Henry Cooper

by Norman Giller

  It’s history that Henry outpointed London and won the British and Empire belts for the first time. Extraordinarily, he was to remain British champion for the next twelve years apart from when he briefly gave up the championship on a point of principle.

  Many years later Henry confessed that this second meeting with London was one of the toughest fights of his life. His nose was cut in the first round and blood was running down into his throat from his nostrils throughout the fight, making breathing a challenge.

  Henry managed to hide his crisis from London, an opponent of great fitness but little finesse. For fifteen viciously hard rounds he pumped his left jab into the Blackpool man’s accommodating face. London, covered in both his own blood and Henry’s, was so confused and bemused by the pummelling he was taking that at the end of the fourteenth round he held up Henry’s arm in victory, not realising there was still another round to go. The Bishop’s verdict: ‘It was good of London to give us a half-time score. We won by the provincial mile.’ And the proverbial one, too.

  It was back to Porthcawl on 26 August 1959 for a defence of his Empire heavyweight title against Gawie de Klerk, a man mountain of a policeman from Johannesburg. The South African fought with courage but was out of his depth and the referee came to his rescue as Henry opened up with a vicious volley of punches in the fifth round that had de Klerk staggering around like a blind man in a maze.

  Henry’s twenty-eighth professional contest – against his oldest rival Joe Erskine – was to cause him the fright of his life.

  And it was his final fight as a single man.

  ROUND 4

  GLOVE STORY TO LOVE STORY

  Love was just around the corner as Henry prepared to take on his great nemesis Joe Erskine in a fight that would almost certainly make or break one of them. He had fallen – slowly, it has to be said, like a tumbling oak tree – for a tiny Italian waitress at our mutually favourite Soho restaurant, Peter Mario’s in Gerrard Street.

  The waitress was one Albina Genepri, who had come to London from her home, a small farm in the foothills of the Apennines, to be educated and then work at her uncle’s restaurant when she was sixteen. She was pretty and bubbly, barely five feet tall and spoke Chico Marx English. By the time Henry got round to courting her she was into her twenties and had enough command of the language to put us customers in our place with non-stop friendly banter.

  To watch Albina and Henry falling in love was the stuff of Mills & Boon, and I am not talking Freddie Mills and Eric Boon.

  By his own admission, Henry struggled to chat up girls. He lived for his boxing and was basically a shy man. You would never find him in a nightclub or a dancehall, and when training for fights he used to be in bed by nine-thirty ready for his 4.45 a.m. alarm call the next morning. The fling with Fräulein Hilda apart, he was close to chaste.

  Our Enery epitomised how great sportsmen of his time gave 100 per cent to the pursuit of fitness. He grew up admiring dozens of champions who set the right example: Stanley Matthews and Billy Wright in football, Sir Len Hutton and Peter May in cricket, Henry Cotton and Arnold Palmer in golf. All his idols were clean-living and dedicated to their sport.

  When he fell for Albina, a little matter of six years since she had started serving him his regular meal at Mario’s, those of us looking on from the sidelines almost felt like applauding. We had long seen the sparks, but they seemed to fly over Henry’s head.

  I used to eat regularly at Mario’s with my Boxing News colleagues Tim Riley and Ron Olver, and Albina was our waitress in the days shortly after she had left school in Clerkenwell and tried – and failed – her hand as a dressmaker. Henry had yet to clap eyes on her, and I always loved being able to tell him that I knew his wife before he did. We watched her grow into an elegant and confident young lady, who lit up the room with her personality and contagious laughter.

  Mario’s, standing out as an Italian restaurant in the heart of Chinatown, was a popular haunt for the boxing aficionados, with Jack Solomons’s gym just a stroll away in a basement opposite the Windmill Theatre, and promoters, managers and matchmakers were always meeting at nearby Mario’s to talk business. It was a great place for a journalist to pick up stories and gossip, and for me – a jazz lover – it had the extra pull of being just a few doors from Ronnie Scott’s original jazz club. (Ronnie and I went to the same East End school, where he was then known as Ronnie Schatt. Could never understand why he changed his name.)

  Jim Wicks, a gourmet who used to go through the menu with the same diligence and appetite he showed with a racecard in his hand, liked to go to a different restaurant every day, provided he could get on the blower to his bookmaker. ‘Suddenly,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t understand why Our Enery only wanted Italian food and kept insisting we go to Mario’s. It took me a long time to twig he had fallen hook, line and sinker for Albina. When he told me he was going to marry her, I thought, “Blimey, I must make sure she don’t feed him too much pasta.”’

  Actually, The Bishop was delighted and claimed matchmaking credit.

  More of the great love story in the next chapter, but first back to the great glove story and the continuing saga of the serial with Joe Erskine. Their next battle was to produce one of the most dramatic finishes I ever saw to a fight anywhere in the world.

  They breed ’em tough down at the Tiger Bay end of Cardiff and Joe was a tough Taff, all right. He was built like a Welsh back row forward yet was as light on his feet as a ballet dancer. He was as expressionless as the Sphinx. I hit him with some of the hardest punches I ever threw, but you would never know it from the look on his face. He was a cunning fox of a boxer who never showed emotions and he had more natural boxing skill than any British heavyweight I have seen before or since.

  Our careers ran parallel like two express trains and every now and then we found ourselves on the same track. Our lines crossed for the first time in the semi-finals of the ABA light-heavyweight championship in 1952. It was the battle of the left jabs and I just managed to get the better of him over three evenly balanced rounds, which neutrals said presented traditional British boxing at its best.

  We were both upright boxers who liked to move behind a stiff left jab and keep the action at long range. Where I always had the advantage over Joe was that I could hook off the jab, which meant I carried the heavier ammunition, but I have to own up to him being the cleverer boxer. He had such good rhythm and neat footwork that he could nullify the big punchers by keeping them off balance and out of distance; and he was a master at swaying and rolling on the ropes, letting opponents punch themselves out by hitting thin air. Believe me, that can be more tiring than hitting your target. Mind you, Joe’s rope-a-dope tactics – long before Ali made them famous – were a dangerous practice that brought him a lot of trouble later in his career when the lead started to get into his legs.

  Our styles didn’t change very much from when we first fought, although I developed my punching power and stepped up my work rate to the body, whereas Joe stuck to his stylish jab-and-move tactics.

  We met twice more as amateurs, both of them Army tournament contests, and we won one each on points. So when we turned pro in 1954, the score stood at two-one in my favour.

  Our first fight with a purse rather than a tin pot at stake came at Harringay on 15 November 1955, in an official eliminator for the British championship. It was a repeat of our amateur contests, only this time spread over ten rounds, and it was Joe whose hand was raised by the referee at the end. I concentrated too much on conserving my energy in the early part of the fight and was unable to make up lost ground. I had Joe in trouble a couple of times with left hooks, but the wily bugger rolled, weaved and danced his way out of bother. I banged my left hand up on his tough old Welsh bonce in the seventh round, but no excuses, Joe deserved his win. That wasn’t my night and as a superstitious sort I couldn’t help reflecting on the fact that it was my thirteenth fight.

  My fifth fight with Joe came in what I call my Black Year of 1957. I h
ad been knocked out by a freak body blow from Joe Bygraves in a British Empire title fight in the February, then took the full ten-second count on my knees after Ingo’s Bingo had landed on my jaw in a European title fight against Ingemar Johansson in the May. Then in the September I took on Erskine for the British title he had lifted off old war horse Johnny Williams.

  My confidence wasn’t exactly sky-high and again I made too cautious a start, allowing Joe to build an early lead. But I came back strongly and there were several times when even Joe’s poker face couldn’t hide the fact that I had hurt him. I was choked when the referee held up Joe’s hand at the end of the fifteenth round because I thought I’d done just enough to have nicked the verdict.

  Both Joe and I had managers who could claim the fastest tongue in the West. Joe was managed by a colourful Jewish Welshman called Benny Jacobs, like Jim Wicks a master at banging the publicity drum and with filling reporters’ notebooks with outrageous, ticket-selling statements. When they were talking about having a smaller ring to suit me, he came up with the classic line: ‘What an insult to Joe. You wouldn’t show off a Goya in a brick outhouse.’ Only he didn’t say outhouse!

  Because we left Jim and Benny to do much of the talking for us, the public got the impression there was bitterness and enmity between Joe and me. But that was all hocus-pocus created by our managers and the press. Outside the ring Joe and I were good pals, and inside the ropes we had total respect for each other.

  Of our eight fights, the one I remember above all others is the sixth, when I at last proved beyond all argument that I was the guv’nor.

  I was in the champion’s corner for the fight, staged at London’s Earls Court on 17 November 1959. Joe had lost his championship to Brian London and I in turn had relieved London of both the British and Empire titles.

  No denying that Erskine deserved the chance to try to regain the British crown, but he had never met me in more determined or confident mood. He weighed in at 13st 10lb, which gave him a four-pound weight advantage, but I was always happiest when boxing at 13st 6 or 7lb, and I felt superbly fit and raring to go.

  I had made up my mind to try to hurt him early doors, rather than hang around, as in our previous professional contests. I was handicapped by a cut in the first round, but had the satisfaction of knowing I had really stunned him with a couple of meaty left hooks. In fact I had Joe grabbing hold of me while he cleared his head. He couldn’t kid me with his poker face this time; I knew that I had hurt him.

  There was a controversial finish to the end of the fifth round. Right through my career I specialised in throwing a hook off a jab, that is leading with the left and then all in the one movement throwing the same hand but this time from an angle. I had pierced Joe’s guard with the jab and was into the reflex action of throwing the hook when the bell rang. Joe relaxed and my punch continued on its way and landed flush on his jaw.

  Anybody who ever saw me box will confirm that I never once committed a deliberate foul in the ring. This was a complete accident, but Benny Jacobs didn’t just make a meal of it but an entire banquet. He came diving into the ring and demanded that the Scottish referee Eugene Henderson should disqualify me. Mr Henderson was closer to the incident than anybody else apart from Joe and me, and he knew that the punch had started before the bell. He quite rightly ordered Benny back to his corner, but the volatile manager had made such a fuss that it planted the thought in some minds that I had gained an unfair advantage.

  It was the first time in all my fights with Erskine when I felt in complete control despite the aggravation of the cut over my right eye. Joe was also cut, over his left eye, and as the fight moved into the last third I knew I’d got him going. He was breathing heavily, and his usually immaculate footwork had become plodding. At the end of each round I stared hard at my old mate, with my eyes saying, ‘I’m coming to get you, Joe… I’m coming to get you…’

  The end came in the twelfth round and it was one of the most frightening experiences I have ever known in the ring. Joe was doing one of his rolling and weaving acts on the ropes, but he was tired and lacked his usual split-second timing. I caught him with a cracker of a left hook to the jaw and he slid down the ropes for the first count either of us had ever taken in our six meetings. He was unwisely – and unsteadily – up at seven and I quickly moved in with a two-fisted attack that sent him down for another seven count.

  I wish referee Henderson had moved in because Joe was in no position to defend himself, but I was waved forward and this time I let fly with a left-right combination followed by a left hook that carried every ounce of my strength. Poor Joe went flying backwards, the top half of his body crashing under the middle rope. He was arched over the bottom rope like a giant violin bow, and he was out to the world. The referee wisely didn’t bother to count but stopped the fight there and then, waving for assistance to get the unconscious Joe disentangled from the ropes.

  Even in this sweet moment of victory I felt sick because I thought Joe had broken his back. Jim Wicks felt the same, and when I returned to the corner he was visibly shivering with fright and shock.

  Thank God, Joe recovered after some treatment from the ringside doctor and suffered only bruising to his back. It could have been so much worse.

