It was a hard place that demanded hardness from everyone and everything living there. The streams teemed with alligators and the razor-toothed fish called gars. Wild boars in the woods were capable of killing a man with their tusks. Clouds of particularly aggressive mosquitoes attacked any exposed skin. Equally aggressive ticks awaited the opportunity to suck blood from anyone who brushed up against a bush or clump of grass. In fact, there are stories that Harris showed up for boxing events early in his career with ticks embedded on his back. No one thought anything of it.
“Big Henry” Harris, Roy’s father, became known throughout East Texas and beyond for his boxing skills, both in gloved matches of record and illegal bare-knuckled brawls. Legend around Montgomery County holds that word of his fighting prowess reached Joe Louis’s managers, who proposed a bout. Big Henry was amenable, as long as Louis traveled to Texas for the fight. Big Henry wasn’t about to go north to Louis’s home turf, suspicious that everything would be rigged against him. The matchup never occurred. Not surprisingly, Big Henry’s sons wanted to emulate their father, and Roy proved to possess the mental toughness and physical coordination to be a very successful boxer. Roy signed on with a somewhat larger-than-life character named Lou Viscusi—“Viscusi could talk the eyes out of a bullfrog,” claimed one rival Houston manager. Viscusi was a New York native then managing boxers in Houston while maintaining ties with mobsters on the East Coast.10 With Big Henry working his corner, Roy began defeating all the boxers Viscusi could arrange for him to fight.
Most of Harris’s bouts occurred in Houston, far removed from the boxing establishments of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and Boston. At the time of the Patterson fight, the American Boxing Association had Harris ranked as the number three heavyweight contender, trailing only Zora Folley and Eddie Machen. Harris was 22-0, with quality wins over Bob Baker, Willie Pastrano, and Willi Besmanoff, and he received an award from The Ring magazine for the fighter who made the most progress during the previous year (1957). He also regularly appeared in the magazine’s listing of top ten heavyweights for several years. Novelist Joe David Brown wrote in Sports Illustrated that Harris might well be the best heavyweight produced by the state of Texas since Jack Johnson emerged from Galveston some fifty years earlier.11
The matchup of boxing skills between Patterson and Harris was lost in the prefight publicity, which centered on Montgomery County and Harris’s extended family—all of which were ideal fodder for Americans who were still caught up in the Davy Crockett craze and who giggled over the antics in Dogpatch as they read the daily comics. Patterson was OK with the publicity focus on Harris rather than himself because it kept him from getting distracted, allowed him to focus on the fight. And Patterson knew that Harris was a Montgomery County anomaly. True, he came from a family that just a generation before wore buckskin clothes with coonskin caps, but Harris was also a college graduate who had been a military officer and who taught school when he wasn’t boxing. Patterson also was all too aware that a fighter with Harris’s skills could be dangerous for a rusty champion such as himself.
There was another dynamic to this matchup—perhaps the most compelling one from an outside-the-ring perspective. Patterson was an urban African American hailing from New York. Harris was a rural white southerner—Harris’s part of Texas is much more akin to the Deep South than it is to the West. “‘Nigger’ was just the common word used back then to describe black people,” Harris said in describing the Big Thicket country in which he grew up. “It was the only word we knew. It wasn’t said with hate. We didn’t know that in other places it was considered a hateful word.”12 Nevertheless, there was plenty of hate in East Texas. Montgomery County was known as a hotbed of Ku Klux Klan activities, and lynchings were not unknown in East Texas. There was no question that Harris sprang from the same sort of social milieu as Emmett Till’s murderers (agrarian, southern, white) just as Patterson sprang from the same sort of social milieu as Till himself (urban, northern, black). The conflict between what the boxers represented resonated as questions such as public school desegregation and voting rights for blacks divided the nation. Patterson read newspaper accounts saying that some Montgomery County people viewed the fight as a battle between the North and South. That was fine with him.
But neither fighter felt up to snuff as the August 18 bout approached. Patterson thought his timing was off because of ring inactivity. As for Harris, he set up camp at Arrowhead Springs in the San Bernardino Mountains above LA. He subsisted on a high-protein diet that melted too much weight off him. At one point, he was down to 174 pounds before realizing he was carbohydrate-deficient. Two weeks before the fight, he was advised to address the situation by imbibing beer. He’d gained back twenty pounds by the time of the weigh-in, but the yo-yo effect of shedding weight then putting it back on sapped Harris of his energy.
Gamblers made Harris an eight-to-one underdog early on, although that changed when Texas bettors, wagering with their hearts rather than their best judgment, began placing big-money bets on the pride of Cut and Shoot. By the day of the fight, Patterson was down to a three-and-a-half-to-one favorite. More than 21,600 spectators crowded into Wrigley Field, including 1,600 Marines from nearby Camp Pendleton, to watch the fight, setting a California live-gate record for the time of $234,183.13 Theaters carrying the fight on closed circuit numbered 151, including the drive-in theater in Conroe, Texas, where scores of Harris fans were ready to blow horns, hoot, and launch soda water and moonshine bottles into the air whenever Cut ’n Shoot might seem to take an advantage.
As the fight unrolled in LA, it seemed that folks in Conroe might just have a lot to cheer about. Patterson struggled with lethargic feet, the result of too much time out of the ring. Good footwork was key to the success of any boxer, but it was especially true for Floyd. He depended on speed both as a weapon of attack and for defense. He relied on his ability to slip in and out of the pocket quickly to win. But without speed, he left himself open to be hit. Good footwork was also necessary for him to effectively execute his gazelle punches without being off balance. Patterson was indeed off balance in the second round when Harris launched a right uppercut–straight left combination that knocked Floyd down. “I saw punches coming and didn’t get out of the way,” Patterson said. “I thought he sort of pushed me down, but if it will settle matters, let’s call it a knockdown.”14
Harris had planned to attack Floyd early, and it seemed with the knockdown that his strategy was paying off. “I noticed something about Floyd before we fought,” Harris said. “You had to make him mad before he started fighting his best. So I tried to take him down early in the fight, before he got worked up.”15 Unfortunately for Harris, Floyd didn’t stay down. And he was a different fighter once he was back on his feet. He began to take Harris apart in round after round. By the seventh round, Harris seemed exhausted and was bleeding profusely. Floyd was enough in command of the fight that he was able to pick an opening. When one presented itself, he threw a left hook–right cross combination that felled Harris. Harris was able to rise to one knee as the referee counted, and the round ended before Patterson could levy further damage. A left hook dropped Cut ’n Shoot to the canvas for a count of seven in the eighth round. Just before the bell, Patterson knocked him down yet again. Patterson continued to rack up points over the next three rounds as a battered, hemorrhaging Harris could do little to stave off Floyd’s attack. In the twelfth round, Patterson sent Cut ’n Shoot tumbling one more time. Blood cascaded down Harris, and observers at ringside speculated among themselves that if the referee didn’t stop the fight soon, one of Cut ’n Shoot’s eyes might fall from the socket. Big Henry, seconding his son, had seen enough. He told referee Mushy Callahan that the Harris corner was throwing in the towel. Cut ’n Shoot pleaded to go on, but Patterson heard Big Henry tell Roy that continuing was futile.
Fifty years later, Harris still wished his father had not stopped the fight. He believed he could have found a way to win it. “This is someon
e I should have beaten with ease,” he said. “I think about the fight all the time. I have never stopped thinking about it.”16
Patterson’s share of the Wrigley Field ticket sales totaled $101,000, and his payday from closed-circuit TV was $210,000. Floyd Patterson Enterprises made a lot of money from the fight. But Patterson himself was not happy with his performance, believing he’d been stale and slow. Fans and sports columnists were critical of how he boxed, as well, supplying new timbre for the chorus of nonbelievers in the legitimacy of his heavyweight championship. “Falling Floyd,” as Patterson detractor Jimmy Cannon sometimes called him, had allowed yet another boxer to drop him to the canvas. If he had been a true champion in the tradition of Joe Louis, he would have floored Harris, the reasoning went. “You should have knocked Harris out before his corner stopped it,” Cannon said to Patterson afterward. Patterson explained that he believed he could have dispatched Harris earlier, but the sight of Cut ’n Shoot’s hideously bloodied face caused him to back off. “Compassion is a defect in a fighter,” Cannon said.17 That Harris had gone into the fight as one of the top contenders in the heavyweight class seemed to be immediately forgotten as soon as Big Henry threw in the towel. Harris became another nobody, “the hitless wonder of Cut and Shoot,” as Red Smith described him.18
The criticism stung Floyd, and he wanted change. He thought the best plan was to start with the top contender and work his way down the rankings. In order, the first three would have been Eddie Machen, Zora Folley, and Willie Pastrano. Pastrano had earlier turned the Patterson camp down. He, Machen, and Folley went to Europe for what they thought would be easy bouts with healthy paydays.19
But a remarkable six weeks of upsets occurred following Patterson-Harris. In September 1958 Machen, Folley, and Pastrano all had contractual obligations for those European fights before they could sign to meet Patterson. On September 14 Machen fell to Ingemar Johansson in Sweden. Just two weeks later Brian London, the British heavyweight champ, knocked out Pastrano. Two weeks after that, Folley lost a ten-round decision to England’s hard-hitting Henry Cooper. Sweden’s undefeated Johansson, on the strength of his record and his defeat of Machen, emerged as the highest-ranking contender.
There was much about a Patterson-Johansson fight that would make it a marketable show. Johansson was the European champion, and that meant that the radio broadcast and the subsequent films of the fight would play well in Europe. In the 1950s fight promoters continued to believe that America’s primarily white boxing fan base still wanted “great white hopes” to root for—Joe Louis’s and Sugar Ray Robinson’s fights against white challengers always made more money than their fights against black boxers. And finally, Johansson was handsome and had a bit of the playboy’s air about him. He was very promotable.
Immediately after his fight with Machen, Johansson signed a promotion contract with Bill Rosensohn. In it, Rosensohn agreed that within forty days he would secure a contract for Johansson to fight Patterson. If he were unable to do so, he would give Johansson $10,000 and the Swedish fighter would be freed of his contractual obligations. If the fight occurred and Johansson won, Rosensohn would have Johansson under contract for a return bout. And thus the negotiations began. On November 25 D’Amato said that he was optimistic the fight could be scheduled, once he was able to “clarify previous misunderstandings” with Johansson’s manager, Edwin Ahlquist.20 Again, the negotiations were complicated, made more so by D’Amato’s distrustful nature, but in January 1959 Patterson and Johansson signed the contracts for a fight in June.
It was understood by both sides that Patterson would get one tune-up fight prior to his bout with Johansson. For this, D’Amato had lined up Henry Cooper. The balding Brit was a good choice.21 Though notorious as a bleeder—it was said that the blood would start gushing if you did no more than spit on him—he was a game boxer, the only fighter ever to win three Lonsdale Belts outright.22 Before his fight with Folley, Cooper had agreed in principal to fight Patterson for a guarantee of $75,000; after his upset win, Cooper raised his demand to $150,000. D’Amato would have no part of that, so he began to look elsewhere. He settled on Brian London, the rugged British fighter who had upset Willie Pastrano. Patterson would fight him May 1, 1959, less than two months before the Johansson bout.
London, known as the British Bulldog, held the title of British Commonwealth champion, though Cooper, who had beaten him twice, was clearly the superior boxer. But London’s no-nonsense style won him the admiration of many British fight fans. Unfortunately for Patterson, with a tough fight against Johansson looming, the London tune-up bout provided plenty of distractions as it turned into a promotional nightmare, with no one seemingly able to agree about a site or a promoter. Finally Indianapolis was designated the location of the match, and, after several promoters had been named and dropped, Bill Rosensohn emerged as the man primarily in charge.
Patterson signed the four sets of papers presented to him by D’Amato, and everything seemed ready to go. But then, a week later, D’Amato showed up at Ehsan Karadag’s New Jersey facility, where Patterson was in training camp. Instead of going into the gym, however, D’Amato sent an emissary to fetch Floyd and bring him out to his car. When Patterson climbed into the backseat, a distressed D’Amato informed him that there was trouble with the deal. Patterson would be receiving less for the London fight than D’Amato had thought—and his take in subsequent fights would be less as well. D’Amato confessed that it was all his fault. With the confusion surrounding the fight’s promotion, he claimed he had failed to read the contracts carefully and had signed away some of Patterson’s future earnings. But now that the ink was dry, fighter and manager had no choice but to accept them as written. Another thing Patterson learned was that there was no television-revenue guarantee for the bout. Finally, D’Amato told Floyd he feared there would not be sufficient time for an effective publicity campaign in Indianapolis, which meant that the Indianapolis gate receipts might be less than anticipated. Stunned, Patterson climbed out of the car and trudged back to the gym as D’Amato drove away. D’Amato promptly went underground, and Patterson publicly acknowledged that his manager had made some mistakes that would affect Floyd Patterson Enterprises, though no dollar amounts were ever disclosed. Floyd said he was still committed to D’Amato, even while beginning to wonder to himself about his manager’s acumen. Or maybe that something else was going on with D’Amato.
Everything seemed odd about the developing title fight. Just two weeks before the contest, London, typically a publicity seeker, was still hidden away in New York. Normally, a boxer would have been in the city of the fight by this time. He was registered under an assumed name at a hotel. Why? No one would say. But the mystery surrounding London seemed to bear D’Amato’s stamp, especially after London, his father, his brother, and his local boxing manager were spotted leaving the East Side’s Gramercy Gym. When word spread that Patterson’s foe was training at his home gym, working out with Patterson’s regular sparring partners, and no one outside the D’Amato clique was being allowed up the stairs, observers wondered if Floyd’s manager had taken charge of his challenger as well. That seemed weird—as did D’Amato’s complete absence from the scene.23 Only later did it become clear that D’Amato did indeed have a role in London’s New York management, but the details were not disclosed. Floyd remained silent about the matter.
“Those men in white coats at the Patterson-London fight won’t be there to sell peanuts,” said Sports Illustrated’s Martin Kane. “They will be psychiatrists, assembled for the clinical study of one of the more lunatic sporting promotions of our century, surpassing in some aspects even such demented delights as bunion derbies and dance marathons.”24
In late April, London finally arrived in Indianapolis, and he was his old talkative self. The $75,000 guarantee he received for the fight was the biggest of his career, and he was certainly happy about that. The opportunity to compete for the champion’s belt was something he’d never come close to achieving earlier in hi
s career. He said he would gladly fight Floyd for free, just to have a shot at the crown. He knew that his opponent regarded this as nothing more than a tune-up for his meeting with Johansson, but London predicted that Patterson just might get the surprise of his life. Floyd was no Marciano or Louis, in London’s estimation, and could be defeated.25
Patterson may not have been a Marciano or Louis, and he may have been viewed as a flawed champion by columnists like Jimmy Cannon, but at the time of the London fight, he was held in high esteem by African Americans, who considered him a hero. While in Indianapolis in the days before the London bout, Floyd visited the all-black Crispus Attucks High School. Like southern schools, midwestern public schools of the time were typically racially segregated, and black schools wound up on the losing end of budgetary decisions. Facilities were often substandard, including playing fields and gymnasiums, and there was little money for adequate athletic gear; as a result, black public high school teams often struggled against larger white high schools with more money. But two years earlier, Crispus Attucks High School had made national history by becoming the first African American high school to win a state sports championship. Led by the legendary Oscar Robertson, Attucks had come out on top of the equally legendary Indiana state high school basketball tournament. Another Robertson-led Attucks team repeated as champions the next year, becoming the first high school basketball team in Indiana history to go undefeated for the season. Floyd received an enthusiastic welcome from the sports-crazed student body. In particular, he impressed a fifteen-year-old girl. “In 1958,” said Janet Langhart, who was then living with her mother in a housing project, “on the heels of Little Rock and all the racial turbulence that had engulfed the country in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery bus boycott, Floyd Patterson was one of the heroes who gave ‘the Negro’ a sense of power, a conviction that in spite of prejudice and hatred, we could compete and triumph.”26 Langhart later became an author, playwright, and TV personality, as well as wife of Defense Secretary William Cohen.
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