King of the World

by David Remnick

  Baldwin went to Elgin, where Patterson’s press aide, Ted Carroll, greeted him with great deference and gave him a tour of the camp. Carroll seemed to understand that Baldwin was a beginner in boxing.

  “Mr. Baldwin, this is a training camp,” he said. “And this countryside matches the personality of the champion. While his trade is violent, Mr. Baldwin, his personality is unruffled, bucolic. Is that a good word, Mr. Baldwin?”

  Baldwin nodded. Yes, it was.

  Carroll set up Baldwin to take a long walk with the champion and watch him train. Patterson allowed that he had not read any of Baldwin’s books, but he had seen him once on television debating the race question.

  “I knew I’d seen you somewhere!” Patterson said.

  Baldwin clearly felt something for Patterson—he would even place a $750 bet on him. Patterson, for Baldwin, was an unlikely warrior, a complicated, vulnerable, troubled young man who seemed to yearn for privacy even as he uncorked yet another interview for another set of reporters. Baldwin watched Patterson jump rope, “which he must do according to some music in his head, very beautiful and gleaming and far away, like a boy saint helplessly dancing and seen through the steaming windows of a storefront church”; it was a scene that recalled Baldwin’s boy saint Elisha, in his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain.

  After the training session, one of the last before the fight, Baldwin watched Patterson meet with a few reporters. Patterson drank a cup of hot chocolate and wore a tight shy smile. He was asked, as he was every day, why he was fighting Liston.

  “Well, it was my decision to take the fight,” Patterson said. “You gentlemen disagreed, but you were the ones who placed him in the number one position, so I felt it was only right. Liston’s criminal record is behind him, not before him.”

  “Do you feel you’ve been accepted as champion?”

  “No,” he said. “Well, I have to be accepted as champion—but maybe not a good one.”

  “Why do you say that the opportunity to become a great champion will never arise?”

  “Because you gentlemen will never let it arise.”

  “I mainly remember Floyd’s voice, going cheerfully on and on,” Baldwin remembered later in his piece for Nugget, “and the way his face kept changing, and the way he laughed; I remember the glimpse of him then, a man more complex than he was yet equipped to know, a hero for many children who were still trapped where he had been, who might not have survived without the ring, and who yet oddly did not really seem to belong there.”

  Before Baldwin left, he gave Patterson copies of Another Country and Nobody Knows My Name, inscribing them, “To Floyd Patterson … because we both know whence we come, and have some idea of where we’re going.”

  Baldwin also visited Liston’s camp, and there he found the Liston almost no one else did. Some reporters, including Jack McKinney of the Philadelphia Daily News, Jerry Izenberg of the Newark Star-Ledger, and Bob Teague of The New York Times (one of the very few black reporters on the sports beat), had enjoyed a good rapport with Liston, even when he was still a contender, but the rest had not. The reporters asked questions that invariably referred to this arrest or that shortcoming, and Sonny would answer with a grunt or a yes or a no or a sustained glare.

  Even when Liston was trying to be funny with a reporter, he could be intimidating. A. J. Liebling once went up to visit him in training camp and was told he would get an interview at a local restaurant after the day’s workout. Liston arrived at the restaurant and everyone around the banquette ordered cups of steaming tea. Suddenly, Liston’s expression soured and he began screaming at his cornerman, Joe Pollino, about the two dollars he owed him. The two men argued and then Liston lunged toward Pollino.

  “You lie, you hound!” Liston shouted. “Gimme my two bucks!”

  As Liebling remembered it, “A vast fist shot out, and I heard a tremendous smack as Pollino went down, amid a shower of teeth.” Liston then pulled out a pistol and started firing away at his cut man, Pollino slumped in the banquette. Then Liston turned the revolver on Liebling and fired. “I threw up my hands and, in doing so, spilled my tea.” Liebling’s self-description gives him more credit for calm than was genuinely due. He nearly died of heart failure on the spot. When he recovered, his overcoat now blotched with tea stains, Liebling heard Pollino explain that the teeth were actually white beans and Liston explain that the bullets were blanks.

  “You come see us again, hear?” Liston told Liebling. “You come back!”

