Henry Cooper (24 page)

If Henry’s first encounter with Clay had been the most
famous fight of his career, and his second the most disappointing, then this one with Bugner was certainly to be the most controversial, the more so because it was also to be his last.

The referee was Harry Gibbs, from Bermondsey. Gibbs had been having a little trouble with the BBBC the previous year; he had felt, possibly accurately, that he had not been receiving his fair share of top division fights. But perhaps there was a reason for that, which he could not acknowledge. A semi-official rota existed within the Board of Control, the sort of Spanish practice with which Gibbs, as a docker, was entirely familiar, and he asserted his rights, as he saw them, regularly. He was also quite litigious. But he had also been responsible for some controversial decisions, once against Henry in the Amos Johnson fight, but more notably against Billy Walker when he fought Midlander Johnny Prescott and again (by some verdicts) Walker once more against Northerner Brian London a little later. Not all these verdicts necessarily sat well with other commentators and quite possibly had led to his joining the back of the queue with the Board of Control, which situation had, according to Gibbs’s own memoirs, led to him to consider resigning. Perhaps he had a point to make.

No one, least of all in the Billy Walker camp, had ever complained about these potential lacunae, however much they may have disagreed with them, but the faint suspicion does rather emerge that Gibbs tended to overcompensate for his impeccably London origins when calling a tight decision in the favour of an ‘outsider’. He also clearly relished being controversial as well as being in control;
there was something of the loose cannon about him. Under the UK rules, of course, the referee enjoys total autonomy in coming to his decision and there is no element of external control. This was to be a fight that stretched the limits of that rule.

Gibbs’s verdict in the Cooper/Bugner fight was and is quite inexplicable, even at this distance, and it still causes controversy to this day. He himself would also wince a little at its impact, both at the time and later. I recall this fight very well, especially as it was one of the first things I saw on a colour television. It was a great scandal at the time and I contend that it remains one today but not, of course, through any fault of the challenger. Even my late grandmother, admittedly no great expert (and a committed Cooper fan, it must be said, despite his defeat of her two favourite boxers, Erskine and Richardson), thought it grotesquely unfair.

It was an interesting fight, if relatively dull by comparison with certain others. Henry, conceding all that height, weight and reach to a man who was also 16 years his junior, gave a quite magnificent performance. On the other hand, Bugner displayed an observable reluctance to risk damage, which made his efforts seem pedestrian by comparison and this was a tendency that rather typified his later career. If anything, he looked nervous. Perhaps he had read Neil Allen that morning in
The Times
‘If he gets too rattled this evening, young Bugner may find himself on the floor.’

Interestingly, Danny Holland was now in Bugner’s corner as cut-man; he knew Harry Gibbs very well, having trained
him in 1946, before joining Wicks, when Gibbs had actually fought briefly (but quite successfully) as a professional heavyweight.

Wicks, presiding over what he knew to be their final appearance – at least in the ring – announced: ‘We are not hanging around. We have a commercial TV appointment after the fight so we might be in a hurry.’

This was not to be a fight characterized by knockdowns, dramas or even particularly heavy punches. Neither fighter seemed in any serious danger, it was merely 15 rounds of faintly repetitive boxing, and clearly hard work for both men. Peter Wilson reported:

On Gibbs’s card, Bugner was a half point ahead. Wilson continued:

Gibbs scored round five to Henry and round six to Bugner. Wilson takes up the story:

For Gibbs, round seven was even. Wilson continues:

But for Harry Gibbs, round eight was a draw as well. Wilson’s infuriated comments continue:

Gibbs allowed Henry a quarter point win in the thirteenth. By now most observers felt that Henry was comfortably ahead. Peter Wilson had him 9-4 up and Donald Saunders agreed, with Henry ‘several rounds ahead’. (It must have been one of the few occasions on which the
Daily Mirror
and the
Daily Telegraph
have ever agreed about anything.) Desmond Hackett of the
Daily Express
rather concurred, indeed he made Henry 10-4 up going into the last round.

But on Gibbs’s card the fighters were exactly even going into the last and it is probably safe to say that the last round was Bugner’s, although even the
Guardian
disagreed about that. But, when Henry confidently offered his hand to Gibbs, he was startled when the referee showed him his back and stalked over to Joe Bugner. Raising the clearly surprised blond giant’s hand, Gibbs gave him the verdict.

There were perhaps three heartbeats of disbelieving silence – and then followed complete uproar. Henry’s corner had not witnessed any thing like this since the near riotous conditions of the Piero Tomasoni fight. Debris poured into the ring as the stunned crowd gave vent to a vast collective roar of outrage.

Henry predictably behaved with great dignity. He sighed
and tousled Bugner’s hair almost affectionately. However unfair he thought the decision, it was clearly no fault of Bugner’s, who had done his best, however modest his efforts had been according to the crowd. Henry recalls:

Naturally, it is very easy to confuse a profound sense of dismay with mere sentimentality, an emotion with which the boxing ring has always been liberally drenched. Henry was inordinately popular with the London crowd but there were other, more neutral observers, such as Joe Frazier’s manager, Yancy Durham, who felt that Henry had won quite comfortably. On the other hand, both
Boxing News
and
The Times
scored the fight exactly the same way that Gibbs had. Seldom had a fight been scored so differently by such a range of experienced observers. A discreet file of policemen gathered to escort Gibbs down from the ring (and out of the reach of Jim Wicks) and out into the limelight of British boxing history.

For Henry’s fans in the press corps, his next words, to the saddened assembly in the dressing room after the fight, were lowering but inevitable: ‘Well, gentlemen, that’s my lot. It’s a choker having to go out like this. It was close, but I thought I did enough to clinch it. I want to thank the public and everyone else for all the wonderful years. I 
don’t regret one moment of it. I’d do it all over again.’ He meant it, too.

Wicks, completely empurpled with indignation, was rather more forthright, if inaccurate: ‘It was a diabolical decision. Henry Cooper retires today – Harry Gibbs retires tomorrow.’

He, of course, did not retire. The two men, Wicks and Gibbs, who had never been particularly close in the first place, never spoke again. For Albina, though, the final announcement of Henry’s retirement was a godsend: ‘It was lovely – one of the greatest gifts ever bestowed on me, like a great weight lifted. When he retired, it was wonderful; I started to feel like a different person.’

British boxing rapidly felt rather different, too. Suddenly it seemed that Henry had been around for ever and his retirement, however inevitable, was to create a huge void in the heavyweight division, even in the wider sport as a whole. For his friends and allies in the sport, it came as a blessed relief that he had finally decided to stop. All who knew him closely realized that the sheer work involved in achieving and maintaining the levels of fitness required to shine against younger men was taking a lot out of him. Between the Tomasoni fight in 1969, and this last fight with Bugner, he seemed to have aged rapidly – he was suddenly looking much older than 36. The last thing anyone wanted was the ignominious spectacle of a public decline. The loss to Bugner, was, they reckoned, as good a reason to stop as he had ever had.

But if Albina Cooper thought that retirement from the ring meant that she would start to see as much of her husband as other wives saw of theirs, she was to be 
mistaken, for the groundwork undertaken by the Wicks organization prior to Henry’s retirement had prepared him for a life in the public eye the like of which no British sportsman had ever experienced before. While his training schedule was sharply curtailed (he found it hard to give it up completely) he still kept in shape, not because he ever seriously contemplated a comeback but because the sudden cessation of training for a man as fit as he was could be extremely dangerous; ask any befatted ex-swimmer. Instead, Henry the Ninth, as some of the press now referred to him, had rediscovered golf.

It had been 30 years before, on the wartime Beckenham course, that the brothers Cooper had first dealt in ‘rescued’ golf balls, but Henry did not take up the game until 1970, when he joined Ealing Golf Club. He became as hooked as any unwary fish as he started to discover the pleasures and torments of this unique game. It would start to redefine him in his boxing retirement and would become a vehicle for some of his best work.

Of course, his temperament was perfect and he recalled being pleased at having taken it up so relatively late in life because he came to it without any particular preconceptions – no baggage. His previous career had been one of a series of 10 or 15 violent and tiring rounds, with communication with his opponents being defined by a series of unrepeatable grunts punctuated by heavy punching. Now, over 18 holes and a pleasant chat, he could finally allow his innate personality to actually complement his new sport, as opposed to act against it, as it had done for 17 years as a professional fighter.

Further, because it would not be his living, he was able to 
pace himself. He was pleased to learn that the unfairness of life, that some are athletes and some are not, is a natural opposition for which the game of golf has a ready answer. The handicapping system, he realized quickly, meant that he would not be condemned to playing only with rabbits.

But, passionate about it though he would become, it was not a living. That, he would have to do in other ways.

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: