Bert Cooper

I still have my entire collection. Surprisingly the tapes still look great after all these years. I have probably close to 1,000 VHS tapes still, hell probably more I’ve never counted. I have a vcr hooked up to my 4K tv and yes compared to tv today they definitely don’t look HD. But I recorded all my fights on SP back in the day and have had them stored safely away inside a room in my house and they all still look great. Much better than the quality of the fights on YouTube, most of those don’t look like first generation recordings. I think having recorded them on SP and having kept them stored away, in those huge plastic sealed containers (they are almost like huge Tupperware, my wife bought me like 20 of those years ago each holds a huge supply of tapes) Storing them properly is huge. I used to hear that same thing “they’ll never last” but like I said some of those recordings are almost 40 years old at this point and they still look great. Prior to that I had them in movie cabinets before vhs became obsolete. I’ll never Part with them. I’m a physical media guy though. I’ve got well over 1,000 DVD’s and Blu-ray’s and now 4K discs. I have all the streaming stuff but I love having physical copies of everything. Even those old fights. I just pulled the tape out the other night of Bowe - Golota 1 and it was still beautiful. But I’ve always been an obsessive neat freak. Tapes always stayed in cases and then packed back safely away. It really does make a difference I see people looking for fights on here all the time that I have but I’ve never once transferred any of my fights over so I’d be of no help to them.

A Fun Cooper fight is his 1 round thrashing of Richie Melito. Richie was unbeaten and from Queens NY and the crowd was packed with his fans, the fight was in NY. Richie learned that night that “The Smoke ain't no joke” as Cooper liked to say. It was a classic Tuesday Night Fights fight.

Cooper is easily one of my all-time favorite warriors from the fight game. I grew up loving the guy always rooting for him. The fights with Mercer, Moorer and Holyfield are all classics. He like Mercer always wanted a fight with Tyson sadly we never got either.

 

The best Bert Cooper fight IMHO is the "war" he had with that bare knuckle con man Joe Savage. No matter how many times you see it, it just never gets old.

 

I remember reading an article about that guy, “Joe Savage” (prior to the Cooper thrashing) back in the day and he was calling out all these top level heavyweights from the era. He was supposed to be in that “One night Heavyweight tournament thing” back then that Cooper, Biggs, Bonecrusher Tubbs and many others were in. Tubbs ended up schooling everyone in those 3 rounders. I think the final was him and Daniel Dancuta. Anyway had Savage been in that he’d of obviously been exposed even sooner. Cooper literally flattened that dude, good stuff!!!

 

It was, unbelievable, I think either man would have rather died than given in.

 

you should see if you can get some of those fights up on YouTube if they’re not already there for us to see.

 

Thats the guy I was on about .well worth a look. Apparently at that one night HW thing he saw Bonecrusher Smith sparing with Tubbs promptly fainted !!!!! He then went home .

 

You absolutely remember this correctly.

But before we learned from the Cooper debacle that he was an uncoordinated tavern clown that looked like he'd never thrown a punch in anger his whole life, he was running around in the British press yammering about fighting both Lewis and Tyson in the same night and how he was this unstoppable fighting force not seen since the gladiator days. Comical that he believed his own fantasies to climb in the ring for peanuts with Cooper.