Henry Cooper (11 page)

Swiftly, Wicks organized a fight with the German heavyweight champion, Hans Kalbfell. The German boxer was 2 inches taller and more than a stone heavier than Henry who entered the ring at 13 stone 61bs, more or less his perfect fighting weight. Clearly, something had happened, as Henry gave the German champion a comprehensive boxing lesson and scored a runaway points victory; it is unlikely that the hapless Kalbfell won a single round out of the ten.

The crowd was remarkably unpartisan (possibly buoyed by a large contingent from British Army over the Rhine, who cheered their ex-comrade very hard indeed) and appeared delighted as they chaired Henry round the Westfalenhalle, celebrating what was probably his finest technical career performance to date. What this must have done for poor Hans Kalbfell’s morale can only be guessed at but it had all certainly served to motivate Henry.

That single (but vital) victory over a national champion went a long way toward rehabilitating Henry in the eyes of the sport and, more particularly, in the eyes of the promoters, but Wicks felt that there were other German boxers who probably made obvious matches, particularly those who had faced top Americans in the ring. Kalbfell had actually boxed Archie Moore, for example, and a further logical choice was the ex-European champion Heinz Neuhaus, who, while possibly over the hill (‘past his best’, as the boxing euphemism went), was still apparently formidable. Back to Dortmund the cheered little team went.

There was another reason to return to Germany, as Henry’s rather spartan training regime had clearly not
ruined him for the manliest game of all; her name was Hilda. With typical media savvy and promotional deftness, Wicks announced grandly, in the wake of the well-reported defeat of Kalbfell, that Henry had profited hugely from a motivational encounter with an eccentric and reclusive German shrink, ‘Doctor Whassisname’, as Wicks christened him. The gullible British press, who had a huge respect for Henry, and shared his low morale concerning the future, rather latched on to this. Had they known the truth, that Henry’s German girlfriend was helping to relax him more than any fictitious mad professor ever could, there might even have been a xenophobic backlash, particularly from a disapproving Levene or Solomons, but just as probably from the tabloid press, which was as ethnocentric then as it is now, however gullible they were where Wicks was concerned. The Bishop certainly knew his business; he was able to conjure up a huge amount of attention on the flimsiest of pretexts. As well as being a good manager, Jim Wicks was himself absolutely wonderful copy, particularly during the silly season.

But on returning to Germany for the Neuhaus fight, Henry learned that the rules of the ring as they had evolved in Germany were not necessarily consistent with complete fairness. The convention had emerged that a fighter had to win a bout by a margin of five clear points in order to be awarded the referee’s decision if there was no knockout. Henry had certainly accomplished that against Kalbfell and in his opinion he did so again against Neuhaus but the decision was to be disappointing: a draw. Although Henry was dropped in round four, he fought back strongly, but not, alas, strongly enough. But a draw was better than a defeat.

Both boxers and crowds hate draws. A boxing match, like any other duel, is supposed to resolve something and the better referees took the job of judging a close fight very seriously indeed, and occasionally took the odd risk in coming to their decisions, which is why a draw is a relatively rare occurrence in professional boxing.

There was one more encounter to come in Germany, but this time in Frankfurt, on 19 April 1958. The opponent was the German light heavyweight champion, Eric Schoeppner, and the fight was to lead to the only disqualification of Henry’s career. Wicks was of the opinion, having seen Schoeppner already, that Henry would knock him out easily but the German’s management was convinced it was a fair match.

Henry recalls Schoeppner as ‘useful, but a bit flashy. Naturally, as a light heavyweight, he was fast, and possibly even ahead on points for the first five rounds, but in the sixth, Henry managed to put him on the ropes with a left and followed through with a mighty left hook just as the German turned away. As the punch connected, Schoeppner dropped to the canvas, quite senseless. In fact, he had to be stretchered out of the ring and was to be hospitalized for five weeks. It was to prove the end of Schoeppner’s ambition to fight for the world title against Archie Moore. But the celebrations in the Cooper corner proved to be both precipitate as well as short-lived, as the announcement came over the tannoy that Henry had been disqualified.

