Henry Cooper (9 page)

Also, professionals, being more mature, were stronger and simply able to inflict more damage. They trained for body punching and the extra length of a professional fight allowed the boxer more time to wear down an opponent with blows to the heart and liver that would weaken him very fast. Henry knew this:

So, the boys' club mores of the amateur ring were clearly now a thing of the past. Obeying the spirit of the rules rather than the letter of them was the order of the day, as Henry recalls: A good trainer would massage the horsehair stuffing in the six-ounce gloves back and work it away from the knuckle, so you could land a hard punch more cleanly.'

Other dodges, it was suspected, included dusting the tapes around the boxer's hands with plaster of Paris or alabaster and, once the gloves were on, dribbling water down the
fighter's wrist into the glove. Quite soon, the plaster set hard. It was allegedly this manoeuvre that allowed Jack Dempsey to wreak such destruction on the bones of the hapless Jess Willard's face in 1919, a beating that was to put Willard out of boxing.

The referee's job, then, was not simply to ensure that the fighters adhered to the letter of the law, rather it was to ensure a good fight within rules of safety and fair play that were outlined with a very broad brush indeed. He had in many ways to exercise a constant bilateral interpretation of an unwritten advantage rule and trainers and boxers were quick to exploit any weaknesses they identified in the referee as a man, or in his personal view of the rules, rather as a barrister might approach dealing with a judge. Refereeing, it must be said, was not an easy task.

Henry and George were not the only ones to take notice of the huge difference between the amateur and the professional game. George Page, who had worked so hard with them at Eltham and had initially accompanied them to work with Danny Holland at the
Thomas à Becket
, realized quite early on that the professional sport was really not for him. The Corinthian traditions of amateur sport, as praised by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, via Sherlock Holmes, ran through Page as words run through a stick of Brighton rock and he discovered that the slickness and packaging that rather characterized professional boxing even in those far-off days was totally alien to him. He also rather disliked sharing the twins with Holland, having brought them skilfully to this level. Quite soon, he was to go back to purely training amateurs, which was where his heart truly lay.

Basically, Page disliked the fact that money was involved, any money. In his opinion it wrecked and degraded the game. Perhaps he had a point; after a novice professional fight, the ringside crowd would throw coins – ‘nobbins' – into the ring in appreciation of a skilful or, more often, a bloody fight. To someone brought up in the rather Calvinist traditions of the amateur ring, such things were anathema, both patronizing and degrading, but all agreed that it was a lot worse when they threw bottles.

Not only did Henry and George buy their parents a television, but they also bought themselves a car, a perpendicular Ford Prefect, though Henry recalls that it was money earned from plastering that paid for it. Virtually all the cash the pair earned from fighting was spent either on the unavoidable costs of getting to and from the
Thomas à Becket
or helping the Cooper household financially. But from this modest beginning Henry was to acquire something of a grand passion for motor cars that has never left him.

In fact, once the twins had learned the basics of what was required to train, they worked together, which made Holland gradually almost redundant. He was officially their trainer of record, because Wicks was their manager of record, but in reality the discipline of rising at 4.a.m. for their road-work (carried out in Army ammunition boots) was all theirs. As they both remained working as plasterers for some time, it made for a rather long day, with little time available to chase girls. ‘Oh, no, we didn't do any of that,' says Henry. ‘Everyone else went off to a dance hall on a Saturday night, but George and me took boxing so seriously that we just trained and trained.'

But plastering was good training for Henry's left hand and George's right, and both brothers started to become observably asymmetric. Because both were completely monodextrous they started to resemble not so much identical twins but more mirror images of each other and naturally enough, any athlete whose sport demands some sort of polarity will start to favour the strong side in preference to the less strong, but Henry took this to unusual levels – he used his left for everything.

So, gradually, the standard of living at Farmstead Road was raised, to the clear and predictable envy of certain of the neighbours, as the Cooper twins started to achieve some modest fame. Their local celebrity was not long in coming, indeed, they had featured as an interesting curiosity, as twins often do, as far back as the days of the Bellingham club, but if they had thought that that had been fame – and they had – then that was quite inadequate preparation for what Wicks had in mind for them.

He insisted that they behave in certain ways, and his list of do's and don'ts was short but absolute. When Henry was invited by a friend to accompany him to one of the perfectly innocent but private drinking clubs with which Soho was liberally dotted, for example, Henry's response was perhaps curious. ‘No,' he said, ‘Jim wouldn't like it…it just wouldn't look right.'

In essence, Wicks was teaching his boys to behave like champions, to be not as other men. Henry quite saw the sense of this, as the little anecdote suggests, but it also hints that Wicks was a man possessed of a formidable personal authority. In truth it was never in Henry's nature to while away afternoons propping up a bar, a fact that made his
later friendship with Oliver Reed such a dangerous one, for there is perhaps a slight streak of the puritan in Henry.

Wicks really didn't miss a trick. The more exposure, he reasoned, the more celebrity, and the more celebrity, the more money, both for boxing and for other activities. His fighters were not the first to perform a string of public relations exercises, and they were certainly not to be the last, but for Wicks all was one; he had a full agenda, and it was not totally concerned with boxing.

But the Coopers, of course, were not the only twins in boxing: there were the Krays, too. The Kray family hailed from Hackney, so they had no social acquaintances in common with the Coopers in their early years, but Jim Wicks knew of them through boxing, as both Krays had tried their hand at the professional game a year before the Coopers, albeit at a lighter weight. They were good, too, if hard to train properly, but had given the fight game up for more obviously lucrative activities in 1954, just as the Cooper brothers turned professional.

Interestingly, the Krays never really went back to it. Had they put their minds to it as a business activity, history might have been very different. Henry remembers them from the early days:

So, even the Krays didn't dare upset Jim Wicks, they always asked politely. But they also clearly had no particular interest in muscling in on boxing. They were frequently present at gyms as well as fights but really their primary motivation was publicity. If celebrities went boxing, so would the Krays.

‘I remember when the biggest thing on television was
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
, says Henry. ‘Almost every single American star who went there – and there were hundreds – wound up in some Kray night club or other having their picture taken with them. They just couldn't get enough of that. They were basically publicity seekers.'

Under Wicks's firm hand, Henry's career started to build. There was no particular pressure but by 26 April 1957 Henry had an almost perfect record of nine victories out of nine fights, all but two inside the distance. His first defeat came that evening at the hand, or rather the head, of the Italian Uber Bacilieri at Harringay Arena. Henry sustained a badly cut eye – his first serious cut – in round two. The speed with which Wicks threw in the towel was startling but he knew full well that the identical twins had this potential weakness, if only because poor George was suffering badly from the same problem and had been stopped quite frequently.

Henry would get his own back on Bacilieri when he knocked him out in round seven of their rematch in September, after stopping Ron Harman in June. On 15 November 1957, though, he encountered Joe Erskine for the first time in the professional ring. The pair had fought as amateurs in the Army, as Henry recalls:

Erskine as a professional was even stronger, despite his lack of a big punch, and he outpointed Henry at Harringay Arena in an eliminator for the British heavyweight title. It was a disappointing loss, but going the full ten rounds, even if he did lose the fight, marked the end of Henry's apprenticeship.

All in all, in his professional career, Henry would fight Erskine five times, and if there was ever an opponent who had a psychological edge over him in their early encounters it was this one, but it is also fair to say that at each
full-blown
championship encounter the two men had, Henry was always able to reach deep and beat him.

From the start of 1956 Henry's work rate logically started
to ease off. Having built his resume over a fairly intensive two years, and established that he was a formidable boxer, Wicks could now commence phase two of this great adventure, which was to gradually position his fighter for a serious crack at a national title: a Lonsdale belt. Henry had already popped his head into the higher reaches of the division with the match with Erskine and Jim Wicks's job was now to ensure that he stayed there.

Pacing a fighter's development is utterly critical to his future. History is scattered with examples of badly managed fighters of great talent (Erskine was one of them, Zora Folley another) who are brought to a peak too early. There is only a certain number of top level fights that a boxer is capable of delivering, as a sturgeon has eggs, and an unscrupulous manager, while he is constantly on the lookout for new talent, will exploit his seasoned fighters for his shareof their purses. It happened to so many in the earliest days of the ring, and was still happening when Henry commenced this vital part of his career, but more particularly in the USA.

Boxing may have been inordinately popular, but planning a fighter's finances was a business fraught with practical problems. For a start, it was difficult for a boxer to live anything but a hand-to-mouth existence. It was inordinately hard for a fighter to get credit, for example, if only because there was a higher than normal risk that he would be incapacitated at any time, so the pattern of a fighter's life tended to be fairly well circumscribed. Boxers simply did not live as other men and were in many ways totally dependent upon their managers as a contact point with reality and day-to-day business. Some were
particularly unlucky or ill-advised in this respect. Henry was not.

Wicks was a patient man; not only was he fiercely protective of his fighters – he really cared about them – but he managed to disguise this behind a pink, scrubbed exterior mask of world-weary wit, which journalists in particular found extraordinarily attractive. The private face of Jim Wicks lived amid a frenzy of telephones in his ratty little office off the gym in the Old Kent Road, with its curling linoleum, cheap furniture and unmistakable ‘atmosphere', whereas the public face of Jim Wicks was to be seen regularly in his favoured booth at Simpson's restaurant (or one of a host of other venues) from where he handled the increasingly vital element of his portfolio of responsibilities – public relations. He was, happily for the twins, in the autumn of his life, so as the rest of his stable slowed down and retired, he did not replace them now. Soon he would be left with just the twins and, quite shortly after that, just Henry.

Harry Levene finally managed to promote a Cooper fight on 28 February 1956 but it was a charity event, at the Albert Hall, just prior to the re-opening of Wembley. The opponent was Maurice Mols, the French heavyweight champion. Henry totally outclassed him, putting the clearly overweight Frenchman down no fewer than four times in the fourth round. He accomplished this by a succession of sickeningly solid left hooks to the body, which caused referee, Tommy Little, to stop the fight and deliver Henry's tenth win inside the distance.