  These public relations tactics, such as they were, got an ex post facto laugh from Liebling in print, yet they did not always charm. Many of the reporters approached Liston as they would a monster. The terms “gorilla” and “jungle cat” were common enough, but the texture of the racism became far more elaborate. Peter Wilson of The Daily Mirror wrote: “Sometimes he takes so long to answer a question, and has so much difficulty in finding the word he wants to use, that it’s rather like a long-distance telephone call in a foreign language. But the man is fascinating. While his scarred face is immobile and his enormous painted-saucer eyes have the fixed glare of an octopus, his hands compel attention. The palms are soft and white, like the inside of a banana skin. His fingers are the unpeeled bananas.”

  Many of the reporters marked Liston’s recalcitrance for stupidity or worse. Baldwin did not. “He is far from stupid; he is not, in fact, stupid at all,” he wrote. “And while there is a great deal of violence in him, I sense no cruelty at all. On the contrary, he reminded me of big, black men I have known who acquired the reputation of being tough in order to conceal the fact that they weren’t hard. Anyone who cared to could turn them into taffy. Anyway, I liked him, liked him very much. He sat opposite me at the table, sideways, head down, waiting for the blow: for Liston knows, as only the inarticulately suffering can, just how inarticulate he is. But let me clarify that: I say suffering because it seems to me that he has suffered a great deal. It is in his face, in the silence of that face, and in the curiously distant light in the eyes—a light which rarely signals because there have been so few answering signals. And when I say inarticulate, I really do not mean to suggest that he does not know how to talk. He is inarticulate in the way we all are when more has happened to us than we know how to express; and inarticulate in a particularly Negro way—he has a long tale to tell which no one wants to hear.”

  Liston, as it turned out, didn’t mind talking to Baldwin. The son of a Harlem preacher, Baldwin, with his bulging sad eyes, was unlike any other writer who had visited him. Baldwin’s soft manner was far different from the wised-up style of most of the journalists Liston had known, and so he spoke to Baldwin in a different tone, with his defenses down. “Colored people say they don’t want their children to look up to me,” Liston told Baldwin with great sorrow. “Well, they ain’t teaching their children to look up to Martin Luther King, either.” Liston seemed to be issuing a plea through Baldwin. “I wouldn’t be no bad example if I was up there. I could tell a lot of those children what they need to know because I passed that way. I could make them listen.”

  Baldwin went away from his meeting with Liston liking him, but racked with confusion. In Patterson-Liston, the heavyweight championship was once more a morality play; what was unique was that the opponents were both black and represented opposing styles of rhetoric, of political style and action. Baldwin’s essay for Nugget was not his best, but in it he was able to rehearse some of the themes he would develop the following year in what would be his most thorough statement on race, The Fire Next Time. “I felt terribly ambivalent, as many Negroes do these days,” he wrote of Liston, “since we are all trying to decide, in one way or another, which attitude, in our terrible American dilemma, is the more effective; the disciplined sweetness of Floyd, or the outspoken intransigence of Liston.… Liston is a man aching for respect and responsibility. Sometimes we grow into our responsibilities and sometimes, of course, we fail them.”

  Baldwin’s antagonist at the fight, his erstwhile friend
Mailer, did not approach his chore with the same sadness or sense of burden. If Baldwin approached fight night with dread, Mailer looked forward to it with pleasure—the event was, after all, an opportunity both to witness something memorable and to perform. For all the ambition, energy, and self-advertisement he poured into the novels following The Naked and the Dead—The Deer Park, Barbary Shore, An American Dream, Why Are We in Vietnam?—his journalism for Esquire and Harper’s and Life was far more than a job done for money. His dispatches, written at great speed and length, from prizefights and political conventions, crackled with an energy that laid waste the conventions of fifties gentility. He was never more on the job than he was in Chicago for the Patterson-Liston fight. Patterson, he wrote,

  was a liberal’s liberal. The worst to be said about Patterson is that he spoke with the same cow’s cud as other liberals. Think what happens to a man with Patterson’s reflexes when his brain starts to depend on the sounds of “introspective,” “obligation,” “responsibility,” “inspiration,” “commendation,” “frustrated,” “seclusion”—one could name a dozen others from his book. They are a part of his pride; he is a boy from the slums of Bedford-Stuyvesant who has acquired these words like stocks and bonds and income-bearing properties. There is no one to tell him it would be better to keep the psychology of the streets than to cultivate the contradictory desire to be a great fighter and a great, healthy, mature, autonomous, related, integrated individual. What a shabby gentility there has been to Patterson’s endeavor.…

