Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  When we judge professional performers we tend to take for granted, and forget, some of the things that they do well. During the years when I had watched Patterson fight I had fastened on his flaws, and I was impressed now by his boxing knowledge and his ability to spot the errors of the others, even though they were just beginners.

  "You see," he was saying to one of them, after I had followed him and the others back upstairs, "as much as I know about boxing, if I was going to fight again I'd need a trainer, because I can't see what I'm doing wrong. I don't know. That's why I tell you these things, because I can see."

  He started to undress, then, to take his shower, and I told him that I thought the boxing lessons had gone very well. I said I wanted to see him again the next morning.

  "That's all right," he said. "How about 10:30?"

  "Fine," I said.

  At 10:30 the next morning, when I drove into the parking area at the top of the driveway, Patterson was washing a car. It was a golden-tan Lincoln Continental with the New York license plate FP 1, and Patterson was in the jeans and T-shirt. He turned off the hose and we shook hands.

  "Here's something that might interest you," I said.

  I had brought along a copy of the February 28, 1959, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. In those days the magazine ran long interview pieces they called "visits" with celebrities, and they used to give me the fighters. I did Patterson and Johansson and Jack Dempsey, always with Jacob Lofman photographing it and with my friend Jim Cleary taping it because, although I had been taking accurate notes for twenty years by then, the magazine insisted that everything be recorded and then transcribed onto some sixty pages of typescript from which I had to work.

  The Patterson piece led the issue, and on the opening page there was a picture of him in the ring after he had knocked out Hurricane Jackson. At the bottom of the page, was a shot of the two of us sitting and talking by the ring in the Gramercy Gym. Patterson, gesticulating, was wearing a sand-colored, medium-weight cardigan.

  "You haven't changed much," I said, showing him the picture, "but I have."

  "Look at the sweater," Patterson said. "I still have that sweater."

  "I remember it as a particularly fine one."

  "Is it all right if I show this to my wife?" he said. "My wife would be interested to read it."

  "Of course," I said.

  He took the magazine, and I followed him around the front of the house and into the entry hall. He motioned me into the bar room and then excused himself and disappeared with the magazine.

  "I'm always interested," I said when he came back, "in the relationships, years later, between fighters who fought each other. In your travels do you ever see Johansson?"

  "I've been to Sweden a few times," he said, "but I and Johansson never showed any friendship until lately. He said so many derogatory things. In 1964, when I beat Eddie Machen in Stockholm, he said that Machen would knock me out and that Floyd was over the hill. It was an afternoon fight, and just as I walked out to get in the ring, Ingemar was in the first row. Our eyes met and I went over and shook hands and everybody booed. I don't know why."

  "Probably," I said, "because he'd taken himself and his money to Switzerland."

  "Then in 1974, after I hadn't fought in two years, I was in a restaurant in Stockholm, and who walked over but Ingemar Johansson. He was very nice then, and I've seen him a few times since."

  "What about some of the other fighters you fought?"

  "There were some of the guys, coming up in my career, like Hurricane Jackson and Jimmy Slade who were in the same camp until we fought. In camp, Jimmy Slade and I would play cards, and he'd get angry when I won. He'd throw the cards in my face, and in camp he'd be in charge.

  "Then one day Cus asked me would I fight Jimmy Slade. I said, 'Of course not. We're friends.' Cus said, 'There comes a time in a fighter's career when he has to forget friendship.' I said, 'Ask Jimmy.' Jimmy said, 'Sure.' I was hurt, it came so easy to him.

  "The guys I fought I don't dislike," he said, "and I'd like to stay in communication with them. I tried to call Jimmy Slade for days and days after I beat him, but I never got an answer. Dick Wagner, though, my first fight with him was difficult, and in the second I stopped him, but I made it known to the press that I respected him. He's out in Portland, Oregon, where he works on the railroad, and he's married to a school teacher. I had dinner at his house and his family met my family and I sent him cards from Sweden.

  "A lot of guys I fought, though, have nothing but derogatory things to say. I saw Roy Harris when Joe Frazier fought Bob Foster. I met him in the lobby of the hotel and we talked a while, and the following day there was an article in the press where he said some derogatory things. Brian London said derogatory things. Why do they do this?"

  "I guess they're still trying to win fights they lost to you years ago."

  "It tends to bring them down," Patterson said. "They should carry themselves like Joe Louis."

  When Patterson was small Louis was his idol. He kept scrap books filled with clippings and pictures of Joe, and after Patterson won the title the two met for the first time at a dinner.

  "What was it like finally meeting him?" I asked Patterson, shortly after that.

  "Well," Patterson had said, "I said to myself, 'Is this really Joe Louis? Am I finally meeting the man who is my idol?' I almost couldn't believe it."

