King of the World

by David Remnick

  Then, very slowly, Ali lifted his hand and fluttered his fingers like the wings of a bird.

  “It just flies away,” he said.

  PART ONE

  Floyd Patterson, 1954.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Underground Man

  SEPTEMBER 25, 1962

  ON THE MORNING OF THE FIGHT, THE HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION of the world packed a loser’s suitcase. Floyd Patterson, for all his hand speed, for all the hours he put in at the gym, was the most doubt-addled titleholder in the history of the division. There were always losers, professional opponents, set-’em-ups, unknowns who suffered as he did, men who took no pleasure in winning except as the periodic escape from loss and humiliation. But he was champion, the youngest man ever to win the title.

  In the last weeks of training, Patterson lay on his bed at night, out in a cabin in the Illinois countryside, half asleep, listening to his recording of “Music for Lovers Only,” and, if he was lucky, he saw himself winning, he saw himself leaping out of a crouch and striking Sonny Liston with his famous “kangaroo punch,” a flying left hook delivered with so much vaulting thrust and ambition that there was always a chance that Patterson would go sailing past his target and through the ropes and into the flannel laps of press row. If the punch landed, as it had against so many, Patterson was golden. He might wait a while to take such risks, at least a few rounds until Liston started to feel the fatigue, but he would leap soon enough. Then he’d follow up, relentless, dropping the bigger man with a right uppercut, a cross, another hook. Patterson could not count on the power of a single punch, not against Liston, whose countenance suggested the strength of iron. He would rely on his gift, his speed.

  Patterson knew he had to beware: Liston’s left jab was as powerful as another man’s cross; in one fight, Liston had beaten a plodding contender named Wayne Bethea so badly with his jab that at the end of the bout Bethea’s cornermen dragged their fighter to the dressing room and removed seven teeth from his mouthpiece. Blood was dripping from his ear. The fight had lasted fifty-eight seconds. So Patterson would have to keep his head. He would box, he would duck inside Liston’s jab and beat the body.

  “I really thought I could beat Liston,” Patterson told me nearly forty years later. “I think about it even now and I figure I’ll find a way to win. That’s funny, isn’t it?”

  But the odds were against Patterson. Cus D’Amato, his mentor since he began boxing at fourteen, had spent years avoiding this fight, preferring instead to set Patterson up with softer opponents. D’Amato, who looked like a cross between the emperor Hadrian and Jimmy Cagney, used his authority and standing among the columnists to deliver righteous pronouncements about Liston’s connections to the Mafia, and, like someone from the department of social welfare, he spoke of the need for rehabilitation, for Sonny to prove himself civilized and stay that way if he wanted a chance at the title. But Patterson knew perfectly well that D’Amato thought he had little chance against Liston. And in this, D’Amato was not alone. Some of Patterson’s predecessors as champion, Rocky Marciano and Joe Louis among them, arrived in Chicago for the fight, and no sooner had they stepped off the plane than they began telling reporters that the challenger was too strong, too mean, to lose to Patterson.

  Almost everyone, of course, was backing Floyd, rooting for him, but this support was purely sentimental: the writers liked Patterson because he was always so cooperative, he was so open and polite; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was behind Patterson because he was a civil rights man, an integrationist, a reform-minded gentleman, while Liston, the ex-con, projected what one newspaper after another called “a poor example for the youth of America.” Jackie Robinson’s prediction that Patterson would “demolish” Liston had more to do with political hopes than boxing smarts.

  Patterson was determined, as always, to be fair, to accommodate, to do the right thing. Liston had been ranked the top contender for a long time. He had been to jail for armed robbery, true enough, but he had served his time, he deserved a chance. Patterson was doing his bit for the cause of social mobility. “Liston paid for his crimes,” he said. “Should he be able to win the championship, these qualities will rise to the surface. I think you’d see a completely new and changed Liston.”

  At least for the time being, Liston did not wish to betray any appreciation. “I’d like to run him over with a truck,” he said.

  And so, with losing on his mind, Floyd made arrangements. He carefully stuffed his bag and an attaché case with clothes, food, and a disguise—a custom-made beard and mustache. If he won, of course, he’d meet the press and head back to the hotel for a victory party. If not, he would leave Comiskey Park in his false whiskers and drive through the night to his training camp in upstate New York.

  That was always the way it was with Floyd. Fear, especially the fear of losing, ate at him. He was entitled to call himself the toughest man on the planet, yet he didn’t much believe it. He was champion in the sense that Chester A. Arthur had been president. “I’m not a great champion,” he would say, “I’m just a champion.” There were those who wondered if Floyd was beyond sensitive, if he was a neurotic in shorts. Some of the reporters from England took to calling him Freud Patterson.

  He had ample reason to doubt himself. Until now, Patterson had been a lucky man, winning the title in November 1956 against Archie Moore. Moore was the craftiest of fighters, but like Patterson, he was small for a heavyweight, and, by the time of his fight with Floyd, a geriatric case in his early forties. Once Patterson won the title, he never projected the arrogance of a heavyweight champion. He never had the proper disdain. His eyes were sad and vulnerable, the dreamy eyes of a jilted teenager, and his physique was sinewy, the body of a road laborer, an utterly plausible body, but one that did not convey invincibility.

  At best, Patterson was a fine light heavyweight, bulked up for the marquee division. At fight time, Liston would outweigh Patterson 214 to 189. In boxing, if both men are equally skilled, more or less, the rules of physics usually obtain, and, as in the straight-on collision of two vehicles, the greater power goes to the greater force, to the bigger man, to the truck. Patterson’s natural inclination was to get even smaller. “If we put him on a diet,” his trainer, Dan Florio, said, “we’d soon have a middleweight on our hands.”

  Patterson had never defended his title against a fighter even remotely as powerful as Liston. D’Amato set him up with the likes of Pete Rademacher, an Olympian fighting for the first time as a professional, and Brian London, one of those knobby Englishmen who bleed rivers on a pale chest. Perhaps the most notable of Patterson’s opponents before Liston was one Roy Harris of Cut and Shoot, Texas. As the papers were happy to point out (happy, because the fight itself didn’t promise much except cornpone exotica), Harris grew up wrestling alligators in a swamp around his house known as the Big Thicket. He was also kin to an Uncle Cleve and cousins Hominy, Coon, and Armadillo. In short, Harris was a PR setup, and still it took Floyd thirteen rounds to end it. Liston destroyed Harris in one.

  So, as much as he played out the winning scenario in his head, as much as he trained, Patterson was fully prepared to lose. Mentally or physically, he had no great advantage he could call his own. He had lost to lesser men than Liston, certainly—first to Joey Maxim in 1954, and then, as champion, to Ingemar Johansson in 1959. He reacted not with fury, as most heavyweights did, but with depression, prolonged withdrawal. After the Maxim defeat—a controversial decision—Floyd locked himself in his apartment and stayed there for several days. Against Johansson, the humiliation was far deeper because the stage was so much more visible. Defending his title at Yankee Stadium, he had been knocked to the floor, over and over, as in a particularly merciless alley fight. Patterson was a speed fighter, but against Johansson he never made his move. He froze, and Johansson, a burly Swede of modest talent, unloosed what his camp called, so annoyingly, his “toonder and lightning.” After the first knockdown, Floyd got off the canvas and b
egan walking dreamily toward his corner. Leaving the neutral corner, Johansson came in from Patterson’s blind side and struck him down again; the assault looked less like boxing than an angry drunk splitting open another man’s skull with a beer bottle. By around the fourth knockdown, as Patterson crawled around the canvas, staring through the ropes, his eyes locked on John Wayne, who was sitting at ringside, and, as he stared at the actor, Floyd felt embarrassed. Embarrassment was Patterson’s signature emotion, and never more so than now. The fight was not even over before he started to wonder if everything he had fought for—his title, his belonging to a world greater than the one he grew up in—if all that was now at risk. Had he ever deserved any recognition, any belonging in the first place? What would John Wayne think of him? The referee, Ruby Goldstein, stopped the fight after Patterson had gone down for the seventh time.

  Floyd wanted to hide, but there was no hole deep enough. He had no disguise, so he borrowed a cornerman’s hat and tugged at the brim as if to disappear inside it. He let his friends and family hug him, console him, but he hated their pity. He could not wait to be alone. And when they all went away, the family and the friends and the reporters, Floyd went home to New York. Day after day, he sat in his living room with the curtains drawn. “I thought my life was over,” Patterson told me. He was one step away from where he started, one step from Bedford-Stuyvesant, the slum of his childhood. It was as if he expected the repo man to trot up his walk at any minute and start stacking the television and the oven and the couch outside in the front yard, and all the neighbors, his white neighbors, would see that he was nobody now.

  Floyd could not sleep, or, at least, not for long. Later that night, as he recounts in his autobiography, he climbed out of bed and headed down to the den. After a while, just before dawn, Sandra found him there.

  “Floyd,” she said, “Floyd, what good will it do sitting down here in the dark thinking?”

  “Will it do more good lying up there in the dark?”

  When he woke, he looked up from the couch to see his three-year-old daughter, Jeannie, staring at him. His face was still covered with welts, and so he held Jeannie close, trying not to scare her. Later, Sandra persuaded him to come upstairs and get some real sleep. But after a while, she looked down at her husband and was terrified.

  “What’s wrong with your ear?” she said.

  Patterson’s pillow was covered with blood. Johansson’s punches had ruptured his eardrum.

  His depression deepened. He sat alone for days, not reading, not talking, pushing everyone away. In three weeks, he left the house twice. He was, he said later, mourning his own death as champion. “Daddy’s sick,” Jeannie kept saying. “Daddy’s sick.” Patterson’s depression lasted nearly a year.

  Fighters, Floyd was convinced, are always afraid, all of them, especially fighters at the top level. “We are not afraid of getting hurt but we are afraid of losing. Losing in the ring is like losing nowhere else,” he said once. “A prizefighter who gets knocked out or is badly outclassed suffers in a way he will never forget. He is beaten under the bright lights in front of thousands of witnesses who curse him and spit at him, and he knows that he is being watched, too, by many thousands more on television and in the movies, and he knows that the tax agents will soon visit him—they always try to get their share before he winds up flat broke—and the fighter cannot shift the blame for his defeat onto his trainers or managers or anybody else, although if he won you can be sure that the trainers and managers would be taking bows. The losing fighter loses more than just his pride and the fight; he loses part of his future, he is one step closer to the slum he came from.”

  THERE HAD NEVER BEEN A HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION AS SENSITIVE, and as honest about his fears, as Floyd Patterson. He was the first professional athlete to receive what would become the modern treatment, a form of Freudian sportswriting that went beyond the ring and into the psyche. Victory Over Myself, Patterson’s autobiography, as dictated to Milton Gross, a columnist at the New York Post, as well as his confessions to Gay Talese in The New York Times and later in Esquire magazine, had about them at least an echo of Richard Wright’s “The Man Who Lived Underground” and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

  Patterson was surely not the first fighter to know fear, but he was the first to talk about it so freely in public. He was brought up that way in the gym. Cus D’Amato trained Patterson not only in the jab and the peekaboo defense, but also in introspection. D’Amato was the only modern psychoanalyst who carried a spit bucket in his hand and a Q-Tip in his teeth. In his lectures to his fighters, D’Amato taught that all things being relatively equal, the fighter who understands his own fears, manipulates them, uses them to his advantage, would always win; he taught young men like Patterson and José Torres, the brilliant light heavyweight from Puerto Rico, to understand their fights as psychodramas, as contests of will more than of gristle.

  Patterson grew up in a series of cold-water flats in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, a crumbling landscape of galling poverty. His father worked as a longshoreman, on construction gangs, as a laborer at the Fulton Fish Market. At night, Floyd’s father came home so tired that he often forgot to eat and fell asleep in his clothes. Floyd would quietly take off his father’s shoes and polish them, and wash his father’s swollen feet. When Floyd’s mother was not working at home, she was making a few dollars as a maid and working at a bottling plant. There were eleven children to feed. Floyd shared a bed with two of his brothers, Frank and Billy. Very early on, Floyd came to despise himself. He hated that he could do so little to help his father and mother. He felt stupid, powerless. “All I wanted to do was help my parents,” Patterson told me, “and all I did was ending up in failure and making matters worse.” He used to point at a photograph of himself at two years old and tell his mother, over and over again, “I don’t like that boy!” When he was nine, he took down the picture and scratched a series of X’s over his face. He had nightmares. More than once, neighbors found him out on the street, in the middle of the night, sleepwalking. He was a child who wanted to hide all the time, who sought the dark. Floyd prowled the alleyways, the dark corners, not because he was looking for trouble, but because he wanted to lose himself. He went to the movies in the morning and stayed through the last show. He rode the A train, back and forth, east to Lefferts Boulevard in the far reaches of Queens, back through Brooklyn, across the East River and up Manhattan to Washington Heights, and back again. From the time Floyd was nine, he would often stop his journeying at the High Street station in Brooklyn. He discovered there the ultimate hiding place. He walked through the tunnel to a semi-hidden tool shed the subway workmen used. He climbed up the metal ladder and locked himself into the darkness. This was his hideaway from the world. “I’d spread papers on the floor and I’d go to sleep and find peace.”

  During the day, he began to steal, little things, a quart of milk, a piece of fruit, something he could bring home to his mother. By the time he was a teenager, Floyd was in court all the time—for truancy, for stealing, for running away. He went to court, he guessed, thirty or forty times.

  Finally, when Floyd was ten, a judge who had seen enough of him sent him to the Wiltwyck School for Boys, a farm for troubled youngsters upstate in Esopus, New York. It was September 1945 when Floyd went off to Wiltwyck. He thought he was being sent to jail, and he was furious with his mother, who had greeted the news with relief. It turned out to be the best thing that had ever happened to him. Wiltwyck was 350 acres of farmland, an old estate that had been owned by the Whitney family. There were no fences or bars. There were chickens and cows, a decent gym, a creek to swim and fish in. There were teachers on the staff, as well as psychiatric social workers and therapists. The children were never beaten or locked in their rooms. Slowly, Floyd began to learn to read, to speak with a little more ease, to get over his permanent sense of shame. When he became champion, Patterson dedicated his autobiography to the school, “which started me in the right direction.” Wiltwyck was pre
cisely the kind of break that Sonny Liston would never have.

  THE TWO YEARS AT WILTWYCK TURNED FLOYD AROUND. HE WAS never a good student, but at least now he could function in the world. Back in New York, Floyd entered P.S. 614, one of the city’s “600” schools for troubled kids, and later he went for a year to the Alexander Hamilton Vocational High School. By the time Patterson got back to the city, two of his brothers were working out at the Gramercy Gym on East Fourteenth Street. Cus D’Amato owned the gym and slept in the back room. His dog was his only companion. D’Amato was a boxing ascetic. He made his living from boxing, but he despised money, gave it away. Money, he said, “was for throwing off the back of trains.” When Patterson won the title, D’Amato took most of his share of the take, more than thirty thousand dollars, and used it to order up a bejeweled championship belt as a gift for his fighter. “Cus was crazy about everything in life except boxing,” José Torres said. D’Amato was a well-informed paranoid. Fear ruled him. He was especially fearful of the Mafia, which ran boxing in his time—and he slept with a gun under his bed. He would never ride the subways, for fear of being pushed onto the tracks. He feared snipers. He feared unfamiliar food and drink. He told people that he never married for fear of being duped by “enemies.”

  “I must keep my enemies confused,” he once said. “When they are confused, then I can do a job for my fighters.”

  As a kid, growing up in the Bronx, D’Amato starved himself for days, the better to withstand the pain when someone tried to take food from him. He was probably the youngest fatalist in the borough. He used to watch funeral processions outside his building and say, “The sooner death the better.” D’Amato was a street kid and a street fighter. One day another kid slammed him in the head with a stick, and he lost the vision in his left eye. D’Amato, however, believed in the regeneration of optic tissue, and throughout his life he made an effort to heal himself, closing his good eye so as to “force” the left eye to see once more. When he became a trainer, D’Amato told his fighters that security, financial and otherwise, would be the death of them. Security dulled the senses, and pleasure—pleasure was worse. “The more pleasures you get out of living,” D’Amato said, “the more fear you have of dying.”