Rang Tang Ding Dong Rankie Sankie
Over the years, I’ve talked to a lot of people who got hit by Bert Cooper. Inventive standards had to be devised to measure what had happened to them, because being hit by Bert Cooper didn’t hurt any more than being hit head-on by a runaway bus. Are you in pain once your entirety has short-circuited?
Tyrone Booze: “Smokin’ Bert Cooper, when he hit you, you didn’t feel no pain. You was in the Twilight Zone. It’s been over twenty years, and I still wake up screamin’ from nightmares where I’m fightin’ Bert Cooper.”
Eddie Mustafa Muhammad—-who never actually fought Cooper officially, but sparred with him: “You ever see The Exorcist? When Bert Cooper hit you, it was like what happened to that girl in The Exorcist—your head would spin clean around.”
Mitch “Blood” Green—loathe to praise anyone but himself—on the phone, handing it to me: “It Bert Cooper. You know Bert Cooper, right? That boy can hit. Like one of them carnival rides. Bert Cooper a man. He punch a lot harder than Michelle Cicely Tyson.”
Every time I called down to check on him in Miami, where he was happily dissipating in the hot sun, Bert was fucked up—either drunk or high on coke or pills. Every time.
He’d also been tagged in the head for a couple of decades. Once you were around Bert, it became clear that, for all the damage he’d inflicted, a lot more damage had been done to him in return. Maybe nobody punched as hard as Bert, but Tony Fulilangi, Nate Miller, George Foreman, Orlin Norris, Ray Mercer, Riddick Bowe, Joe Hipp, Evander Holyfield, Michael Moorer, Mike Weaver, Corrie Sanders, Samson Po’uha, and Luis Ortiz all punched plenty hard. It added up to a boatload of big punchers hitting him in the head. And, for the most part, when not told to go home early, Bert went rounds, compounding his predicament. And let’s not talk about sparring.
All these things—the booze, the drugs, and the punches to the head—combined to make him dreamy and slurry, giggly and forgetful. He was a likeable guy. Even the fighters knocked out cold by him would agree with that. And he knew the game, which meant that you could reason with him.
I was staying in touch because Bert was on my radar as an opponent for a guy I was looking out for. I was waiting for the right time and place to use him, periodically testing the waters. There was laundered money and the wrong kind of juice behind the people I was handholding through the boxing business, so I had to be careful.
If you know what you’re looking for, BoxRec is a good—if only partial—road map. Embedded in its dry statistics there is a complex tapestry of subtext. Everything tells you something. Names pop up again and again as reliable record-building certainties; towns with poetic names—Ashtabula, Houma, Fond du Lac, Fort Smith —are lyrical “Losers Live Here” advertisements; footnotes attached to results—“fight stopped in corner” . . . “down three times in round 1” . . . “disqualified after repeated warnings”—pinpoint the precise nature of dives.
Bert had taken a dive against George Foreman. Probably against Corrie Sanders. Possibly against Jeremy Williams. When he needed fast cash, he took dives in other fights, but was unreliable when doing it. On at least a couple of occasions, he’d agreed to lose fights, but the fixes had been discovered before the events were to take place. Bert panicked and wound up with a couple wins that weren’t supposed to be wins. He was lucky to still be alive after mistakes of that kind.
In one such fight, a middle-aged fraud from England with the telltale name Joe Savage, who somehow got it into his head that his forty-one mostly imaginary first-round nonsanctioned bare-knuckle knockout wins against forty-one mostly nonimaginary civilians would prepare him to step into the real world of boxing with one of its hardest-ever punchers, wound up lasting just over one scorched-earth minute.
Cooper’s first direct connect turned Savage from an overconfident bully into a fat, bald, pompous British banker stumbling stiff-leggedly while trying to catch a bus in the rain as his outsized umbrella turned inside-out.
Before he knew it, Savage was on the ground, uncomprehending, his wide, terrified eyes imploringly fixed on a visibly alarmed referee, who was probably wondering if he’d just allowed a man under his protection to be killed.
When you’re fixing fights to set up someone’s career, you strategize, concatenating the wins in a way that systematically increases your fighter’s credibility. The first ten or twelve are handled off the radar to quickly build an undefeated record before anyone starts watching over your shoulder. You can use opponents right off the street, fresh out of prison, or go with some muscled-up guy working construction. They can be 0-0. They can be 0-10. No commission will stop you. You scamper to put those wins in the till as fast as you can so that you can get to the money sooner.
You don’t waste a knockout over someone like Bert Cooper. You want to make sure that people see that win. You don’t use him merely as a BoxRec statistic.
“Rang Tang Ding Dong Rankie Sankie” is excerpted from The Legend of Mitch “Blood” Green and Other Boxing Essays. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Hamilcar Publications.
Charles Farrell has spent his professional life moving between music and boxing, with occasional detours. He has managed five world champions, and has played and recorded with many of the musicians he most admires—Evan Parker and Ornette Coleman among them. His first book, (Low)life: A Memoir of Jazz, FIght-Fixing, and the Mob, was published by Hamilcar in 2021. Farrell lives outside of Boston.
