Floyd Patterson

by W. K. Stratton

  After a blur of congratulations and impromptu celebration, he found himself on the Olympic platform with a gold medal around his neck and a bouquet of flowers in his arms. After the conclusion of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” he bowed to the cheering crowd, the first time he’d ever bowed to anyone, he would later claim. Overwrought with emotion, he bowed and bowed and bowed again, until someone told him enough was enough.

  Floyd was part of a spectacular showing for the 1952 American boxing team. For the first time in nearly a half century, five American boxers made it to the Olympic finals, and all five claimed gold medals. No other country came close to claiming that much boxing gold that year. And all five of these men were African Americans, hailing from all across the country—Brooklyn, Cleveland, Washington, DC, Gary, Indiana, and the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. It was a significant event in African American history, though hardly recognized as such at the time or since. Had it happened a few years later, it would no doubt be compared to Texas Western’s defeating Kentucky for the 1966 NCAA basketball championship. (In that game, the Texas Western Miners played five black starters against the Wildcats’ five white starters—and won, 72–65. The Miners’ victory has been celebrated as a milestone in the fight to integrate college sports ever since.) In 1952 five black Americans entered the ring on the world stage, and all five emerged as champions—winning for their country its greatest Olympic boxing triumph.11 But the champions’ race went largely unremarked upon in an America in the grips of a Red scare, an America where most schools were segregated and blacks were expected to know their place.

  Arriving back at New York International Airport at Idlewild, the five champions lined up with Barrodale and Mello for a photograph. In it, most of the fighters are beaming, but Patterson has a stare of determination locked on his face. After the picture taking, reporters approached him and asked if his next step was to turn pro. Patterson had forty-five amateur fights under his belt now, Golden Gloves and AAU titles, and an Olympic gold medal. If he never fought another bout, he would go down in history as one of the dozen or so best amateur boxers America had ever produced. He knew he wasn’t ready to stop now. He knew he wanted to fight for money, but he didn’t share that. He looked over at the barrel-chested, white-haired man who, along with his former teacher Vivian Costen, had come to greet him at the airport.

  “Cus answers the questions,” he told the reporters.12

  4

  Cus Answers the Questions

  THE TEENAGE FLOYD PATTERSON returned home to Brooklyn as a history maker. But the home he went back to was a rundown, crowded (Thomas and Annabelle’s family eventually numbered eleven children) apartment in a crime-ridden ghetto. Even though newspapers carried accounts of his amateur boxing heroics during the previous two years, he had earned no money whatsoever from sports. Except for the pittance Charles Schwefel paid him for part-time work at the Gramercy Park Hotel, plus some cash from manual-labor jobs here and there, he had nothing to contribute to the family coffers, and the Pattersons seemed as financially desperate as ever. He seldom had dollars for dates or to purchase small holiday presents for his girlfriend, Sandra. The situation was frustrating for him, and he was ready to turn pro as soon as possible to do something about it.

  D’Amato agreed it was time. Cus had directed Floyd’s amateur career masterfully to ready him for a professional career. Patterson had fought in four different weight classes, giving him experience against opponents ranging from fleet-footed lightweights to hard-slugging light-heavyweights. He’d also squared off against boxers from different parts of the United States and from Europe, all employing different stances and styles. All of which had seasoned Floyd for what he would face in New York’s bloody prizefighting halls. Not long after Patterson returned from Finland, D’Amato took the steps necessary for Floyd to turn pro.

  First on D’Amato’s agenda was drawing up a formal, written contract under which Cus would manage Floyd’s career as it moved forward. “With character that ran so deep,” D’Amato said publicly, “it was plain that Floyd’s word and faith were more important than a contract.”1 That was fine as far as an amateur career went. But bitter experience had taught D’Amato that when money is involved, agreements should be in writing and signed.

  Early in his career at the Gramercy Gym, D’Amato had schooled a talented middleweight named Rocky Graziano, but Cus failed to sign Graziano to a contract, and lost his boxer to different management—management with deep mob ties. D’Amato sourly watched as Graziano won the world middleweight title in 1947, and never missed an opportunity to dismiss him thereafter as a gutless bum who couldn’t fight.2 D’Amato was not about to let that happen again with one of his fighters.

  So he insisted Floyd sign a contract.3 The contract essentially gave D’Amato complete control and, significantly, excluded the man who had “discovered” Floyd, Frank Lavelle. For the time being, it appeared things would continue as they had been for Lavelle. He would still participate in training Patterson and would work his corner during fights, only now he’d get paid for his efforts. But he was, in fact, a marked man in terms of Floyd’s long-term future.

  D’Amato was under no illusion about just where the Gramercy stood in the hierarchy of New York boxing gyms. He knew it was second tier and lacked the quality of sparring partners Floyd needed to develop into a first-rate pro. He also knew that Patterson needed better training than either he or Lavelle or anyone else at the Gramercy could provide. So shortly after he signed Floyd, Cus took his young fighter to Stillman’s Gym, which occupied a soot-covered three-story building just a short walk from Madison Square Garden. The most successful prizefighters worked out here under the stern gaze of the very best trainers in the world. It was here that D’Amato hired the man who would mold Floyd into a contender.

  Dan Florio seemed to have been around the New York fight scene forever. As early as the 1920s, he was refereeing fights on the East Coast, after which he turned his focus to training. He worked with the best. With his brother Nick, he coached Tony Canzoneri, Battling Battalino, Petey Scalzo, and Freddie Miller to world titles. He also had been responsible for resurrecting the career of Jersey Joe Walcott, working the corner in the infamous 1947 title fight in which Walcott floored Joe Louis in the fourth round and seemed to completely dominate the rest of the fight, but lost the decision to Louis. Florio was verbose, so, naturally, the hands hanging around Stillman’s called him “Silent.” His brother, who almost never talked, became known as “Gabby.” For the next dozen years, Silent and, sometimes, Gabby seconded Patterson in key fights. But at first, Silent took one look at Patterson and, discounting Floyd’s stellar amateur career and Olympic gold medal, said to D’Amato, “He has to learn everything. His stance. He fights with his legs too far apart. He hops around all the time. He jumps like a kangaroo and throws a right. He don’t keep his hands up.”4 D’Amato charged Florio, not Lavelle, with fixing all that.

  From the beginning, Floyd wanted to look good at Stillman’s. The important managers, matchmakers, and promoters in the gallery eyed all the fighters, trying to determine who had heart, who didn’t, who was being brought along by their trainers at just the right pace, and who was being pushed too fast. The impressions a boxer made on these men, leaning forward in their filthy folding chairs, overcoats securely tucked under their arms, could affect the whole course of a career. A bad showing would stay burned in their memories for years, preventing a fighter from getting plum spots on lucrative fight cards.

  One day at Stillman’s, Charley Goldman, who trained Rocky Marciano (shortly to become world heavyweight champion), approached Floyd and asked if he could go a few rounds with a new fighter Goldman was working with, Tommy Harrison. Patterson wasn’t so sure he was ready for that. Harrison was one of Marciano’s regular sparring partners, and he was taller and heavier than Patterson. And he was fast, nearly as fast as Floyd himself. Patterson told Goldman to ask D’Amato, who was cautiously bringing Floyd along, not rushing him to spar fighters
substantially better than he. D’Amato, to Patterson’s surprise, gave the OK.

  Early in the first round, Harrison unloaded twelve unanswered jabs, most landing in spite of Patterson’s bobbing and weaving. Those blows hurt Floyd, even though Harrison wore padded sparring gloves. In all his amateur career, even fighting for the championships of the AAU and the Olympics, Floyd never encountered punches as hard as these. It was a brutal introduction to just what Floyd could expect as a pro. The eyes of the Stillman’s cognoscenti locked onto Patterson as he took those heavy shots—Would the kid collapse? Patterson knew he had to do something. He timed Harrison’s next big jab. When it arrived, Patterson threw a stiff right cross above it, tagging Harrison in the face. The experienced pro staggered. After that, Floyd pursued Harrison, firing combinations that Harrison struggled to ward off. The men in the folding chairs nodded their approval, happy with how Floyd had overcome adversity, transforming it into an advantage. A buzz began to spread around New York about D’Amato’s up-and-comer, a kid who someday soon just might be good enough to put in the ring with the likes of Sugar Ray Robinson.

  There was some question, however, about whether a bigtime matchup for Floyd would be made. No one inside boxing doubted the talent that the Bed-Stuy kid had shown so far. There were plenty of questions about his manager, however, the most eccentric man in the New York fight community. He was a weirdo, someone who read too many books, someone who believed in flying saucers and welcomed visitors from another planet, someone who never smoked or drank—the latter all but unheard of in the world of professional boxing. And there was more. For reasons no one could quite understand, D’Amato refused to play ball with the men who ran professional boxing. It seemed as if he bore a vendetta against something, but just what that something was left boxing insiders scratching their heads. It also seemed as if he were preparing for a war of some kind. He lived in his gym, sleeping in a small room to the left of the boxing ring, a baseball bat within easy reach, a gun or two hidden away, his fierce dog curled up on the floor next to him. He never rode subways, fearing enemies could push him onto the tracks as he waited for a train. What was this all about?

  It was simple, actually. D’Amato was plotting to become the most powerful force in professional boxing. This was his raison d’être, and it was no small ambition. Nor was it a safe one. For boxing, from the smallest club venues in out-of-the-way places like Houston or New Orleans to the big action at Madison Square Garden or Yankee Stadium, was controlled by men who responded to challenges to their authority with lead pipes, stilettos, and snub-nosed thirty-eights. Organized crime had exerted sway over professional boxing for generations, but in the early 1950s its hold was complete.

  The mob used a front organization, the International Boxing Club of New York, to ensure prizefighting functioned according to the wiseguys’ whims. A promotional organization on paper, the IBC did far more than promote fights. It essentially determined which boxers would be allowed to fight for which titles, who their managers and trainers would be, which matchmakers would be allowed to set the fight cards. The IBC also decided where and when fights would occur and who would be paid how much—and occasionally who would win fights and who would lose. Its influence extended to the new broadcast medium of television as well as to tried-and-true radio. It accomplished all this through strong-arm tactics combined with what boiled down to bribes and kickbacks.

  The face of the IBC was a Chicago swell named James Norris. On the surface, Norris appeared to be about as white-bread as anyone could possibly be. His father was one of America’s best-known businessmen, with holdings in grain mills, transport ships, and cattle operations. The elder Norris was also an important early team owner in the National Hockey League. Once his son became involved in the family business, it moved more heavily into sports, buying Detroit’s Olympia Arena and the Chicago Stadium and acquiring majority interest in the Madison Square Garden Corporation. But there was a side to Jim Norris that the sports, society, and business pages overlooked. Since at least 1930, he associated himself with the Al Capone faction of the Chicago Outfit. Norris’s IBC functioned at the bidding of a Mafia figure known in crime circles as “Mr. Gray.”

  His real name was Paolo Giovanni Carbo, but he was better known as Frankie Carbo. Born on New York’s Lower East Side, Carbo became a soldier in the Lucchese crime family. Eventually he was recognized by crime bosses across America as the underworld’s unofficial commissioner of boxing. Carbo’s police record showed seventeen arrests for vagrancy, suspicious behavior, felonious assault, grand larceny, robbery, and violation of New York boxing laws. But worse than that, he had been a gunman for Murder Inc. in his younger days, and it was widely believed that he had killed, either directly or indirectly, no fewer than eight men. “There wasn’t anyone over him,” New York District Attorney’s Office detective Frank Marrone said.5 Certainly Jim Norris answered to Mr. Gray when it came to matters of the IBC. If a manager, trainer, promoter, matchmaker, or boxer balked at the IBC, Carbo simply dispatched pipe-carrying thugs to convince the offender of the error of his ways.6 No one understood this better than Cus D’Amato.

