Henry Cooper (13 page)

For Joe Erskine was on the card that night, too. He was fighting Bruno Scarabellin, a 30-year-old (and extremely game) pork butcher from Venice and, while Erskine outpointed the hugely tough Italian fairly comprehensively, he did not dispatch him with the finesse that the Welsh audience quite expected. Erskine therefore also witnessed the quite pitiless attack that Henry had unleashed on the hapless Gawie de Klerk. Perhaps that was unwise of him; Erskine was challenging Henry for the British and Empire titles on 17 November. While he may well have dominated Henry in the two professional bouts they had fought before, he could surely see that while this was clearly the same man he was also by now a radically different opponent. Something had changed.

Henry’s third encounter with Joe Erskine would provide one of the British sport’s most enduring images, that of a completely unconscious Erskine spread across the bottom
rope, dead to the world. The fight, at Earl’s Court, was to be controversial, in fact, but not immediately for that reason.

Despite the aggression and maturity that Henry had shown four times in a row, there was still a measure of uncertainty on the part of the pundits as to whether this was merely a ‘good run’ or something more than that. Was this a re-invented and remotivated Cooper who could now be taken seriously as a world-class fighter? Ever pessimistic, Donald Saunders of the
Daily Telegraph
had his doubts. In an unusually convoluted piece on the morning of the fight he wrote:

Saunders would see for himself later that evening the degree to which Henry’s aggression, quite counter to his nature, had asserted itself.

Henry started as he meant to go on. In round one, when Erskine slipped, Henry caught him with a mighty left, which dropped him to the canvas. When he got up, Henry simply hit him again. Erskine was able to respond with a few overarm rights, one of which opened a cut at the side of
Henry’s left eye. It was an eventful first round, and Danny Holland produced the Vaseline/adrenalin rather earlier than he would have liked.

Erskine, technically one of the best boxers the British ring had ever produced, closed in for round two, negating Henry’s slightly longer reach, but some of the best punches travel mere inches, and a hard hook to the body had the Welshman in trouble again at the end of round two. One spectator commented: ‘Henry Cooper won this fight in the first round.’

And he may well have done, but there were, in fact, many more to go. At the end of round five Henry clobbered Erskine a ‘split second’ after the bell after the challenger dropped his guard. It was a perfect but quite undefended right. It was indeed a blatant foul and there were predictable and justified howls of protest from Erskine’s corner. Benny Jacobs, by now reinstated – reluctantly – by Erskine as his manager, leaped into the ring and berated first Wicks and then referee Eugene Henderson. Henderson calmly ordered Jacobs out while Erskine’s corner men worked frantically to revive their dazed prospect. At the start of the sixth Henderson cautioned both fighters, but particularly Henry. He may well have been too surprised to issue a formal warning. Henderson had witnessed (very close up indeed) the damage that Henry had inflicted on de Klerk, but sneak punches had played no role in that.

Erskine continued gamely but it was clear that he was fighting by ‘courage and instinct only, as one report had it. The end came in the twelfth round. Henry dropped his hapless foe for two counts of seven before lashing out with a blinding combination left/right to the jaw that propelled
poor Erskine clean off his feet and left him draped inelegantly over the bottom rope, totally out cold. There were only five seconds to go and Henderson, who, as we have already seen, was not a referee to stop a fight unless he absolutely had to, declared the contest over, which it certainly was. It had been a brutal experience for Erskine, a real heartbreaker; truly, this was not the same Henry Cooper to whom he had given those boxing lessons before. ‘We were really worried,’ says Henry. ‘We were convinced that Joe had broken his back.’

Even with this totally authoritative (if perhaps slightly grubby) display, which involved Henry giving perhaps the finest technician in the sport the worst thrashing he ever received, the praise was faint. ‘…I cannot see Cooper ever taking that crown off Ingemar Johansson, who has already beaten him in five rounds,’ said Harry Carpenter. ‘Cooper can be hit too easily ever to stand a chance with a really heavy puncher.’

