Floyd Patterson

by W. K. Stratton

  Although Patterson shared few values with Beat Generation writers and their adherents, he was in his own way emblematic of a significant cultural shift taking shape in America. Just as pop culture icons Elvis Presley (also born in early January 1935) and Marlon Brando represented a break from what went before them in music and acting, so too would Patterson represent a break from what preceded him in boxing. Boxing writers who covered him as he came into his own in his early pro fights in New York were observing the dawn of a new age in boxing. In his quiet way, Patterson was setting the stage for one of the most exhilarating periods in boxing history.

  The new era being ushered in was, among other things, obsessed with speed: fast new car models like the Corvette and the Thunderbird, jet airliners, rock ’n’ roll, frenetic Neal Cassady raps captured in the novels of Jack Kerouac. Patterson was the perfect championship material for this speed-obsessed age. No one had ever seen a boxer of his size who had the hand speed he did. Remarkably, as he grew heavier, his hands didn’t slow down one bit.

  Yet Floyd, ever the walking contradiction, adhered to tradition as well. He began training in Summit, New Jersey, at a facility that was hallowed in boxing lore. Founded by a Turkish-born diplomat’s wife, Hranoush Agaganian Bey, the camp had been known as Madame Bey’s during its early years, and its list of star clients included Battling Siki, Gene Tunney, Max Schmeling, Primo Carnera, Max Baer, Henry Armstrong, and Tony Canzoneri. The facilities were anything but stellar: a large yellow farmhouse, a barn, and a barracks-like structure on a hillside that functioned as both a gym and a dormitory. Following Madame Bey’s death, the camp came under the control of Ehsan Karadag, who earlier had been a partner with her in an unsuccessful rug-import business. The parade of champions who trained there didn’t stop with the change of ownership. Jersey Joe Walcott, Rocky Graziano, Kid Gavilán, Ike Williams, Kid Chocolate, Jake LaMotta, and Sandy Saddler all became associated with Karadag’s place.

  At Karadag’s camp, D’Amato began to reveal his long-term goal for Patterson. He had Floyd work with the toughest light-heavyweight and, significantly, heavyweight sparring partners he could find. The sessions became intense, much more so than any sparring Patterson had engaged in previously. D’Amato didn’t tell Floyd that he was paying these sparring partners as much as $100 a round—absolutely top dollar for the 1950s. Each of them received the same instructions from the mystifying white-haired man: Do your best to knock out Patterson. Go all out, no pulling punches, bang away as hard as you can. D’Amato preferred that his fighters spar without headgear. “It gives the fighter a false sense of security,” he explained. “It cuts down his vision, forces him to keep his chin up, and, in the end, causes him to get hit more often.”12 But D’Amato knew that the ferocity of what was to come was going to be out of the ordinary. So this time, the sparring partners and Floyd donned head protection along with the thickly padded sparring gloves. Patterson proved up to the test, knocking down twenty-two of the twenty-five men who entered the ring against him. Only one fighter, Tommy “Hurricane” Jackson, was able to stay on his feet for more than one round.

  It was an impressive display. Sportswriters visiting the camp left Jersey thinking about the heavyweights Patterson had sparred. Could it be Cus’s intention to have Floyd eventually challenge the undefeated Rocky Marciano for the world heavyweight championship? If so, D’Amato didn’t admit it. The man who answered the questions said at the end of 1954 that Floyd’s long-term goal was to fight Archie Moore for the world light-heavyweight title. More than a year would have to pass before Floyd would be eligible to fight Moore, though. Much could change in a year’s time. Moore might not be champion by the time Floyd was eligible to fight him.

  Frank Lavelle still numbered among Patterson’s seconds when Floyd signed to fight Don Grant in January 1955. In the weeks leading up to the contest, things were tense in the Patterson camp, and most of that tension involved Lavelle. His importance as a trainer had eroded ever since Patterson signed his pro contract with D’Amato. Dan Florio had clearly established himself as the principal trainer. A neighborhood buddy of Floyd’s, Buster Watson, had entered the entourage at Patterson’s invitation as an unpaid trainer. Lighthearted, gregarious, up on all the latest music, Watson was almost Floyd’s alter ego. He was the lone black among Patterson’s seconds, and he was also young, close to Floyd’s age. So he and Floyd established a natural bond. With D’Amato in charge and Florio and Watson carrying out their roles, Lavelle had become the odd man out. As a result, hard feelings reigned. D’Amato certainly did nothing to improve the situation. Lavelle was the only one of Floyd’s handlers whose relationship with the fighter extended back further than Cus’s. Complete-control Cus undoubtedly thought Lavelle was the sole person on Patterson’s team who might in some way challenge his authority. If anything, Cus seemed as if he’d just as soon be shed of Lavelle.

  The breaking point came when Floyd insisted that Sandra be allowed to visit him at Karadag’s. Lavelle was dead set against it, believing Sandra would be a distraction. Floyd didn’t see the problem. Sandra planned to stay just long enough for dinner and a movie, then take the train back to Brooklyn. But Lavelle refused to budge. Floyd held his ground too. Finally, Lavelle said he would quit as a member of Patterson’s team if Floyd went ahead with his plans to see Sandra. Again Floyd didn’t blink. And D’Amato was mute on the situation—Lavelle had to understand that he definitely did not have Cus’s back. Sandra came to New Jersey, and she and Floyd went out on their date. Then she returned home, just as they’d planned. For Lavelle, this answered any questions he had about where he stood in the Patterson camp.

  On January 17, 1955, Floyd TKO’d Don Grant at Eastern Parkway, with Lavelle as one of the trainers working the corner. When it was over, Lavelle changed his clothes, then said to Floyd, “Well, kid, I’ll be seeing you.”13 He walked out the door. For good. He left behind the talent he’d first spotted in a Brooklyn YMCA. And D’Amato was rid of the man who’d first discovered Floyd’s boxing potential. Cus was now completely in charge and ready to move his fighter on to bigger and better things. Lavelle slid into boxing’s most woeful shadows, complaining to whoever would listen about how Patterson was taken from him.

  5

  Do I Have to Fight Floyd?

  D’AMATO WANTED TO build up a national reputation for Patterson, because if he became well enough known around the country, fans and sports columnists would demand that Floyd be given a title fight. And if those demands grew loud enough, the IBC would have to accede eventually. Besides that, good money could be made out in boxing’s hinterlands. Six of Patterson’s next seven fights took place outside New York in venues removed from the IBC’s immediate clutches.

  One was Patterson’s first professional bout outside the United States. His opponent: the ever-dangerous Yvon Durelle. Durelle had fought thirteen times in the sixteen months that had passed since his first matchup with Patterson. He lost five of those, and had grown somewhat disenchanted with his boxing career and his manager. But he still ached for a grudge match with Patterson, and he was delighted when it was arranged. This time, the fight was to occur on Durelle’s home turf of Newcastle, New Brunswick, where he was confident he would not be robbed of a decision by the judges. “I beat Patterson in New York,” a defiant Durelle said, “and I wanted to show the people I could beat him here, and this time get credit for the win. He was ranked number one light-heavyweight [contender] in the world by now, and it would be a big break for me. I wanted that fight so bad I said I’d fight him winner-take-all, or even for nothing.”1

  But Durelle’s manager had also signed him to fight in Moncton, New Brunswick, just a week before the Patterson bout. In that fight, Durelle felt a bone snap in his right hand as he landed a punch. So now he faced the prospect of battling Patterson with a broken hand. The fight should have been canceled, but Durelle, fearing he wouldn’t get another chance to fight Patterson, would have none of that; Patterson-Durelle went on as scheduled in Newcastle. Exhaus
ted and injured, Durelle looked bad from the first. Fighting off nausea from the pain shooting up his right arm, he made an unsuccessful attempt to knock Floyd out in the fourth round. After that, Durelle was completely spent. He managed to stay on his feet, but once he hit his stool after the fifth round, he was done. He couldn’t answer the bell for the sixth round. Patterson had bested the tough fighting fisherman.

  Floyd went back to New York with a nice paycheck. When all was said and done, it cost the Newcastle promoters close to $6,000 to get Patterson to fight there. By now Patterson was receiving for one fight what some big-league baseball players earned for an entire season. Still, that was chump change compared to what the top heavyweight contender could demand for a fight.

