Fashion’s Plaything: The Tragedy of Bill Hooper
Nobody is more popular than a great prizefighter. Crowds of hanger-ons flock to and surround him. Men want to be him, women want to be with him. The rich and famous line up to meet him and strive to make him their most intimate of friends. But when the short window of greatness has closed for a fighter, the fawning crowds and fast friends quickly disappear. Those who once lauded him are the first to mock him.
It’s been like that for as long as men have battled in competitive bouts.
The great boxing chronicler Pierce Egan wrote in the early 1800s: “No men are subject more to the caprices or changes of fortune than the pugilists; victory gives them fame, riches and patrons; their bruises are not heeded in the smiles of success; and basking in the sunshine of prosperity, their lives pass on pleasantly, till defeat comes and reverses the scene: covered with aches and pains, distressed in mind and body, assailed by poverty, wretchedness and misery, — their friends foresake them — their towering fame expired — their characters suspected by losing — and no longer the playthings of fashion.”
When Egan wrote these words, he seems to have had one particular fighter in mind: Bill Hooper. Yet another great fighter of his era who hailed from Bristol, Hooper was an undersized but extremely clever fighter, with outstanding physical courage and endless bottom. He was one of the best pound-for-pound fighters of his era.
Hooper was a tinman by trade — a skilled craftsman, though illiterate. But his successful prizefighting career, and his fearless manner of doing battle with larger men, quickly earned him the patronage of the Earl of Barrymore.
While genteel patronage would prove to have life-changing benefits for many great boxing stars of the Georgian era, such as Jack Broughton, Richard Humphries and John Jackson, for Hooper, falling in with the Earl of Barrymore’s entourage would prove to be the first step toward a tragic fall.
The fault for this largely belongs to Barrymore himself, who was a noted drunkard and an eccentric boor. Barrymore is remembered by history for being involved in one of the most bizarre duels of all time, with MP Humphrey Howarth, another famous drunk. After a night of drinking during the Bristol races, the two got into a conflict that they felt could only be resolved with pistols at dawn. Howarth showed up with no pants on and promptly began to strip stark naked. Even for a nut job such as Barrymore, shooting a naked man proved too disconcerting to go through with. Both sides declared themselves satisfied and the duel was called off.
Barrymore surrounded himself with a crowd of loud, swaggering blowhards and he was famous for enjoying “larking” as his favorite activity — essentially, going out in public and starting shit with people by acting like a jackass. The advantage of including Hooper in his crew at this point would become clear, as the once humble tin worker would quickly come to his patron’s aid, cowering by mere reputation anybody who might have been interested in beating up Barrymore.
This sort of behavior was viewed as disgraceful among the Fancy; it was a betrayal of everything noble and heroic about boxing. As a highly skilled, trained fighter, Hooper had fought, and won, some of the most brutal fights of his era. The nickname given to him by the fancy had been “The Lion Heart.” But under the influence of Barrymore, he picked up a new nickname: “The Bully.”
Not suprisingly, following the example of his patron led to an inevitable decline in Hooper’s famed conditioning. He lost a fight to the unheralded Tom Owens, dislocating his shoulder and then getting knocked out.
Once Hooper had tumbled from the elite rank of prizefighters, his low-born swagger was no longer charming to Barrymore and the rest of his rich friends. He was cast aside and quicky spiraled into the gutter. Chronic drunkeness destroyed his health. Eventually he was found on the steps of a church in an insensible state. He was taken to a poor house, where he passed away, still a young man.
