Sir Henry Cooper(1934–2011)

Henry Cooper was born at 4 Marsden Square in Lambeth, south London, on the third of May 1934, twin elder son of Henry Cooper, a Lambeth plasterer, and Lily Cooper. He was raised at Bellingham in south-east London in the working-class Bellingham Estate, was schooled at the Bellingham Secondary Modern School, and was apprenticed at fifteen to a Lambeth plasterer. He took up amateur boxing at fourteen on the strength of his elder cousin Eddie Buckle's encouragement (Buckle was a professional boxer), boxed at the Bellingham Amateur Boxing Club, was selected at sixteen for the Combined Services boxing team during his National Service in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps 1952 to 1954, and took the senior ABA heavyweight title in 1952 and 1953.

He turned professional in September 1954 in his twentieth year under the management of Jim Wicks. He won his first British heavyweight title against Brian London at Earls Court in January 1959, took the British and Empire heavyweight titles together against Joe Erskine in November 1959, and held both continuously for the next twelve years to his retirement in 1971. He won the Lonsdale Belt outright three times (the only British heavyweight to do so), the unique achievement that put his name at the centre of the modern British amateur-and-professional boxing tradition.

His central single career moment came on the eighteenth of June 1963 at the Empire Pool, Wembley, in his first fight against the twenty-one-year-old world heavyweight contender Cassius Clay (the boxer who two months later would change his name to Muhammad Ali). The fight was a non-title contest scheduled over ten rounds. Through the first three rounds Clay danced and out-pointed Cooper in the conventional Clay style. In the closing seconds of the fourth round, with Clay backed against the ropes in his own corner, Cooper threw the famous left hook that connected on Clay's jaw and put him on his back across the bottom rope. Clay's corner held a glove over his eyes and called the doctor; Clay rose at the count of four and was saved by the bell at the closing of the round. In the corner between rounds, Clay's trainer Angelo Dundee deliberately ripped Clay's right glove (the foundational corner-controversy of the fight) to win an extra ninety seconds of recovery time while the replacement glove was brought from the dressing-room. Clay returned in the fifth round, opened a deep cut over Cooper's left eye that streamed blood, and the referee Tommy Little stopped the fight in the fifth round. The Wembley fight is by every modern measure the central single non-title fight of post-war British boxing.

He fought Clay (then Muhammad Ali) again for the world heavyweight title at Highbury Stadium, Arsenal Football Club, on the twenty-first of May 1966; Ali won by technical knockout in the sixth round on a recurrence of the left-eye cut. Cooper continued at the top of British heavyweight boxing for the next five years; he was European heavyweight champion three times (1964, 1968, 1970), British heavyweight champion for twelve consecutive years, lost his British title to Joe Bugner on a controversial points decision at Wembley on the sixteenth of March 1971, and retired immediately after the fight at thirty-six.

He was awarded the OBE in 1969, was made a Knight of St Gregory (KSG) by Pope John Paul II in 1978 (the first English boxer ever to receive a papal knighthood, on the strength of his work for Catholic charities), was knighted in the 2000 New Year Honours List, and was the BBC Sports Personality of the Year three times (1967, 1970, 1971), the only three-time winner of the award until Sir Andy Murray equalled the record in 2016. He served on the Sports Aid Foundation, the Variety Club of Great Britain, and the British Boxing Board of Control, and held the long-running television advertising campaign for the Brut aftershave from 1972 to 1990 (the famous splash-it-all-over campaign that made him one of the most-recognised single voices in British advertising of the period). He died at his Oxshott home on the first of May 2011 in his seventy-seventh year. The Cooper name in modern English sport carries the weight of the Wembley left hook of the eighteenth of June 1963.