  An enduring irony in the world of boxing was that the lighter weight classes boasted of more-skilled fighters than the heavyweight division, and title fights involving smaller men almost always produced superior contests compared to those staged by the heavyweights. Yet heavyweight battles always drew more fans to the box office—fans who were willing to pay premium prices for their tickets. As a result, the manager of the heavyweight champion of the world held incredible power, the very power Cus D’Amato so desired. After the second Durelle fight, D’Amato posed a question to Floyd: Can you see yourself beating Rocky Marciano?

  Patterson had been thinking about the thirty-two-year-old heavyweight champ. Rocky seemed to lack good boxing technique, yet he had a way of winning—and winning, and winning. Marciano had never lost a prizefight, besting forty-seven opponents, all but six of them by knockout. Still, Floyd came around to believing that he could possibly beat the Brockton Blockbuster. But he also wondered how realistic his chances were of getting a shot at the champion, who was in the pocket of the IBC. Could D’Amato, with his vehement opposition to the IBC, ever line up the great Marciano? One thing was clear: Floyd needed to put on weight to survive in heavyweight fights. For the second Durelle fight he weighed just 170 pounds, small for even a light-heavyweight. Patterson also had to get some experience absorbing the hard blows that heavyweights delivered before he’d be ready to battle the toughest of them all. D’Amato wasted no time. He booked Floyd to fight his first heavyweight match in July 1955, and found an opponent who ensured he would brush up against literary history, if nothing else.

  Budd Schulberg was among the top American authors to write about boxing since Jack London had first taken up pen in 1910 to despair of Jack Johnson’s winning the heavyweight championship. Schulberg had been introduced to the sport by his father, Paramount Pictures head B. P. Schulberg, and grew up idolizing Benny Leonard, the superb lightweight champion of the 1920s. Schulberg wrote the first major American boxing novel, The Harder They Fall, in 1947. He also wrote the screenplay for the 1954 classic boxing film On the Waterfront, with the unforgettable “I coulda been a contender” line.

  Schulberg went beyond just writing about boxing. He became an actual part of the sport when he opened a fight gym in an old barn on his Pennsylvania farm. Soon local Golden Gloves competitors were working out there. Eventually an aspiring pro heavyweight named Archie McBride showed up at the barn, and in short order Schulberg became his manager. After scoring a series of early-round knockouts, McBride emerged as a rising star in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Decisioning the tough Cuban heavyweight Nino Valdes earned him enough respect to start fighting in New York.

  To get McBride matches at Madison Square Garden, Schulberg had to do business with the IBC and its behind-the-scenes overseer, the infamous Mr. Gray. He took on a comanager with Frankie Carbo ties and stepped into a world populated by characters even a gifted novelist would find hard to dream up. In 1955 Schulberg received a call from a matchmaker wanting to know if McBride was available for a fight in the Garden. The opponent? Floyd Patterson. “The name stuck in my throat,” Schulberg said. “Patterson was the current sensation. He had knocked out everybody he faced that year, including the tough Canadian Yvon Durelle. The maestro Cus D’Amato was crafting his masterpiece. When Archie came in from his workout in the barn, I told him who he’d be meeting. He said quietly, ‘Do I have to fight Floyd?’ This wasn’t fear. Archie had pride and heart. Just realism setting in.”2 Schulberg set aside his writing work and invested all his energy into prepping McBride.

  Floyd was happy to be back in New York for the McBride bout because it allowed him to spend time with Sandra. The absences caused by out-of-town fights had been difficult for him, making him realize just how much he needed her company. By this point, Floyd and Sandra had reached an agreement to marry at some point in the near future. Sandra seemed to understand just how much boxing meant to Floyd. She also could salve his anxieties. She seemed to understand that Floyd’s career would demand that he be away from home a great deal. Sandra showed no signs of resentment in those early days. But they were still young and callow—neither had experienced anything approaching a serious romance with anyone else.

