Channel Hopper: Pain of 1971 still binds Bugner and Cooper

Published on Saturday 26 April 2008 02:22

Henry Cooper v Joe Bugner Inside Sport, BBC1, Monday

EVEN the most rancorous disputes tend to fade with the passing of time. Certainly, when both parties are no longer involved in the same business, they are usually able to give up on their old grievances and move on.

But Sir Henry Cooper and Joe Bugner are different. They may have retired from the ring – I say 'may' because you never know when Joe is about to launch yet another comeback – but they both still feel the pain from their bout in 1971. Whatever they have done since, they still regard themselves primarily as boxers, and for different reasons that fight blighted their self-image.

Cooper was an icon of working-class conservatism, English through and through. By the early 1970s he was, like the long-running TV series Dixon of Dock Green, a symbol of simpler, more secure times, when all it took to set the world to rights was a good old-fashioned clip round the ear from copper or boxer.

Jack Warner, the actor who played Dixon, was pushing 80 when he finally hung up his helmet, and Cooper, although less than half that age, had also seen better days. Bugner, on the other hand, had turned 21 only days before the fight at Wembley, and was clearly the coming man of British boxing.

But for some, shall we say 'traditional' types, Bugner was not accepted as British at all. Born in Hungary, he had fled to the UK with his family after the Soviet invasion of his homeland in 1956. He assimilated quickly, but from the start a section of the boxing audience, reporters and spectators alike, felt hostile towards him. As Bugner recalled in last Monday's Inside Sport, when he and Cooper were interviewed together by Steve Bunce, it was the result of that famous fight which hardened that hostility into implacable hatred. In a 15-round fight scored only by Harry Gibbs, the referee, Bugner won by quarter of a point to strip Cooper of his British, Commonwealth and European heavyweight titles.

Asked by Bunce what he would have done when offered the fight if he had known of the furore that would follow, Bugner wasted little time in replying. "I would have said no," he stated. "They chased me out of my beautiful country, England. Why? Because I beat a legend."

Two weeks before the fight Cooper had announced that he would retire after it. He wanted to do so as the holder of those three titles, and when he failed he was far from being the only one who felt frustrated by Bugner's departure from the script. The BBC commentator Harry Carpenter asked how they could "take away the man's titles like this", and from that day forward Bugner was regarded by some as a traitor.

"I still think I won the fight by half a point," said Cooper. "I knew it wasn't one of my best performances, but I still thought I'd just nicked it."

That was exactly what he thought – and told the referee – at the end of the fight, but Gibbs was having none of it. "Champions don't nick fights," he is supposed to have replied. It was the last exchange of words between the two for years, as Cooper simply refused to speak to the official until shortly before the latter's death.

"There was genuine animosity that night", Bugner recalled, and from the evidence of the Inside Sport interview, in which the pair perched at opposite ends of a sizeable couch, a certain amount of suspicion at least remains between them. Reunions between former foes are virtually guaranteed to be interesting as you wait to see how they will greet each other, and the programme worked in that sense, but in another it did no more than scrape the surface.

While Cooper's career ended that evening and he has since inhabited the celebrity afterlife, Bugner went on to do so many different things well worthy of a far longer examination, most of them after heading Down Under. ("I live in Australia where they don't have class distinctions," he explained. "They're just ordinary convicts made good.")

Bugner fought on, barring a few temporary retirements, for almost three decades after the Cooper fight. He and his wife also opened a wine business, which failed, and he returned for a time to his first sporting love, the discus, in which he had been a schools champion back in England. But whatever he does, in whichever field, Bugner will surely remain a British antihero, the man who beat Our 'Enery in his final fight.