The upshot of all of this activity was the best Christmas present I could have imagined: an offer to meet Floyd Patterson in a title-elimination bout at Madison Square Garden on February 1, 1965.
The fight took on a life of its own from the moment it was announced.
For starters, the January rankings from the World Boxing Association had me at No. 3, Patterson at No. 2 and Liston at No. 1, with Terrell as champion. Even though virtually every other jurisdiction in the world—along with The Ring—acknowledged Ali as the undisputed titleholder, the WBA refused to recognize him because of his Nation of Islam affiliation and the fact that he’d signed for a rematch with Liston instead of facing Terrell. The sanctioning body had officially stripped Ali of his title the previous June.
None of that mattered to me, because behind the scenes an agreement was already in place to circumvent the WBA’s bureaucratic bullcrap. If Patterson beat me and Ali beat Liston in their rematch, Patterson would be the next name on Ali’s dance card. If I beat Floyd and Liston beat Ali, Sonny and I would rumble for the title. It was a done deal.
Either way, I figured to get a shot at the big prize sooner rather than later. That, along with the $50,000 (plus a cut of the closed-circuit TV money) I would pocket for Patterson made February 1 the most important night of my life.
The pre-fight hype was unbelievable, like nothing I had experienced in my entire career. With reporters coming from all over Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America to join their North American counterparts, the fight set a record for press credential requests at Madison Square Garden.
The deluge of media attention started as soon as we set up training camp at Huntington Golf and Country Club, near Woodside Park north of Toronto. Once again, I had Greatest Crawford, Cody Jones, Jimmy Christopher and Lucky Little on board as sparring partners, and by the time we moved the camp to Kutsher’s Resort in Monticello, New York, three weeks prior to the fight, I was razor-sharp.
When I wasn’t sparring or otherwise conditioning my body, I relaxed and sharpened my mind by reading The Prophet, a collection of 26 poetic essays by Lebanese writer Khalil Gibran. I was absolutely blown away by what he had to say about life. It was like reading words from God’s mouth. The Prophet is still one of my all-time favorite books.
At Kutsher’s, the whole atmosphere was electric. My sparring sessions (176 rounds in total) became part of the resort’s daily entertainment schedule, and when I wasn’t in the ring or noshing on great kosher food, I was running laps on the golf course or chopping down trees in the surrounding woods.
One morning after we’d been at Kutsher’s for a couple of weeks, Ungerman got a disturbing message from one of the resort’s telephone operators. Part of her job was to screen calls from all the reporters who wanted to do interviews, and in the course of carrying out that duty she periodically eavesdropped on what was being said on the other lines.
The woman told Irving that Greatest Crawford was getting calls from Dan Florio, one of Patterson’s handlers. She said Crawford, who had previously worked with Patterson, was passing along advice about not trying to fight me on the inside because, as he put it, “George is way too strong for Floyd.” She also said Crawford told Florio that Patterson’s best strategy would be “to run like hell”—a strategy that had never been part of Floyd’s repertoire.
Although Crawford’s treachery surprised and disappointed me, we did nothing about it because I liked Greatest and felt no animosity toward him. Scrawny, with long arms and a wispy goatee, he was a man of very few words, but when he said something in that deep, resonant voice of his, it was usually pretty good. His favorite expression was “I gotta make me some cakes [money], baby!” Crawford was a pretty decent fighter, too—although he would’ve been a hell of a lot better if he hadn’t smoked so much. His breath always smelled heavily of tobacco, and every time I whacked him to the body it was just like somebody blowing smoke in my face.
Why Greatest chose to tip off Patterson’s people is anybody’s guess, but he never found out that we knew what he’d done. And to Crawford’s credit, the telephone operator reported that he only reluctantly gave up information. He was a New York guy, so maybe he felt a kind of loyalty to Florio and Patterson. Either way, he disappeared from camp the day after we found out—and Teddy was convinced he’d been whisked straight to Patterson’s headquarters in Marlboro, New York, about 50 miles away. McWhorter even coined a clever name for it for the newspaper guys: “sparnapping”!
Sadly, Greatest was killed in his fight with Marion Connor in Canton, Ohio, the following year.
Another of the little distractions that surfaced during our time at Kutsher’s was the endless parade of former fighters and other ring luminaries who dropped by to watch me train before offering their predictions to the hordes of reporters. Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano both predicted I would knock Patterson out, as did ex-lightweight and welterweight champ Barney Ross, who was treated like some sort of Jewish deity when he came around for a visit. Jimmy Braddock, the old “Cinderella Man” who refereed my bout with Julio Medeiros in ‘58, went the other way, forecasting Patterson would win “a very tough decision.”
On January 19, I was in the middle of a sparring session with Cody Jones when we were distracted by a wave of commotion moving across the ballroom in the direction of the ring. Then I heard the voice: “Let me in there! Step aside and let me in that ring!” It was Muhammad Ali.
“There he is! There he is!” Ali shouted, pointing at me. “He insulted me, and now I’m gonna whup him! That’s what the champ is gonna do … I’m gonna get in there and whup the Washerwoman!”
Like the Pied Piper, Muhammad had about 50 reporters and photographers trailing behind him and he was carrying a mop and pail. He jumped up on the ring apron, handed me the props, then read a “prepared statement,” bellowing so that nobody in the big crowd missed a single word: “I have come as heavyweight champion of the world to offer you a chance at becoming the champion, which would bring you great honor and dignity and make you a national hero in your home state of Canada! If you can defeat the Rabbit and look good in defeating him, I may grant you an opportunity to be in a $10 million gate with me!”
It was all in good fun—payback for the stunts we’d pulled on him in Detroit and Miami. After the fuss died down, Ali quietly watched me go four rounds with Jones, then told a TV interviewer, “Up close, George is tougher than I thought. And he hits pretty sharp, too. Maybe I should stop talking and start training. I think from now on, I’ll have to call him the Washerman!”
I got the final word, though. After I wrapped up with Jones, Ali doffed his coat and climbed into the ring with gloves on, trying to coax me into going one round with him. “Don’t bother me when I’m working, Sonny,” I snapped. “I’ll give you my autograph later.”
While the atmosphere at Kutsher’s was somewhat overwhelming, by the time we moved to a hotel in downtown Manhattan the fight had become the talk of the town—literally. Every five minutes, it seemed, Ungerman was fielding another request for an interview or photo session. My mug graced the cover of Sports Illustrated for a feature story entitled “The Croatian Candidate,” and I was invited to appear on The Les Crane Show, which at the time rivaled Johnny Carson as television’s No. 1 late-night gabfest.
The Sunday before the bout, snazzily decked out in a crisp new shirt and tie, I was introduced on The Ed Sullivan Show. Backstage, Mr. Really Big Shoo told me that he’d be at the fight, and if I won he wanted Teddy and me to do a demonstration of the glove beat on the following week’s show. But the best part about that little detour into TV land was that I got introduced to one of Sullivan’s other guests: Juliet Prowse, the gorgeous redheaded dancer/actress. What a doll!
Meanwhile, as fight night drew closer, a lot was being said and written about me being the heavyweight division’s new “Great White Hope.” The stories—almost all of which were penned by U.S. writers—inevitably drew comparisons to the Jack Johnson era, when it seemed like any Caucas
ian over six feet who could punch was hailed as the next savior of the white race. Well, I’m a white guy and I sure as hell hoped I’d win, but that was the extent of it for me.
Unfortunately, a lot of other folks couldn’t leave that angle alone. This was still the era of segregation in many parts of the U.S., and black-vs.-white fights were viewed as “unsavory” in some Southern states (although heavyweight Buddy Turman did a lot to torpedo that in 1955 by becoming the first white fighter to legally take on a black opponent in Texas). Protests by the Ku Klux Klan resulted in some theaters in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi refusing to carry the closed-circuit telecast of me and Floyd Patterson, and on the day of the fight some idiot phoned a bomb threat into Madison Square Garden.
