Patterson was skilled, yes—no one had ever seen faster hands. But some insiders were beginning to whisper to each other about whether Floyd had the mental toughness to go far in the sport. Was he just too nice a guy for boxing? His first out-of-town pro fight pitted him against Chicago’s Chester Mieszala in Mieszala’s hometown. Patterson arrived in Chicago a week early, planning to train at the famous Midtown Gym. But when Floyd discovered it was Mieszala’s home gym, he refused to work out there. Floyd feared he might inadvertently pick up some tips by watching Mieszala that would give him an unfair advantage in the fight. That sort of attitude was unheard of in the cutthroat world of boxing.
The fight itself stirred up doubt about Floyd’s toughness. Toward the end, he hit Mieszala in the face, dislodging the Chicago fighter’s mouthpiece. Unbelievably, Mieszala stopped fighting, bent over, and tried to retrieve his mouthpiece from the canvas. It would have been completely within the rules for Patterson to go into full attack mode at that point, scoring an easy knockout. Instead, to the shock of everyone who saw it, Patterson joined Mieszala in his attempt to retrieve the piece of gear. Finally the referee called a time-out and reinserted Mieszala’s mouthpiece himself. Floyd won the match by technical knockout. Though Patterson was certain the people watching on TV must have thought it odd to see him trying to help an opponent, he stood by his actions. It doesn’t make you any bigger, stronger, or more important to take advantage of another person, he insisted afterward. But the boxing old-timers weren’t so sure.
D’Amato believed it was time for Patterson’s “ceiling of resistance” to be tested, so Cus scheduled him for eight rounds against light-heavyweight Dick Wagner from Toppenish, Washington. Wagner, ten years Patterson’s senior, was a journeyman boxer at best, closing out an up-and-down career. But he had fought professionally more than fifty times, knew the tricks of the ring, and was an expert at delivering body punches. The fight was, in a sense, choreographed. D’Amato told Patterson he did not want him to attempt a knockout. Instead, Patterson was to stretch the contest out for the full eight rounds. D’Amato was concerned that Floyd had yet to box an entire fight, and he knew that Patterson had yet to learn how to pace himself, how to endure taking hard blows over a prolonged period of time, how to score sufficiently with the judges to win a decision. Patterson complied. And Wagner tortured him severely. In the middle rounds, Floyd came close to folding under the onslaught of body shot after body shot. The crowd sensed at one point that he was out on his feet and called for the referee to declare a knockout. But Patterson recovered, finished the fight, and won a close split decision, though he had sore ribs to nurse for the next few days. At least when it came to absorbing punishment, Patterson proved he was tough enough.
Patterson’s impressive ring wins caught the attention of a sports columnist who would come to play an important role in his career. On the eve of Rocky Marciano’s title fight with Roland LaStarza, Milton Gross of the New York Post devoted his column to Patterson, “a kid everybody says should displace tomorrow’s winner within two years.” Gross put the emphasis on the word should, explaining that Patterson was being shut out of competition because D’Amato refused to connect himself to the IBC. Patterson clearly was the best talent among young boxers, Gross believed, but that alone did not ensure he would someday compete for coveted titles. “It isn’t the survival of the fittest,” Gross said, “but the survival of those who can finagle the best.”8 Gross had yet to see evidence that D’Amato could successfully finagle. D’Amato would soon get a chance to do some finagling, though—over, of all things, Floyd’s age.
Under the rules of the New York State Athletic Commission—the most important boxing sanctioning board of the day, with influence reaching far beyond New York—Floyd could start fighting ten-round bouts once he turned twenty. A year after that, he would be able to compete in fifteen-round championship bouts. In the 1950s pro boxers began their careers fighting four-round bouts. As they gained more experience, they fought longer fights of six and eight rounds. To be considered “contenders” for a world title—one of the ten top boxers in their weight categories—they had to battle in ten-round fights. New York rules prohibited fast advancement of boxers, to prevent putting them in dangerous fights before they were sufficiently experienced, and, perhaps in vain, to encourage boxers to finish their education before devoting their attention to the ring full-time. Throughout Floyd’s amateur and early pro careers, D’Amato had reported Patterson’s age based on the fib Floyd told him back in 1949: that Floyd was born in 1934. But at some point, D’Amato discovered the truth. He certainly must have known by 1952, when he helped Floyd prepare for his trip to Helsinki, which included applying for a passport. Floyd was a year younger than advertised.
