Henry Cooper (19 page)

No one had ever done this before at any weight and Henry was starting to cost the Board of Control, who paid for the belts, rather a lot of money. Immediately, he announced that he would now challenge Karl Mildenberger for the European championship, which he had been forced to resign in September 1964. If he won, he would be back exactly where he had been four years before, albeit with an extra belt for his groaning trophy cabinet.

Harry Levene, perhaps having seen his investment in Billy Walker depreciate somewhat, overcame his scruples and agreed rather reluctantly to promote the fight at Wembley on 18 September 1968, which gave Henry fairly light duties in the ring that year; it was to be his only fight in 1968. Challengers were actually becoming few and far between, for the simple reason that he had beaten all the rated British heavyweights and many of his old adversaries were retiring. He was in the no-man’s land between generations.

But he was busy. Wicks was in constant receipt of requests for Henry to make appearances, in television commercials, on chat shows and radio and TV commentary slots, and some of the sums of money involved were quite startling and, when all was said and done, less than arduous. It was perhaps the inevitable rehearsal for retirement, calls for which had rather receded with his defeat of the young and strong Billy Walker.

So, in between all these novel engagements, he maintained his fitness regime and enjoyed his new baby. He was relaxed, he had nothing to prove and he looked forward to taking back the title he felt was rightfully his. Mildenberger, of
course, was the boxer he would have fought previously had he not been incapacitated and it became clear on the night that he had not necessarily improved as an opponent with the passing of time.

This was not a particularly inspiring fight, being characterized mainly by rule infringements, both in the ring and in Mildenberger’s corner. It was a fight of clinches; after ten months out of the ring, Henry took a round and a half to settle down before belting Mildenberger hard ‘on the break’, while coming out of a clinch, which clearly troubled the champion, for while Henry was being warned for this sneakiness by the indignant Italian referee, Nello Barroveccio, poor Mildenberger simply fell over.

Unwisely, Mildenberger’s seconds applied smelling salts quite liberally during the second interval, which suggests that Henry had actually hit him rather hard and that the champion might no longer be quite the master of his subject, but the use of the ammonia created a rare storm of protest from the BBBC officials, which rather begs the question: where they had been looking on the evening of the fight with Clay in 1963? There was indeed some uncertainty as to whether this fight was being held under British rules or European ones – it was a European title fight, but it was being held in London – and further confusion arose later on.

Mildenberger was in turn warned for ‘careless use of the head’ several times but Henry seemed untroubled; he put the champion down again in round seven and arguably the fight should have ended there, but just before the closing bell of round eight, Barroveccio stopped it, not because Mildenberger was unable to continue, but because he had clearly butted Henry, causing a rather nasty cut. Without
hesitation, Mildenberger was disqualified. It was a stout piece of refereeing.

At first it had been assumed that Henry’s victory was as a result of being injured while clearly in the lead, according to a new and rather baroque EBU regulation, but no great commotion erupted upon Mildenberger’s disqualification. Obviously to win a fight in this way is not as satisfying as doing so in the traditional manner, but Henry was now British, Empire and European heavyweight champion again. He would be called upon to defend it within six months, and that process would not be a pleasant experience.

But, despite the pleasure of the European title, there was another nagging commercial worry. The grocery business had done rather well for some time but it was starting to take up an inordinate amount of time, almost to the exclusion of all else, yet it was now losing money. Henry had discovered that his partner, Harry Cooper, while a perfectly pleasant fellow, seemed quite happy for Henry to be doing the lion’s share of the work. During some periods Henry would be in the shop all week, which made training and PR work almost impossible. Not only were the losses mounting, but he was also forced to forgo some lucrative television and promotional work, which made things infinitely worse. As he explains, he was reinforcing failure:

The venture had cost him in the region of
£
10,000; in reality, given that he was putting tax-paid cash into it, it was considerably more. Couple that with the opportunity costs created by simply being there, and the little venture had proved to be a very costly exercise indeed.

