Floyd Patterson

by W. K. Stratton

  Floyd and Sandra planned to start calling the Mount Vernon house home after their February 1956 wedding—at least until they could buy their own house. They planned a Niagara Falls honeymoon but never made it farther than their first stop, Schenectady. They were two innocents, not entirely sure just who they were. Floyd had just turned twenty-one; Sandra was eighteen. Floyd had been a teenage world traveler himself, but Sandra had never been away from home. The stay in Schenectady was her first night in a hotel, and she was fascinated by such luxuries as room service. They decided to forgo Niagara Falls and stay a week in the hotel, but after a few days, Floyd became restless. Sandra sensed what was calling him.

  The next fight, then maybe another, and then—would that be the title shot against Rocky Marciano?

  Marciano had won a remarkable forty-nine straight fights by early 1956. Not only had he never lost as a pro, he’d been knocked down just twice, the most recent coming in his latest fight. The wily light-heavyweight champ, Archie Moore, moving up in weight to attempt to capture the heavyweight crown, struck Marciano on the chin in the second round, sending the heavyweight champ to the floor. But Marciano made it back to his feet and went on to dominate the rest of the fight. He was well ahead on the judges’ scorecards when he knocked out Moore in the ninth round. But Marciano found the fight taxing and said afterward that he was glad it was over. He also told reporters he was contemplating retirement.

  At first, it appeared Rocky might fight on. At least one more time. That would give him the opportunity to claim his fiftieth victory in fifty fights. Talk floated around that the fight could occur during the summer of 1956. But after a long South American vacation, Marciano decided he’d had enough of the rigors of the ring. In April he announced his retirement, with Jim Norris of the IBC standing at his side, which was appropriate, for no boxer was more associated with the mobbed-up organization than Marciano.

  Rocky’s stated reason for his decision involved his wife and young daughter and his admission that he’d been a poor father because of the time he had devoted to his career. Certainly Marciano’s celebrity status was such that he stood to make a lot of money in business and public relations—more money than he could make boxing and with no risk of injury. But the real reason he quit was the one significant fighter in the heavyweight division he’d yet to defeat: Floyd Patterson. Though Patterson had fought just one heavyweight, considerable attention had been paid to his prospects of becoming heavyweight champ. He and Marciano were approximately the same size, and both could deliver hard punches. But there was one big difference between them. No one had ever seen a heavyweight with the speed, in particular the hand speed, that Patterson had shown in dispatching opponent after opponent since the Maxim loss. No one knew how—or even if—Rocky would be able to cope with hands that fast. It was a very real possibility that Marciano could suffer a humiliating defeat to the boxer eleven years his junior, especially given Rocky’s tendency to leave himself unprotected as he fought close to his opponents. Word spread that some people close to the champ feared Marciano risked getting killed in the ring with Floyd. Likewise, the Patterson camp was confident its man would win easily. “It’d be no contest,” Floyd’s trainer Dan Florio said. “Patterson is just too fast. I’ve trained a lot of old guys. I trained Joe Walcott. They get tired, and if you get tired in there against Patterson, then God help you. I’d hate to be the guy.”3

  Rocky opted not to be that guy, so sports’ most coveted throne was made vacant. And Cus D’Amato had played his chess game perfectly. The prize he sought was available for the taking, and he’d maneuvered Patterson into a position where he had to be considered in whatever plans the IBC had for determining a new champion. The outcry would be too great if Patterson were slighted. All Floyd had to do now was get bigger.

  At the time, the best training minds in boxing believed that 185 pounds was the ideal weight for a heavyweight.4 Rocky Marciano, for instance, fought at between 184 and 188¼ pounds for his title bouts; Jack Dempsey, at between 185 and 192½ pounds; Ezzard Charles, at between 180¾ and 186 pounds. Joe Louis won the championship from Jim Braddock in 1937 at 197¼ pounds and subsequently fought most of his title defenses weighing just above 200 pounds, but he was something of an exception.5 Most trainers dismissed boxers weighing that much as muscle-bound, so bogged down by their body mass that they were unable to make speedy athletic moves. But Patterson presented a different problem. He weighed in the 170s, which meant he did not have enough mass to put enough power into his punches to knock out bigger men. Nor was he likely to be able to withstand repeated blows from a bigger man without crumpling. So Floyd needed to bulk up. And he did just that in time for his first fight of 1956. Topping the scales at 183, he defeated a boxer ten pounds larger with a second-round knockout. The extra weight did not slow Floyd down one iota. He looked strong enough to withstand a hurricane.

