OLYMPIC MEMORIES

Welshman Terry Gooding recalls competing at the 1952 Helsinki Games

TERRY GOODING of Cardiff recently received a letter from the British Olympic Association reminding him of his exploits as a middleweight boxer in the 1952 Games at Helsinki. The letter contained the words “Once an Olympian, always an Olympian”.

The Great Britain team, of which Gooding was a member, contained three future British professional champions in Henry Cooper, Dai Dower and Peter Waterman, and one future Commonwealth titlist, Percy Lewis. I recently had the pleasure of talking to Terry about his Olympic experiences and his short professional career.

Terry was 21 years old when he took part in the Helsinki Olympics. He and Dower were the only two Welshmen in the squad but they both came to the Games with an excellent pedigree. Terry had won just about everything worth winning as a youth, and he first represented his country at senior level aged 17 when he beat an Irishman in Dublin. An international debut didn’t come much harder than that back in 1949. By the time he was 18 he had won the Welsh senior championships and had made the ABA final at middleweight.

Terry learned well from these experiences and he peaked as an amateur when it was the hardest to do so – in an Olympic year. In 1952, Terry won the Army title, the Inter-services championships and then became ABA champion. Clearly the leading amateur middleweight in Britain at this time, Terry was picked as the GB representative for the Games without having to first undergo a trial, unlike his fellow squadmembers Cooper and Waterman who, despite both also being ABA champs, still had to earn their place on the team.

To this day Terry remembers just how much his Army coach, Fred Verlander, played a part in preparing him for the Games, and when he left for Helsinki he was as fit and prepared as it was possible to be. In the first round, Terry outpointed an Egyptian but he came a cropper in the second series when losing to the Bulgarian Boris Nicoloff.

Terry thought he had won the bout and he told me that in 1952 “one almost had to knock out an Eastern European representative just to get a draw.” The competition was finally won by a littleknown American, Floyd Patterson. Terry missed out on the chance of boxing Patterson at the Games but he would have had no qualms about doing so had he been drawn against him. The American, of course, became world heavyweight champ four years later in the pros.

After completing his National Service in 1953, Terry was ready to hang up his gloves for good. He had been in the sport since the age of nine and he now wanted to put it behind him so that he could concentrate on his family and his job. That shrewd London manager, Sam Burns, had different ideas. He sent a representative to Cardiff to persuade Terry that he had a future in the professional game and, despite feeling uncertain about the wisdom of doing so, Terry found himself in the ring for his first professional contest in 1954. Such was his talent that within 16 months Terry had won all 12 of his contests and was ranked number four in Britain at lightheavyweight. Included among his victims were Brian Anders, Ron Crookes and that real tough guy from Lancaster, Johnny Barton. Terry remembers frustrating Barton so much that, on turning to walk to his corner after the bell had ended one of the rounds, he received a blow to the back of his neck from his angry foe.

His lack of enthusiasm for the professional ring finally caught up with Terry in his last two contests when he lost firstly to Ken Rowlands in a contest for the Welsh title before being blitzed by Arthur Howard of Islington.

In a particularly tough era, Terry rose to great heights in both the amateur and the professional game and Wales can be proud of him.