But there was good news, too: Henry was awarded an OBE in the New Year’s honours list. It was a signal honour and, while it was the cause of several butterflies in the Cooper household, an experience to cherish. Henry, dressed perfectly, courtesy of Moss Bros., describes it:

He would need the morale boost of his investiture, for scarcely a month later he was due to defend his newly won European title against the new challenger. It would be an evening to remember, and not at all for the right reasons.

W
ith that slightly ungallant and, it must be said, rather untypical riposte, Henry made his new role, as Britain’s leading apologist for boxing, quite clear. I asked him if he thought he had been rude. He replied: ‘Well, I thought it was fair enough really; I’d been a very good boy all the way through the discussion, even agreeing with her, and then she just turned round and ambushed me. Bless her, she was no oil painting anyway.’

The occasion on which this
lèse-majesté
took place was a television debate on the sport in 1972. Henry recalled it as a ‘points win’. In truth, this was not a new debate as boxing had been mocked even in ancient times, and the nature of the previous Whig position on the sport of prizefighting had been rather focused on the harm it did to the fighters. The approach of Baroness Summerskill and her cohorts was
rather more holistic, if only in the sense that fighting was not only bad for the fighters, it was bad for the audience, too; she felt free to wag her finger at all involved. But to a generation of fightgoers and other citizenry hardened by their experiences in wartime, her view seemed quite ridiculous. To those architects of the nanny state, many of whom sat on her side in the House of Lords, it was not a campaign that was considered politically viable, given the number of potentially useful votes that would be lost if a ban was imposed. The man who had done more than most to make boxing so inordinately popular in Britain was now clearly the implacable opponent of the highly vocal campaign to ban it.

For the politically motivated anti-boxing lobby, Henry was a formidable bundle of contradictions; he was a working-class hero, he was highly intelligent, he was honoured with an OBE, he had been a lunch guest of the Queen and, most difficult, he was clearly quite undamaged by his experiences. He was therefore a truly dangerous and highly popular opponent, as the exchange quoted above suggests. For the purely medical lobby, the situation was different, as the British Medical Association was attacking the sport not on a moral or ethical platform but simply on a physiological one. Edith Summerskill, polymath as she was, had a foot in both camps, which fact could, from time to time, appear to confuse her argument. Did she oppose boxing because it was medically dangerous and therefore immoral or was there a sinister Stalinist agenda at work? The British public, ever suspicious of politicians’ motives, affected not to care, but that public was by now also completely in love with Henry, which made for an even 
more uphill struggle for the anti lobby. It was all very well for Edith Summerskill to win a debate with Jack Solomons, who was both inarticulate as well as astonishingly rude (which rather served to belie his carefully constructed cheeky chappie image), as his motivations were merely and obviously financial, but Henry was a radically different prospect. Not only had he prospered as a boxer, but also, outrageously, he had even dared to enjoy it and was never bashful about saying so. And everybody loved him.

The issue over the morality, if not the legality of boxing was, of course, something of a press bandwagon, which was wheeled out after every disaster that befell a fighter. Regrettably, there were several, one of the most tragic being the fate of Gerald McClennan after he lost to Nigel Benn in February 1995. The fight had been broadcast to a TV audience of 15 million, and all who were able to bear to watch the whole event knew that McClennan was, on the morning after the fight, locked in the iron dark of a deep coma. Naturally, the mediafest contained the usual paradox of mawkish headlines, predictably illustrated by the most prurient of pictures available to them. Henry told the
Daily Mirror
. ‘Nobody makes men box – all boxers do it because they want to fight. We all know the possible tragic consequences, but we all pray its not going to be you. There are thousands of fights every year and it’s only occasionally where there is an unfortunate tragedy of this nature.’

