The Cross of Redemption

by James Baldwin

  I am not an aficionado of the ring, and haven’t been since Joe Louis lost his crown—he was the last great fighter for me—and so I can’t really make comparisons with previous events of this kind. But neither, it soon struck me, could anybody else. Patterson was, in effect, the moral favorite—people wanted him to win, either because they liked him, though many people didn’t, or because they felt that his victory would be salutary for boxing and that Liston’s victory would be a disaster. But no one could be said to be enthusiastic about either man’s record in the ring. The general feeling seemed to be that Patterson had never been tested, that he was the champion, in effect, by default; though, on the other hand, everyone attempted to avoid the conclusion that boxing had fallen on evil days and that Patterson had fought no worthy fighters because there were none. The desire to avoid speculating too deeply on the present state and the probable future of boxing was responsible, I think, for some very odd and stammering talk about Patterson’s personality. (This led Red Smith to declare that he didn’t feel that sportswriters had any business trying to be psychiatrists, and that he was just going to write down who hit whom, how hard, and where, and the hell with why.) And there was very sharp disapproval of the way he has handled his career, since he has taken over most of D’Amato’s functions as a manager, and is clearly under no one’s orders but his own. “In the old days,” someone complained, “the manager told the fighter what to do, and he did it. You didn’t have to futz around with the guy’s temperament, for Christ’s sake.” Never before had any of the sportswriters been compelled to deal directly with the fighter instead of with his manager, and all of them seemed baffled by this necessity and many were resentful. I don’t know how they got along with D’Amato when he was running the entire show—D’Amato can certainly not be described as either simple or direct—but at least the figure of D’Amato was familiar and operated to protect them from the oddly compelling and touching figure of Floyd Patterson, who is quite probably the least likely fighter in the history of the sport. And I think that part of the resentment he arouses is due to the fact that he brings to what is thought of—quite erroneously—as a simple activity a terrible note of complexity. This is his personal style, a style which strongly suggests that most un-American of attributes, privacy, the will to privacy; and my own guess is that he is still relentlessly, painfully shy—he lives gallantly with his scars, but not all of them have healed—and while he has found a way to master this, he has found no way to hide it; as, for example, another miraculously tough and tender man, Miles Davis, has managed to do. Miles’s disguise would certainly never fool anybody with sense, but it keeps a lot of people away, and that’s the point. But Patterson, tough and proud and beautiful, is also terribly vulnerable, and looks it.

  I met him, luckily for me, with Gay Talese, whom he admires and trusts. I say “luckily” because I’m not a very aggressive journalist, don’t know enough about boxing to know which questions to ask, and am simply not able to ask a man questions about his private life. If Gay had not been there, I am not certain how I would ever have worked up my courage to say anything to Floyd Patterson—especially after having sat through, or suffered, the first, for me, of many press conferences. I only sat through two with Patterson, silently, and in the back—he, poor man, had to go through it every day, sometimes twice a day. And if I don’t know enough about boxing to know which questions to ask, I must say that the boxing experts are not one whit more imaginative, though they were, I thought, sometimes rather more insolent. It was a curious insolence, though, veiled, tentative, uncertain—they couldn’t be sure that Floyd wouldn’t give them as good as he got. And this led, again, to that curious resentment I mentioned earlier, for they were forced, perpetually, to speculate about the man instead of the boxer. It doesn’t appear to have occurred yet to many members of the press that one of the reasons their relations with Floyd are so frequently strained is that he has no reason, on any level, to trust them, and no reason to believe that they would be capable of hearing what he had to say, even if he could say it. Life’s far from being as simple as most sportswriters would like to have it. The world of sports, in fact, is far from being as simple as the sports pages often make it sound.

  Gay and I drove out, ahead of all the other journalists, in a Hertz car, and got to the camp at Elgin while Floyd was still lying down. The camp was very quiet—bucolic, really—when we arrived: set in the middle of small, rolling hills; four or five buildings; a tethered goat, the camp mascot; a small green tent containing a Spartan cot; lots of cars. “They’re very car-conscious here,” someone said of Floyd’s small staff of trainers and helpers. “Most of them have two cars.” We ran into some of them standing around and talking on the grounds, and Buster Watson, a close friend of Floyd’s, stocky, dark, and able, led us into the press room. Floyd’s camp was actually Marycrest Farm, the twin of a Chicago settlement house, which works, on a smaller scale but in somewhat the same way, with disturbed and deprived children, as does Floyd’s New York alma mater, the Wiltwyck School for Boys. It is a Catholic institution—Patterson is a converted Catholic—and the interior walls of the building in which the press conferences took place were decorated with vivid mosaics, executed by the children in colored beans, of various biblical events. There was an extraordinarily effective crooked cross, executed in charred wood, hanging high on one of the walls. There were two doors to the building in which the two press agents worked, one saying “Caritas,” the other saying “Veritas.” It seemed an incongruous setting for the life being lived there, and the event being prepared, but Ted Carroll, the Negro press agent, a tall man with white hair and a knowledgeable, weary, gentle face, told me that the camp was like the man. “The man lives a secluded life. He’s like this place—peaceful and faraway.” It was not all that peaceful, of course, except naturally; it was otherwise menaced and inundated by hordes of human beings, from small boys who wanted to be boxers to old men who remembered Jack Dempsey as a kid. The signs on the road pointing the way to Floyd Patterson’s training camp were perpetually carried away by souvenir hunters. (“At first,” Ted Carroll said, “we were worried that maybe they were carrying them away for another reason—you know, the usual hassle—but no, they just want to put them in the rumpus room.”) We walked about with Ted Carroll for a while and he pointed out to us the house—white, with green shutters, somewhat removed from the camp and on a hill—in which Floyd Patterson lived. He was resting now, and the press conference had been called for three o’clock, which was nearly three hours away. But he would be working out before the conference. Gay and I left Ted and wandered close to the house. I looked at the ring, which had been set up on another hill near the house, and examined the tent. Gay knocked lightly on Floyd’s door. There was no answer, but Gay said that the radio was on. We sat down in the sun, near the ring, and speculated on Floyd’s training habits, which kept him away from his family for such long periods of time.

