Henry Cooper

by Robert Edwards

  Of course, this being Britain, there was no particular public sympathy for this new underclass, which had been so instantly created, perhaps, indeed, until the news came that Henry Cooper himself had fallen victim to this unique fraud, one of the longest-running and cynical in history.

  He was clobbered, but not as hard as some. He had, in his first career, been hit far harder than that and recovered. As he had been an active (if slightly nervous) member for over 20 years, he had learned the value of ‘stop-losses’, which can be used to put a floor under the level of liability, but there was still a huge hole in his finances. Friends, notably Jimmy Tarbuck, were quick to offer financial assistance, but his boxer’s pride asserted itself and he declined.

  The original purpose behind Lord Lonsdale’s belts had in fact been primarily an economic one. If a fighter won a belt outright, he had not only a trophy but also an object that was a genuine store of value against hard times or the breadline. Henry famously owned the freehold on three of them and, despite an ardent lobbying by friends and family, he decided to sell them. ‘It was either that or risk losing the house, and I wasn’t going to do that,’ he told me.

  I well recall the giant collective sigh of dismay that this announcement triggered, whether from those who realized full well how hard he had worked to achieve this unique accomplishment, or from what we can happily refer to now as his ‘general fans’; it was a huge wrench, and when the belts went under the hammer at a country auction in June 1993, they realized a modest £42,000, against an estimate of £100,000, which was the cause of further sympathy. But their sale provided a necessary stopgap, saving him from the unwelcome clutches of the stone-faced hardship committee at Lloyd’s, a body which had already made a reputation for itself as one which took few prisoners, despite the essential rottenness of the institution which it represented. He was also pleased that the three belts had stayed together, a unique memento of a unique career, whoever it was who now owned them. It was the sad result of one well-known British institution cynically ripping off another.

  Unsurprisingly, his knighthood, announced in the 2000 New Year’s honours list, pleased him hugely. Rather as Buckingham Palace had come to the rescue after his controversial loss to Amos Johnson with a decent lunch, now here they were again after the embarrassing snakebite episode. It was, he recalled to me, his pride in his family aside, the highlight of his life: ‘I was a bit sad that Mum and Dad couldn’t have seen it, but the old heart gets thumping and the adrenaline gets going.’ Rather like the old days, in fact …’

  What was particularly pleasing for Henry was the fact that although both his OBE and his papal knighthood had been for services to charity, his KSG was for services to boxing, which in these politically correct days was extraordinary, and therefore all the more to be appreciated, not the least by him. He was the first English boxing knight, although remember poor old Daniel Donnelly, who had been rather impulsively dubbed at the behest of the Prince of Wales the year before he became George IV Donnelly had of course at the time been a subject of the Crown, but, having died a year later, in circumstances already described, was rather forgotten, except apparently in Co. Kildare. So, Henry Cooper was not the first boxing knight, rather that honour had fallen to the man whose heroics, passed down to him in song, had so inspired little George Cooper in the 1870s. The connection is pleasing.

  So, after an Odyssey through this fighter’s life, it is a relief but, I confess, no particularly great surprise, to discover that the public Henry Cooper is also the private one. There is no spin there; he is the natural inheritor of the mantle of all those other great British champions, and the British public, which can so often be entirely correct in their collective assessment of a person, have maintained their respect and regard for him for two generations, ever since that evening in London in 1963, which has passed into history, for the general public at least, as the most memorable fight in British heavyweight history. He lost it, but nobody cared then, and they certainly don’t care now. They can easily forget his successors, and probably will.

  As this book was being finished, we suffered a family tragedy when my wife’s poor mother lost her battle with cancer. I was sitting with the nurse as the shifts changed. We were in the kitchen, drinking some of my execrable coffee, as her colleague started work upstairs. She asked me what I was up to; I told her that I was finishing the biography of Henry Cooper. Her tired face lit up a little and she smiled: ‘Ah, my son will look forward to that; so will I, actually.’

  Pleased, I asked her how old her son was.