In late 1953, when a reporter commented that Patterson would be turning twenty in January 1954 and thus eligible for ten-round fights, D’Amato responded peculiarly, muttering something about not being sure if Floyd would or wouldn’t be. This certainly raised the reporter’s eyebrows. Now that Cus knew the truth, he wasn’t forthcoming with it. Cus’s evasiveness sent reporters scurrying to find some record, any record, that would establish Floyd’s actual age. They found it when they turned up his original passport application—the date listed on it was January 4, 1935.
A small ruckus ensued, and the New York State Athletic Commission suspended Patterson until he could provide documentation showing his true age. He didn’t have a birth certificate—poor black kids of his generation from places like Waco, North Carolina, typically did not. But he was able to get a sworn statement from county officials that fixed his birth date at January 4, 1935. Now that the issue of his age was resolved, the impatient Patterson accepted the reality that another year would pass before he could become a true contender, and two years under the rules of the time before he could challenge for a title.
Some consolation arrived in January 1954 when the New York Boxing Writers Association named Patterson the Ring Rookie of the Year. Receiving the award at a banquet at the Hotel Astor in front of hundreds of people, Floyd was scarcely able to mumble his thanks, mostly because the presenter of the trophy was Joe Louis, the greatest fighter America had ever produced. Born in Alabama as the grandchild of former slaves, Louis had spent much of his youth in Detroit. He rose out of poverty to become heavyweight champion, which made him a hero to African Americans across the country. But Louis won over white Americans as well, especially after he destroyed German Nazi Party favorite Max Schmeling in a 1938 fight that lasted just two minutes, four seconds. Before the fight, Louis had been invited to the White House, where President Franklin Roosevelt told him that America needed muscle like his to defeat Nazi Germany. The victorious Louis was the very embodiment of American might as he stood over the fallen Schmeling. No African American in history had ever held such important symbolic value to the nation. Floyd stood in awe of the man who was now honoring him.
Patterson had little time to relish the moment, however. That February, the nineteen-year-old Floyd began battling some of the best boxers in the world, starting with a fighting fisherman from Canada.
Yvon Durelle was the first contender-quality boxer Floyd faced as a professional. Durelle hailed from the tiny village of Baie-Sainte-Anne in New Brunswick, Canada, and had worked in the brutally tough commercial fishing trade while training as a boxer. He took a never-say-die attitude with him into the ring. And he went into the ring often. Sometimes, Durelle fought with no more than five days of rest between bouts when even the busiest contenders of the time typically entered the ring no more than once a month. The twenty-four-year-old Durelle was a mystery to American fight fans. He’d already fought more than four dozen fights of record, but most were club bouts in small Canadian towns unfamiliar to many New Yorkers. His light-heavyweight fight with Patterson marked his first outing in America. Just two weeks had passed since his last matchup, and Durelle arrived at Eastern Parkway tired. He was also hungry. His manager had dumped the small-town boy in New York, and Dur
elle was so overwhelmed by the city that he skipped meals. He was so green he didn’t know how to find restaurants or corner groceries. At the weigh-in, he tipped the scales at just 158 pounds, 13 pounds under what was announced at the weigh-in and subsequently reported in the sports pages.9 Patterson outweighed him by 9 pounds, but fight promoters were not wont to announce that kind of weight difference, fearing a mismatch of that many pounds might drive away ticket buyers.
Given all that, it should have been an easy fight for Floyd, and indeed, he cruised through the early rounds. But as the fight progressed, Patterson sank deeper and deeper into trouble as the bobbing-and-weaving Durelle delivered uppercut after uppercut while managing to avoid Patterson’s retaliatory strikes. In the eighth and final round, Durelle floored Patterson, and the oddsmakers who had made the fighting fisherman a four-to-one underdog seemed foolish. Floyd unsteadily rose to his feet before the referee’s count ended. Then Durelle went to work on him, pounding the groggy Patterson unmercifully with body shots. Somehow, though stunned, Floyd made it to the final bell. Durelle went to his corner, certain he’d won the fight. But the Floyd-friendly judges at Eastern Parkway stunned Durelle and the fans by awarding a unanimous decision to Patterson.
The newspapermen at ringside didn’t buy it. The consensus among them was that Patterson had just proved himself clearly unready to battle in prizefighting’s upper ranks: “That was plastered on the records last night at Eastern Parkway,” Caswell Adams of the New York Journal-American said, “where one Yvon Durelle, fighting as if in one of his beloved lobster pots off his native Canadian shores, showed Patterson still to be a confused novice as a fighter.”10 A bitter Durelle, who later became the stuff of legend for his hard-fought contests with Archie Moore, left the arena telling anyone who would listen that Patterson was overrated. Any good boxer could defeat Floyd, he believed. He wanted another chance to prove that. For his part, Patterson could only say that Durelle was the most complicated boxer he’d ever faced.
Six weeks later, Floyd made his first trip below the Mason-Dixon Line as a pro boxer. He and his traveling companions stopped at a Baltimore rest stop to eat, but the waitress refused to allow him to sit at the dine-in counter because he was black. She shoved a bag of burgers at him and told him to eat outside. Floyd turned and walked out without the bag. As a professional boxer, he would be traveling around the nation to fight, and this experience reminded him that racial prejudice was something he was going to have to face. With his actions in Baltimore, he served notice to those around him that he was not going to accept it.
There was time for more lighthearted matters than boxing or the prejudice he encountered on the road. Now nineteen and sixteen, respectively, Floyd and Sandra spent many blithe hours together. They especially loved to go on dates to Coney Island, where Floyd proved his strength to her at the ring-the-bell concession. He consistently was able to hit the hammer hard enough to make the bell sound. The carny working the game pronounced Floyd to be strong as a boilermaker. Floyd once slipped into a tattoo parlor off the Coney Island boardwalk and had “Sandra—1954” inked on the inside of his left forearm. Sometimes they took Floyd’s car to Manhattan to take in a show at the Apollo Theater. Other times they went roller-skating.
Sandra was outgoing and full of laughter, in many ways Floyd’s opposite. Floyd, a self-admitted sad sack, credited her with bringing him out of his shell and teaching him how to feel comfortable around other people. She helped him with his catechism classes, worked with him on improving his vocabulary, and recommended books for him to read.
For several months, IBC representatives had been hinting that the organization would like to stage a match at Madison Square Garden between Patterson and former world lightweight champion Joey Maxim, a boxer the IBC controlled completely. The IBC’s interest in such a fight had made some of the boxing columns in the New York newspapers, which Patterson read. (The IBC had every reason to believe it might be able to stage such a fight. Earlier, D’Amato had allowed Floyd to fight at the Garden one time before whisking him back to Eastern Parkway.) Though Floyd had beaten Durelle only through the charity of the hometown judges, he believed he was ready to fight Maxim. But D’Amato rebuffed the Maxim bout overtures and instead booked Floyd to fight three unknowns over the next three months. Meanwhile, Cus and Teddy Brenner negotiated a Maxim fight behind the scenes, ensuring it would occur at Floyd’s home court, Eastern Parkway, not at the IBC-controlled Madison Square Garden. It was a victory—a small one, but a victory nonetheless—for D’Amato in his war against the IBC. He’d elevated Floyd’s reputation to such a point that the IBC could not ignore him. In the contract, Maxim received a $10,000 guarantee from the IBC, plus a kickback of $1,500 for his manager to use as “walking around money,” as Brenner put it.11 For his part, Patterson was guaranteed $5,000—easily the most he’d made so far for a fight.
Maxim’s real name was Giuseppe Antonio Berardinelli. His ring moniker, derived from the Maxim machine gun, was applied to the boxer because of his ability to throw left jabs repeatedly. Maxim held the world light-heavyweight title for three years, although he was not the best light-heavyweight during those years. (Archie Moore was the best, but he was denied a shot at the light-heavyweight crown until he signed with a manager aligned with the IBC.) Maxim’s willingness to play ball with assorted mob types put his career under suspicion, but one thing could not be denied him: in 1952 he’d beaten the great Sugar Ray Robinson.