All the tension and chaos of the buildup culminated with the pre-fight weigh-in, which looked more like a panic sale at the New York Stock Exchange. There were so many bodies packed in the room and it was so noisy I just remember thinking that Floyd and I were like prize cattle or racehorses as we stepped onto the scales and heard our weights announced over the deafening din: “Chuvalo, 208! Patterson, 197 and a quarter!”
The weigh-in provided my first up-close look at Patterson, but we didn’t speak. I admired Floyd when I was a kid; I remembered watching him win the middleweight gold medal as a 17-year-old at the 1952 Olympics. I’d always liked the way he could look kind of quizzical by raising his eyebrows and crinkling his forehead. In fact, I even tried to mimic that look when I was a kid. But we weren’t kids now.
I felt great climbing into the ring that night, and the sold-out crowd of 19,100 gave me a thunderous reception, even though we were fighting in Patterson’s backyard.
My personal cheering section was a few rows back of ringside: Lynne, looking beautiful (if a tad apprehensive), and a handful of my buddies from Toronto. Weeks earlier, I’d told my parents and sister that I didn’t want them there because I knew it was very hard on them to watch me fight in person—especially my mother. On the few occasions when they’d attended previous fights I’d found it a distraction, so for this one, my mother and Zora stayed at home, taking care of the boys, while my father had a ticket for the sold-out closed-circuit show at Maple Leaf Gardens.
To this day, I can still see and smell the cloud of stale cigar and cigarette smoke that was suspended high above the ring as announcer Johnny Addie introduced everybody from Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano to Frank Sinatra and Ed Sullivan. Ali was roundly booed when he waved to the crowd from ringside, where he was providing color commentary for the closed-circuit telecast, but I didn’t pay any attention to him. However, I did pay distressing attention to the amount of tobacco I was inhaling as I stood in the center of the ring in a billow of smoke, receiving the referee’s instructions. I said to myself that I might as well be smoking. The only thing that helped me calm down slightly was the fact that Floyd was in the same boat. I also remember that, as a loyal Canuck, I was a bit surprised when it was time for the anthems and the Garden organist played “God Save the Queen” (badly) instead of “O Canada.”
From the opening bell, it was obvious that Patterson’s camp had taken Greatest Crawford’s surreptitious advice to heart. Instead of coming straight forward and boxing, as he’d done so successfully against Ingemar Johansson, Tom McNeeley and Eddie Machen, Floyd immediately got on his bicycle and threw flurries of light pit-a-pat punches before sliding backwards or sideways to keep the fight in the middle of the ring.
To compound matters, referee Zach Clayton constantly wedged himself between us to force a break every time I got on the inside. It was almost like he was working to a plan—if not consciously, then at least maybe somebody on the New York State Athletic Commission had put the idea in his head.
When you watch the tape today, the favoritism is pretty obvious. Clayton was a New York guy, working for the New York commission, and Patterson was a New York fighter. They all knew I lived on the inside, that being there played to my strength. Through the first six rounds, every time I managed to get my hands free in close, I ripped Patterson to the body and head—but just as quickly, Clayton moved in to pull us apart.
I’m not taking anything away from Floyd. In terms of quickness, he was one of the best I ever fought, and he threw me off right away by moving around so much. He was extremely agile and a very sharp counterpuncher. He fired a lot of punches, but there wasn’t a whole lot of snap on them. That was another shock, to be honest. Floyd had shown murderous power in a lot of his previous fights, particularly against Johansson, but to me his shots felt like a feather duster.
After seven rounds, my corner told me I was leading and I could sense that Patterson was really tiring, but the more I tried to press the action, the more Clayton felt duty-bound to pull us apart.
I was hurting Floyd big time with hooks to the body, but in retrospect, I never zeroed in on his chin the way I should have. Remember, Patterson was knocked down more times than any heavyweight champ in history (and got up more times, too), and most of the shots that dropped him were right on the button. I had my chances to do the same, but I kept missing high. Besides, I figured I was doing enough damage to his ribs that he’d eventually wilt.
Unfortunately for me, that never happened.
Both of us were dog tired after eight rounds, and that’s when the fight started to slip away from me—at least according to the judges. Floyd’s quick little combinations had raised a pretty good mouse under my right eye, and in the ninth he nicked me beside the left, but I still had enough in the tank to bull him into the ropes and land a half-dozen hooks to the kidneys that buckled his knees.