  Floyd went into the Madison Square Garden ring for his first heavyweight fight at a significant weight disadvantage, giving up sixteen pounds to McBride. In the early rounds, he struggled to take charge of the bigger man. After the fifth round, Floyd’s cornermen implored him to get busy, fearing he could be slipping behind on the judges’ scorecards. He went out for the sixth round punching, and one hard counterpunch dropped McBride. A right-left combination to the jaw knocked McBride down again early in the seventh. McBride answered the count but remained shaken. Patterson was able to batter him at will before knocking him out with a body shot a little more than halfway through the seventh round. McBride was no Marciano, but he was a solid heavyweight. Floyd had just demonstrated that he could go toe-to-toe with a bigger man and come out the winner.

  After watching McBride hit the mat, Schulberg was hurrying from ringside to the dressing room when he was collared by the most influential figure in sports journalism at the time. Jimmy Cannon wrote the daily sports column for the New York Post, a column that was nationally syndicated. He received handsome compensation, rumored to top $100,000 annually, and with good reason. His byline alone could sell newspapers by the thousands, and his influence over other sportswriters was immense because of his success. Cannon was a reformed alcoholic and a bit of an egotist who believed he knew more about boxing than any other writer. Guzzling coffee instead of gin, he made the rounds of the Stork Club, P. J. Clarke’s, and Toots Shor’s. He palled around with the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Frank Sinatra. The opinion of this man about town counted, and he now proclaimed to Schulberg that he’d just watched a fixed fight—McBride had, in Cannon’s eyes, taken a fall to give Floyd a victory.

  Schulberg was stunned and insulted. Patterson-McBride was not the sort of fight that lent itself to fixing, given that Patterson was the favorite and won it handily. What was the point of fixing it? It was not a fight to stir particularly much interest among gamblers. No one stood to profit greatly from the outcome except for the fighters themselves. In that instant, Schulberg decided Cannon was a fraud, at least when it came to boxing. Cannon repeated his accusation in his column the next day, but it didn’t seem to hurt Patterson’s standing as a prizefighter. Floyd would have good reason to regard Cannon warily from this point onward. For now, though, he packed his bags and set out on the road again.

  Floyd fought in Canada and in California, winning all his contests by knockout, which only increased the buzz surrounding him. While he was in Los Angeles, he allowed himself to enjoy some time off to take in the sights. He was given a Hollywood studio tour, which included a visit to the set of The Man with the Golden Arm, where he met Frank Sinatra. Sinatra, a boxing enthusiast, and Floyd hit it off. From then on, the Chairman of the Board became a big Patterson fan.

  While in LA he also befriended Billy Eckstine. The smooth big-band baritone was one of Patterson’s favorite singers as well as a man Floyd admired on several levels. Eckstine was an artist who managed to be both a traditionalist and an innovator, much as Patterson was as a boxer. As a biracial American
, Eckstine had run head-on into racism as he built his career yet emerged victorious. Eckstine predicted that Floyd would become a world champion, which left Patterson beaming. Floyd was now rubbing shoulders with the very people he used to see projected bigger than life on the Banco Theatre’s movie screen back in Bed-Stuy. Patterson was becoming ever more prominent in the sports pages, he was filling big arenas like LA’s Olympic Auditorium, his fights were broadcast on radio and, sometimes, television, and he was earning a lot of money. Since the loss to Maxim, he had put together a string of fourteen straight wins, twelve of them by knockout. No doubt about it, Floyd Patterson was a star.

  Floyd had been looking the part for a while. He dressed stylishly when in the public eye. He drove a Cadillac, the ultimate status symbol for the newly affluent in the 1950s, not to mention the automobile famously associated with Sugar Ray Robinson. Floyd indulged himself with hi-fi equipment and TVs, and he and Sandra attended movies obsessively whenever he was in New York. But he was no spendthrift. He saved money and made regular contributions to his parents to help support the children still at home. Floyd made a pledge to himself that he would buy a house so his family could escape Bed-Stuy. And he did just that when he bought a ten-room, shingled dwelling on a large corner lot in Mount Vernon, New York. The house was bright, airy, and roomy—a dream home for any ghetto kid. For Floyd, liberating his family from poverty was the American dream come true.