Sonia Gandhi’s memoir: The 1966 fight between Muhammad Ali and Henry Cooper, which the former Congress president remembers from her Cambridge days

When Ali beat Cooper in a ‘moral victory’ NEW DELHI: Sonia and the 60s is also the story of a young girl caught up in the wave of civil rights sweeping across the globe.In her memoir, “Belonging,” citing Martin Luther King, the “free speech movement” at Berkeley and student movements in Europe as influences on her generation, the congressional matriarch made a fleeting but striking reference to an indelible episode in the timeless story of boxing great Muhammad Ali. This was one of the “memorable moments” in Cambridge after Sonia met Rajiv Gandhi. One evening in May 1966, Sonia and friends gathered at a friend’s place glued to the radio to listen to “a boxing match between Ali and the British boxer Henry Cooper”.He adds, “when Clay beat Cooper in the sixth round of the fight, we roared in triumph. It was not only a sporting victory for us, but a moral one. We were roused by Martin Luther King Jr.’s massive demonstration in Washington and his ‘I have a dream’ speech.”It was a momentous evening – not only for the prizefight – but also for the time it represented. Two years ago, Ali became not only the heavyweight champion of the world, earning a reputation as a buffoon, but also as a fiery rebel and a political lightning rod who shook the white establishment of Jim Crow America with his assertion of black pride.A rebellion that would lead him to oppose conscription for the Vietnam War with that stinging barb – “I have no quarrel with ’em VietCong”. This led to his exile from boxing, before his return four years later shook the world more than his original avatar, interspersed with gladiatorial battles like ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ and ‘Thrilla in Manila’. But before Ali’s exile came his two fights with Cooper, the British champion. The first was in 1963 as Cassius Clay, then still a braggart who backed up his claims with heavy punches and beat opponents with blinding speed. Clay went to London hoping to clean up the points to get the reigning heavyweight champion, the fearsome Sonny Liston, to give him a shot at the title.This was a fight that remembers the playmaking of trainer Angel Dundee that saved Clay’s life and kept him in business for the future. Who knows if it would have turned out differently.Clay mocked Cooper as he did everyone else – predicting it would end in five rounds. But ‘Enry’s ‘Ammer’, that dreaded left hook (hammer) that Cooper was famous for, put Clay on his ass in the fourth round. Ali later said, “I felt as if I had gone back and visited all my ancestors in Africa”. Enough, almost. But a small tear in the seam of one glove, which trainer Angelo Dundee had seen before the fight but had the foresight to keep in case of emergency, was now put to good use.As Ali “fell on the stool like a sack of potatoes”, Dundee stuck his finger into the gash, enlarged it, then asked the referee to change gloves. That bought Clay enough seconds to come back to his senses. He recovered to beat up Cooper. A year later, Clay shocked the world by defeating Liston twice, converted to Islam and became the most famous man on earth.A heavyweight champion and world icon, Clay returned to London as Ali for a rematch with Cooper in 1966. This was a phase when, along with the protests, Malcolm X and King, Ali himself was the clear face of the struggle for social justice.However, the match itself was an anticlimax. Unlike his heroic failure in the first fight, Cooper was no match this time. And the duel was stopped in the 6th round when Cooper was bleeding profusely.And that was the result that Sonia and friends celebrated that evening at a friend’s dig in Cambridge as a “moral victory”.