Floyd Patterson

by W. K. Stratton

  While changing into his street clothes, Floyd received a surprise invitation to dinner that night at a downtown Fort Smith restaurant, where he would be the guest of honor. But there was a catch: the black men traveling with him would have to enter through the back door. Infuriated, Patterson refused. The whole Patterson crew fled the arena to eat with Father Delaney at a restaurant on the outskirts of town. Floyd then spent a restless night at the rectory, impatient for the early-morning train that would take him away from the South. Back in New York, Patterson sent Father Delaney a check for $3,000 for improvements to the St. John the Baptist building in hopes that it would help the priest’s integration efforts. After his experiences in Arkansas, Patterson also became a lifetime member of the NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, which was then battling in the courts to systematically desegregate America.

  The exhibition tour behind him, Floyd ensconced himself at the Long Pond Inn in Greenwood Lake, New York, to train for his first title defense. He believed he still had to show the boxing world he was a legitimate champion, one with a real knockout punch, and Hurricane Jackson’s prefight antics helped make Floyd want to put him down. Jackson told a reporter that the heavyweight title meant nothing to him, that the upcoming fight was just another fight. Patterson was flabbergasted. How could Jackson discount everything Floyd had worked for? Jackson also announced that he regarded Patterson as an enemy. When pressed about why that was the case, Jackson maintained that the two boxers had once made a pact never to fight each other, and that Patterson violated it when he fought Jackson a year earlier. Of course, if such a pact existed, Jackson had also violated it when he stepped into the ring to fight Floyd, but that fact didn’t seem to register with the Hurricane. All this caused Floyd to fume in anticipation of the fight, but he knew that knocking out Jackson would be difficult. Jackson was the most durable fighter he’d met in the ring.

  In late July, as the fight date grew close, Gay Talese, on assignment for the New York Times, joined the group of reporters at the Long Pond Inn. Talese was different from the other sportswriters Patterson had encountered. For one thing, he was very neatly attired. In the shirt-and-tie-required 1950s, most sportswriters dressed as shabbily as they could, the cigarette burns in their lapels and the egg stains on their ties worn almost as badges of honor. But Talese, who came from a family of Italian American tailors, gave his appearance a lot of attention. His reporting style was different as well. Talese seemed to prefer overhearing conversations to scribbling down answers to interview questions. When he did conduct an interview, he liked to probe his subjects about what was going on inside their heads. He took as much time and care as deadlines allowed to get everything just right.

  “You know I did try to bring the sense of a short story writer to my sports pieces,” Talese explained. He found he could take chances with stories in the Times’s sports section that would not be allowed in other parts of the paper. “There is a general acceptance of people in sports as being fair game for scrutiny, held to account in a way that people not in sports are not held to account. For instance, in the 1950s, you couldn’t write about—or shouldn’t write about—the adulteries of a person in business or politics, but you certainly could about anyone having to do with sports. I am just showing why I could write about sports with the freedoms that I had in the 1950s. I wasn’t interested in putting people down. I was trying to understand them. I never had a person that I wrote about that I couldn’t call up again. In the case of Patterson, I called up fifty times and I did fifty pieces.”2

  Talese was just three years older than Patterson, who was used to dealing with much older sportswriters. Their youth created a bond between them, but they also connected in other ways. Talese had grown up in the island community of Ocean City, New Jersey, as the Roman Catholic son of Italian immigrants surrounded by middle-class Protestants. As a consequence, he had a sense that he was a marginal American, “an outsider, an alien in my native nation.”3 He could appreciate Patterson’s own feelings of being an outsider. Patterson found in Talese someone who listened carefully and did not interrupt. Talese began penning pieces about Floyd that were different from the Gray Lady prose typical of the Times, and the two forged a lifelong friendship. Neither man’s career would have gone the way it did without the other.

  The young Times reporter filed a characteristic dispatch from the Long Pond Inn, detailing how much money the camp was spending on food, including $9,000 on steaks, most of which seemed to be winding up in the belly of Floyd’s brother Sherman. Some of Floyd’s siblings participated in his career, most particularly his kid brother Raymond, who would become a regular member of Patterson’s entourage when Floyd was at the peak of his career, and who was a Golden Gloves champion before becoming a professional boxer himself. But as for Sherman, his purpose at Long Pond, other than consuming groceries, was never quite clear to Talese.

  Hurricane Jackson may have been the top contender, but Patterson entered the fight as a five-to-one favorite. As the fight at the Polo Grounds played out on July 29, Floyd proved the oddsmakers were right. Floyd knocked Jackson down in the first round. In the next round, the Hurricane stayed on his feet, but Floyd seemed to score at will. In his corner between rounds, Jackson performed a set of jumping jacks, astounding the Polo Grounds audience. Perhaps he was attempting to show that Patterson’s punches weren’t hurting him. Before the fifth round, Jackson stomped out a sort of war dance in his corner. But for all of Jackson’s show, Floyd’s punches were taking a toll. Floyd scored another knockdown, and then, in the tenth round, referee Ruby Goldstein declared a TKO after the Hurricane fell for a third time. The Polo Grounds crowd jeered the decision—perhaps they wanted more jumping jacks. And Jackson made a show of protesting the call, but it was the right decision, for Jackson was clearly out of the match by that point.

  Any doubts about whether Patterson was the better fighter were erased, although some fans grumbled about why Patterson had not been able to put Jackson down for the count, given how poorly the all-but-defenseless Hurricane had battled. And there was bad news in terms of money. Patterson had been guaranteed $175,000, but the gate receipts fell short of expectations. D’Amato agreed to waive the guarantee in exchange for 40 percent of the gate. Lence handed over only $123,859 to Patterson’s manager.4

  There was more bad news. Within hours of the bout’s finale, Jackson began urinating blood. His mother took him to a Long Island hospital, where he was admitted with what was reported as kidney contusions, the result of the many body shots he’d taken from Patterson during the fight. The doctor who examined him diagnosed him as “fairly sick, but not dangerously so. He needs rest.” The doctor advised Jackson to remain in the hospital for a few days. The hospital staff admitted only one set of visitors—Floyd and Sandra Patterson, who arrived with Cus D’Amato. Jackson was shocked that the Pattersons came to see him. The mercurial Hurricane shook hands with the champ and wished him luck in his upcoming fights.5 Patterson left knowing that the tragic man-child Jackson was likely finished as a boxer of any significance.6

  If Cus D’Amato proved masterful in his triumphant campaign to gain control of the heavyweight championship, his management of it turned out to be a whole other matter. His announcement that he planned to have Patterson fight the best contenders one by one was admirable. To have done so would have placed his fighter in league with the great Joe Louis, who did just that in his day. If D’Amato had stuck to his guns, Patterson’s next challenge would have come from Eddie Machen, who, prior to Jackson’s loss to Patterson, had been the number two contender. But Cus nixed him, claiming that Machen’s managers were tied to the IBC. Number three was Harold Carter, who was then in the Army and thus unavailable. Willie Pastrano? He turned down D’Amato’s overtures. Nor would it be Bob Baker, Zora Folley, Ingemar Johansson, Johnny Summerlin, Johnny Holman, or Wayne Bethea—the boxers who rounded out the rest of the list of the top ten contenders. D’Amato deemed all to be unacceptable for one reason or another
, most for IBC ties.

  In the end, D’Amato signed . . . Pete Rademacher?

  Rademacher was not unknown to American boxing fans. In fact, he was something of a sports hero. Just the previous year, he had won the heavyweight gold medal at the 1956 Olympic games in Melbourne, Australia, where he scored a first-round knockout of his Soviet opponent. The fight came during the cold war, and like all American-Soviet Olympic battles of the time, it was a politically charged contest. After Rademacher put down the USSR’s Lev Mukhin, members of the Hungarian boxing team rushed the ring and carried the American champion around on their shoulders. At the time, Hungary was set to explode in revolt against the Russians, an uprising that infamously was crushed by Soviet tanks. Against this backdrop, Rademacher’s victory ensured his heroic status back home in the United States. “Just the same,” said Newsweek’s influential sports columnist John Lardner of the challenger, “it is hard to believe in Pete, even for those of us who saw him win the Olympic title last year.”7

  The balding twenty-nine-year-old was much bigger than Floyd, and he had a lengthy amateur career that went back years. A Washington State native, he had tried his luck in the boxing ring as early as the eighth grade, and he continued fighting while a student at a military academy in Tennessee. He racked up dozens of amateur victories and won a national Golden Gloves title. His Olympic championship crowned his nonprofessional career.

  He learned about Marciano’s retirement after returning from Melbourne, and, pumped by his victory over the Soviet champion, decided he wanted to take a shot at the pro title, improbable as winning it may have seemed at the time. He convinced two affluent friends to put up guarantee money for a matchup with Patterson after Floyd defeated Moore. The Rademacher camp then contacted D’Amato and offered a $250,000 guarantee for a fight. At first D’Amato thought the idea was preposterous, but a quarter of a million dollars was nothing to blow off. Besides, D’Amato was having trouble lining up challengers who weren’t IBC affiliated. Rademacher had no ties to Jim Norris or Frankie Carbo. Or anyone else. At the time of the offer, Patterson had yet to defend his title against Jackson. But Rademacher’s backers were ready to make the deal. So D’Amato accepted, and the match was set for Sick’s Stadium in Seattle, with “Deacon” Jack Hurley, who’d served as the model for the manager in W. C. Heinz’s classic boxing novel, The Professional, acting as promoter. Its announcement spawned a chorus of hoots from the boxing fraternity. Floyd stood by his manager’s decision—and the $250,000 guarantee that came with it.

  Floyd was now operating as a corporation. Floyd Patterson Enterprises took in money from his ring earnings, product endorsements, and personal appearances, paid to cover Floyd’s training costs, and gave him a salary.8 Expenses for the Moore and Jackson fights had left a serious dent in the corporation’s earnings for the year. Floyd needed the Rademacher payday to shore up his company’s profits. Viewing the contest as something of a gimme, one step above an exhibition, and tired from the Jackson fight, he did not train in earnest.

  The fighters battled each other on August 22, 1957, less than four weeks after the Jackson fight. Rademacher was the hometown favorite and had an enthusiastic crowd rooting for him. But the boxing cognoscenti at ringside agreed among themselves that the fight would last no more than a round, possibly two. As soon as Patterson had a chance to connect, they thought, it would be all over for Rademacher. But in the second round, it was Rademacher who connected with a right cross, and Patterson fell to the mat. The ringside timekeeper counted off four seconds before Floyd rose. If Patterson had been lackadaisical about Rademacher before, the knockdown changed his attitude. He was now energized and angry. As the fight proceeded, Floyd knocked Rademacher down seven times, the final one coming at two minutes, fifty-seven seconds into the sixth round. Referee Tommy Loughran, himself a 1930s boxing champion, waved his arms to end the fight. Floyd had another knockout to add to his record. But the lingering image from the Patterson-Rademacher bout was that stunning right cross that had put the champ on his butt. How could a first-time pro do something like that to the heavyweight champion of the world?

  Patterson did not fight again for a year, as D’Amato went through torturous machinations to line up a challenger who met his standards. Floyd continued to retreat to remote training camps, away from his wife and daughter in Rockville Centre and away from the press. So isolated was he that some columnists began referring to him as the unknown champion. Patterson was hopeful that D’Amato could find a way to make a fight with the boxer who had had the greatest connection of all to the IBC: the retired Rocky Marciano.

  Patterson enlisted Emil Lence to arrange the match, using a million-dollar guarantee to entice Rocky back into the ring. Lence was not the only one trying to make the match. Frank Sinatra, in partnership with Irving B. Kahn, the CEO of the TelePrompTer Corporation, tried as well. TelePrompTer was making a fortune, not so much from the speech-aid machines it sold to politicians as from its technology that allowed it to show lucrative closed-circuit championship fights live at movie theaters across the country. Sinatra wanted to promote the fight just for kicks, but Marciano stood to profit handsomely from Kahn’s offer: $750,000 in cash and TelePrompTer stock. But the Rock wanted no more of boxing. He remained retired.

  The Sinatra-Kahn offer did wind up affecting Patterson’s career, though. Kahn’s associate Bill Rosensohn promoted the next Patterson bout—a fifteen-round title fight against Roy Harris at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles.9 But it wasn’t quite that simple: nothing was simple when Cus D’Amato was involved.

  The making of the Patterson-Harris fight is representative of the maddening way D’Amato typically did business. First, a story ran over the United Press International wire claiming that negotiations were under way to stage it at the Roosevelt Raceway on Long Island once the 1958 harness season ended. The day after the story hit the papers, D’Amato—who most likely was responsible for leaking the story to UPI in the first place—told the New York Times that nothing definite was in the works. He said he was in negotiations with five different fighters for a possible title defense. And, yes, Roy Harris, a recently ranked contender whose name was being bandied about as a possibility, was one of the five.

  Next a Texas promoter offered a guarantee of $250,000 for Patterson to fight Harris in Houston. D’Amato spurned the proposal. Then the World Boxing Committee, which was headed by Julius Helfand, who also chaired the New York State Athletic Commission, announced it would lift its recognition of Patterson as the world heavyweight champion if he didn’t defend his title against a ranked defender before September 30, 1958. A little more than two weeks later, as that deadline edged closer, the Associated Press reported that the fight would take place in Los Angeles, pending final settlement of the date and approval by the California Athletic Commission. Al Weill was listed as promoter. Weill had been Marciano’s manager and had always been tight with the IBC. Why would D’Amato agree to a fight with an IBC man like Weill at the helm? Within a week, the question became moot. The California Athletic Commission denied Weill’s application for a promoter’s license. So Bill Rosensohn replaced him, pending approval of his application. Coming in as copromoter was the Deacon, Jack Hurley, who’d staged the Rademacher fight. With all this in place, the fight was set for August 18, 1958.

  California matchmaker George Parnassus howled about the decision because he’d already booked heavyweight matchups between Zora Folley and Pete Rademacher and Carmen Basilio and Art Aragon to occur within weeks of the proposed Patterson-Harris bout. The championship fight would no doubt hammer ticket sales for the two nontitle fights. But the Patterson-Harris bout was given the OK, and the fighters began preparing. Promoters expected the fight to generate around $650,000, more than $200,000 of it to come from closed-circuit TV. Fans could pay between $3 and $7.50 to watch the fight at a movie theater or on the big screen at a drive-in. Tickets at the Los Angeles Wrigley Field sold for as much as $40 each, extraordinarily expensive by 1950s standards.

 
; And so the fight was made, the prices set. But it all took a lot of time to arrange. Patterson worked out and sparred, but that wasn’t the same as actually fighting. He would enter the ring against Roy “Cut ’n Shoot” Harris with a year’s worth of ring rust.

  Cut and Shoot, Texas, was such an out-of-the-way place, no one knew for sure how to spell it. The Handbook of Texas and the United States Postal Service used “Cut and Shoot,” no hyphens. But newspaper stylebooks of the 1950s preferred “Cut-and-Shoot.” There were a half dozen other variations. The wide spot in the road in Montgomery County, Texas, was called Cut and Shoot on roadmaps, but its most famous son became known as “Cut ’n Shoot.”

  When Roy Harris was a small boy in the 1930s, Cut and Shoot was one of the most remote, most insular communities in the continental United States. Its white population drew from families whose lineage tracked back to Scotland and Ireland, and clan competition in Montgomery County could be fierce. Often law enforcement officials prudently turned their heads while disputes were settled according to ancient codes. For generations, Montgomery County men made their living cutting timber and hunting wild hogs in the region’s all-but-impenetrable jungle-like forest. Things started to change with the arrival of the oil companies in the 1930s. The area became more “civilized” as outsiders moved in, and money began to trickle down to longtime residents. Yet it remained a region where violence was a constant. The measure of a man was judged by how well he could ride, shoot, use a knife, and fight with his fists. No one in Montgomery County could best Roy Harris’s father and uncles at any of these tests.