With dozens of fights behind him, Maxim knew the tricks necessary to survive in the ring. By matching Patterson with Maxim, D’Amato would be moving his fighter into the big time, no doubt about it. Cus wanted to emphasize to Patterson that this was a big step up in his career, so he told Floyd that they would leave New York and conduct a training camp away from the city’s distractions. Cus and Floyd were driving around upstate, sniffing out possible sites, when Floyd realized they were near Esopus. They decided to stop at Wiltwyck.
Vivian Costen had retired by this time, but Patterson found plenty of other friends there, including Ernst Papanek, who was now the school’s director. Walter Johnson, who had been executive director when Patterson attended Wiltwyck and who had first encouraged Floyd to box, still worked there. When Johnson learned why Patterson and D’Amato were in the area, he offered them the use of Wiltwyck as a training facility. They also discovered that they could lodge at a nearby farm owned by relatives of Sandra, whose romance with Patterson was growing ever deeper. So it was set: Patterson would conduct his first full-fledged training camp at Wiltwyck.
It was a productive camp and Floyd stepped into the ring feeling optimistic about the eight-round bout. He opened aggressively, attacking the one-time light-heavyweight champ with a series of left hooks and right crosses. Maxim came back in the second round, but Floyd hit him with a straight right that cut Maxim above the right eye. The next two rounds were dominated by Maxim, although Floyd came back to win the fifth. It seemed to most of the crowd and to the sportswriters at ringside that Floyd won the next three rounds as well. After the final bell, it looked as if Floyd had scored a lopsided victory. But Maxim was announced the winner, eliciting boos from the crowd. The eleven sportswriters who had covered the fight all had Floyd winning and were perplexed by the judges’ decision. Floyd was stunned. D’Amato quickly announced that he planned to protest the decision with the New York State Athletic Commission. (The commission ruled to let the decision stand.) Patterson’s first professional defeat went into the record books.
Patterson tried to put on a good face for the press in the dressing room and did not criticize the judges. But he was sorely disappointed by losing on his home turf, Eastern Parkway, and proving its nickname, the House of Upsets, true yet again. The refrain you lost, you lost echoed through his thoughts. In a pattern that would replay itself in more extreme ways in years to come, he retreated into himself. He spent the better part of a week hidden away in the Brooklyn apartment he’d rented for himself, until some neighborhood friends stopp
ed by and brought him out of his funk.
Over the next year, D’Amato matched Patterson with boxers who wouldn’t come close to winding up on anyone’s all-time-great list, perhaps to build up Floyd’s confidence. Mostly Floyd threw his punches at Eastern Parkway, but sometimes D’Amato worked out deals with the IBC that allowed Floyd to fight at Madison Square Garden or St. Nick’s. Boxing-beat writers who covered these fights were not sure what to make of this up-and-coming pugilist from Brooklyn—a fighter who’d try to help a fallen opponent rise from the canvas, a fighter who’d try to signal the referee to end the bout whenever he thought his adversary had endured too much punishment, a fighter capable of slicing up an opponent’s face with lightning jabs and delivering knockout blows with a left hook as powerful as any ever seen in boxing.
Columnists after the quick, colorful one-liner weren’t likely to get it from Floyd. They were more likely to encounter silence. If they asked questions, a good deal of the time Floyd referred them to D’Amato. When Patterson did answer, however, he sometimes delved so deeply into his inner motivations that it left many writers perplexed and uneasy. Soon enough, some of the boxing writers began to joke that a better name for him might be Freud Patterson. Eventually, some writers would call him the first Beatnik boxer, and his appearance reinforced that notion. He wore his hair in a style known as the “front,” unprocessed, trimmed with a rise over the forehead and short the rest of the way around, usually with fairly long sideburns. It was a hip new look, which, combined with Patterson’s growing taste for sharp clothes and big cars, gave him some flair. Yet it was a flair that came with a curious reserve.
Floyd Patterson Page 6