  ‘He’s ten,’ she replied, ‘he’s a great fan of Henry’s.’

  As the sport of boxing has re-invented itself in Britain after its slump in the wake of Henry’s retirement, many things about it changed. The Thomas à Becket is still there in the Old Kent Road, and it is still a pub, but its once-famous upper room, with the gym, the skipping ropes, the punch bags, the speedballs, the whole place redolent of sweat, pain, effort and liniment, not to mention Jim Wicks’s ratty little office where so much business was done, is no longer. It is now an art gallery, which some might find entirely appropriate.

  Peter Mario’s restaurant, along with Jack Isow’s, closed some time ago, and Sheekey’s is now re-invented and relocated – still excellent, though – but you can still go to Simpson’s in the Strand to eat; they will serve you, with impeccable courtesy, from a very similar menu to the one from which Jim Wicks chose so gravely all those years ago, ensconced in his usual stall in the first-floor dining room.

  Jim Wicks died, nine years a widower, on 10 December 1980 and until he fell ill with the cancer that would plague him for the last 18 months of his life, he and Henry would continue their traditional culinary progression around the West end. Towards the end, Henry asked him why on earth he had never written down his life history: ‘Well, son, it’s simple,’ the old man had wheezed, in his unique Bermondsey patois. ‘The bigger the truth, the bigger the libel suit.’

  And Wicks was entirely right. Jim Wicks had, through the course of his extraordinary life, seen changes in the sport of prizefighting which would have been unimaginable when he fought his one and only professional fight all those years before. Boxing had moved from being on the margins of the law to being respectable, to being immensely popular and, in the period when Henry fought, to becoming almost a national obsession.

  Wicks’s influence on this sport, mainly subliminal, it must be said, had been huge; he had, along the way, worked at every level of it, from fighter to promoter, manager and fixer. He had over his long career observed a great many sadnesses and glories, errors, tragedies and triumphs and he had paid Henry Cooper out with the full coin of those experiences. Henry is in no doubt that Wicks was, professionally, the best thing that ever happened to him; he still feels a profound sense of honour that by the time he retired he was the only boxer left in Wicks’ organization, such as it was by then; indeed that Wicks had gone on in the fight game longer than he had to purely to work with him.

  A cynic might say that Henry was actually the best thing to happen to Wicks, and it is hard to disagree, but in reality the relationship between these two men was a quite unique symbiosis, based upon a rare blend of mutual self-interest, but fully balanced by great affection. For Wicks, his approach to life was reflected by that plain statement that might well have served as his epitaph: ‘The game, son, must be played.’ For Henry, there was a more important aspect to the role that Wicks played in his life, as Albina related his own words to me: ‘He always told me, “All my life, I wanted to be somebody.”’

  Well, I am pleased to be able to report – he is.

  * With great irony, this same friend was later invited to join an insurance syndicate (when it became clear that after half a century of hard graft he was clearly worth a few bob). His response was logical, if somewhat brutal ‘Why the hell am I going to hand over my hard-earned cash to some twit with no O-levels? Bugger off.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ENDGAMES


  ‘Southpaws should all be strangled at birth.’

  SIR HENRY COOPER, K.S.G., O.B.E., (2002).

  Signor Rino Tomasi was an extremely successful promoter. Aged 35, ‘handsome and personable’, he was in many ways Italy’s equivalent of Harry Levene, apart from the fact, of course, that he was both handsome and personable. Tomasi was particularly proud of his favoured venue, the Palazzo dello Sport in Rome; of the 23 European title fights, whether challenges or eliminators, that he had staged there at all weights, no Italian fighter had actually lost any of them. It was a trend he was committed to continue. Naturally, he had help.

  The traditions of the Roman Colosseum were alive and well at the Palazzo; the place was virtually ruled by the heaving, braying mob of up to 18,000 Romans whose noise output was so intimidating that even the most determined of boxing referees could easily quail under its onslaught. The fact that so many of the Italian fighters who triumphed there would go on to humiliation at other more neutral venues was lost on no one. It was generally held that any Italian midget stood at least a chance of a title win in this place. It was a major asset to Italian boxing in a way that the Wembley Arena could never be.