The disqualification was both unexpected and unwelcome. The reason – rabbit-punching – was, given the speed of a fighter’s reactions, hard to justify. It had been said of Joe Louis that an opponent would be on the
canvas before Louis realized that he had even hit him; it is a trait shared by many top class professionals and Henry was no different.

As well as a disqualification, Henry was fined the equivalent of
£
700 – half the already meagre purse – which, it later emerged, the German Boxing Federation sorely needed; the German economic miracle had clearly not trickled down into its coffers, as it was forced into some difficult financial gymnastics from time to time. Of course, the disqualification did not in any way invalidate the efficacy of the punch itself; it was, after four years in professional use, clearly developing into an awesome weapon.

Heavyweight fighters can take more time to mature than those men in the lower divisions, it is often said; one reason for this must be the sheer variety of their opponents. Any man from any weight can technically fight at heavyweight, there is no minimum or maximum, so over his career a heavyweight fighter might be called upon to fight men of a huge range of skill and weight, from less than 12 stone to more than 16, which makes the top division both unpredictable as well as arduous. Henry was, by that late spring of 1958, starting to mature nicely. He had learned to live with the risk of cuts, as Wicks had known he would, and his burgeoning faith in Holland’s skills allowed him a degree of relaxation that had been rather obviously absent before.

He had grown up to trust only family, particularly George. There was a closeness about the Cooper household, and a particular closeness between the twins; they could even at times finish each others’ sentences, which could make for a slightly fractured conversation if others were
present – most confusing. Henry’s willingness, initially wary, after that short string of defeats, to accept the input and judgement of others, marked a sea-change in him and the pleasing succession of fights in Germany (plus the fringe benefits) allowed him a reserve of energy that he had previously wasted on fretting and worrying, clearly a trait he had inherited from Lily.

So, it was clearly time for a UK comeback now. The chosen opponent, on 6 September 1958, would be the very rough Welshman, Dick Richardson, whom George had defeated on his own professional debut in 1954. The arena would be home turf to Richardson: the dreadful, seedy Coney Beach Arena at Porthcawl on the South Wales coast. The Welsh fighter enjoyed a 17lb weight advantage over Henry, as well as the extra edge of enjoying his own very liberal interpretation of the rules. Henry had known Richardson as something of a thug and a bully in the Army and had wisely given him a fairly wide berth.

This was a now a critical fight for Henry. The three encounters in Germany had not paid particularly well –
£
1,500 or so each – and, although they had served to restore both his credibility and his self-confidence, he needed to shine against Richardson if the level of his purses was going to rise. In the event he would receive f,6,000, which, although it was the equivalent of four fights on the Continent, was still not a vast amount, given the level of expenses he was incurring. Henry was confident, if wary.

Richardson attacked immediately, a thing that Henry had thought he might do, for he knew his man: ‘Dick realized that very few referees were strong enough to disqualify a
man in the first round.’ That is presumably why Richardson overtly head-butted Henry and opened a huge vertical cut on his eyebrow, which bled profusely. Henry managed to hold the charging, swinging Richardson off, protecting the eyebrow so that Danny Holland could effect some useful running repairs between the rounds, but this was not looking promising. It looked even worse in round five, after a fairly well-balanced second, third and fourth rounds, when Henry was floored by a painful right to the body. Richardson, assuming that he had his opponent exactly where he wanted him, went dashing in and promptly impaled himself on what was probably the best left look that Henry had yet delivered in his career. As he launched it, it was already near textbook perfect, and Richardson’s own momentum made it even better. His feet actually left the canvas and he was quite out cold before collapsing. It was such a fine punch that even the usually partisan Welsh crowd cheered.

It had been two years since the loss to Peter Bates and the forced reassessment of his career. To a professional fighter, that is a very long time indeed, but Henry had proved, in this win over Richardson, that it had been well spent. He showed, in succession, that he could take a punch, recover from a knockdown, deal with cuts and also deliver a classic left hook of truly terrifying power. Some fighters, even the most highly rated ones, can perhaps do one or even two of these things. To be able to do all four was remarkable. He had also showed enormous courage, as well as an enormous left.

Obviously this splendid punch needed a name, and naturally it was Jim Wicks who thought one up. Ingemar
Johansson had ‘The Hammer’, so now ‘’Enery’s ’Ammer’ had arrived. It would dominate the upper reaches of the heavyweight division of British boxing for more than a decade and almost change the course of sporting history.

C
harles ‘Sonny’ Liston was not, it must be said, considered by many to be a perfect role model for American youth – particularly black American youth, given that the administration of the sport was entirely white. He was boxing’s perfect bad boy, illiterate, violent (when drunk), an ex-convict (coached to box in prison by that almost inevitable Catholic priest) and managed by the mob. He was also possessed of what was probably the hardest punch in the history of the ring. The Cooper left was, some maintained, but a friendly caress by comparison. Unfortunately, Liston also enjoyed using his huge
ham-hock
hands (15-inch circumference) on policemen, which made him to say the least unpopular with the forces of law and order.

In the office, however, his behaviour was different. Harry
Gibbs described Liston as being ‘fearsome to look at, but a gentleman in the ring’. Jim Wicks had actually never heard of him; this was not of itself unsurprising, as Liston had, since 1955, been dividing his time between prizefighting and breaking legs for low-level gangsters in St Louis. He had not fought at all in 1957 (he had pressing business elsewhere, mainly in the Federal Penitentiary) and thus only appeared on the radar screen of
Ring
magazine, in early 1958 after having comprehensively demolished a hapless boxer called Billy Hunter in January. In August of that year he knocked out a hopeful Wayne Bethea in round one. After that brief encounter, Bethea’s distressed seconds removed no fewer than seven of their boy’s own teeth from his gum-shield. Liston was, in the parlance of the day, bad news, the sort of fighter every sane man dreads. And Jim Wicks was a very sane man indeed.

It was Wicks’s friend Jim Norris who tipped him off; the two men, both extreme gamblers, were engaged in a little gentle betting in Jack Solomons’ office in Great Windmill Street: ‘If you’re offered a fighter called Liston, don’t take him,’ came the clear message.

And Jim Norris had every reason to know. Despite a vast inherited fortune, which came from family interests in the grain business, based in Chicago (much of which was redistributed among the bookmaking fraternity around the world) Norris took an all-consuming interest in the fight game. As head of the International Boxing Commission (IBC), which had, since its formation in 1949, acquired controlling interests in the fortunes of a large number of fighters as well as a man aging interest in Madison Square Gardens, Norris was a close (some say the closest) associate
of Frank Carbo, the gangster and alleged assassin of Bugsy Siegel, who had recently acquired a controlling interest in Sonny Liston’s career and who would shortly be invited to spend 25 years in prison. Carbo owned Liston just as surely as if the emancipation of slaves had never happened. ‘Jim Norris got a bigger kick out of making $5,000 crookedly by stealing from a boxer than he did from making $10 million legally; he just made a lifestyle choice,’ Henry recalls, with no particular fondness.

Harry Levene, who was extremely keen to promote a Henry Cooper fight rather than see Jack Solomons put on yet another one, had other ideas about Sonny Liston; he had already opened negotia tions with Miami-based Chris Dundee (brother of Angelo), who was at that time a promoter of Liston. As a result of the upcoming fixture between Henry and Alex Miteff being called off due to Miteff’s injuries from a fight with Willie Besmanoff, Levene needed a replacement, and urgently. A black American fighter would be a good idea, he thought, for Henry’s first bout under his promotion. In the event he got one, but it would not be Liston. It would never be Liston, in fact, certainly not a matter of particular regret to Henry, and one of profound relief to Wicks, whose view was eloquently summed up: ‘I’m not going to let my boy fight that mahogany wardrobe; we don’t want to meet this geezer walking down the street, let alone in the ring. He’s too ugly, we only take on good-looking boys.’