The debate will go on; the simple fact, that boxing is a blood sport, the only activity whose purpose is for one man physically to hurt another, is clear. What is more blurred is the morality that allows it to take place at all. The libertarian right would argue that if two men wish to train 
hard, climb into a boxing ring and seek to knock each other out, and millions of people will pay, in one form or another to watch that take place, then that is entirely their business and nobody else’s. The opposing view, that boxing falls into the same category as dog-fighting, perhaps misses the point made by Henry, that because the sport of boxing is a voluntary one then the issue is really one of civil liberty. Essentially, then, it becomes basically a political matter. The lentil-eating tendency will always oppose fighting, whereas libertarians will always prefer to allow it even if they do not follow it particularly closely. In Henry, the libertarian view has a powerful spokesman. The dice are clearly loaded in their favour because of that. Henry has survived and prospered and he is who he is primarily because of what he did for a living until 1971. But there was rather more to him than that, as the successive decades were to show.

Initially, he recalls, his first impulse upon retiring was to become a trainer/manager. He had hoped to find a young heavyweight hopeful and bring him on in the way that he had himself been managed but to his regret, even now, there were few prospects. He had no particular hostility to Joe Bugner (although he never particularly reckoned him), indeed he offered his services only a few days after that fight to the Bugner corner when they were due to challenge Ali. But elsewhere it was a fruitless task. ‘There just didn’t seem to anyone around,’ he told me, still slightly regretfully. ‘I wanted to find a decent heavyweight – the bigger men think differently – and really bring him on, but I couldn’t really see anyone suitable.’ It was almost as if he had seen through the fog of hype that surrounded American boxing and understood that there were some unalterable fundamentals 
that a clever tactician could exploit. A singular and mighty punch, coupled with some plain old-world common sense, could perhaps drill down through the hype?

There was some serious unpleasantness quite shortly after his retirement. He produced, in 1972, an extremely tactful autobiography, which rather walked on eggs, with the skilled assistance of John Samuel of the
Guardian
. That journal has, over the years, built up a well-earned reputation for the occasional misprint (the
Grauniad
, as it is known), but the error which was contained in Henry’s book was nothing to do with that. It was more a matter of an overenthusiastic sub-editor at the book’s publishers, Cassell. The issue was to do with the addition on Harry Gibbs’s scoring card during and after the Bugner fight. What Henry and Samuel finally produced, concerning the final assessment and scoring of the fight, read like this: ‘On Peter Wilson’s [of the
Daily Mirror
] score card I had won nine of the fifteen rounds, but Harry Gibbs had me losing by a quarter of a point.’

Not a particularly sensitive matter, one might think, but when the book came out the passage read: ‘On Harry Gibbs’ scorecard I had won nine of the fifteen rounds but he had me losing by a quarter of a point.’

Whoops. This well illustrates some of the perils that can be encountered as a result of sloppy proof-reading but Harry Gibbs sued Henry and the publisher for libel, and won. Damages were modest at £1,000 (Cassell quite properly paid them) but Henry was forced to make a slightly humiliating apology in open court for something that was in truth not his fault. 

Henry did have a grievance against Gibbs but the issue over the passage in the book did not express it; that was merely a simple publisher’s slip-up. Perhaps the fact that Gibbs sued so promptly was significant but unfortunately the laws of libel permit me to go no further. Gibbs is no longer with us, but others are. It was an unpleasant episode, which was clearly irreconcilable without recourse to a major investigation by the Board of Control, which never took place.

The controversy over the Bugner fight actually served an unforeseen purpose, which was to add an edge to Henry’s popularity. He and Gibbs would not speak for 15 years, in fact, and only did so when Henry, goaded by the offer of a large donation to charity, agreed finally to shake Gibbs’s hand at a charity boxing evening at the London Hilton: ‘Well, I was told that if I shook his hand, then at least £2,000 would go into the pot, and probably £20 each from all those present, so I did it,’ says Henry. ‘ I didn’t have to sleep with the bloke, or anything after all, I just had to shake his hand, so I did it. For charity.’