  It was at this highly partisan location, on the eve of the Ides of March 1969, that Henry Cooper, buoyed by his New Year’s honours list OBE, was booked to defend his European title against the ‘Axeman of Manerbio’, Piero Tomasoni, a match to be refereed by Dutchman Ben Bril. This was to be a fight distinguished only by the minimalist elegance of the poster that announced it.

  An overgrown welterweight, Tomasoni was a rough and dangerous southpaw fighter with a useful right hand but little finesse. He came from farming stock near Brescia. He was not a boxer in the sense that Henry was -he was a scrapper. He had beaten an unlucky Jack Bodell in three rounds, in one of the most inelegant fights that anyone could remember, and gone the distance with Karl Mildenberger, even knocking him over in the process. He had only been stopped twice in 44 fights, in fact, but, as we have seen, that can be a mere statistic. His style, as a relatively short man, was to fight from a crouching position, throwing out hard, swinging right hands with no particular concern as to their destination. In short, he was a little less than classy.

  As a mildly concerned Donald Saunders, clearly familiar with the venue, pointed out: ‘Although Mr. Bril is the most experienced, accomplished and impartial of Continental referees, I think Cooper would be wise not to waste time in settling the issue.’

  Others agreed, including John Rodda, the boxing writer, who wrote two days before the fight:

  No one, not even the promoter…is putting this match forward as a classic. In fact, with a man of 6ft 2in who does almost all his fighting off the left flank against an opponent four inches shorter who relies on big swings, then all kinds of disasters could be imagined. But unravelling every possibility the strongest one is that after six or seven rounds, Italian courage, enthusiasm, perhaps even wildness will have been dampened by the Cooper left jab, and then the left hook should bring Cooper victory No. 38.

  The relative size of the fighters’ purses rather said it all; Henry was to receive £20,000, and Tomasoni £3,000. I remember watching the fight on television and being utterly appalled by it; it had the truly ghastly fascination of the road accident.

  Despite the intimidating atmosphere, Henry was calm, chatting to his little entourage. When the time came to go into the ring, he simply nodded, saying, ‘I got to go to work.’ He slipped in his gumshield (which he would not need in this fight) and climbed up into the spotlights.

  The Italian press were well aware that Henry was married to an Italian, and when she was interviewed by several of them at home, Albina broke her habit of not commenting on what her husband did for a living and trenchantly expressed her hope that Henry would ‘knock over Tomasoni in ten seconds’, which he nearly did, catching him with a near perfect left hook late in the first round. The ‘Axeman of Manerbio’ took a count of eight, and clearly needed it. Commenting shortly after the fight, Henry remarked very charitably: ‘…in fairness to him, he may not have known too much of what happened later.’

  The rest of the fight, only four more rounds, in fact (but I recall it seemed much longer), involved some of the most blatant fouls and rule infringements ever seen in the post-war ring at this level. The thuggish Tomasoni, squat, plodding, clearly outclassed and hunched like some grotesque Nibelung of mythology, launched a panicked flurry of the crudest body punches. Craftily waiting until Ben Bril was unsighted, he threw out a desperate right in the second round that caught Henry full in the balls; he collapsed in outraged agony and Bril blithely started the count, to the clearly audible delight of the crowd. Henry dragged himself to his feet at nine. It was only at the end of the third round that an enraged Jack Solomons, seated ringside, loudly pointed out to Bril what was going on. Bril promptly but nervously warned the Tomasoni corner during the break, to the clear disgust of the crowd. It is perhaps hard to believe it, but worse was to come.