  "But you were the heavyweight champion of the world," I had said. "You have his old title."

  "It seemed to me," Patterson had said, "like Joe Louis was still the champion, and I wasn't."

  "Do you ever see Joe?" I asked him now.

  "I see Joe often," he said, "and I'll still flash back to when I was nine, ten, and eleven and how I admired him, the way he carried himself. Here it is thirty years later, and I try to carry myself so that they might say the same thing about me."

  "You picked a good model," I said.

  "I know who I am," he said, "and what I believe in, but today you must be militant—down with Whitey—to be accepted. If that's what it takes, then I'll be the white man's black man, because I won't accept it the other way. I'd leave the country first. In my gym there are whites and colored and Puerto Ricans. I believe in an equal society. I see no colors. Everybody is the same like in my gym—but the militants don't like me."

  "You know that?"

  "I go over to the college here," he said. "This black group—the black something—asked me to give a speech. I knew they'd harass me. This one guy said, 'How come you call him Cassius Clay. Why not Muhammad Ali?' I said, 'First of all, I think Cassius is a beautiful name, and I can't pronounce Muhammad. My tongue won't pronounce it. Then you give him rights you don't give me. I believe Clay believes in a separate society. You believe the same, or you wouldn't be all blacks here. He called Liston 'The Ugly Bear.' He called George Forman 'The Mummy.' He called me 'The Rabbit.' You must give me the right to call him 'Clay.' "

  "But what did you say in your speech?" I said.

  "I'll get it," he said. "I'll be right back."

  What I had really wanted to say was that he should be done with the name-calling, that the beauty he ascribes to the name Cassius and his problem in pronouncing Muhammad are pretexts and have nothing to do with it. Louis would have pronounced it as best he could. When he came back now he handed me the typewritten speech and I read :

  "To all you young people, I would like to see you go out in the world and have all your dreams come true, and they can if you work hard at your God-given talents. Our people have come a long way, and we have had to struggle to get where we are today.

  "You young people are our hopes and pride. It is you who must continue to struggle. This world is not all black, and we can't make it so. We must live with all people. The sooner we realize that, the happier we'll be. You're young and you're beautiful and have a whole lifetime of living to do. Be conscious of your dreams and pride. Leave color at the end of the list—not the beginning.

  "Black power is not
a true power. White power is not a true power. What I ask you to look for is the power of right, not the power of might. My career has shaped my life, and I have learned much. I have met people from all over the world, the highest to the most humble. The finest of these people accept a man for what he is. Be men, and other men will know you at a glance. Remember Jesus said; 'Love.' Racists say: 'Hate.' One of most renowned Americans who died for what he believed preached love. He was a black man. Some of our people did not agree with him, but in the annals of history his name will be at the top. I speak of Martin Luther King."

  At the age of ten Patterson was unable to read, and he refused to talk. His family had moved seven times, and he had attended irregularly seven schools before they sent him to Wiltwyck, a school for emotionally disturbed boys, at Esopus, New York, and later to P.S. 614, one of New York City's five schools for maladjusted children.

  "That's a good speech," I said now.

  "My wife helped me with it," he said. "She helps me with all my speeches."

  "What kind of a reception did it get? Did they applaud?"

  "Yes," he said. "About two thirds did. One third, I guess they couldn't be broke. If I reach one, though, I think it's fine."

  "If I may say so," I said, "you should shut your mind to Ali. To begin with, you were in no shape to fight him the first time, and . . ."

  "I had a slipped disc," Patterson said. "It started in 1956, before the fight with Archie Moore, and I took three or four days off. Before the fight with Clay it went out. I took some days off, and it was all right. Then in the first round it went out, and there was a knot in my back as big as a fist. The pain was so bad that it was the first time in a fight I was begging to be knocked out."

  Between rounds, as I had watched on television, Al Silvani, who trained Patterson for the fight, would stand behind Patterson and put his arms around him, under the armpits and across the chest. He would lift Patterson, Patterson's feet dangling above the canvas as Silvani tried to slip the disc back in. Then, during the rounds, until they stopped it in the twelfth, Ali would taunt and torture him.

  "In the eighth and ninth rounds," Patterson was saying now, "I was saying to myself, 'The first good punch he catches me with I'm going to go down.' He hit me good punches. I was down. I was dizzy, but when I opened my eyes I was up again. I could not take a dive."

  "I believe that," I said, "and you should be proud of it."

  "There are things I like about myself," he said. "I could not stay down. In boxing you learn about yourself. The feeling of shame I will never lose, because I let people down, but I will never again feel ashamed of being ashamed."

  "And you shouldn't," I said.

  "It's me," he said. "I can't change it."

  "I was impressed yesterday," I said, "watching you teach those kids. When it was over you were telling one of them that, if you were to fight again, you'd need a trainer because you wouldn't be able to see what you were doing wrong."