I can well recall a rather bored, mainly student audience, slumped on a wet Saturday night in the dismal fleapit that passed as the local cinema in that jewel of Dyfed, Aberystwyth. It was 1975. A group of us had decided to inspect
Royal Flash
, the promising adaptation of George MacDonald Fraser’s reworking of
The Prisoner of Zenda
theme. It had been a first-rate book but the early stages of the movie were disappointing, despite the presence of Oliver Reed, whom we all rather admired. Then suddenly a scene arrived that called upon Reed, who played Otto Bismarck, to receive a boxing lesson from the retired prizefighter John 
Gully. When the audience saw who played Gully, as Henry Cooper turned to face the camera, a loud cheer erupted, which was an unusual event in that dismal little theatre, to say the least.

Actually, Henry was probably the best thing in the film, and probably because in reality he was playing himself; we were not to know it but
Royal Flash
, in most other ways a disappointment, marked the start of a good friendship between Henry and Reed, but Henry told me that he learned quite fast to be rather wary of his new mate: ‘Ollie was a lovely bloke, but really dangerous. God, he drank!’

Reed’s ability to get himself into alcohol-fuelled scrapes was legendary and he also sailed very close to the wind in terms of matters sexual. He had started his relationship with his second wife, Josephine, when she was suspiciously young; Henry and Albina encountered them on holiday in 1980:

Reed admired Henry tremendously, as he admired most
red-blooded
males, but he could take his expression of this to 
toe-curling extremes. His habit of appearing on television when roaring drunk was an unfortunate one and invariably embarrassing for all concerned, no more so than when appearing with his hero Henry on a disastrous episode of Michael Aspel’s chat show. Reed had decided, clearly under the influence, that the most appropriate way to pay tribute to his hero would be to don shorts and gloves, ketchupped eyes and all, and simply punch his way through the studio scenery in order to reach the sofa. Needless to say, the show had to be cut, which was perhaps rather a pity. Reed would attempt a similar stunt when sharing a line-up with Billy Beaumont, with truly embarrassing results.

Even without
Royal Flash
, which did relatively poorly, Henry’s place in the public eye was assured, if only as a result of his myriad television appearances. It seemed that not a week went by without him popping up somewhere. He had been an inaugural panellist on BBC’s
A Question of Sport
since 1969 and had starred in an extraordinary array of commercials, for Crown Paints, Shredded Wheat and, most famously, Brut aftershave, so his public profile was always going to be high. Only recently, as one of Britain’s favourite OAPs, he fronted the flu jab campaign. Another important job, though, had been to step into the BBC radio slot vacated by Barrington Dalby, who had retired from the role just before Henry had retired from his. Henry had to provide authoritative assessments of the state of various broadcast boxing matches between the rounds. He did this expertly with all the authority that only a 17-year career can provide. He had started working for the BBC before he had retired from the ring, in fact. The journalistic challenge was quite formidable – to provide a 30-second running 
commentary of how the last round had gone, an assessment that called for an extremely quick brain indeed, for the view of a fight from the ringside is a radically different thing from the perception offered elsewhere, particularly to a radio audience.

Evidence of the speed with which boxers have to think is to be found in conversations held with them. Albina describes for me some of the frustrations of conversing, particularly about a topic in which Henry has a special interest: ‘He will keep interrupting! He won’t let someone finish their sentence before he butts in.’

Clear evidence, in my opinion, that he probably already knows where the conversation is going; time to move on, but his speed of conversational riposte, as Edith Summerskill had discovered, is astonishing, both witty and well timed. The latter we should expect from a boxer, and Henry’s commentaries for BBC radio were a rich seam of swift, accurate and pithy inputs. Even if his assessments of the relative merits of the fighters to each other, or to people whom he had fought himself, were low, he was never rude about them, however scathing his inner view may have been. That would change, though, as he found himself more and more disconnected from boxing. An encounter with the singular Christopher Livingston Eubank illustrates this: