be completely unmoved by Henry’s reputation as a puncher. Henry won on points but it was a fight he should have won inside the distance. One reason may have been that he was well above his fighting
weight again and nudging 14 stone, which always made him sluggish, and might have betrayed the long layoff he’d had, but whatever, it was certainly an off day. The news that Albina was expecting another child was a morale-booster, though, but on the other hand, it might well have been a natural distraction.

Jack Bodell, who enjoyed the very nineteenth-century soubriquet of the ‘Swanlicote Swineherd’, challenged Henry Cooper for his British and Empire titles at Wolverhampton Wanderers’ home ground, Molyneaux, on 13 June 1967. Possibly the most ungainly boxer these islands have ever produced, he was also potentially a man who might cause the odd upset, mainly because he was a southpaw, which for a conventional boxer is rather like fighting a mirror image of oneself – right foot forward, leading with the right. Bodell was not at all a dirty fighter but on occasion he could look it, as if he was simply wired up differently from other men. An almost entirely left-handed man like Henry, when facing a southpaw, often has to resignedly rethink his game and either use the right hand or await opportunities if he wishes to avoid embarrassing accidents. Henry’s philosophy, as we shall see, was to try to finish them quickly, but first size them up to avoid trouble. There was no question of even trying to look at ease. ‘They always bring you down to their level,’ says Henry, with rare derision. For a left-side boxer like Henry, southpaws were always hard work: ‘You could never look good against them.’

Bodell plunged in during the opening round, using his weight advantage to work Henry onto the ropes, and even inflicting a modest measure of damage upon him. At 27, he had the advantage of age and weight but not, alas for him,
subtlety. Henry spotted his weaknesses very quickly and saw the opportunity to use his left hook, over the top of Bodell’s right, but only when the challenger swung it; it was a rare occasion of Henry Cooper uneconomically accepting two punches in order to land one but, he reasoned, if that is what is necessary, then so be it.

Nearly two minutes into the second round, he saw his chance and launched one of the longest left hooks of his career. It was of necessity a compromise of a punch, a hybrid; it sailed over the top of Bodell’s right arm and shoulder and hit him on the jaw, after which point the whole matter became quite academic. Henry went after the dazed challenger, thumping him onto the ropes and chasing him around the ring. Obeying the received wisdom about facing southpaws, he even hit with the right a few times, at which point the referee, Ike Powell, saw that the game was clearly up. He stopped the fight, giving Henry his fastest yet championship victory.

Henry and Albina’s second son, John Pietro, arrived on 5 August 1967, closely followed by yet another challenge for the British and Empire title, this time from Billy Walker, whose home turf was very close to the Cooper clan’s first London base over a century before, in West Ham. Walker’s brother George had fought (and fought very well) as a professional and Billy was an extremely promising, if rather inexperienced prospect. He had both youth and strength on his side but, as he later admitted with beguiling modesty, ‘You need three things to be a great fighter: heart, a good chin and boxing ability. Unfortunately, I only had two out of three.’

In many ways Billy Walker was a product of the times. He was extremely telegenic and the thought persists that his career was pushed too far too fast for the sake of his appeal to a television audience. It was exactly the policy of so many unscrupulous managers over time, although this time the culprit was not Billy’s manager (actually his brother George) but rather Harry Levene and his ally Jarvis Astaire, who had made a large investment in offering a contract to Walker and were quite keen to recover it as quickly as possible, which is why the encounter between Billy Walker and Henry Cooper was in reality something of a mismatch in Henry’s favour (which takes nothing away from Walker’s bravery). The fight took place at the Empire Pool, Wembley, on 7 November 1967. Billy Walker quipped a revealing aside before the fight: ‘I reckon even my friends will be rooting for Henry.’ They weren’t, in fact.

Henry, having seen Walker in action as an amateur, knew that he was extremely tough and planned for a long fight. He was unlikely to knock his man down quickly – ‘Billy had a very hard head.’ – and so assumed that he would have to soften him up somewhat before producing the hammer. This is more or less what happened, although Walker gave an extremely good account of himself for the first three rounds, despite which he absorbed some serious punishment in the opener, and it was at the end of round five that a cut appeared on the challenger’s eye. In the interval it was plain what was required: the faintly distasteful task of opening up the cut. ‘You know what to do,’ said Wicks, and Henry went in and did it; George Smith stepped in towards the end of round six and stopped the fight, to Walker’s intense and visible disappointment.
Henry’s grip on his third Lonsdale belt was now complete and unassailable.