“It’s not a bad feeling when you’re knocked out,” he said. “It’s a good feeling, actually. It’s not painful, just a sharp grogginess. You don’t see angels or stars; you’re on a pleasant cloud. After Liston hit me in Nevada, I felt, for about four or five seconds, that everybody in the arena was actually in the ring with me, circled around me like a family, and you feel warmth toward all the people in the arena after you’re knocked out. You feel lovable to all the people. And you want to reach out and kiss everybody—men and women—and after the Liston fight somebody told me I actually blew a kiss to the crowd from the ring.”2 But the love evaporated. Floyd realized where he was, what had happened. What ensued was a confused pain combined with anger. There was no avoiding it.
Floyd could not seem to escape conflict, especially on the home front. The Patterson children were having a difficult time with the white kids in their neighborhood. Floyd’s children were “stoned, literally,” on the way to school, according to Milton Gross’s daughter, sportswriter Jane Gross.3 In addition to throwing rocks, the white kids called the young Pattersons “nigger, chocolate drop, and Sambo.”4 Now, a new problem had arisen. “I’m not going to work out today,” an upset Patterson said to Talese. “I’m going to fly down to Scarsdale.5 Those boys are picking on [Floyd’s daughter] Jeannie again. She’s the only Negro in this school, and the older kids give her a rough time, and some of the older boys tease her and lift up her dress all the time. Yesterday she went home crying, and so today I’m going down there and plan to wait outside the school for those boys to come out, and . . .”6
Talese in tow, Floyd stormed off to the airport, threatening to deal with the offenders with a left hook. Patterson had always been afraid of flying, and he was addressing that fear by taking flying lessons. Accompanied by his pilot friend Ted Hanson, Patterson flew a Cessna to the airport in Westchester, where Sandra was waiting for him. They drove to the school. There, Patterson confronted the boy who had been lifting his daughter’s skirt. Despite his earlier chest-thumping, Floyd threw no punches. In fact, he did nothing more than tell the boy to stop it. “I won’t tell your mother—that might get you in trouble—but don’t do it again, okay?”7 The boy calmly walked away. Patterson retreated to his airplane and flew back to training camp.
Floyd found himself dealing with conflict even at his inner sanctum, the place he felt most secure, his training camp. For several days in a row, Cus D’Amato drove to Highland Mills to visit his former fighter’s camp. Each time, D’Amato banged on the door, expecting Floyd to step out and greet him. His knocks went unanswered, but Cus knew that Floyd was inside. Miffed, D’Amato would linger, sometimes for as long as an hour. Still, the door remained closed. Finally, D’Amato would leave. “We had an agreement,” D’Amato would say, “that I never was to believe anything he supposedly said until he told it to my face. He has never told me to my face that I am not his manager. I have no idea why he won’t see me.”8
Unable to penetrate the wall of silence from the Patterson camp, D’Amato began legal action against Patterson for money he believed was contractually owed him from the two Liston fights. D’Amato claimed he was flat broke, even though he was now guiding José Torres up the light-heavyweight ranks. He maintained that his battles with the IBC had used up every dime he’d earned off Patterson, leaving him busted. He estimated he was owed at least $250,000 from the first Liston fight alone. D’Amato asked Julius November for a full accounting of the proceeds from the first Liston fight but November refused him—or at least did not provide enough of an accounting to satisfy D’Amato. So D’Amato hired famed attorney Edward Bennett Williams to find remedy in the legal system. But there was more than just money involved.
“I am the only man in this business who has made flat and uncompromising statements about fighters I’ve been associated with,” D’Amato said. “When Patterson won the Olympics, I said that Floyd would be rookie of the year in boxing and that he would become a heavyweight champion, and he was still a middleweight! My predictions were based on knowledge and analyses of Patterson and his potential. I was derided. When Patterson was knocked out by Johansson I saw what happened and why, and I knew what had to be done. So I went into the ring and made a flat statement that Floyd Patterson would be the first heavyweight champion to win back the title. The critics said that if Dempsey couldn’t do it, how could Patterson? But then look what happened. My record, damn it, is certainly worth some respect.”9
But none was forthcoming for the barrel-chested, white-haired man who soon began fading from public sight, as did the lawsuit.
Though written off by all but his staunchest American fans, Patterson started to slowly recover a measure of respect for himself as a fighter. Wisely, he chose Sweden as the location for his next two fights. There, never mind what had happened with Liston, he was a beloved figure, someone who could attract a crowd of adoring fans just by walking down the street—“I’m kind of a one-man Beatles,” he said.10 He would not have to deal with a cynical press or cynical fans. His Italian opponent for the first fight was no world-beater, but that hardly mattered. After two humiliating knockouts, Floyd wanted a win. And he notched one in early 1964.
After that time, Patterson was the ninth-ranked contender in the heavyweight category. Cassius Clay had risen to number one. If Patterson wanted to get a shot at the title any time soon, he needed to beat someone of higher standing than a virtually unknown Italian boxer to lift his ranking. That opportunity came along when he was scheduled to fight Eddie Machen, the fourth-ranked contender, in July 1964.
But before that fight could take place, Talese’s profile of Patterson appeared in Esquire. It was a stunning example of the New Journalism, the result of Talese’s dogged reporting during the weeks he spent with Floyd. Talese would return to his motel room after following Patterson through the day and dump out page after page of notes and impressions that he would later use to compose an article as tightly constructed as the best short story. The long article was a hit from the moment it showed up on newsstands. It was destined to be anthologized for years to come, ensuring that Patterson’s name lived on. But the Esquire editors used a title for it that Talese never approved of—“The Loser”—which consequently served to reinforce Patterson’s failings over his successes. Floyd had plenty of pressure on him to become the winner in his fight with Machen.
In 1958 Eddie Machen had suffered an upset in a bout with Ingemar Johansson, which opened the door for Ingo to fight Floyd for the world championship. Before that, Machen was considered one of the best contenders for the crown. Machen hailed from Redding, California. After a few amateur fights in his late teens, he served three years in prison for armed robbery. When he was released, he began boxing in earnest and entered the pro ranks in March 1955. Fighting often in the Bay Area or elsewhere on the West Coast, Machen won twenty-four straight bouts, including two wins over Joey Maxim, before fighting Zora Folley at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in 1958. The two men battled to a twelve-round draw. Then Machen fought Johansson.
After the Johansson loss, Machen fought at a furious pace, recording win after win with only occasional losses. One of the defeats was to Sonny Liston in 1960, but Machen stayed in the ring for the full twelve rounds of the fight, which was a kind of moral victory. After that Machen scored an impressive win over contender Doug Jones in December 1961 and a draw with Cleveland “Big Cat” Williams in July 1962. In December 1962, however, authorities committed Machen to the Napa State Hospital after he threatened suicide. He was diagnosed as an acute schizophrenic. At the time, he was the third-ranked heavyweight in the world. His inactivity in the ring while he was institutionalized caused his rating to fall. Finally released, he resumed fighting in early 1964. Machen smashed Duke Sabedong to the canvas in just one round to boost his world ranking to number four and set up his fight with Patterson in July of that year.
In spite of Machen’s contender status, the fight elicited mostly yawns back in the United States. Arthur Daley of the
New York Times dismissed the bout between a defrocked champion and a “quondam contender” as a stop on the road to nowhere. He said of the Patterson and Machen matchup, “They are a pair of emotionally entangled men with enough psychoses and neuroses to have fascinated Freud. They have totally bewildered those amateur psychiatrists, the boxing experts. Neither ever realized his full potentialities as a fighter and the irony is that a fight between them might have straightened out the winner at least. Now it is too late.”11
Still, it was a contest between two of the ten highest-ranked heavyweights. Floyd’s friend Pete Hamill thought it could be the most important fight in his career. “For Patterson,” Hamill said, “the money he can earn from prizefighting is no longer of prime importance. What is important is his pride. He wants to erase the image he fears he will leave behind when he retires: that as heavyweight champion he was an elaborate fraud with no ability to take a punch, a fraud whose true measure could be found in the total of four minutes and sixteen seconds he lasted in two fights with Sonny Liston.”12
The bout in Råsunda, Solna, Sweden, on July 5, 1964, turned out to be dull, with Patterson and Machen spending much of the time locked in clinches. When they weren’t hugging each other, Patterson managed to knock Machen down two times. In the end, Floyd was awarded nine rounds, two were judged even, and just one round went to Machen. Floyd thought the Machen bout proved that he could still battle the best in the world and win. Patterson, who planned to retire if he lost to Machen, announced he wanted to fight the man formerly known as Cassius Clay.
Muhammad Ali was now the heavyweight champion of the world, having pulled off one of the greatest upsets in boxing history when he dethroned Liston earlier in 1964. Liston, overconfident, perhaps, as a seven-to-one favorite, trained with little intensity before that fight. He certainly looked like an older, slower fighter than he had against Patterson. Liston quickly learned that the larger, faster Ali was not going to be an easy man to defeat. After three rounds, Liston and his cornermen conspired to end the fight by disabling Ali. When Liston came out for the fourth round, his gloves were coated with a caustic substance—no one outside Liston’s corner was ever sure exactly what it was—that he smeared into Ali’s eyes. His vision blurred, Ali insisted to his corner between rounds that he could not go on and asked that his gloves be cut off. Ali’s corner wizard Angelo Dundee was able to flush out Ali’s eyes and instructed him to stay away from Liston until his vision cleared. At the midpoint of the fifth round, Ali could see clearly once more and began to take charge of the fight. In the sixth round, Ali ripped Liston’s face to hamburger with his whip-snap jabs. Liston, like a twelve-year-old bully who has run into someone willing to stand up to him, feigned a shoulder injury and refused to answer the seventh-round bell. With that, Ali became the new king of the world.
In the weeks after the Machen fight, Patterson became obsessed with beating Ali for reasons having more to do with Floyd’s ideas about patriotism and religion than with the challenge the young Ali presented in the ring.
In October 1964 Patterson began to stir up controversy when he collaborated with Milton Gross for a Sports Illustrated essay entitled “I Want to Destroy Clay.” Patterson struck out at the dethroned Liston, expressing dismay that Sonny refused to keep fighting in his championship bout with Ali. “A champion doesn’t quit,” Patterson said. That was certainly true for Floyd. He did have fights stopped because of injuries, but they were always halted by the referee. Floyd never once failed to answer the bell on his own. In the article, Floyd slammed Ali for telling Dundee that he wanted to quit when his eyes were burning and his vision went blurry. Floyd questioned the character of the men who had claimed the title he once proudly held. Patterson said, “There’s a tremendous responsibility on the champion that Clay and Liston obviously don’t understand—to themselves, to the sport and to the public, especially in these times of such great social changes in our country and in the way the people all over the world look at us.”13
But Ali’s religious conversion irked the good Catholic Patterson even more. The Nation of Islam, an American religion that embraced teachings contrary to orthodox Islam, stood in opposition to all that Patterson believed when it came to issues of race. He once told Pete Hamill, “It’s not a fight for friendship; it’s a fight for equality. As long as I can sleep in the same hotels as you, as long as I can eat in the same restaurants as you, as long as I can read in the same libraries and swim in the same swimming pools and watch movies in the same section as you and vote with the same rights as you, then we can consider friendship.”14 Black Muslims under Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad believed that that was all folderol. They demanded that American society be segregated because they believed the races had no business intermingling.
At the base of the Nation of Islam’s belief system was the tenet that black people were not equal to white people but superior to them. Whites, in their view, were devils, the creations of a mad scientist intent on releasing evil on the world. By expressing this kind of attitude toward whites, the Black Muslims had exposed a nerve that ran throughout black communities in the United States at the time. James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time is one of the most important books written about race in America and grew out of his own meditations on the Nation of Islam. “There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point,” Baldwin wrote, “but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be ‘accepted’ by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on the planet.”15
The message of the Nation of Islam resonated with blacks who were growing increasingly frustrated and angry by the slow progress America was making in ending the virtual apartheid that had existed since the end of Reconstruction. The Freedom Summer of 1964 may have been when Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act, but it was also when sheriff’s officers in collusion with the Klan killed three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi, and dumped their bodies beneath a rural earthen dam. These killings and other violent incidents reinforced Black Muslim concepts about why the races should remain apart. Since he was born, Cassius Clay had been exposed to his father’s disdain of white people. The young boxer made for a rapt acolyte when he learned about the Nation of Islam’s teachings from Malcolm X and others. And he stunned and outraged much of America when he announced his conversion and name change after he became heavyweight champion in February 1964.
Floyd could not abide a Black Muslim holding what he considered to be the most prestigious title in sports. He said of Ali, “He has a right to believe what he believes, but harm has been done to the Negroes’ cause and the way the rest of the world regards it by the one who calls himself Muhammad Ali.” Patterson went on to say:
I am a Negro and I’m proud to be one, but I’m also an American. I’m not so stupid that I don’t know that Negroes don’t have all the rights and privileges that all Americans should have. I know that someday we will get them. God made us all, and whatever He made is good. All people—white, black and yellow—are brothers and sisters. That will be acknowledged. It will just take time, but it will never come if we think the way the Black Muslims think.
They preach hate and separation instead of love and integration. They preach mistrust when there must be understanding. Clay is so young and has been so misled by the wrong people that he doesn’t appreciate how far we have come and how much harm he has done by joining the Black Muslims. He might just as well have joined the Ku Klux Klan.16
Floyd said that he hoped Ali would defeat Liston in their rematch. Then, if Patterson were successful in his upcoming fights, he wanted to battle Ali to, at least in his mind, reclaim the title for America. Ali responded by calling Floyd an Uncle Tom and criticized him for moving into an affluent, predominately white neighborhood. Ali also questioned just how much Floyd cared about black people, saying that the only time Patterson was ever seen in Harlem was to ride in a parade
. “The big shot didn’t have no time for his own kind,” Ali said, “he was so busy integrating. And now he wants to fight me because I stick up for black people.”17
Before he could attempt to return the title to America, the thirty-year-old Patterson had to best a tough Canadian. George Chuvalo was nearly three years younger than Patterson and grew up in a rough part of Toronto known as the Junction. He began boxing when he was eighteen. He was a big man, six feet tall, typically weighing around 210 pounds for his fights. He hit hard, but the thing he was best known for was his chin. If Patterson had a chin made of china, as critics often alleged, Chuvalo’s chin was cast iron. He had gone the distance with the very best boxers of his time, never once getting knocked down. But he was more than a pair of fists. Though he quit school before graduating, Chuvalo read Freud and Jung as well as Greek and Asian philosophers. He said that if he weren’t a boxer, he’d have become a lawyer.
By the beginning of 1965 Chuvalo had risen to be the third-ranked heavyweight contender.18 Patterson was rated number two following his victory over Machen. The winner of the Patterson-Chuvalo bout would be in line to fight for the heavyweight crown. “Should I be victorious against Chuvalo,” Patterson said, “I look forward to meeting Cassius Clay. It will be a great opportunity to vindicate myself. Of course, once I do that I want to fight Liston again. I must do that. I have a lot of things to prove—to myself and to everybody.”19
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