  In May 1956 the IBC announced its plans to fill the vacant heavyweight throne. Floyd would fight the number one heavyweight contender, Tommy Jackson6—better known as Hurricane Jackson—in June at Madison Square Garden, with the winner to take on Archie Moore for the world heavyweight title.7 Both Floyd and the Hurricane were guaranteed $40,000. The Friday-night fight would be broadcast nationwide on TV.

  In 1956 Archie Moore, Hurricane Jackson, and Floyd Patterson were black men on the verge of history. It was still rare for such an important competition in the United States not to include whites, and any event that guaranteed a new champion would be black was significant in terms of race relations in America. African American athletes were breaking down color lines in baseball, football, and basketball in the 1950s, and their presence in the upper rungs of prizefighting was growing as well. Likewise landmark events in the civil rights movement were rattling America beyond the realm of sports. Three weeks before Patterson fought Joey Maxim, the US Supreme Court handed down its unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which declared segregated public schools unconstitutional. In August 1955, a month after Floyd fought Archie McBride, a fourteen-year-old black youth named Emmett Till was tortured and killed by white men in rural Mississippi for either whistling at or speaking to—accounts vary—a white woman. Till’s murder became a civil rights cause célèbre. In December 1955, a month before D’Amato announced his intention that Floyd contend for the heavyweight title, a black woman named Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat in the white section of a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus, thus setting off the boycott of city transportation there—a boycott led by a then largely unknown black Baptist preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. Sports and political activism did not mix in the ’50s, but black athletes like Floyd were well aware of these developments.

  Hurricane Jackson was not unknown to Patterson. In fact, Floyd once considered Jackson a friend, and the two boxers had sparred together on a number of occasions at Stillman’s. Not quite four years Patterson’s senior, the Hurricane had much in common with Patterson. Born in Sparta, Georgia, he grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens. Far Rockaway, like Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, had once been a Jewish enclave and in midcentury had become home to more and more African Americans. Its streets could prove hard, especially for a strange boy like Jackson, who never fit in. Jackson was a monster of a kid, towering over other students at school, and slow-witted, unable to learn to read and write. The boys in his class taunted him mercilessly, sometimes bombarding him with sticks and rocks as they chased him down Far Rockaway streets after class. He became a boxer in order to survive. “He was disturbed, lonely, unhappy,” a sympathetic Floyd once said.8 In the New York boxing world, the Hurricane became known as a fighter with unsteady, if undeniable, talent—and a definite head case.

  After the two boxers became acquainted with each other at Stillman’s, Jackson developed a kind of fixation on Patterson—much like Lennie’s fixation on George in Of Mice and Men—which lasted until one of their sparring sessions turned into a brawl, going beyond just a practice session to an out-and-out fight. Jackson lef
t the ring at Stillman’s injured, blaming Floyd. After that, their relationship turned sour.

  Jackson roared through the heavyweight ranks, winning eleven fights against a single loss, even beating former champion Ezzard Charles twice. His victories piled up until he became the top heavyweight contender. And yet, most observers on the boxing scene were not convinced he was truly of championship caliber. He could unleash stinging flurries of punches, never seemed to run out of gas, and could take hard shots to the chin. But he was also undisciplined, sometimes leading with his right hand, swinging off balance, and clumsily attempting double uppercuts. Worse was his wandering mind. He once lost a bout to a lesser boxer because he “clean forgot” about it, spent the evening before the match partying, and arrived at the arena on fight night hung over. He became something of a laughingstock, even among his own supporters.

