I knew he lost a controversial decision in his final fight to Joe Bugner. A look on boxrec shows the verdict as the referee Harry Gibbs scoring the fight 73½-73¾ Sorry for hijacking the thread, but out of curiosity how was boxing scored back then? It was a few years before I was born.
I think it was "5-point must". The winner of a round received 5 points. The loser generally received 4 3/4, maybe only 4 1/2.
Fast one? don’t believe it, all that nonsense has been debunked over and over again. Coop was a decent Euro level boxer and won 3 Lonsdale belts, when that was in the BBB of C rules, that’s it. “Great” only applies to Robinson, Armstrong, Louis, Ali and their ilk.
Once again, this fantasy has been debunked many times eg : Boxing News did a feature on it several years ago. No extra time, check the audio, gloves not changed, see padding flying out as Clay carved him up in predicted round. Just a myth, move on.
Cooper's problem was how easy he cut. Certainly he had a great style to beat Clay/Ali , he landed on him plenty in both fights and was never wobbled or decked himself by Ali ...... but Ali was a cutting puncher and Cooper was a bleeder. And that was that.
It was scored back then, it varied from state to state. I believe in the UK, the referee was the sole vote, meaning, there were no three judges at ringside, they used a point system.
Henry Cooper was a man with class, enjoyed his boxing matches, he was a credit to the sport and his country. But as a previous poster mentioned, he gave Muhammad Ali two good fights, I saw the second fight on May 21 1966, live on ABC's Wide World Of Sports. Henry Cooper gave a good account of himself on that Saturday afternoon. Ali was clearly watching out for that left hook, but as was said, Ali was a cutting type of fighter. Ali opened a cut over Cooper's eye in round 6, after landing punches, the referee stopped it, I remember Henry swayed his arms in disgust at the stoppage. Henry was always brave in battle.
Henry was aggressive and had bags of courage. He liked to fight and never squealed when he had to take it. As a turned around southpaw he had a superb jab and his left hook was a thing of beauty. I would go as far as saying only Joe Louis, among the Heavyweights, threw such a technically perfect hook. Set against that, his right hand was negligible, his footwork was slow for a small Heavyweight and he could be very one paced. Defeats against Zora Folley, Floyd Patterson, Ingemar Johansson and Joe Bygraves, among others mean he really can't be described as great but he was great to watch and throughout his life was a tremendous ambassador for our sport.