  "That's right," he said.

  "I know," I said, "and I remember something you used to do wrong, and I begged you not to do it against Johansson in that second fight."

  "You did?" he said.

  In their first fight, Johansson, firing the big right hand, had had him down seven times in the third round before they had stopped it. Before the second fight, Alvin Boretz, the television writer, and I wrote a half-hour special that was to be aired on the ABC network the night before the fight. With Manny Spiro, the producer, and a camera crew, I had gone to both camps, first to interview Johansson late one afternoon in the octagonal ski hut at Gios-singer's, and then Patterson early the next afternoon in the main dining room of the dilapidated roadhouse in Newton.

  We shot them both the same way, from the waist up and full face to the camera and, off camera myself, I asked both of them the same questions, about how they started as fighters, about their previous fights, in particular about what feelings they had had about the men they had fought, before and after those fights. Johansson was excellent, confident and even haughty—the way, if you are handling a fighter, you want him to be.

  "After you had knocked Patterson down seven times and were now heavyweight champion of the world," I said, "did you have any feeling, looking across the ring at him, of sympathy for him?"

  "No," Johansson said, "I did not. He'd gladly like to have me in the same situation."

  "How about in the days after the fight when you thought about him?"

  "I know my sister," he said, "she walk over when Patterson went from ring. My sister walked to him and raised her hand, and did like this on his chin. She feel sorry for him. But not me."

  "This guy was great," Leonard Anderson, the director, said, as we walked back to the main building at Grossinger's.

  "Terrific," Manny Spiro said, and he was obviously excited. "Just terrific, but what is poor Patterson going to do compared to that?"

  "Just wait," I said.

  The next morning we drove down to Newtown and, coming right out of Grossinger's, the others were appalled by the place. When Patterson came out to greet us he was in his road clothes, and he shook hands humbly, in that small-boy manner, and then he went back inside while they set up.

  "This is unbelievable," Leonard Anderson said. "Looking at the two camps and the two fighters, I can't give this guy a chance."

  "I feel sorry for him," Manny Spiro said, and then to me, "After Johansson, what can this poor nebbish say?"

  "Relax," I said. "In fact, I'll guarantee you one thing right now. I don't know how he'll do in the fight, but I'll bet you he boxes rings around Johansson and flattens him in the interview segment."

  I went inside then, and I found Patterson. I explained to him how we were going to film him, just sitting on a stool and facing the camera.

  "But I don't know what you want me to say," he said.

  "It's going to be easy," I said. "I'll just ask you questions I've asked you before, about your first fight on the street, and about your feelings for other fighters. I'll ask you about how you felt about Archie Moore after you won the title, and then I'll ask you about how you went into seclusion after the Johansson fight, and then about the little girl in the hospital in Atlantic City. All you have to do is tell me what you've told me before."

  "All right," he said.

  Sitting there on that stool and looking right at the camera, he told it as he had told it to me before, the voice low level and neither rising nor falling, but the answers direct and explicit. He told about knocking out Moore, and then looking across the ring and, realizing that Moore had wanted the heavyweight championship as much as he and was now so old that he would never get another chance, feeling sorry for him. Then I asked him about the month he had spent in seclusion at home after Johansson had knocked him out, and he explained how he had felt that he had let all of his friends and the United States down, and that late one night he was sitting in the game room in the basement, still feeling sorry for himself.

  "I was just sitting there, thinking," he said. "You know, when your mind just wanders. I was thinking about some things that had happened in some of the places that I had been to, and I thought about being in Atlantic City one time and going through a hospital for leukemia and blood diseases and cancer, and I specifically remember a girl in the hospital.

  "She had leukemia," he said, and he gave a pause that you would celebrate a professional actor for timing. "Cancer. The doctor was showing me through the wards, and he brought me into this little girl's room and she had a tube running through her arms and whatnot, and said she was about four and she was small for a four-year-old girl and you'd think she was just born. She was just nothing but bones, and as I walked out of the room and upon viewing this, I remember the doctor saying to me it would be a miracle if she should live past tonight or tomorrow.

  "So," he said, "after thinking about this, I thought, 'Who am I to feel sorry for myself?' I should get down on my knees and thank God for the things I do have, and actually all I did was lose a fight,
and I got paid for the fight and I have a beautiful home, and all the things the average man would want and even more. So, why should I feel sorry for myself?' I began to come out of it then, and I started going out the very next day, and that night was the first night that I think I got a good night's sleep."

  "Cut!" Leonard Anderson said. "Great!"

  "Thank you, Floyd," I said.

  "You're welcome," he said.

  "Floyd, you were terrific," Manny Spiro was saying. "That was absolutely terrific."