  Presently, here he came across the grass, loping, rather, head down, with a small, tight smile on his lips. This smile seems always to be there when he is facing people and disappears only when he begins to be comfortable. Then he can laugh, as I never heard him laugh at a press conference, and the face which he watches so carefully in public is then, as it were, permitted to be its boyish and rather surprisingly zestful self. He greeted Gay, and took sharp, covert notice of me, seeming to decide that if I were with Gay, I was probably all right. We followed him into the gym, in which a large sign faced us, saying, “So we being many are one body in Christ.” He went through his workout, methodically, rigorously, pausing every now and again to disagree with his trainer, Dan Florio, about the time—he insisted that Dan’s stopwatch was unreliable—or to tell Buster that there weren’t enough towels, to ask that the windows be closed. “You threw a good right hand that time,” Dan Florio said; and, later, “Keep the right hand up. Up!” “We got a floor scale that’s no good,” Floyd said, cheerfully. “Sometimes I weigh two hundred, sometimes
I weigh ’eighty-eight.” And we watched him jump rope, which he must do according to some music in his head, very beautiful and gleaming and faraway, like a boy saint helplessly dancing and seen through the steaming windows of a storefront church.

  We followed him into the house when the workout was over, and sat in the kitchen and drank tea; he drank chocolate. Gay knew that I was somewhat tense as to how to make contact with Patterson—my own feeling was that he had a tough enough row to hoe, and that everybody should just leave him alone; how would I like it if I were forced to answer inane questions every day concerning the progress of my work?—and told Patterson about some of the things I’d written. But Patterson hadn’t heard of me, or read anything of mine. Gay’s explanation, though, caused him to look directly at me, and he said, “I’ve seen you someplace before. I don’t know where, but I know I’ve seen you.” I hadn’t seen him before, except once, with Liston, in the commissioner’s office, when there had been a spirited fight concerning the construction of Liston’s boxing gloves, which were “just about as flat as the back of my hand,” according to a sportswriter, “just like wearing no gloves at all.” I felt certain, considering the number of people and the tension in that room, that he could not have seen me then—but we do know some of the same people, and have walked very often on the same streets. Gay suggested that he had seen me on TV. I had hoped that the contact would have turned out to be more personal, like a mutual friend or some activity connected with the Wiltwyck School, but Floyd now remembered the subject of the TV debate he had seen—the race problem, of course—and his face lit up. “I knew I’d seen you somewhere!” he said, triumphantly, and looked at me for a moment with the same brotherly pride I felt—and feel—in him.

  By now he was, with good grace but a certain tense resignation, preparing himself for the press conference. I gather that there are many people who enjoy meeting the press—and most of them, in fact, were presently in Chicago—but Floyd Patterson is not one of them. I think he hates being put on exhibition, he doesn’t believe it is real; while he is terribly conscious of the responsibility imposed on him by the title which he held, he is also afflicted with enough imagination to be baffled by his position. And he is far from having acquired the stony and ruthless perception which will allow him to stand at once within and without his fearful notoriety. Anyway, we trailed over to the building in which the press waited, and Floyd’s small, tight, shy smile was back.

  But he has learned, though it must have cost him a great deal, how to handle himself. He was asked about his weight, his food, his measurements, his morale. He had been in training for nearly six months (“Is that necessary?” “I just like to do it that way”), had boxed, at this point, about 162 rounds. This was compared to his condition at the time of the first fight with Ingemar Johansson. “Do you believe that you were overtrained for that fight?” “Anything I say now would sound like an excuse.” But, later, “I was careless—not overconfident, but careless.” He had allowed himself to be surprised by Ingemar’s aggressiveness. “Did you and D’Amato fight over your decision to fight Liston?” The weary smile played at the corner of Floyd’s mouth, and though he was looking directly at his interlocutors, his eyes were veiled. “No.” Long pause. “Cus knows that I do what I want to do—ultimately, he accepted it.” Was he surprised by Liston’s hostility? No. Perhaps it had made him a bit more determined. Had he anything against Liston personally? “No. I’m the champion and I want to remain the champion.” Had he and D’Amato ever disagreed before? “Not in relation to my opponents.” Had he heard it said that, as a fighter, he lacked viciousness? “Whoever said that should see the fights I’ve won without being vicious.” And why was he fighting Liston? “Well,” said Patterson, “it was my decision to take the fight. You gentlemen disagreed, but you were the ones who placed him in the number-one position, so I felt that it was only right. Liston’s criminal record is behind him, not before him.” “Do you feel that you’ve been accepted as a champion?” Floyd smiled more tightly than ever and turned toward the questioner. “No,” he said. Then, “Well, I have to be accepted as the champion—but maybe not a good one.” “Why do you say,” someone else asked, “that the opportunity to become a great champion will never arise?” “Because,” said Floyd, patiently, “you gentlemen will never let it arise.” Someone asked him about his experiences when boxing in Europe—what kind of reception had he enjoyed? Much greater and much warmer than here, he finally admitted, but added, with a weary and humorous caution, “I don’t want to say anything derogatory about the United States. I am satisfied.” The press seemed rather to flinch from the purport of this grim and vivid little joke, and switched to the subject of Liston again. Who was most in awe of whom? Floyd had no idea, he said, but, “Liston’s confidence is on the surface. Mine is within.”

  And so it seemed to be indeed, as, later, Gay and I walked with him through the flat midwestern landscape. It was not exactly that he was less tense—I think that he is probably always tense, and it is that, and not his glass chin, or a lack of stamina, which is his real liability as a fighter—but he was tense in a more private, more bearable way. The fight was very much on his mind, of course, and we talked of the strange battle about the boxing gloves, and the commissioner’s impenetrable and apparent bias toward Liston, though the difference in the construction of the gloves, and the possible meaning of this difference, was clear to everyone. The gloves had been made by two different firms, which was not the usual procedure, and, though they were the same standard eight-ounce weight, Floyd’s gloves were the familiar, puffy shape, with most of the weight of the padding over the fist, and Liston’s were extraordinarily slender, with most of the weight of the padding over the wrist. But we didn’t talk only of the fight, and I can’t now remember all the things we did talk about. I mainly remember Floyd’s voice, going cheerfully on and on, and the way his face kept changing, and the way he laughed; I remember the glimpse I got of him then, a man more complex than he was yet equipped to know, a hero for many children who were still trapped where he had been, who might not have survived without the ring, and who yet, oddly, did not really seem to belong there. I dismissed my dim speculations, that afternoon, as sentimental inaccuracies, rooted in my lack of knowledge of the boxing world, and corrupted with a guilty chauvinism. But now I wonder. He told us that his wife was coming in for the fight, against his will, “in order,” he said, indescribably, “to console me if—” and he made, at last, a gesture with his hand, downward.

  Liston’s camp was very different, an abandoned racetrack in, or called, Aurora Downs, with wire gates and a uniformed cop, who lets you in, or doesn’t. I had simply given up the press conference bit, since they didn’t teach me much, and I couldn’t ask those questions. Gay Talese couldn’t help me with Liston, and this left me floundering on my own until Sandy Grady called up Liston’s manager, Jack Nilon, and arranged for me to see Liston for a few minutes alone the next day. Liston’s camp was far more outspoken concerning Liston’s attitude toward the press than Patterson’s. Liston didn’t like most of the press, and most of them didn’t like him. But I didn’t, myself, see any reason why he should like them, or pretend to—they had certainly never been very nice to him, and I was sure that he saw in them merely some more ignorant, uncaring white people, who, no matter how fine we cut it, had helped to cause him so much grief. And this impression was confirmed by reports from people who did get along with him—Wendell Phillips and Bob Teague, who are both Negroes, but rather rare and salty types, and Sandy Grady, who is not a Negro, but is certainly rare, and very probably salty. I got the impression from them that Liston was perfectly willing to take people as they were, if they would do the same for him. Again, I was not particularly appalled by his criminal background, believing, rightly or wrongly, that I probably knew more about the motives and even the necessity of this career than most of the white press could. The only relevance Liston’s—presumably previous—associations should have been allowed to have, it
seemed to me, concerned the possible effect of these on the future of boxing. Well, while the air was thick with rumor and gospel on this subject, I really cannot go into it without risking, at the very least, being sued for libel; and so, one of the most fascinating aspects of the Chicago story will have to be left in the dark. But the Sweet Science is not, in any case, really so low on shady types as to be forced to depend on Liston. The question is to what extent Liston is prepared to cooperate with whatever powers of darkness there are in boxing; and the extent of his cooperation, we must suppose, must depend, at least partly, on the extent of his awareness. So that there is nothing unique about the position in which he now finds himself and nothing unique about the speculation which now surrounds him.