Henry Cooper, Oh Lucky Man

At 72, Henry Cooper remains one of the most popular sports personalities in Great Britain, his diary full, constantly in demand for speaking engagements and personal appearances. “I’m as busy as I’ve ever been,” said the former British heavyweight champion.

Cooper’s popularity dates back 43 years shortly after Cassius Clay gained a ten-round decision against former light-heavyweight contender Doug Jones at Madison Square Garden.

The victory moved Clay into the No. 2 position, behind Floyd Patterson, and while he waited for Sonny Liston to dispose of Patterson in their rematch, Clay’s associates looked around for another, preferably rated, opponent whose defeat could ensure that he took over the No, 1 slot. They settled on the British champion Cooper as the man most likely to provide him with a win with the minimum risk or inconvenience.

Cooper, a likeable, modest fighter, was unfortunately somewhat fragile, weighing around 188 lbs. and prone to cuts. He had been knocked out by Joe Bygraves, Ingemar Johansson and Zora Folley, and stopped on cuts by Uber Bacilieri and Peter Bates. He had won a Lonsdale Belt (given to British champions) outright, but his overall record was an unimpressive 27 wins and a draw in 36 fights.

Clay’s showmanship drew a crowd of around 30,000 to Wembley Stadium in north London to see whether the brash 21-year-old could fulfil his prediction :

LondonBridgeis falling down

And so will Cooper in London Town

For three-and-three-quarter rounds the fight went according to Clay’s script. Cooper pressed, even drawing blood from Clay’s nose in the first round, but generally played straight man to the clowning Clay. In his book The Illustrated History of Boxing, the late Harry Mullan wrote: ‘It seemed almost as if Clay was holding him up so as not to spoil the prediction, which stipulated a fifth-round finish. The cut-prone Englishman was already leaking from several injuries around the eyes. But then, in the dying moments of the fourth, Clay got careless. Cooper backed him into the ropes, Clay’s arms hanging loosely by his sides in the style that had rewritten boxing’s textbooks. Cooper stepped in with a perfect left hook and the American crashed to the floor, his right arm hooked over the middle strand of the ropes.’

Clay regained his feet, unsteadily, at four, but the bell rang before Cooper could follow up the advantage. A split had opened in Clay’s left glove during the third round and Angelo Dundee summoned referee Tommy Little to the corner to inspect the damage.

The suspicion that the glove had been tampered with has never been proved but in any case it provided Clay with only a few extra seconds in which to recover. His head clear, Clay went for Cooper. Seventy five seconds later, his slashing blows had brought blood spraying from four different cuts around Cooper’s left eye, and forced the referee to stop the contest. It was the closest Clay came to defeat for eight years and that single powerful hook transformed Cooper’s career making him a national hero.

By the time they met again three years later, Muhammad Ali, as Clay had become, cut Cooper to defeat in six rounds of an anti-climactic rematch at Highbury, the Arsenal football ground in London.

Cooper let no one down, least of all himself. He fought to the limit of his powers and for three or four rounds the world champion was perceptibly worried by the determination of his opponent’s attacks.

Bloody defeat did nothing to undermine Cooper’s popularity. Forty years on he remains in demand as a speaker at corporate functions and a competitor at celebrity golf matches. Two weeks ago he was fitted with a pacemaker but does not expect it to interfere seriously with his activities. “I’ve been lucky,” he said this week. “After all these years I’m not forgotten. It saddens me to see the way Ali is now because he was such a great fighter. I’ve got my contests with him to thank for my way of life and he always treated me like a gentleman.”