Floyd Patterson

by W. K. Stratton

  The celebration of Johansson’s victory in the rest of the United States seems suspect as well. He seemed to be on everyone’s broadcast, from Ed Sullivan’s to Jackie Gleason’s to Dinah Shore’s, sometimes showing off his ability to sing. News magazine photographers mobbed Ingo, snapping pictures of the champ with the striking Birgit Lundgren, especially relishing opportunities to shoot her poolside clad in a bikini. Ingo found himself cast with Alan Ladd, Sidney Poitier, James Darren, and Mort Sahl in a Korean War drama called All the Young Men—and he sang in the now largely forgotten movie.10 Ingo was named athlete of the year in a poll conducted by the Associated Press, beating out Johnny Unitas, who had just led the Baltimore Colts to their second consecutive NFL championship. Johansson’s big year was topped off when Sports Illustrated named him its “Sportsman of the Year.”11

  Americans love it when underdogs emerge victorious. But only a naive observer could conclude that the adoration Johansson received during the last half of 1959 was based entirely on his athletic prowess. When Patterson, an underdog, knocked out Archie Moore to become heavyweight champion in 1956, the parade of opportunities made available to him were slight compared to what Johansson received. Hollywood didn’t come seeking Floyd to sing in the movies. Had it been a Zora Folley, an Eddie Machen, a Cleveland “Big Cat” Williams, or any other African American boxer who had floored Patterson seven times in one round, he would not have been pursued by gossip columnists and magazine photographers the way Johansson was. It’s clear that race played a large role in Johansson’s celebrity. Reading between the lines, one can detect that writers of a certain age considered Jack Dempsey the last great white champion. As for Gene Tunney, Max Schmeling, Jack Sharkey, Primo Carnera, Max Baer, and James J. Braddock, none of them held the title long enough to be considered great. Marciano? Well, he was Italian American and perhaps too swarthy. But Dempsey was a solidly white American. And columnists like the NEA’s Harry Grayson went out of their way to liken Johansson to Dempsey. Dempsey was the last champion to knock down a challenger seven times in a round, so it was easy for writers to rationalize a bridge between the young Viking and the Manassa Mauler, who refused to fight black contenders once he became champion in 1919.12

  Floyd came out of what he called his black mood as he was sitting in his darkened den one night. In the late 1950s, TV stations signed off after airing a late, late movie. The signoff involved the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” When the national anthem ended, the TV was reduced to a slowly fading gray dot and soft hissing from the speaker. Floyd would later say that as he watched that dot, he thought about a girl he’d once met who was dying of leukemia. He reflected on how lucky he was in comparison to the stricken girl and her family. He arose from the couch and stepped over to a window, where he watched the dawn. He decided it was time to get on with his life—and win back his title.

  That night he and Sandra went to a movie—not in his comfortable suburb, but in the city, the place where he’d lost his title. He’d lost track of just how many weeks had passed by since that disastrous night at Yankee Stadium. But summer had given away to the chill of autumn when he decided he was ready to begin training again. He was anxious to get started. Floyd would prepare for the Johansson rematch fired by an emotion foreign to him. He hated the new heavyweight champion of the world, and he planned to take that hatred into the ring with him.

  It would take six days short of a full calendar year before the rematch took place—and then only after weeks of scandalous newspaper headlines about D’Amato’s involvement with organized crime. At the time, Cus credited himself with breaking the back of the International Boxing Club. In fact, the IBC was dissolved in January 1959 under orders of the US Supreme Court, and its demise had little, if anything, to do with D’Amato’s war against it. The IBC died under the weight of the federal Sherman Antitrust Act. Prosecutors were successful in sending the IBC’s leaders to prison without D’Amato’s ever once providing testimony to a grand jury or otherwise aiding the government, even though other boxing managers did so.13 In fact, investigators discovered that D’Amato privately took loans of $15,000 and $5,000 from the IBC’s Jim Norris in 1956, the year Patterson won the championship.

  D’Amato’s other business dealings in the mid to late 1950s turned out to be scarcely pure. D’Amato certainly knew that Bill Rosensohn had a gambling habit when Cus brought him in as a promoter. Often in debt, Rosensohn did not have the cash on hand needed for the guarantees for the first fight with Johansson. He turned to a friendly bookie for advice. The bookie referred Rosensohn to Genovese crime family leader Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno. (Salerno, though later infamous, was virtually unknown to law enforcement at the time.)

  Rosensohn managed to cut a deal for Salerno to provide the upfront money for the Johansson fight in exchange for a share of the profits. One problem existed: a friend of D’Amato’s named Charley Black already was under contract to receive 50 percent of the net. Black and D’Amato’s relationship went back to their boyhood days in the Bronx. Friendship aside, Black was valuable to D’Amato because Black was himself a gangster, a convicted loan shark with deep underworld connections. Black had secretly been involved in the underside of D’Amato’s dealings as far back as the 1958 fight with Cut ’n Shoot Harris. For reasons never clear, Black received 50 percent of the profit from that fight. A clause in the fight contract required Harris, if he won, to take on Black as his manager. Black relinquished his claim to any percentage of the first Johansson fight in exchange for one-third ownership of Rosensohn’s promotion company. Salerno himself took another third of the company for the money he gave Rosensohn.

  All of this placed D’Amato in a bad light when it became public. The man who cast himself as the champion to clean up boxing was now shown to have consorted with two bigtime gamblers (Rosensohn and Black) and a shadowy Mafia figure (Fat Tony Salerno). It was this scandal of D’Amato’s own making that prompted US senator Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee Democrat famous for his organized crime investigations, to direct his subcommittee toward prizefighting in September 1959. In addition, a New York State grand jury began hearing testimony about possible wrongdoing in boxing. Once the newspaper stories began to break, Johansson’s team demanded a full financial accounting of the first fight before it agreed to move forward with negotiations for the second. Finally, the New York State Athletic Commission admonished D’Amato for attempting to wrest control of the heavyweight division by acting as both manager and promoter. The commission also attempted to revoke D’Amato’s manager’s license, but D’Amato played a gambit that ultimately blocked the commission from doing so: he purposely had not renewed his license application. Subsequent court decisions held that a license that had expired could not be revoked.

  D’Amato left New York for Puerto Rico, where he stayed under an assumed name. He refused to testify before the grand jury or the Kefauver Committee. “What did D’Amato know and when did he know it?” asked author Montieth Illingworth. “Perhaps he didn’t conspire to drive Rosensohn to Salerno and Black. Maybe Rosensohn was just a loose cannon moved by his own inexperience, bad judgment, and greed. D’Amato apparently never discussed the details of what happened with anyone. It’s hard to believe, however, that a man so obsessed with control would not have known about the Salerno-Black connection.”14 José Torres, at the time making his way up the professional boxing ranks to become D’Amato’s next contender, later agreed with Illingworth’s assessment.

  As the legal and regulatory drama played out in the newspapers, Patterson began to train for his rematch with Johansson, scheduled for June 20, 1960. But he was not blind to what was being reported in the newspapers. Patterson’s distrust of D’Amato, which had its roots in Cus’s mishandling of the London fight contracts, continued to grow, even as he prepped hard to fight Johansson again.

  Floyd felt good getting back in shape after all those days on the couch. He thrived in the outdoors and seclusion at his upstate New York camp near Roaring Brook. Unfortun
ately, he couldn’t train there for long. The facility closed once the weather turned frosty. So he relocated to a gym in Westport, Connecticut, which at first seemed to be a workable site. But word of his choice for a training headquarters spawned local newspaper interest in D’Amato’s behind-the-scenes shenanigans. Patterson picked up the Westport daily paper and read the headline: BOXING GANGSTERS INVADE WESTPORT. That was it for him. He departed the community before the day was out.

  Patterson and his entourage moved thirty miles inland to Newtown and set up shop in the out-of-business LaRonde roadhouse, owned by the once-famous bandleader Enric Madriguera. The dance floor became the gym, furnished overnight with speedbags, heavy bags, mirrors for shadowboxing, and exercise mats. Patterson engaged himself in a tough conditioning routine that involved chopping wood, running, and repeating heavy-bag drills. But he was not happy with his surroundings. When Howard Cosell and his wife, Emmy, came calling, he vented. Patterson told Cosell: “Nothing but rats. I complained to the owner, and he said there were no rats in the house. I got a gun, shot three rats, and hung them up on the line in front of the house where he lives.”15

  Rats weren’t Floyd’s only worry. He was concerned about being what he called glove shy, whether fear of being knocked out again would hinder his ability to box effectively. He began sparring in the rat-infested roadhouse, and while that went well, sparring was just sparring. He needed to step up the challenge. So Floyd asked D’Amato, back from Puerto Rico and acting as an adviser, to arrange a two-week exhibition tour in Canada. Patterson fought ten times, and he felt completely satisfied that whatever glove shyness he might have had had dissipated by the time he returned to camp.

  Yet one thing still troubled Floyd. He couldn’t bring himself to watch the film of the Johansson fight. Whenever Dan Florio suggested the time was right to take a look at it, Patterson would say, “Next week.” And when next week arrived, Floyd would postpone it again. He just couldn’t confront Johansson—either as an image on film or TV or as a real person.

  But Johansson seemed to be everywhere. Word arrived at Patterson’s camp that Ingo would be appearing in a TV adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers.” Patterson had no interest in watching it, just as he’d eschewed watching his foe when Johansson sang with Dinah Shore on her popular TV show. Floyd assumed the other members of his camp would join him in avoiding the telecast. But then, as he and some others were playing cards, Patterson heard a Swedish voice coming from the TV set in an adjacent room. Patterson walked into the room to find his younger brother, Raymond, who had recently joined Buster Watson and Dan Florio in Patterson’s training corps, taking in the made-for-TV movie.

  Floyd thought about leaving, but then plopped down next to his brother. At first he kept his head bowed, staring at the floor, listening to Johansson’s smooth delivery. Then, finally, he made himself look at the screen. And there Floyd saw, in stark shades of gray, the man who had taken so much from him, proving that he could be a decent-enough actor. Patterson pondered why he had avoided Johansson for so long. It wasn’t fear, he determined. No, it was shame. And hate.

  In fact, hatred filled his mind. “Some people think you have to hate to be a champion fighter,” Patterson said later. “I have never hated an opponent except once. That was Ingemar, between the first and second fight. I hated him for a whole year, not because he beat me the first time, but because of his boasting on the Ed Sullivan program.”16 Hatred alone, however, was not going to get the job done against Johansson. Dan Florio decided it was time for Floyd to reassess his fighting style. In the makeshift gym, he told Patterson to assume his characteristic peek-a-boo stance. Patterson did as instructed, hands high on his head, body squared up to Florio’s. Florio placed his hands on Patterson’s shoulders and pushed. Floyd nearly fell down.

  “You see?” Florio said. “You’re not right. You got bad balance. Let’s go back to the book. Left foot out front, angle forty-five degrees. Left hand out front, angle forty-five degrees. Right hand straight up and down. Now you got leverage. The jab got to come better. Now try it and see what you think.”17

  Patterson liked it. Fighting out of a conventional stance became the focus of the remainder of the training camp, with Florio shouting at Patterson every time Floyd strayed.

  Visitors to Floyd’s camp found a remade man with a remade boxing style. They liked what they saw. The license-less D’Amato was as absent as the black despair Patterson had suffered through, prevented from working either as a manager or a cornerman. Observers on the scene believed this to be a good turn of events. Floyd seemed more relaxed and confident with Cus in exile. In April, Patterson matter-of-factly told one reporter that he was his own manager now.18 This was, within the context of the times, a shocking statement. Patterson confessed he still considered D’Amato a friend, and he said that he was now receiving some business advice from Julius November.19 (November was a tough New York attorney who was best known publicly for his unsuccessful legal maneuvers to keep the New York Giants baseball team from moving to San Francisco.) But Patterson was also stating for the world that he was now his own man. Even greats like Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano had never boldly declared they were their own managers. Patterson’s taking charge of his career was a landmark event in the evolution of black athletes. “You see,” Floyd told famed New York columnist Jimmy Breslin, “I feel I’m mature now. It’s like my weight. It came naturally. I had no special program. I just grew to 190 and my neck went to size seventeen. The same with my attitude. I always used to know what I felt. I knew that, all right. But I had trouble expressing myself. Now I can do it. And I don’t need anybody to do it for me . . . I’ll fight anybody regardless of name or affiliations. I’m tired of arguments.”20

  It was not a clean break. Newspapers typically reported D’Amato to be Patterson’s manager even after Floyd announced he was managing himself. Ever loquacious compared to the champ, D’Amato continued to be interviewed by sportswriters and seemed to speak for Patterson, even though he may not have spoken to Floyd for weeks. By this time, Julius November had more influence on Patterson than did D’Amato. It had been Cus who first brought November into Patterson’s business dealings, but as time went on, November began to seem like he was D’Amato’s rival. It was November who ultimately was winning Floyd’s trust, not D’Amato. But November did not want anyone to assume he had become de facto manager. He told Breslin, “Don’t get any incorrect ideas about the situation. Floyd Patterson is a client. And as a client he has his own mind. And let me tell you, this boy has his own mind.”21

  Patterson said, “When I talked to Cus about these terrible things which I had so much trouble understanding, as they came out one after the other, I just formed my own answer . . . ‘How many agreements were there before that I didn’t know about?’”22

  D’Amato stayed away from Floyd’s training camp in Newtown, but he telephoned once or twice a week. Floyd got on the phone only when he believed D’Amato had something important to tell him. Otherwise, the call was handled by Dan Florio. Shortly before the fight, D’Amato finally made an appearance at Newtown. But the relationship between mentor and protégé seemed strained. “In his early days,” Red Smith said of the situation in 1960, “Patterson was brainwashed by Cus D’Amato. Today D’Amato is manager in only one sense: He still gets a cut of the purse.”23 Floyd’s contractual obligations to Cus ensured that D’Amato would receive the manager’s percentage of his ring earnings for the next few fights, even if D’Amato contributed little or nothing.

  In addition to November, another lawyer was playing an increasingly important role in Patterson’s professional life: Roy Cohn. Cohn was famous—some might say infamous—in 1960. He had become a darling of American conservatives for his work with the redbaiting US senator Joseph McCarthy, for his role in the Communist espionage convictions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and for his work in bringing down Alger Hiss. He was a pugnacious foe to battle in the courtroom, yet he was a physically unimposing figure, no
one you’d expect to find butting heads with promoters and matchmakers in the pro boxing demimonde.

  Yet he was doing just that in 1960. He was the power behind Feature Sports Inc., which acquired Bill Rosensohn’s promotion company after Rosensohn’s connections with organized crime became public knowledge. With this, Cohn essentially became the promoter of the second Patterson-Johansson fight. Feature Sports turned out, like most of Cohn’s business ventures, to be anything but ordinary. He installed his law partner as treasurer of the new organization and travel agent Bill Fugazy, who had known Cohn since their school days, as supervising director. But as with many Cohn-directed operations, contention soon ruled. Sometimes the principals resorted to fisticuffs to settle disputes. (From the sidelines, Cus D’Amato thought they were a terrible bunch, guilty of bringing a kind of Wall Street sleaziness to boxing, which to him was even worse than that associated with the likes of Fat Tony Salerno.)

  Despite the dysfunction of his business practices, Cohn and his partners stood to make a good deal of money from Patterson-Johansson II. In addition to New York, cities desiring to host the fight included Los Angeles, Chicago, and Dallas, where American Football League founder and Dallas Texans owner Lamar Hunt wanted to stage it at the Cotton Bowl. In the end, New York won out, with the match set to take place at the Polo Grounds.

  In May 1960 Feature Sports announced it had hired Joe Louis as a consultant for the Johansson rematch. One of his duties was to advise Floyd on how to avoid the mistakes he made in the first fight. The legend that Johansson was the next Dempsey still flourished, with Johansson a heavy favorite to demolish Floyd. Perhaps if Patterson received some guidance from the great Louis, fans might think the match could turn out to be closer. It seems that Feature Sports took Louis on for the Louis name more than any precise services the ex-champ could provide, and Louis, always in need of money, was more than happy with the arrangement. As a publicity stunt, it worked. Louis’s visit to Newtown generated headlines. But that visit turned out to be more than just PR. “I have been studying the pictures of the first fight between Johansson and Patterson,” Louis said, “and I think I have found something. I think I can show Floyd how to win.”24 Louis did, in fact, lay out a sound blueprint for Patterson: Floyd should crowd Johansson at every opportunity, never allow Ingo a chance to throw a big right-hand punch. It was the only way to beat a heavy hitter, Louis believed. Louis said Floyd should take Ingo to the ropes from the get-go and never let him escape. Louis also told Floyd not to wait any longer before he saw the film of the first Johansson fight.