Which rather begs the question: what on earth does a man have to do in order to be taken seriously? In fact, Henry would be denied again a chance at the world title, a match to which he had every right since his win over Folley, for in June 1960 Floyd Patterson, driven by the humiliation of losing his title to Johansson a year before, knocked the giant Swede out. In five rounds.

With the recovery of Patterson’s crown (a unique event at the time) the US heavyweight division promptly deteriorated into an unseemly farce; Cus d’Amato, Patterson’s manager, knew full well that the only challenger who had, by right of conquest, an entitlement to fight for the title was Sonny Liston, who had shot up the rankings to undisputed number
one contender with dizzying speed by stopping Nino Valdes, Zora Folley and Eddie Machen, who were all themselves fighters whom d’Amato had refused. D’Amato was no less protective of his boy than Jim Wicks was of Henry. Clearly, Sonny Liston was not going to go away unless somebody shot him (a thing which more than one policeman would have been happy to do had anyone asked them nicely) and so a ridiculous logjam built up – everybody wanted a crack at Patterson, nobody wanted a crack at Liston, but Liston’s brooding presence, coupled with Patterson’s (or d’Amato’s) clear reluctance to engage with any of the top five (apart from Johansson, whom he was to beat again in 1961) meant that the world title as defined by the World Boxing Council (WBC) was quite literally inaccessible. It was to stay in virtual cold storage until Liston finally got his chance in September 1962, proving that Patterson and d’Amato had been entirely right to avoid him – he totally flattened Patterson in a terrifying display of barely controlled aggression – in just 126 seconds. The bad boy, who had announced before this fight that he would like to ‘run Patterson over with a truck’, had arrived on the world stage.

For Henry Cooper, though, these dramas were all in the future as he reflected upon his remarkable transformation. He had won five bouts in succession, including the one against the US number one contender (as Folley had been then) and he had even beaten his nemesis Erskine, but he was still not, as we have seen, quite yet the darling of the press. The pundits were not yet believers, indeed many never would be. However, he had other objectives to fulfil as the 1950s gave way to a new decade – for Henry Cooper, British and Empire heavyweight champion, was engaged to be married.

I
n their stately peregrinations around London’s better restaurants, Henry and Jim Wicks had settled into a comfortable routine. Monday usually saw them at Simpson’s in the Strand and Friday usually saw them at Sheekey’s, the famous fish restaurant off the Charing Cross Road quite near Jack Solomons’ Soho office. In between, there were rich pickings to be had in a bewildering variety of places; lunch with Solomons, a decreasingly frequent event as he surrendered his turf to Levene, would invariably be at Jack Isow’s, the kosher restaurant in Brewer Street. Then, of course, there were the Italian bistros.

Henry had been casting an appreciative eye over the new waitress at Peter Mario’s, a restaurant in Gerrard Street, for some time before he finally summoned up the courage to ask 
her out. She was the niece of Maria, the wife of the owner, Peter Rizzi, and her name was Albina Genepri. She had in fact been in living London since 1948. Forty-five years on, she recalled to me their disastrous first date:

After this rather unpromising start, Henry tried again and this time managed to be taken seriously. Gradually an understanding simply emerged that they would marry and they drifted towards an engagement. There was the matter or Henry’s religion to be considered, as he was technically Church of England, but he had no issues with Catholic doctrine, in which he was instructed prior to the wedding, and nor did his parents.

The pair married in January 1960, honeymooning on the Italian Riviera. On their return they stayed with Albinas family and went looking for a house, which they found through the classifieds of the
Evening Standard
. It was in Ledway Drive, Wembley, far removed from the tribal lands south of the river. 

Despite marriage, Henry and his twin brother were still quite inseparable, and so George came too. Henry and George both worked hard on the house, and Albina, schooled as she was in the traditions of the rural Italian family, saw nothing out of the ordinary in sharing her new house with a brother-in-law. The idea of George staying in Farmstead Road on his own seemed absurd.