I knew the body shots were hurting him, because just before the bell rang to end Round 10, I knocked out his mouthpiece before he wobbled over to the wrong corner.
I thought Rounds 11 and 12 were pretty close, though most of the post-fight stories said those six minutes swung the scoring in Patterson’s favor. All I know is that he was a desperate fighter, particularly in the last round, and that was the only time during the whole fight that he reverted to his old style, if only for a few moments.
Judge Tony Castellano gave it to Floyd by seven rounds to five, while Joe Armstrong saw it eight to four. What fight was he watching? Ironically, the closest score was turned in by Clayton, the guy who wouldn’t let me fight my fight. He had it six to five for Patterson, with one round even.
The details of the scorecards showed how close it actually was. Patterson won only three rounds unanimously, while I got two. With Clayton and the two judges divided over the other seven, it basically came down to the subtle intangibles that color every decision in the ring. And Floyd was no dummy when it came to maximizing his advantages. He had the hometown crowd, two New York judges and a New York referee. That’s a pretty loaded deck in anyone’s game.
I was disappointed, naturally, but far from disheartened. I felt then (as I do now) that Clayton made the difference by not letting me fight my fight, but what could I do about it?
Floyd never came close to hurting me, but I know I did some major damage to him. An hour after we left the ring, he collapsed in his shower while a bunch of reporters were in his dressing room, but one of the few guys who wrote about it was Dave Anderson of The New York Times. All the Toronto writers witnessed it, too, but somehow that little fact never made it into their stories. I could just see the headline: “Winner KO’d in Shower!” It would have made a nice addition to my scrap-book. Oh well.
For his part, though, Patterson was a gracious victor. “Fighting Chuvalo is like trying to chop down an oak tree,” he told Anderson. “He hurt me several times, but I was fortunate enough to weather the storm. I thought at one time in the fight I was behind, and my corner told me so. I guess it was around the eighth or ninth round. I wanted to throw a lot of punches, trade with him and then move outside. But every time I tried to fight him inside, he always got the better of it. Had I fought George three fights ago, he probably would have knocked me out. Even two fights ago, he would have stopped me. One f
ight ago, it would have been a lot closer. This wasn’t a title fight, but it’s the most satisfying victory of my career—and I’m definitely not looking for a rematch.”
Floyd was as good as his word. As much as we tried to get him in the ring again, the answer was always a resounding “NO!”
I must have made a lasting impression on him.
In the 1980s, long after both our careers were over, Patterson became a marathoner. In an interview with The New York Times, he talked about what it was like to hit the infamous “wall” that long-distance runners often speak about. “The only thing I can compare it to in boxing was the night I fought George Chuvalo at the Garden,” he told the reporter. “After five rounds, I was totally exhausted. I couldn’t even hold up my arms. I was so tired, I lost the next two or three rounds. But then the crowd started cheering me and chanting my name, and I knew I had to do something special. Somehow I won the last couple of rounds, and that made the difference.”
My dance with Patterson ended up being named The Ring’s Fight of the Year for 1965, and it was the highest-grossing non-title bout in boxing history to that point, with a live gate of $166,423 and $600,000 from closed-circuit TV. It made for a real nice payday … but all I could think about was getting away for a little R&R.
A couple of weeks later, Lynne and I were in Lethbridge, Alberta, where I appeared at a charity event with former Boston Red Sox star Jimmy Piersall. He had a reputation for being a bit of a wingnut (immortalized in the 1957 movie Fear Strikes Out, starring Anthony Perkins and Karl Malden), but I found him to be personable and interesting to chat with while we signed a couple of thousand autographs.
But Piersall’s demeanor changed once dinner was served. Even though the MC had instructed the audience to hold off on autograph requests until we were finished eating, a couple of guys made the mistake of approaching Jimmy with baseball cards they wanted signed. In the blink of an eye, he transformed from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde. “Get the fuck away from me! Didn’t you hear the MC?” he screamed. “Can’t you see that I’m eating?” It was quite a scene.
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