  Like I say, for all our rivalry Joe and I were good buddies and the last thing I wanted was to see him seriously injured. Boxing is a hard, hard sport, but you’d be surprised how close and caring opponents become once the punching is over.

  Crafty old Benny Jacobs, who somehow kept on managing Joe after he had been accused of gambling away his purse money, made the most of the punch that I landed as the bell rang in the fifth round. He kicked up such a stink that we had to give Joe another crack at the title. We fought at Wembley on 21 March 1961 and it lasted only fifteen minutes. My left hand was never out of his face and both of his eyes were cut and closing when his corner took the referee’s advice and retired him at the end of the fifth round. It was a memorable moment for me because this third successful championship defence won me my first Lonsdale Belt outright. For me, the Lonsdale Belt – named after one of the original father figures of boxing and awarded to winners of British title fights – was the premier prize in the sport, and to win one outright was a dream come true. Little did I know that I would get another two in my trophy cabinet before I packed it in. That would have sounded too far-fetched.

  Just over a year later, Joe and I were at it again, this time in Manchester, and again my British and Empire titles were at stake. He was past his best and very puffy around the eyes, and he lacked the mobility that had made him such a difficult target in his prime.

  I concentrated on shovelling as many lefts as I could through his defence as in the previous fight, and I closed one of his eyes and gashed the other before the referee sensibly stopped the one-way traffic in the ninth round.

  It was our eighth and last fight, so I finished 5–3 ahead in our series that spanned the best ten years of our fighting lives. But neither of us was ever really a loser because we won each other’s friendship and respect.

  Joe battled on for a couple of years after our final fight but was never the same major force in the game and he retired in 1964 after a points defeat by Billy Walker, an all-heart fighter who would have struggled to lay a glove on him in his majestic prime.

  Joe, who sadly passed on in 1990 aged just fifty-six, turned professional at the same time as Henry in 1954. While he retired ten years later, amazingly Henry boxed on for another seven years… as a happily married man.

  ROUND 5

  MARRIAGE, TAX AND CAULIFLOWERS

  Henry did not just embrace Albina, but her entire Italian culture and also her religion. He converted to Roman Catholicism from non-practising Church of England and became a devout follower who never publicly pushed or promoted his new beliefs but was very happy to talk about them to anybody who was interested.

  All those of us who knew Henry well were aware how his marriage in January 1960 changed him into a mo
re confident, well-rounded person, whose love for Albina almost shone out of him. Suddenly, from living a rather sheltered existence that allowed little room outside the narrow village world of boxing-boxing-boxing, he quickly established himself as a contented family man. With the arrival of his adored sons, Henry Marco and John Pietro, he was the epitome of a proud, doting dad and he settled down to what was to become forty-seven years of married bliss – what all close observers will confirm was the near-perfect marriage. It was a match made in heaven and in their company you could not but help being intoxicated by their love and affection.

  They looked the odd couple, Henry standing a fraction under 6ft 2in, Albina not much above five feet in her high heels; but she always gave as good as she got in mock arguments. Whenever her mother was over from Italy she used to tell Albina off for not waiting on her husband hand and foot, which was the accepted way in the peasant world from which she came. Albina used to tell anybody in listening distance: ‘If he thinks I’m his servant, he is in for a disappointment.’ Henry would just give a big grin and a shrug, and say: ‘Make us a cup of tea, love!’

  Albina took over Henry’s diary, later with the dedicated help of highly respected showbusiness and sports agent and family friend, Patsy Martin – a full-time job if ever there was one, because he was always in demand for charity events and he very rarely said no. If anybody ever earned his popularity by putting something back into the community it was Our Enery. He was a true man of the people, never asking for a penny piece in return for his time and happy to help out any deserving cause.

  There are several boxing writers who walked around padded with extra pounds because of the amazing hospitality shown them by Albina. The morning after any one of Henry’s fights – win or lose – she would cook breakfasts for the story-seeking evening newspaper reporters and photographers, who dropped into their pleasant three-bedroom house within sight and sound of Wembley Stadium.