As Jim Wicks and Harry Levene settled into negotiations con cerning the upcoming fight, Wicks casually but firmly ruled out both Liston and Nino Valdes, the hewn-from-solid Cuban who had recently been defeated by Zora Folley.
Valdes had also been ruled out by Norris, not on the basis that he was necessarily dangerous for Wicks’s boxer, but simply because Norris made a hobby out of denying fights to Valdes’s manager, Bobby Gleason, whom he hated.
*

Levene was naturally piqued because he had virtually made the Liston match with Dundee but had done so without consulting Wicks or, it must be said, particularly researching Liston. But then Levene was a businessman, first and foremost. The prospect of ancient Archie Moore was an enticing one, but ‘The Old Mongoose’ was almost dormant by then, at least as a heavyweight, deservedly picky and extremely expensive.

However, the man who had beaten Valdes, Zora Folley, was, rather to Wicks’s surprise, prepared to travel to London to take on Henry, even for the modest amount of money the famously tight-fisted Levene was prepared to guarantee. Presumably, Folley was at something of a loose end due to d’Amato’s reluctance to match Patterson with anyone if he could avoid it. On the face of it, Folley/Cooper was a fair match in terms of weight and reach, and Folley had no reputation as a savage. On the contrary: a blameless private life, a sunny disposition (in fact rather like Henry himself) and everything that Liston was considered not to be. The match was set for 14 October 1958.

The difference in approaches between Wicks and certain other managers is chillingly well illustrated by a conversation between the columnist Joe Liebling and the
aforementioned Bobby Gleason, who comes down to us as an interesting study, if you happen to be a herpetologist. Having railed at the IBC concerning the difficulties he was having with Norris, Gleason remarked casually, ‘So, what of it? I can make as much with ten fights a year for ten thousand as I can for one big shot for a hundred grand.’

Liebling was coolly scathing: ‘Ten fights at ten thousand dollars apiece entails ten times as much fighting as one at one hundred thousand, but Gleason wasn’t going to do the physical fighting, which is after all a mechanical detail. It is why I think of him as an economist.’ There were many other critics of the sport at this time. By far the most vociferous was Edith Summerskill. Her ranting tract
The Ignoble Art
was first published in 1956, at the end of Henry’s professional apprenticeship and, to coin a phrase, the book pulled no punches. As an MP, a Privy Councillor and not least a qualified doctor, Edith Summerskill’s opposition to boxing was quite merciless and, as Henry was to find out later, she offered little room for compromise. In her opinion the sport should be banned at all levels, amateur and professional. There was no talk of improving safety, head guards, body armour or whatever – she was against it. She viewed it, essentially, as a nothing short of a criminal activity.

As a classic Whig, Summerskill felt almost as incensed that people enjoyed watching boxing as she was that the boxers might actually enjoy fighting. The fact that it was bad for the fighters was one thing; a critical element of her crusade, though, was that it was bad for the spectators. In 1953 she had engaged in a debate with Jack Solomons, which, in almost exclusively male company, she had
narrowly won. Freddie Mills was there, too; when asked to defend himself, Mills reportedly responded by standing up and proudly displaying his gent’s natty: ‘Do you know how much this suit cost, Missus?’ Or words to that effect. Summerskill was unimpressed.

Jolly Jack professed his intention of wreaking his revenge for his defeat upon her by standing for her Fulham parliamentary seat as an independent but only, he announced, after paying for some public speaking lessons. He did neither, in the event.

