A Trial Horse of Another Color

Bert Cooper is what the fight mob calls a “trial horse.” A trial horse is a guy who hits hard--but not too hard. He can box--but he’s no Willie Pep.

He can “take it.” English translation: He has an infinite capacity for personal suffering. But by the same token, he has to take it. He has to be easy to hit.

He’s a kind of pugilistic litmus paper. You measure the acidity of a “contender” by his performance against a Bert Cooper. When Marlon Brando lamented, “I coulda been a contenduh!” in the flick, “On the Waterfront,” he was articulating the lament of trial horses everywhere.

A trial horse never becomes a contender. His job is to create contenders, make the other guy the contender.

Trial horses never get title shots. They are always below the title. They are main-eventers, but the other guy is always the main attraction.

Cooper even looks like a trial horse. He has this big, gleaming gold tooth in the center of his mouth. He looks a little like Mike Tyson. Until the bell rings. Then, the resemblance ends.

In the old days, a fighter such as Johnny Risko was a heavyweight trial horse. His nickname was the “Cleveland Rubber Man,” which tells you all you have to know about him. You could put him down. But not out.

Cooper is nobody’s rubber man. Porcelain man is more like it. Like Risko, he gets up. But there are nights you could make teacups out of his chin. His jaw is definitely not rubber then. His legs are.

It’s not that Cooper isn’t durable. In a way, he’s as indestructible as the Rock of Gibraltar. He has been knocked out no fewer than nine times in his career, which is 45 fights long. On the other hand, he has knocked out 27 himself. He has no trouble getting another main event, another horse to try.

Cooper may be the last of the breed. The trial horse may become as extinct as the buggy whip. In fact, Cooper almost left the ranks himself. Here is what happened: On Nov. 23, 1991, he got a title shot against Evander Holyfield, who didn’t need a trial, just a warm-up.

Let the record show that Cooper flattened Holyfield with an overhand right in the third round. And only an overzealous referee (Mills Lane, imported for the fight from Nevada) saved Holyfield, in Cooper’s view. “He gave him a standing eight-count, which is supposed to be waived in a title fight,” Cooper protests.

The official record book shows that Holyfield rallied to win on a seventh-round knockout, but Cooper complains that his whole career has been marred by incomplete statistics like that. “It don’t show I would have won if he don’t get no standing eight,” he maintains. “I came that close to 45 million dollars.”

But Cooper, so to speak, rolls with the punches. A trial horse doesn’t have time to brood. He has to go on and make character for the next heavyweight hopeful.

Sometimes, he louses up the script, makes them fail the test. He derailed Willie De Wit, the Canadian hopeful, in mid-career. Turned him into Willie De Half Wit, to hear Cooper tell it. “Stopped him in two in his hometown,” Cooper boasts proudly.

Cooper also road-blocked Henry Tillman on his way to the big money. It’s Cooper’s job to turn the prospects into suspects if he can. And sometimes he can.

It is Cooper’s view that he would be undisputed heavyweight champion of the world today if it weren’t for a series of lousy breaks. A trial horse, he points out, never gets any split decisions. If it’s that close, the nod goes to the hero. Trial horses get decisions only when they would have to wake up the opponent to tell him he won.

A trial horse never gets the luxury of signing for a fight months in advance and going to training camp for weeks before the bout. A trial horse gets a phone call asking him if he’s going to be doing anything Friday night.

He got the Holyfield fight on five days’ notice. “He was going to fight the Italian champion and the guy backed out. They gave the fight to me. I just had time to shave and catch the plane to Atlanta.”

He also took a Michael Moorer fight on short notice. Moorer is the current heavyweight champion, a title he took from Holyfield, but when he fought his trial horse, Cooper, in May 1992, Bert put him down twice in the first round. “The referee give it that ‘one-two, buckle-my-shoe’ count,” Cooper sniffs. “He kept pushing me to a neutral corner and not picking up the count. After that, I just got tired. I was in no kinda shape. But I can beat Moorer. He drinks.”

So, of course, does Cooper. He admits he seldom is in the athletic pink of condition. Trial horses seldom are.

Cooper thinks if he ever could get in condition, he’d make the world forget the Joe Louises and the Muhammad Alis and all the Sugar Rays put together. Rocky Balboa would be he.

Take the George Foreman fight. Foreman was one of the half-dozen present or past champions Cooper has battled. For once, Cooper had plenty of time to get ready for the fight. That was just the trouble.

Trial horses are supposed to be vulnerable to certain types of offenses. An Ali rope-a-dope, a hook-off-the-jab. A sucker for the straight right. But Foreman’s camp perceived another flaw in Cooper’s defenses. He was a sucker for a dame. One of Foreman’s camp undertook to fill the blank spaces in Cooper’s days--and nights--with pliant ladies of the evening. Cooper practiced his footwork in discos, not gyms.

Also, his diet was catered to. Most fighters’ diets include a large proportion of heads of lettuce. Cooper’s heads were on mugs of beer. They even provided him with champagne.

Cooper wasn’t happy climbing out of the ring--Foreman knocked him out in two--but he didn’t have a care in the world climbing in. Foreman backers had taken care of the inner man, Cooper admits. Instead of working on the heavy bag, he worked on the heavy drinking. As Satchel Paige said, “The social ramble ain’t restful.”

You can see the life of a trial horse ain’t easy. But even though he got stopped in two by another champion, Riddick Bowe, Bert Cooper whipped contender Ray Mercer--in fact, broke his jaw in the fight before.

Cooper, 28, intends to become a horse of another color. “I’m not gettin’ no younger,” he says. “I’m startin’ to get serious now. I don’t drink nothin’ stronger’n Gatorade. I go to bed early and get up and run five miles. When I got up to 248 pounds, (ex-champion) Joe Frazier said to me, ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You coulda been champ.’ I took it to heart. Now, look at me! I’m down to 226.”

Cooper meets Jeremy Williams, a young comer (16-1) in the heavyweight ranks, Friday at the Olympic Auditorium.

Cooper intends to turn Williams into the trial horse. He plans to be the contender, or the trial horse you can lead to water and make him drink it.