In early 1967 the heavyweight boxing world entered a chaotic state with the ring exile of Muhammad Ali. Years earlier, Ali had been declared ineligible for military induction by his local draft board after he failed what was essentially a writing and spelling test. The board reversed itself after the Pentagon relaxed eligibility standards. Ali could be drafted after all. In April 1967, citing his standing as a minister in the Nation of Islam, Ali refused military induction on religious grounds. The government’s response was that Ali’s motivation for refusing the draft was political, not religious. Criminal proceedings were initiated against the heavyweight champion. Ali was found guilty of draft evasion. As soon as the verdict was in, the various professional boxing sanctioning organizations lost little time in stripping Ali of his heavyweight title.11 His professional boxing licenses were revoked. Floyd was somewhat conflicted by what had occurred to Ali. He agreed that the government should prosecute Ali for refusing induction: “I feel that if a man lives in a country and enjoys the fruits of the country, he should be willing to fight for it. Clay should serve his country. If not, he should go to jail or be driven out of the country.” Floyd said he could understand the rationale of the sanctioning bodies for lifting the title. But in spite of that, Floyd believed, “Clay is the heavyweight champion, there are no two ways about it. Regardless of what he is outside the ring, inside the ring he is the champion, and titles are won and lost inside the ring.”12
It would be three years before Ali returned to boxing. In the meantime, various sanctioning organizations and promoters attempted to capitalize on the vacant throne. A new promotional group called Action Sports Inc. appeared on the scene with a proposal to conduct an elimination tournament to determine a replacement champ, at least for the World Boxing Association’s version of the heavyweight crown. Eight top contenders were scheduled to take part, but the tournament lost much of its luster when the fighter who was emerging as the best of the contenders, Joe Frazier, pulled out. Further diminishing the tournament’s legitimacy was the absence of other top heavyweights, such as Sonny Liston, George Chuvalo, and Zora Folley. Still, the tournament moved forward, with Leotis Martin taking Frazier’s place. Floyd was included, as was an impressive young California contender, Jerry Quarry. Floyd and Quarry had agreed to fight each other before the tournament was announced, so they would meet to fulfill that contract first.
Quarry was a decade younger than Patterson, with a thick neck, ridged abs, and a chin that could withstand a heavy shot. Quarry was often promoted as an Irish fighter, but he was, in the words of Sports Illustrated’s Mark Kram, “pure Okie.”13 Quarry had turned pro at his parents’ urging, and it certainly beat his former job of changing tires at a Greyhound bus garage. He was no fighter to take lightly, and Patterson knew it. He was a tough, young, legitimate heavyweight contender with an effective right hand. He no doubt received more press than he otherwise would have because he was a promising white fighter at a time when heavyweight boxing had largely become a black man’s realm. But Quarry had put together a record of 23-1-3, losing only to Eddie Machen in 1966.
The first Patterson-Quarry fight took place on June 9, 1967, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, and the twenty-three thousand fans there cheered when Quarry won the first two rounds. He floored Patterson twice in the second round alone. But Floyd came back to win the next four rounds. Then, in the seventh round, Quarry landed a stiff right to Patterson’s head. Patterson seemed groggy for a few seconds, but he surprised Quarry with a left hook that sent the younger fighter tumbling just before the bell. Floyd seemed to control the remainder of the fight. Quarry was bleeding, bruised, and swollen when the final bell rang. But the fight was ruled a draw. The referee’s calls in particular were suspicious, outraging many at ringside, including Joe Frazier. Floyd was so sure he had won, he stood in the ring with his mouth agape at the announcement of the decision.14
Patterson swallowed his disappointment and left on a USO tour of Vietnam. He supported the American war effort there, and he was well received during the trip. Floyd was impressed by how well blacks and whites in the military interacted with each other. “There’s no race problem here,” he said. “It would be a fine example for the entire country to live together like these guys do here. Everybody helps everyone else out all the time.” He expressed to the troops he met that he supported their mission. Patterson may have fully backed civil rights protests earlier in the decade, but he had no use for Americans who protested against the war. “I made it a point not to wait for them to ask about these peace demonstrations back home,” he said. “Every place I went, I told them not to be discouraged, that it was only a minority, a handful, and that fifty percent of that minority don’t have any understanding of what’s going on.” Floyd added that he went to Vietnam to see if he could do some good. “I believe in my country,” he said, “and I just came over to see what I could do.”15
When he returned, he prepared to take on Quarry again, this time as part of the heavyweight championship elimination tournament. (Floyd may have disagreed with the decision to remove the title from Ali, but he was nevertheless willing to fight for the vacant championship.) Once again, Patterson and Quarry would fight in Los Angeles. Quarry promised a different outcome this time, pledging he would be more aggressive in his attempt to defeat Floyd. As if to prove his point, Quarry was particularly brutal with his sparring partners leading up to the match.
As it turned out, however, Quarry failed to fight much better in October than he had in June. In the early going, he had Floyd in trouble twice but couldn’t put together the punches to knock out the former champ. Just as he had in their previous fight, Quarry wilted against Patterson during the later rounds. Yet Quarry was awarded a split decision. Again, the verdict was controversial. Quarry “stole the return fight,” said Mark Kram, “thanks to the munificence of the officials.”16 The sparse crowd at the Olympic Auditorium shouted boos and pelted the ring with beer cups. With Patterson out of the elimination tournament, Quarry progressed to the finals, where he was decisioned by Jimmy Ellis, the man crowned WBA heavyweight champion.
Almost a year passed between Patterson’s split-decision loss to Quarry and his next fight. Those months included some of the most turbulent times the United States has ever known. Disagreement about the war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement led to strife throughout the country, from college campuses to urban ghettos. The gap between black and white Americans seemed to grow with each passing day, as did the gap between the World War II generation and its baby boomer offspring. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” William Butler Yeats had written in an apocalyptic poem nearly fifty years earlier, yet those words seemed particularly appropriate for America in 1968.
At no time did the center seem less likely to hold than in April, when an assassin’s bullet felled Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. A grieving Patterson made plans to go to Atlanta to attend the funeral for the man who symbolized the dream Floyd and other moderates held for a peaceful, integrated American society. While post-assassination violence erupted across the United States, Floyd arrived in an Atlanta that was unprepared for the funeral, an Atlanta that was in a state of shock, an Atlanta whose population had swelled with the influx of as many as a quarter of a million mourners.
The crowd at the funeral was so large that Ebenezer Baptist Church could not accommodate all who had come to pay their respects. A second memorial service was scheduled at King’s alma mater, Morehouse College, but many of the grief-stricken insisted on witnessing the service at the church where King served as co-pastor with his father, Floyd among them. Patterson had to elbow his way through a throng to get close to the building. Other dignitaries, including Robert Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Bill Cosby, Marlon Brando, Betty Shabazz (the widow of Malcolm X), and Jacqueline Kennedy, did the same. The widow of the slain president was pulled and then pushed through a narrow doorway, a frightened look on her face. Inside, the church was packed, but people kept coming—“Clear the way for
Wilt!” someone shouted as Wilt Chamberlain, the seven foot, one inch center for the Philadelphia 76ers, ducked through the door. Like Floyd, renowned NFL running back Jim Brown used his size and strength to squeeze in.17
After the Reverend A. D. King threatened to remove the casket and conduct a private burial service, the jostling and tumult lessened, and the funeral commenced. From his post inside the church, Patterson heard Dr. L. Harold DeWolf, dean of Washington’s Theological Seminary, say, “It is now for us, all the millions of the living who care, to take up his torch of love. It is for us to finish his work, to end the awful destruction in Vietnam, to root out every trace of race prejudice from our lives, to bring the massive powers of this nation to aid the oppressed and to heal the hate-scarred world.”18
That torch of love seemed nowhere to be found in America in 1968.
Improbable as it seemed to many fight fans, Jimmy Ellis was recognized as heavyweight champion in most states in the United States. Ellis was a fellow Louisville fighter roughly the same age as Muhammad Ali, and it was Ellis’s fate to always be in the more famous Kentuckian’s shadow. While Ali’s career was sublimely plotted and executed by his management, Ellis had to take what he could get when he could get it. He was a natural middleweight and spent three years fighting in that category before moving up in weight. As a light-heavyweight, and then as a heavyweight, he won ten straight fights, including victories over formidable challengers like Leotis Martin and Oscar Bonavena. But during that time, he was better known for being one of Ali’s sparring partners. He even knocked Ali cold during one of their sparring sessions. Still, almost no one considered Ellis to be championship material, right up until April 27, 1968, when he decisioned Jerry Quarry to win the WBA world heavyweight title.
Once Ellis was champ, Teddy Brenner attempted to match him with Joe Frazier, whom the New York Athletic Commission recognized as world heavyweight champion. The winner would emerge with an essentially unified title. But Ellis turned down Brenner’s $250,000 offer, most likely because Ellis stood little chance of beating Frazier. Ellis’s handlers then contacted Patterson, who readily accepted an offer to fight Ellis in a title match. Nearing thirty-four years of age, considered a has-been after his loss to Ali, Patterson suddenly had a chance to be a world champion for a third time.
Las Vegas and the Swedish city of Stockholm bid on hosting the fight. In the end, Stockholm won out, the package put together by none other than Edwin Ahlquist, Ingemar Johansson’s old manager. The contract offered Patterson a good payday, $60,000 (Ellis would receive $125,000), and Floyd’s kid brother Raymond would fight on the undercard; Ray had turned pro in March 1963 and the following year began fighting regularly in Sweden, where he became a fan favorite. Harold Conrad was promoting the fight. But there was a catch.
Floyd, intrigued by Hollywood for years, had agreed to play a small role on the popular TV series The Wild, Wild West. Patterson told Conrad that the fight’s original date had to be postponed until he could film his scenes for the TV show. Conrad was flabbergasted. How could anyone put a bit TV part ahead of a title fight? “I’m not going to be fighting forever,” Patterson said. “I’m going to become a movie star. If Jim Brown can do it, I can do it.”19 Conrad feared that this was not going to sit well with the Swedes involved in the fight’s promotion. He contacted The Wild, Wild West’s star and producer, Robert Conrad (no relation), and asked him to persuade Patterson to change his mind. The actor, a fight fan, agreed with Harold Conrad that Patterson was nuts to postpone the Stockholm fight, and said he would try to talk Patterson out of it. He failed. “It’s no soap,” the Wild, Wild West star reported to Conrad.20 Patterson insisted on shooting the series. So the fight was rescheduled for September 14, 1968.
The date wasn’t the only sticking point, however. Choosing a referee caused controversy as well. The Swedish prizefighting rules held that the referee would be the only official scoring the fight. No judges would be involved in scoring. So both fighters’ camps attempted to get a ref in place who would not be inclined to favor the other side. Harold Conrad produced a list of five referees. Harold Valan, who’d boxed out of Brooklyn in the 1930s before beginning a distinguished career as a ring official, topped the list. Angelo Dundee, who was acting as Ellis’s trainer and manager,21 nixed him immediately. Dundee believed that a New York–based referee like Valan would be inclined to favor Patterson. When Conrad contacted Patterson and told him that Dundee did not want Valan, Floyd said, “Then I want [Valan].” Conrad went back to Dundee and said Valan was Patterson’s choice. A great deal of back-and-forth bickering occurred before Dundee finally accepted Valan.22
Patterson was an eleven-to-five underdog, according to London oddsmakers, one of whom sniffed that betting on Patterson to win would be like betting on the Communists to win the upcoming British national elections. The weigh-in was unlike any the boxing reporters on hand had ever witnessed. It occurred at a hotel ballroom that had the air of an art gallery, as soft music played and vases of roses adorned the tables. Patterson arrived at the weigh-in at a svelte 188½ pounds. Ellis outweighed him by 10 pounds. Floyd seemed relaxed. He had a ref of his choosing making the decisions, and he knew he would have an enthusiastic Swedish crowd supporting him at the fight.
The Swedes had plenty to cheer about. In the first round, Patterson landed a right-hand punch that fractured Ellis’s nose, sending blood cascading down Ellis’s chest. Patterson later opened a large cut above Ellis’s right eye. Floyd clearly seemed to be winning, ready to make history as the first man to win the heavyweight title three times. Back in America, his fans watching ABC’s live broadcast were starting to celebrate.
But then a curious thing occurred. Howard Cosell’s audio commentary from Sweden suddenly went dead. An ABC sportscaster in New York was quickly enlisted to provide a voice-over. The sportscaster in New York reported that Patterson was winning on the scorecards kept by boxing writers at ringside. In the fourteenth round, Patterson hammered Ellis with two left hooks that knocked the champ off his feet. In the fifteenth and final round, the video feed failed, leaving televisions in America blank. ABC scrambled to recover the lost signal. American viewers at home were unaware of how the last round played out, though it appeared certain, barring a knockout, Floyd would win. Finally the decision was announced, and it was a stunner: Jimmy Ellis had won, and won big. Valan scored it a lopsided nine rounds for the sitting champion to just six rounds for Patterson.
The decision caused a near riot among the pro-Patterson fans in the Stockholm soccer stadium. Police had to provide Valan with protection as he departed the venue. The fight’s outcome outraged Floyd’s followers in America as well. Arthur Mercante, a boxing referee who worked some of the biggest fights of the late twentieth century, was watching the bout on TV and nearly choked on his beer when he heard the decision: “It was clear to anyone with 20/200 vision that Floyd Patterson was the clear winner.”23 Mercante thought Valan was lucky to get out of the stadium alive. Cosell said he saw fear on Valan’s face as the cortege of Swedish cops swept the referee past the sportscaster.
Cosell interviewed Floyd, who came across, as always, as the perfect gentleman once he knew he was on camera. Patterson refused to admit he believed he had won the fight. But it was a different story once Patterson was out of range of the camera. “Patterson is screaming in his dressing room after the fight that he was jobbed and blames it all on the referee,” said Harold Conrad, who was rendered incredulous by what Patterson was saying. After all, Harold Valan had been the Patterson camp’s top choice. Conrad’s incredulity grew as Patterson’s rant continued: “He makes no bones about it and says that Valan is in the pay of the Dundees [Angelo and his brothers]. He also says that Valan is hanging out with the Dundees and living at their hotel—which is not true.”24
Conrad scheduled a press conference to allow Patterson to air his grievances. The reporters showed up, but Patterson did not. Conrad discovered that Patterson was at the airport, literally helping Cosell with his
baggage. Cosell said, “He personally carried our bags to the trunk of his car and drove us to the airport. He had about him a sense of elation. He admitted to me, now, that he indeed thought he had won the fight. I asked him why he wouldn’t say so in the ring. He shrugged that little shrug of his. When we got to the airport Floyd carried our bags to the ticket counter. The Swedish people looked at him with love. Some would reach out and touch him, softly, gently, as he would bow his head.”25 Back in the United States, Patterson finally asserted, during interviews with Cosell on ABC and with Johnny Carson on NBC’s The Tonight Show, that he believed he had beaten Ellis. But there was to be no third crown for Patterson.
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