  Jackson was bigger than Floyd, had more experience in the heavyweight ranks, and had defeated a former champion, but bettors believed his liabilities outweighed his advantages. They made Patterson a two-to-one favorite. They might not have done so, however, if they knew about Floyd’s secret. During a prefight sparring session, Patterson broke his hand. But he kept the pain to himself. A prudent person might have postponed the fight so a doctor could treat the injury. But Floyd wasn’t about to delay the most important fight of his career. He dealt with his pain in silence.

  On June 8, 1956, Patterson and Jackson fought at Madison Square Garden. Floyd pummeled Jackson hard early on, as if he wanted to end the bout quickly—not surprising, given his broken hand. Jackson endured a great deal of punishment in those early rounds, but his iron chin held up and he remained on his feet. As the fight progressed, Patterson seemed to be on the verge of scoring a knockout on several occasions, but Jackson was able to stage surprising rallies, which brought the crowd to its feet in support of the underdog. Patterson grew more and more perplexed by Jackson’s unorthodox fighting style as the Hurricane crouched at odd moments, threw strange combinations of punches, and sometimes even slapped Floyd. Jackson used his size advantage to bully Patterson around the ring, tying him up, and leaning on him. By the seventh round, the well-conditioned Patterson was panting while his right hand throbbed painfully. Jackson battered Floyd at will through the next three rounds. Patterson might well have thought he was far enough ahead on the judges’ scorecards to be able to surrender those rounds. In fact, he had fallen behind in the estimation of at least one judge. Patterson needed a strong tenth round to ensure a win, and he produced one. But the outcome was not at all clear when the final bell rang. After collecting the judges’ tallies, the referee announced a split decision: One judge declared Jackson the winner, but two favored Patterson; Floyd would thus move on to fight Archie Moore. Some columnists, not knowing about the broken hand, questioned if Patterson could hit hard enough to defeat the Old Mongoose, Moore, a fighter who was already a legend for his knockout skills, when the two boxers met in Chicago that November.

  6

  Youngest King of the Mountain

  IN SEPTEMBER 1956, at Chicago’s Bismarck Hotel, in a room crowded with boxing dignitaries along with a throng of newspaper reporters and broadcast journalists, Floyd Patterson and Archie Moore signed a contract to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world. The fight was set for November 30 of that year at the Chicago Stadium. The Old Mongoose was a press favorite because he always made for good copy.1 He understood how to sell an upcoming match, just as he understood how to conduct psychological warfare against an upcoming opponent. A later master of self-promotion and psyching out the competition, Muhammad Ali, would learn a great deal from Moore. After the contracts were signed, one of the broadcast journalists asked Moore to predict the outcome. Moore said he’d probably knock Patterson out. Asked to respond, Floyd said, “If Moore can knock me out, more power to him.”2

  This was Moore’s cue. He rose to his feet and began a blistering verbal attack on Patterson as the cameras rolled and the sportswriters scribbled notes. Patterson was completely taken aback. He believed in treating the opposition with dignity. There was nothing dignified about the words spewing from Moore’s mouth. Finally, Patterson could stand it no longer. He fled the room and hurried through the lobby and out onto the street, where he sucked in some deep breaths of fresh air. He found a pay phone, called Sandra, and poured his heart out. She was always effective in those days at calming him down. But now he had even more reason to check in with her. Sandra was pregnant and their baby was due to arrive about the same time as the heavyweight title fight. Sandra directed the conversation to the soon-to-arrive baby and how she herself was feeling. She soothed his anger over Moore’s tirade. Patterson returned to the hotel and completed the interview, although he was irked by later questions about how he planned to stand up against a fighter with Moore’s decades of experience. Floyd believed that he’d learned as much in a short time as Moore had learned over many years, but no boxing prognosticators seemed to consider that possibility.

  As his nickname suggested, the Old Mongoose had been at it a long time. He’d begun fighting professionally before Patterson was born; Moore’s own birth year was anyone’s guess. It seemed likely to be either 1913 or 1916, but who could say for sure? Moore himself may not have known. Without question, though, he was a living, breathing link to an earlier era.