  But the deepest reason that Negroes in Chicago had for preferring Patterson was that they did not want to enter again the logic of Liston’s world. The Negro had lived in violence, had grown in violence, and yet had developed a view of life which gave him life. But its cost was exceptional for the ordinary man. The majority had to live in shame. The demand for courage may have been exorbitant. Now as the Negro was beginning to come into the white man’s world, he wanted the logic of the white man’s world: annuities, mental hygiene, sociological jargon, committee solutions for the ills of the breast. He was sick of a whore’s logic and a pimp’s logic, he wanted no more of mother wit, of smarts, or playing the dozens, of battling for true love into the diamond-hard eyes of every classy prostitute and hustler on the street. The Negro wanted Patterson, because Floyd was the proof a man could be successful and yet be secure. If Liston won, the old torment was open again. A man could be successful or he could be secure. He could not have both. If Liston had a saga, the average Negro wanted none of it.

  If, for Mailer, Patterson was the “archetype of the underdog, an impoverished prince,” “Liston was Faust. Liston was the light of every racetrack tout who dug a number on the way to work. He was the hero of every man who would war with destiny for so long as he had his gimmick; the cigarette smoker, the lush, the junkie, the tea-head, the fixer, the bitch, the faggot, the switchblade, the gun, the corporate executive, anyone who was fixed on power. It was due to Liston’s style of fighting as much as anything else.”

  A literary footnote to the Baldwin-Mailer presence in Chicago was a short essay written by a young poet, LeRoi Jones, who had been allied with Allen Ginsberg and the Beat writers in Greenwich Village and who was becoming more of a presence in the Black Arts movement. Unlike Baldwin, who loved the tenderness in Patterson, Jones was disgusted with the champion, calling him an “honorary” white man who craved acceptance in the bourgeois world. He celebrated Liston as a threat, “the big black Negro in every white man’s hallway, waiting to do him in, deal him under for all the hurts white men, through their arbitrary order, have been able to inflict on the world.” He was “ ‘the huge Negro,’ ‘the bad nigger,’ a heavy-faced replica of every whipped up woogie in the world. He is the underdeveloped, have-not (politically naive), backward country, the subject people, finally here to collect his pound of flesh.” When Jones printed the essay in a collection titled Home, he added a footnote saying that now his heart was with the young Cassius Clay, for only Clay could represent the new militant, the truly independent black man.

  At the remove of nearly forty years, when boxing has become a marginal event in American life, all this symbol-mongering heaped on the shoulders of two men belting each other in a ring for money seems faintly ridiculous. But for decades, boxing had been a central spectacle in America, and because it is so stripped-down, one-on-one, a battle with hands and not balls or pads or racquets, the metaphors of struggle, of racial struggle most of all, came easily. Ever since Jack Johnson won the heavyweight title in 1908, white boxing fans and, most of all, white promoters required a white hope. Johnson avoided the black contenders of his era—Sam Langford, Joe Jeanette, Sam McVey. Instead, his fight was against a Caucasian retiree, the former champion Jim Jeffries. Until late in his career, all of Joe Louis’s leading opponents were white: Schmeling, Billy Conn, Tony Galento. Sugar Ray Robinson fought one white after another—Bobo Olson, Paul Pender, Gene Fullmer, Jake LaMotta, Carmen Basilio; the promoters rarely offered remotely the same money for bouts against equally tough black challengers. With Patterson-Liston, something had changed. Both men were black; both had grown up with the same hero (Joe Louis), and with similar deprivations and injuries. The narrative of boxing, however, requires an opposition as broad as slapstick. A fight between two members of the same ethnic group has always required a level of differentiation. When John L. Sullivan, the first modern heavyweight champion, defended his bareknuckle title in 1889 against Jake Kilrain, Sullivan was required to play the bad Irish immigrant who drank and took lots of women to bed while Kilrain was the good immigrant, the virtuous worker. Until Patterson-Liston, the press did not bother much with drawing differences between blacks.

  Now the symbolic differences between the two fighters were obvious, and the resulting pressures on Patterson, especially, were making his life impossible. Patterson’s fear was evident even in his carriage at the weigh-in, a ritual that has always required of fighters a molten stare or, at least, a chilling equanimity. But as Liston glared at Patterson, Patterson stared at his own feet. He never stared at an opponent before a fight. Couldn’t risk it. After all, he said, “we’re going to fight, which isn’t a nice thing.” Once, as an amateur, he made the mistake of looking his opponent in the eye and he saw that he had a nice face and the two fighters smiled at each other. From then on Patterson looked at the floor. Except now he had real reason to worry. Sonny Liston wanted to run a truck over him, and he felt if he let it happen he would have failed his family, his country, his president, and his race.

  “I kept thinking about these things right up until the fight,” Patterson said later. “When the bell rang and I came out, instead of seeing Liston, I seemed to have a vision of all these people; what they told me and wanted me to do. All I can remember is that I wasn’t able to think of the fight at all.”

  Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Two Minutes, Six Seconds

  SEPTEMBER 25, 1962

  THE EVENING OF THE FIGHT WAS MISTY AND RAW, TOPCOAT weather. It was a cold September even for Chicago. Comiskey Park could hold around fifty thousand, but though this was probably the biggest heavyweight fight since Rocky Marciano ended Joe Louis’s career a decade earlier, the stadium was less than half filled with just under nineteen thousand paying customers.

  The ring announcer introduced a parade of past champions, and one by one they climbed through the ropes: Louis, Marciano, Jim Braddock, Johansson, Ezzard Charles, Barney Ross, Dick Tiger. Archie Moore, who was still fighting for a living in his forties, entered the ring wearing a tuxedo and a long cape lined in white silk. “The Mongoose” carried a cane.

  The only noncombatant met with boos was the young contender from Louisville, Cassius Clay. After winning the gold medal as a light heavyweight at the 1960 Rome Olympics, Clay had quickly become known for his mouth. By now he’d run off a string of victories over the middle level of the heavyweight division, and he was scheduled to fight Archie Moore in a few mont
hs. But mainly he was known as an outrageous character who reeled off rhyming ditties predicting the round in which he would prevail. When Patterson visited the athletes at the Olympic Village in Rome, Clay informed the champion, in a pitch of happy hysteria, that he would soon be wearing Floyd’s crown. “You just keep at it,” Patterson had said, laughing. And Clay did, declaring himself the prettiest, the greatest, the king of the world. The sportswriters, especially the older ones, did not find this funny. They hated Clay. Clay was a punk who kept his hands too low and had a punch that could not juice a grape. He had a fresh mouth. Whom had he beaten? He was an affront. Even the liberals among the writers had come to expect the politesse of Louis and Patterson in their champions. Clay’s impudence was beyond imagining.

  “Cassius was still a youngster, just a pretty good contender, when he jumped around that night,” Patterson recalled decades later. “He seemed like a nice kid and all, but how could you take him too seriously? I looked over at him and had to smile, but the way you smile at a kid who’s showing off for all the relatives.”

  The rows around the ring were filled with writers. Mailer and Baldwin were separated by an empty seat, and they were cordial enough. There was the usual gaggle of actors and crooners. And, most of all, there were the mobsters, the cigar chewers, the whisperers, the hawk-nosed men in dark suits who had been running boxing all along. And all of them—the men who ran the unions and the contracting businesses, the numbers rackets and the bookie joints, the garbage haulers and the pizza parlors—they were all for Liston. Part of it was natural allegiance, a nod in the direction of Alcatraz maximum security, where their honorary chieftain, Frankie Carbo, “Mr. Gray,” was beginning a long sentence, first for illegal management (not least for the illegal management of Sonny Liston) and later for extortion. Carbo, for all anyone knew, was still running Liston. But the mob was not behind Liston merely out of allegiance. Loyalty is mob rhetoric, a code, but only sometimes a fact. No, it was also a matter of aesthetics. How could a heavyweight champion bow in the direction of the president, much less stomach a sanctimonious prig like Cus D’Amato? And how could a champion talk about his fears, his anxieties, like some … woman? “In their mind,” Mailer wrote of the mobsters at ringside, “Patterson was a freak, some sort of vegetarian.”