  D’Amato knew how the IBC worked from firsthand, inside experience. The International Boxing Guild was an organization of boxing managers, and it had fallen slave to the IBC, even though the IBC’s interests usually ran counter to those of the managers. In order for a manager to get a fighter on TV, he knew he’d pay a tribute to the IBC, which would be collected by the guild. For a time, D’Amato was the guild’s bagman, picking up those payments. But at some point, for reasons he didn’t discuss publicly, Cus washed his hands of the whole matter, retreated, and began to formulate plans to move to the top of the boxing power structure on his own terms. To do this, he’d need a fighter of such public acclaim that the IBC could not shut him out. D’Amato believed Floyd Patterson could be that fighter.

  After his first pro fight at St. Nick’s, Floyd walked around with the three crisp hundred-dollar bills he’d won in his pants pocket for a day or two, feeling like a millionaire. He figured that only millionaires could afford to carry that much cash around with them. Then he handed most of the money over to his mother for household expenses, keeping only a small part of it for himself. He used those dollars to indulge himself on clothes, oversized hand-me-downs being an all-too-haunting memory. More money was coming. Within the next thirty days, Patterson easily won two more fights, each with a significantly larger purse. Combining his winnings from those fights, he took home $1,100 for what he calculated to be twenty-two minutes of work. It would take an unskilled laborer like his father months to earn that kind of money in the early 1950s; Thomas Patterson took home $73 a week at the time. Mindful of how they struggled with the bills, Floyd gave half of his boxing earnings to his parents for the next few years.

  Patterson rose in the boxing ranks remarkably fast, enough so that by the end of 1952, he starred in the main event of a fight card. The venue was Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway Arena, and it was in this converted skating rink that Floyd developed the core of the fan base that would follow him through the peak of his pro career. At the time, Eastern Parkway was the home base of Teddy Brenner, the best matchmaker in the business. He was able to match Floyd with boxers who’d give action-packed shows. Eastern Parkway didn’t seat many people, but its audience extended well beyond the arena itself because owner Emil Lence had cut a pioneering sports broadcasting agreement with the DuMont Television Network. The Eastern Parkway fights ran for 156 straight weeks on dozens of TV stations affiliated with DuMont. Those fights were popular because of the number of upsets that occurred in the arena—fans and sportswriters called it the House of Upsets—and, with the TV revenue flowing in, the small arena was making more money than most larger facilities. And the hometown hero Patterson, with his flashy ring speed, soon became the most popular boxer on Eastern Parkway cards as he recorded win after win.

  The arrangement worked out well for everyone involved. Brenner had declared his independence
from the IBC by walking away from an earlier job at Madison Square Garden, so D’Amato was able to enter his fighter into bouts without dealing with the enemy. But Cus no doubt was aware that Eastern Parkway was not as clean an operation as it might have seemed from the outside. Owner Lence had a silent partner in the business who ran mob rackets in the garment district. No doubt this individual kept the IBC at bay.

  D’Amato and Brenner were able to handpick Patterson’s opponents without interference from Mr. Gray’s minions. D’Amato did so following boxing tradition. He selected progressively more difficult opponents, but none who had a real chance to beat Patterson. “You don’t take a young fighter and throw him in over his head,” Patterson said later, defending D’Amato’s choices.7 A fight against Lalu Sabotin of Warren, Ohio, marked a professional first for Floyd: he entered the ring as a light-heavyweight this time out, though he weighed only 167½ pounds, some 8 pounds lighter than Sabotin. Sabotin was a solid opponent, if not a contender, who’d begun his pro career with fifteen straight wins. He was now approaching the end of his career though, and losses appeared on his record more often than wins. Still, the selection of Sabotin was D’Amato’s way of serving notice to Floyd that he was not content with Patterson’s fighting as a middleweight, that D’Amato had something more in mind for his charge. As it turned out, Patterson had no trouble defeating the heavier Sabotin by technical knockout. Boxing veterans like Ray Arcel—the venerable trainer known as the dean of Stillman’s Gym—were saying that Patterson might just be the best young boxer at any weight in the world.