Courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
Floyd and baseball legend Jackie Robinson (right) traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 to show support for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Reverend Ralph Abernathy as the city suffered through bombings and other violence aimed at supporters of the civil rights movement. AP Photo
Floyd went against many of his fans, including the president, representatives of the NAACP, and Cus D’Amato, in agreeing to fight Sonny Liston. The 1962 fight became a literary event, but Floyd lasted less than a round before Liston knocked him out. AP Photo
Patterson was so humiliated by the loss that he wore a “beatnik beard” and a hat and shades to disguise himself from fans and the press. AP Photo
The war of words between Muhammad Ali and Patterson grew heated as their 1965 fight approached, particularly over the topic of the Nation of Islam. Ali publicly dismissed Floyd as an “Uncle Tom,” but in fact the two men had a complicated relationship built on a kind of respect. Bettmann/Corbis
Patterson entered that fight injured and lost to Ali. Floyd’s final fight, in 1972, was also a loss to Ali, yet The Greatest later ranked Floyd with Sonny Liston, George Foreman, and Joe Frazier as the best boxers he ever fought. Bettmann/Corbis
As the 1960s progressed, Floyd became increasingly politically conservative. In 1972, he paid a second visit to the Oval Office, this time at the invitation of Richard Nixon. Accompanying Patterson are his second wife, Janet, and their two young daughters, Jennifer and Janene. WPHO 9741-02. Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum
Patterson stayed in shape and loved boxing, just as he loved America, to the end of his days. Here he is in 1995, at his gym in New Paltz, New York, where he trained many aspiring upstate fighters after he left the ring. Michael Brennan/Corbis
10
Standing at the Peak
FOR NOW, FLOYD was back on top of the world, and he lost little time making a deal to give Johansson a rematch. After a contorted process to work out the details, the rubber match in their series was set for March 13, 1961, in Miami. Before Floyd began training in earnest, he took time off to travel to Rome, where the American team was competing in the 1960 Olympics. There he ran into Cassius Clay, who had dazzled Olympic spectators with his boxing skills while winning the light-heavyweight gold medal. Clay was as proud of his Olympic win as Patterson had been of his own eight years earlier—maybe even more so. Clay had not taken off his medal since he received it on the victor’s platform, wearing it even when sleeping.
While being interviewed by Earl Ruby of his hometown newspaper, the Louisville Courier-Journal, Clay spotted Patterson and said, “Good Lord, there’s the champ!”1 Clay ran over to greet the recrowned heavyweight king. Patterson was Clay’s hero. It was Patterson who had showed it was possible for a heavyweight to possess a middleweight’s hand speed and fluidity in the ring, and Clay was building his own career around those qualities. After Clay saw Patterson’s fight with Brian London on TV, he became obsessed with winning the heavyweight championship someday. At one point, Clay had traveled to Indianapolis with his father and brother, Rudolph Valentino Clay, to seek out D’Amato, who was in the city with Patterson for an exhibition. Clay’s father inquired whether D’Amato might consider managing his son Cassius, who was already showing a lot of promise as an amateur. D’Amato passed, but Clay did get to meet Patterson briefly.
Now in Rome, Patterson recognized the hyperanimated eighteen-year-old boxer with the medal around his neck and the nonstop mouth. “Hi, boy, how’s your dad?” Patterson said. For the benefit of the reporters who had ambled up to the scene, Clay, who stood six feet, three inches, said, “Look, I’m three inches taller than him. When I fill out, I’ll be bigger all around. That’s something good to know. You see, I may have to fight him some day.”
That same day, Clay stood in the Quonset hut that served as the dining hall, carrying on with a group of African American boxers and track athletes. Clay spied Patterson strolling through the building and said, “Watch this, I’m going to get this guy. Watch this!” As soon as Patterson reached Clay and the others, Clay jumped up on a table with a knife and fork and proclaimed to the heavyweight champion, “I’m having you next! I’m having you for dinner!”2 Patterson laughed. From the beginning, he understood Clay’s shtick in a way some later fighters never could.