  In round four, Henry let rip with a honking left, which dropped his opponent again, but not until he had grabbed Henry and pulled him down to the canvas with him. As they scrambled up, Tomasoni lashed out with another low blow. This was not boxing, it bordered more on sexual assault. As Henry said: ‘The fairground wasn’t in it!’ This time a justifiably nervous but finally alert Bril saw the foul blow and issued a formal warning to the local hero, which was when the oranges started to rain down…

  It was 9.15 in the evening and the crowd, aggressive and well lubricated, made their feelings quite clear. Fruit, paper cups, bread rolls, half-eaten salami – it all came cascading down into the ring, as Henry recalls: ‘I wasn’t so much worried by the food. I was just waiting for the backs of the seats to follow! In an arena like the Palazzo, with a balcony fifty feet up, they could knock you sparko. I was ready for a quick dive under the ring.’

  He had already seen a distressed Peter Wilson of the Daily Mirror clobbered by a badly aimed blood orange the size of a grapefruit and nearly KO’d by it. Henry already knew rather more than he had ever wanted to about fruit and vegetables; disgustedly, he stepped gingerly around the ring, his bruised undercarriage aching, and kicked the debris back out under the bottom ropes. Round five was coming up; it was time to finish this nonsense and put an end to Signor Tomasi’s proud record as a promoter as well as Tomasoni’s challenge hopes. Without a clean knockout it was quite conceivable that if the farce continued he might even end up with a points loss or, even worse, a cut, not that Tomasoni had seriously attempted to even hit him in the face, being apparently more concerned at assuring that the Cooper family would not get any larger.

  It didn’t take Henry long, in fact; early in the fifth, he used his usually quiescent right for a short, extremely pissed-off uppercut to the Axeman’s chin, which travelled, as I recall, a matter of four or five inches. This novelty punch, a complete surprise, set the dazed Tomasoni up for the ritual execution with the left. It was a mighty blow when it came. Henry hit him with every ounce of force he could muster and Tomasoni’s feet left the floor and he slumped, his arms around Henry, probably unaware even of his own name. As Henry disdainfully shrugged him off and made for a neutral corner (if the Palazzo possessed such a thing), Tomasoni collapsed. He briefly struggled up on all fours before slumping down again and a relieved Bril counted him out. ‘God, the so-and-so must have got my middle stump three or four times,’ says Henry. ‘It was a pleasure to see him drop.’

  Having now seen at least some humiliation, the crowd calmed down a little and a decent cheer went up for Henry. Even the most partisan of them swiftly calculated that this was not a total loss for at least the winner had an Italian wife, and anyway, two other British boxers, Vic Andreeti and Brian Cartwright, were beaten by Italians that night. Other spectators, it must be said, had probably been embarrassed and disgusted by Tomasoni’s tactics but they threw their assorted missiles just the same, in protest at his foul play. Of course, the effect on those below was indi
stinguishable.

  Bril, attempting to claw back some shred of objective dignity, later stated proudly: ‘Don’t worry, Henry, if you hadn’t got up in the fourth, I’d have disqualified him.’ Perhaps justifiably, Henry was (and remains) sceptical.

  Some of the press, ringside though they were, had been a little uncertain as to what they had seen of the foul punches. Wilson was probably still dazed but Neil Allen of The Times reported:

  As Cooper stood in the ring surrounded by photographers afterwards, I asked him how low the blows had been which had put him down…

  The European champion invited me to come to his dressing room and examine the protective cup which every boxer wears under his trunks. In the dressing room there was a horrified gasp as Cooper showed that a normally convex piece of sports equipment had become concave.

  So cross was Henry that, no doubt egged on by the reporters, he took the bold step of holding up this usually extremely private boxer’s appurtenance for the inspection of the television viewers back home in Blighty. I vividly recall that the sight of the still-steaming accessory certainly raised my grandmother’s eyebrows (indeed, possibly her pulse and temperature) very high indeed, as Henry brandished the faintly disturbing and clearly unfamiliar object in front of the fascinated cameras. Energized, he pointed to the clear and obvious damage, while announcing to Europe: ‘I don’t care what anybody says – that was bloody low.’ It was a seminal moment in television sporting history.