Zora Folley, who hailed from Chandler, Arizona, did not pass through the annals of boxing history with the credit that was due to him, possibly as a result of his tragically early death at only 41 in a stupid swimming pool accident in the summer of 1972. He was a prodigious athlete and potentially an extremely difficult opponent; he was, rather like Henry, a skilled boxer with the added edge of a powerful punch. He was also, by all accounts, a most considerate and charming man. In the early autumn of 1958 he was 28, near to the top of his form and (by a clear margin) the man most likely to succeed Patterson if only he could manage to manoeuvre himself into a ring with him.

It was this fight, more than any other, that lifted Henry out of his two years of relative obscurity and put him firmly back in the public eye. The pre-fight comments from the sporting press were, to say the least, cautious. While all agreed that his demolition of Brian London in 1956 had been impressive, he had fought nine times since then and lost five times, drawing once. His victory over Dick Richardson only six weeks previously might, it was
contended, have taken a lot out of him. Further, Folley himself had already fought 45 bouts and lost only two. Despite the physical statistics of the two men being close, Fleet Street did not view it as an even match. The assessment of
The Times
was depressingly straightforward: ‘I believe that he will find the American too strong and too experienced to be hurt seriously and then he will have to avoid being discouraged (a failing he has shown before) and concentrate on boxing his way. Folley must be the favourite but Cooper has a chance to make his name, even by surviving the 10 rounds.’

Oh dear. It was further ominously pointed out that ‘Folley…has defeated Nino Valdes, the conqueror of both Erskine (Henry’s nemesis) and Richardson. He has won eight of his last fifteen bouts inside the distance and is reputed to be a clever boxer with an accurate left jab.’

Well, he was certainly a clever boxer, Folley, but he had a mighty right hand as well. Clearly, despite his world ranking status, he had not been well researched.

Donald Saunders, for the
Daily Telegraph
, was only marginally more optimistic, and pointed out a further source of personal pressure for Henry:

The splendidly jingoistic piece went on to reflect exactly the uncertainty that was descending over the heavyweight division:

Saunders finished the piece with a touch of classic hedging: ‘All this, I think, is too much to expect. But Johansson and London have recently hinted that now is the time for optimism.’

Plenty of local pressure here, then. The upsets in the heavyweight division caused by Johansson and London that had propelled Folley to the status of number one contender were the cause of considerable confusion. Henry had beaten Brian London (and quickly) but had also been well and truly pole-axed by Johansson’s ‘Hammer of Thor’ and so, it was supposed, he sat somewhere in the middle. London, despite the fact that he had very effectively taken out Willie Pastrano, was never rated as highly as he probably deserved to be. Johansson, ‘Thor’s Hammer’ aside, was considered to be a very nice man but perhaps somewhat idle; he even took his girlfriend, who later became his wife, to his training camp. Because Folley was known only vaguely in Britain, there would, all recognized, be a very partisan crowd, which could only help Henry. Even so, Folley entered the ring as favourite at 2-1, odds probably encouraged by the generally pessimistic forecasts by the pundits as well as the clear realization that, quite simply, black men might make better boxers.

Initially, the pundits seemed to have been absolutely right, or perhaps Folley too was aware that he was under the invisible burden created by the recent defeats inflicted upon his fellow compatriots. The first three rounds were a blur of savage and accurate combinations that firstly opened cuts above and below Henry’s left eye and secondly, after a huge right, dropped him to the canvas. Henry took a count of seven, which was wise if not necessary. As he put
it years later: ‘When he put me down in the third, I didn’t have a price…’

All who were present assumed that the fight was basically over. But then Folley changed his tactics; he stopped boxing and started punching, to finish a fight that he now assumed he had won. But as he slung long, looping rights, he metaphorically opened the door and Henry did not need prompting. For the next three rounds he managed to insert himself inside the American’s punches and responded with a series of wicked lefts, which rapidly started to even up the scorecard. A telling left hook to the face drew blood. By round nine Harry Carpenter, who was at the ringside, reckoned the fighters to be almost level, with Folley, having little left, perhaps a quarter point in front, but, of course, it was the referee, Tommy Little, whose opinion counted.