  Born in Benoit, Mississippi, Moore grew up in St. Louis. As a poor teenager, he became involved in petty crime with a group of street-toughened kids. A botched attempt at stealing the change box from a streetcar landed Moore in a juvenile reformatory. There he established a reputation as a fearsome slugger after he coldcocked an older, much larger inmate who’d made sexual advances toward him. He participated in the reformatory’s boxing program, fighting and winning sixteen times, fifteen by knockout. Paroled, he pursued boxing whenever he could, idolizing the fabulous Cuban-born junior lightweight champion known as Kid Chocolate. Eventually Moore wound up at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, where he competed on an amateur boxing team.

  Moore began training for the amateur Golden Gloves competition while at the same time secretly fighting for cash, sometimes using the ring name “Fourth of July Kid.” His early pro fights of record pitted him against largely forgotten men like Piano Man Jones, Kid Pocahontas, Dynamite Payne, and Ham Pounder. His fights often occurred in out-of-the-way towns like Hot Springs, Arkansas; Quincy, Illinois; Keokuk, Iowa; and Ponca City, Oklahoma. Over the years that followed, Moore fought often, usually at least a dozen times a year, taking fights wherever he could and racking up an extraordinary number of knockouts. Eventually he established San Diego as his home base. But as a West Coast fighter independent of the New York boxing establishment, he was not allowed to compete in the richest boxing venues until he was well into his thirties. He made do with tours of Australia and South America, sometimes fighting with no more than three days’ rest, until he finally emerged into boxing’s highest ranks.

  The Old Mongoose fought in a style that made the peek-a-boo look absolutely orthodox. Moore would ball himself up behind the shield of his arms like a crab and absorb blow after blow in this protective stance before shooting out a scoring right. He loved to eat, and his walking-around weight typically was more than 200 pounds. When fighting as a light-heavyweight, he went on diets that became the stuff of legend; the most famous was his practice of chewing a piece of steak for what seemed to be an endless amount of time, swallowing the juices as he masticated, and then spitting out the pulp. Moore claimed to learn this weight-loss secret from an Aborigine during a trip to Australia. “I never saw a fat Aborigine,” he said.3

  Moore was never shy. After he’d won his light-heavyweight title, he designed customized stationery, which included his image, select newspaper clippings, and the wording “Office of the Light-Heavyweight Champion.” There was barely enough room left at the bottom of the paper for Moore to write a brief message. Moore also cut quite a figure whenever he visited New York, sometimes stro
lling the crowded streets wearing a shirt, tie, and suit jacket with Bermuda shorts while carrying an elegant walking stick.

  Although not formally educated, Moore had somehow managed to pick up a remarkable command of English, which he enjoyed demonstrating at every public opportunity. Sometimes his choice of words befuddled those who heard him. He once said that the best way to dispatch an opponent was with a blow to the “goozle pipe,” which caused observers to ask each other just what part of the anatomy he was referring to. Moore came close to knocking out Rocky Marciano in the second round of their 1955 heavyweight title fight but wound up falling far behind the champ as the fight progressed. At one point the ring physician examined the battered Moore between rounds to determine if the Old Mongoose’s injuries were serious enough to end the fight. “Don’t stop it, Doc,” Moore said. “Let me try once more with a desperado.” The doctor allowed the fight to continue. After losing, Moore addressed the press in his dressing room: “Welcome, gentlemen. I found this evening most enjoyable. I trust you did likewise. Now if you have any questions, I shall be happy to answer them.”4 None of the reporters present had ever heard anything like it. Archie Moore was no ignorant palooka, to say the least.

  The gregarious, verbose, weathered Moore presented a stark contrast to the retiring, quiet, young Patterson. Oddsmakers made Moore a six-to-five favorite, mostly because Floyd had failed to knock out Hurricane Jackson, but also because they believed Moore’s experience would trump Patterson’s youth. Moore, advertised to be thirty-nine at the time though probably as much as four years older, would become the oldest heavyweight champ of the modern era if he won. At twenty-one, Patterson stood to become the youngest.