With the departure of the twins, Farmstead Road was depressingly empty for Lily and her husband. As soon as his earnings from boxing had permitted it, Henry had insisted that his father retire. ‘Well, he was only making
£
11 a week,’ says Henry, ‘so I told him to give it up, that I would pay him
£
10 a week to stop working.’

He also bought his parents a small tobacconist and dry goods busi ness; it was in Hounslow, unfortunately near the Heathrow airport flight path and very noisy. Already under pressure from the burgeoning supermarkets nearby, it did not particularly prosper. In fact, Henry’s parents were to find it quite difficult to settle; although there was never any ill feeling about the role that Jim Wicks was playing in their son’s life, it is hard to avoid the impression that they felt rather rudderless.

Albina was to discover in August 1960 that despite the deceptively routine nature of Henry’s daily commute down to the
Thomas à Becket
, the five-week isolation required to prepare for a fight meant that her only communication with him would be on the telephone. In one sense it was no different from a husband being on a business trip (although she was all too aware what the business was to be) but it was made harder by the fact that more often than not he 
was in some London suburb other than Wembley, merely a few miles away, but on a different planet. With the arrival of children, this would become even more difficult.

Meanwhile, Henry was engaged to fight Roy Harris in September 1960. Harris, from the quaintly named town of Cut & Shoot, Texas, was the state champion and appeared to be a good yardstick; he had actually knocked down Floyd Patterson in an August 1958 title fight, although the bout had been stopped in the twelfth in Patterson’s favour. The encounter should prove interesting.

It wasn’t, particularly. The message, that Henry’s left hook was a thing best avoided (‘just let them feel the wind of its passing, son’) had clearly come through and Harris was wisely reluctant to put himself in harm’s way. After a clash of heads, an event in which Henry invariably came second with a cut eyebrow, he took the fight to Harris, but only put him down for the first time in round eight, for a count of six, after which it became something of a slugging match. Harris proved to be durable, in fact, but referee Jack Hart gave Henry the clear decision after the ten rounds were over.

The fight that had been called off in October 1958, between Henry and Argentinean Alex Miteff, the cancellation of which event had produced the Folley encounter, was now back on for 6 December 1960 at Wembley. Originally, Henry had been scheduled to fight Joe Erskine but that fight was now delayed until March of 1961.

Henry knew full well, having researched him in preparation for the postponed fight, that Miteff, having been schooled in the American ring, was likely to be 
something of a handful, and so he was wary. He spent nine rounds simply picking up points with his left jab and seemed comfortably ahead when in the tenth and final he made the mistake of trying to mix it with his aggressive opponent, as he recalls:

The prospect now loomed of keeping forever the Lonsdale belt that he had won by beating Brian London in 1959. The belt was a rather special one; it had originally been made for Tommy Farr and, while most Lonsdale belts were silver, this one was of gold. To keep it he had to beat the game Joe Erskine, who was challenging for the British and Empire titles at Wembley on 21 March. It would be the fourth time the two men had met in the professional ring and, although Henry’s previous dramatic defeat of him had rather served to break the psychological hold that Erskine had exercised, he was always to be a tricky opponent. Jim Wicks had been so bold as to predict: ‘Erskine would be lucky to last five rounds with Henry.’

In the event, Henry started as he meant to go on, by stamping his total authority on the fight. It was obvious that Erskine’s eyes were now a weakness and Henry concentrated on them, alternating with hooks to the body. It was clear that Wicks was right; the fight was really very
one-sided
indeed and after Erskine came out for round five with one eye almost closed and a large cut on his forehead, never mind what looked like a broken nose, Henry barely had the heart to carry on. He switched his attention to body blows, and it was inevitable that this was really a fight that should be stopped. At the end of the fifth, it was, as Erskine’s manager retired him.