While in Rome, Floyd took part in another meeting of significance, but this one included no levity whatsoever. Pope John XXIII had granted him an audience. It was an important moment in his life as a Catholic, and Floyd was nervous, fearful of making a mistake as, sweat trickling down his face, he kneeled and kissed the pontiff’s ring. The audience was a success. Floyd left the Vatican relieved that he had not messed up.
Promoters wanted Johansson to train for a while in Miami to boost ticket sales, and made arrangements for him to work out at the Fifth Street Gym, which was run by Chris Dundee, a Philadelphia-born promoter with deep ties to bigtime boxing. Publicist Harold Conrad arrived at the gym with Johansson and Whitey Bimstein in tow. Only after arriving did they realize that they had failed to line up sparring partners for Johansson. So Conrad asked Dundee’s brother, trainer Angelo Dundee, if he had anyone the ex-champ could work with. Angelo called to a young boxer, who turned out to be none other than Cassius Clay. Clay had wasted little time in turning pro after his Olympic triumphs. The coterie of Louisville businessmen who managed Clay had hired Dundee as his trainer, who then moved Clay to Miami so he could train at his brother’s gym.
Clay’s performance against Johansson left Conrad and Bimstein flabbergasted. Johansson looked helpless against the fast young man who never stopped talking. “Johansson was furious,” Conrad said. “I mean, he was pissed. He started chasing Clay around the ring, throwing right hands and missing by twenty feet, looking ludicrous.”3 All the while, Clay kept chanting that he was the one who should be fighting Patterson for the championship, not Johansson. After just two rounds with Clay, the gasping Johansson was unable to continue. Gil Rogin, then a young writer for Sports Illustrated, having witnessed the scene, told skeptical editors back in New York that he was confident Clay was a future heavyweight champion of the world.
Without question, Clay was sharp at Miami’s Fifth Street Gym that day. But it was easy for him to look good against Johansson, who, despondent after his loss to Patterson, had let himself fall out of shape. Ingo was twelve pounds over his prime fighting weight. All twelve of those pounds seemed to be nothing but flab. For the sake of his own reputation, Floyd hoped for an impressive win over Johansson, something that would prove that what had happened at the Polo Grounds was no fluke. Boxing prognosticators agreed that Patterson was likely to get just that against such an ill-prepared opponent.
A couple of weeks before the fight, Robert H. Boyle of Sports Illustrated reported on discord in the Patterson camp. He described Floyd’s extended group of associates as being the “most bizarre cast of characters to hit the road since Jack Kerouac and buddies careened across the country.” The article focused on Julius November, Roy Cohn, Bill Fugazy, Irving Kahn, and, especially, D’Amato: “The sole tragic figure in the lot is Cus D’Amato, entangled in all sorts of legal snares. The press often reviles him as a crook. A crook he is not; a kook he may be.”4
Boyle exposed the diminished role D’Amato had in all matters pertaining to Floyd Patterson. “Most of the time I just lay around,” D’Amato told Boyle. “I read. I play with the dog. Anything to avoid boredom.” Boyle reported that with D’Amato all but out of the picture, the management power had shifted to November, whom Boyle described as a big, bald, baby-faced Brooklynite, a boastful man who liked to tell people about the honors he won in law school. Fugazy confirmed to Boyle what a lot of outside observers had decided: D’Amato was all but completely out of the Patterson picture. “He is not calling the shots,” Fugazy said.5
The article seemed to be a truthful assessment of the situation, with the people controlli
ng the promotion of Patterson’s fights speaking honestly if somewhat harshly. But November did not take it that way. He sued Sports Illustrated for libel, saying the article defamed him as an attorney and a man. (The suit never went to trial, so presumably was settled out of court.) Patterson’s followers were about to learn that the tumult wasn’t limited to Patterson’s professional associates. It was affecting the champ as well.
A week later, the New York Times Magazine ran one of the most in-depth profiles of Patterson yet published. Not surprisingly, its author was Gay Talese. Patterson opened up to Talese more than he ever had to any other writer about how his shyness and insecurity had left him petrified as a child, unable to hold his head up, and how those things still affected his life. “I’m a lot better now,” Patterson told Talese, “but I remember the funny feeling I had in Rome last year as I waited for my audience with the Pope.”6 Floyd recounted how he’d sweated in the presence of John XXIII.
Readers also learned about Patterson’s growing affection for Sweden. After his loss to Johansson, Floyd received hundreds of letters from Swedish fans saying they were sorry he’d lost: “Not so many encouraging letters came from people in this country.” To repay that kindness, Patterson visited Sweden following the second Johansson fight, where he was received with adoration. The nation impressed him: “Everywhere I went in Sweden, I saw there was no color line.”7 Mixed-race couples were able to walk down the streets there without fear.
Floyd told Talese that while he was enjoying the racial equity overseas, his wife was having trouble getting an appointment back home at a Rockville Centre beauty salon. When Julius November’s wife, who was white, experienced no difficulty at the same salon, it was all too apparent that Sandra was a victim of prejudice. “I wanted to make this incident known,” Patterson told Talese. “I didn’t want colored people to go there and receive the embarrassment my wife received.” Then Patterson learned that the shop was operated by a Swedish family. He couldn’t believe it. But Sandra double-checked, and, yes, it was true. “And I didn’t know what to say.”8
The heavyweight champion divulged that he struggled with racism every day. Patterson shared with Talese that he’d been thinking about moving his family to the upscale suburb of Scarsdale but had been warned that it would be unwise for him to do so because black people weren’t welcome there. As for the fight in Miami, a city that in early 1961 was primarily southern in its attitudes, Patterson said he would take part in the Johansson rematch there only if he could be guaranteed that seating would be totally desegregated, holding true to a promise he’d made to himself when he fought the exhibition match in Fort Smith. The promoters agreed to Patterson’s stipulation, certainly the first time such a demand from an African American athlete had ever been granted in the South.
“I used to think Jesus was a white man,” Patterson said. “All the pictures I’ve ever seen of Him showed Him white. But I no longer can accept Him as a white man. He either is a Jesus of no color, or a Jesus with skin that is all colors.”9 It was a bold thing to declare in America in 1961. Patterson told Talese he’d learned a lot from Johansson during the year Ingo was champion. He’d hear Johansson saying things at press conferences, mostly dismissive statements about his opponents, that Floyd thought one wasn’t supposed to say. Patterson decided to speak his mind more readily. He wouldn’t resort to insulting other boxers. He would, however, speak out—in his subtle way—about matters of racial injustice and fair play. Long gone were the days when Floyd would depend on Cus D’Amato to do all the talking.
If Floyd had practiced self-denial at his training camps and in his choice of accommodations at earlier fights—a freezing jockey’s room, a rat-infested abandoned dancehall—he now indulged himself. He lodged at a villa in an upscale Miami neighborhood, apart from his wife and daughters and his recently born son, Floyd Jr. He trained at Miami Beach’s Hotel Deauville, a fabulous MiMo structure that was one of Sinatra’s favorite hangouts. At the villa, he greeted the New Yorker’s A. J. Liebling while wearing a silk dressing robe. To Liebling’s eye, it appeared Patterson had fleshed out to a full heavyweight, with ropey muscle showing around the base of his neck. But the champ exuded anything but confidence. Patterson said a bad dream was haunting him, so bad he couldn’t describe it. “It’s lucky I’m not superstitious,” he said. “If I was, I wouldn’t go through with this fight.”10 Liebling could hardly believe his ears. Neither fighter seemed particularly hungry for the title.
D’Amato, arriving in Miami with his position in the Patterson entourage reduced to little more than that of hanger-on, considered the fight to be a no-win situation for Patterson. D’Amato thought Johansson would be as good as ever in the ring, gluttony aside. Floyd would have to fight his best fight to win. But D’Amato thought the boxing press would refuse to recognize the situation as such. If Patterson won, D’Amato believed, the press would report it was because Johansson was fat and out of shape. If Johansson won, well, then that would prove that Patterson was really a bum all along, a bum who lost to another bum who wasn’t even in condition. No doubt the fighters themselves held similar concerns. For the average boxing fan, the bout promised to be a ho-hum affair.
Early on, ticket sales were as soft as Johansson’s expanding gut, only picking up once promoters resorted to fire-sale pricing: $100 ringside seats could be had for as little as $20. Matters were better organized than they had been at the Polo Grounds—there were no riots. This time, since the bout was taking place in Miami instead of in New York State, where he remained banned as a manager, “adviser” D’Amato was among those working Patterson’s crowded corner. The others were Dan and Nick Florio and Buster Watson. Liebling, watching from ringside, wasn’t sure having D’Amato as a second was such a good idea. He feared D’Amato’s presence made Patterson jumpy—“It must be like having your old man in your corner.”11
Patterson certainly seemed jumpy during the hours before the opening bell. Perhaps he was still haunted by the indescribable nightmare. He remained on edge when he climbed through the ropes for the fight’s first round. He had good reason to be anxious. The jab Patterson had been trying to improve in recent weeks was ineffective as the fight got under way. After throwing one, Floyd committed the cardinal sin of failing to follow it with another jab or with a right cross. He also failed to step out of Johansson’s range. Ingo may have been soft and already breathing hard, but he reacted to the amateurish opening Patterson provided him. Johansson’s toonder flew, and Floyd, a four-to-one favorite, collapsed. The crowd gasped. Patterson shook off the blow and was back on his feet after just two seconds.12 The referee, a local fireman, signaled for the boxers to resume fighting. Just a few seconds later, Patterson went down again. For the moment, it seemed as if the bloated Johansson was somehow going to pull it off again, floor Patterson over and over until Floyd could no longer fight. But then Patterson surprised Johansson with a left hook that floored the ex-champ. Like Patterson, Johansson refused to stay down. The bell rang to end the round and the audience applauded crazily, certain an out-and-out donnybrook was in the works.
In the second round, the fight quickly became boring. Patterson boxed carelessly, leaving himself vulnerable to attack, but Johansson, his energy already spent, couldn’t exploit the openings Floyd offered him. All Ingo seemed to be able to do was trudge ponderously after Floyd. It went on like this through four rounds, the audience growing ever more discontented by the lack of action. “When they came out for the sixth,” said Liebling, “Johansson made his last charge, and Patterson backed away, as if to gauge the force left in the harpooned, dying porpoise.”13 Patterson hit him with a left hook to the body, followed by two rights. The fireman ended the fight at two minutes and forty-five seconds of the round, declaring Johansson knocked out, as the fans booed referee and boxers alike.14 Patterson paid them no heed. But he did do something no one could ever remember seeing in a boxing ring before. He kissed Johansson on the cheek after his defeated opponent stood back up. Floyd said later, �
�I think I called it ‘girlish’ when they asked me about it, but it was my expression of admiration for a man who had fought me well.”15
The fight reviews were anything but expressions of admiration. Even sympathetic writers like Liebling determined that Patterson was a second-rate heavyweight champion. For Howard Cosell, the second Johansson fight had been “the zenith of Floyd Patterson’s career.”16 He believed the third meeting was the beginning of some sort of decline. Floyd was just too vulnerable to right hands. Even harsher criticism came from Jimmy Cannon, who ridiculed Patterson at length for his inability to take a punch and remain on his feet: “At first, I thought he would be the first heavyweight champion with a cauliflower tail but he still is able to sit in hard-seated chairs during television interviews without squirming . . . the champion has become a master of the pratfall. Only Red Skelton challenges him in this line.” Cannon listed Patterson as no better than the tenth best of eleven heavyweight champions since Max Schmeling won the title in 1930, rating even mediocrities like Primo Carnera and Jack Sharkey above him. The only solace Patterson could take from Cannon’s heavy-handed column was that Johansson was ranked eleventh.17
Yet, with the public beyond the boxing ring, Patterson stood at the peak of his popularity. He may not have sung duets with Dinah Shore on TV, but he had learned from Johansson how he could make the most of his heavyweight crown in terms of generating publicity, and he planned to use it for causes he valued. A little more than a month after the fight, NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins introduced Floyd as the chair of a membership and fundraising drive for the civil rights organization’s New York City operations. The goal was to raise $1 million for legal, legislative, and educational programs while boosting membership from twenty-seven thousand to fifty thousand. Cochairing the effort with Floyd was Jackie Robinson. In addition to the NAACP project, Patterson raised money to create a halfway house for Wiltwyck boys transitioning from the school to life back in the city. He put up $12,500 of his own money and secured pledges for an additional $12,500 to help establish what would become known as the Floyd Patterson House.
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