While that first Lonsdale belt was a pleasing thing to own and a significant rite of passage for Henry, there was frustration at the Games being played in America. Two weeks before that Erskine fight, Floyd Patterson had knocked out Johansson for the second time in a year and showed no sign of accepting a fight with anyone who stood the vaguest chance of beating him. The serious risk now was that Henry might miss out if Patterson’s pride compelled him to accept Liston, for Henry knew that Wicks would not sanction a fight, whatever the prize, with the ‘mahogany wardrobe’, as there was little doubt that Liston would win.

Wicks, as frustrated as Henry at the sheer inaccessibility of Patterson, suggested a rematch with the ever-ready Zora Folley, which, with the advantage of hindsight, was not to be one of his better ideas, and one that many observers found frankly perverse.

Since Henry had comprehensively wrecked Zora Folley’s chances at the world title in October 1958, the Arizonan had fought 16 times against Henry’s six. One of Folley’s bouts had been against the strong heavyweight contender Eddie Machen; Folley had beaten him. Another had been against Liston and he had been KO’d in three. The rate of work put in by Folley since October 1958 had been prodigious and 
had led some observers, Jim Wicks included, to conclude that he was ‘boxed out’.

Henry’s preparation for his second fight with Zora Folley was, as he readily admits now, less than perfect. Folley had slumped in the rankings to seventh, as a result of his defeat by Henry three years before but he had held onto his recognition by dint of simple hard work. He was now ranked number six but there was still turmoil in the upper reaches of the heavyweight division, caused by Floyd Patterson’s clear reluctance to fight Liston; in fact, on the same day as the Cooper/Folley rematch, he was busying himself with a little light exercise ‘burying a body’, Tom McNeeley. A straw in the wind for Patterson was that McNeeley, a relative novice, dropped Patterson twice. Henry was himself ranked three, his best ever rating. If he beat Folley there was a good chance of leapfrogging over Liston for a serious crack at Patterson.

The situation was neatly and elegantly summed up by Robert Daley of the
New York Times
, ever perceptive in matters fistic:

Experienced British Cooper observers were fussed about the match, several wondering why Henry was fighting Folley again at all.
The Times
declared:

So it was clearly perceived as a very high-risk strategy indeed. Henry had little to gain and much to lose and, despite the fact that he was 5:2 at the bookies, Donald Saunders, although generally optimistic, shared the overall concern:

That last remark proved to be very premature indeed, as matters unfolded.

There was a further issue, unremarked on at the time, which would count heavily against Henry, that of training. As Johansson had remarked that very year when his memoirs were published, ‘Henry Cooper is too nice to be a boxer.’ The surest way of overcoming this aggression deficit is the monkish routine of the training camp, and this was not a ritual to which Henry looked forward at all, particularly as a newly married man and proud father of a one-year old. The farmers’ hours required – rise at 4 a.m., bed at 9 p.m. – had never particularly suited him at the best of times, and certainly not in November, so he made the error of training ‘at home’. For a man with a nature like Henry’s, this was to prove a virtually impossible task.

So on 5 December 1961 Henry was cheered into the ring at Wembley Pool by his apparently loyal fans. Due to the nervousness in the informed press (the tabloids were predictably jingoistic), his odds had narrowed slightly to 7:4. Five minutes and eights seconds later, all the misgivings 
expressed by the more informed commentators proved to be sadly correct.

Initially, after a fairly uninspiring first round, there had been a murmur of unease at the sight of Henry’s cut forehead and grazed eyebrow after a clash of heads, but the damage was contained swiftly by Danny Holland during the break. Henry seemed tense to some observers, whereas Folley moved with a smooth assurance; he was obviously immensely fit, as a man who had fought 16 times since the pair had previously met should be, but there was no hint of what was to come as the two fighters squared up for the second round. A minute into it, after exchanging a series of inconclusive left jabs with Henry, Folley let rip with an unorthodox, sweeping right that was almost a hook. It connected between Henry’s jaw and ear and simply dropped him like an empty suit. One report read: