But Mailer was not the most compelling presence in Chicago. That nod belonged instead to novelist James Baldwin, who had been assigned to cover the Patterson-Liston fight by Seymour Krim, the brilliant essayist who was then editing Nugget magazine, a rival of Playboy. Assigning the championship fight to Baldwin was one of Krim’s finest decisions, though at first glance, Baldwin seemed to be the most unlikely of boxing writers. While other Harlem adolescent boys had been playing stickball or basketball, Baldwin had been a teenage Pentecostal preacher, concerning himself with matters of the soul, not of the body. Baldwin admitted that he knew “nothing whatever about the Sweet Science or the Cruel Profession or the Poor Boy’s Game.”23 Yet he seemed to be more in tune with the deeper implications of the Patterson-Liston fight than anyone else in Chicago.
Baldwin knew a good deal about pride, especially “the poor boy’s pride,” and he saw that as being the elemental dispute at hand in Chicago. He bristled when he heard criticism from the mostly white sportswriters about how the black champion Patterson had mishandled his affairs since taking control of his career away from D’Amato. Baldwin writes:
“In the old days,” someone complained, “the manager told the fighter what to do, and he did it. You didn’t have to futz around with the guy’s temperament, for Christ’s sake.” Never before had any of the sportswriters been compelled to deal directly with the fighter instead of with his manager, and all of them seemed baffled by this necessity and many were resentful. I don’t know how they got along with D’Amato when he was running the show—D’Amato can certainly not be described as either simple or direct—but at least the figure of D’Amato was familiar and operated to protect them from the oddly compelling and touching figure of Floyd Patterson, who is quite probably the least likely fighter in the history of the sport. And I think that part of the resentment he arouses is due to the fact that he brings to what is thought of—quite erroneously—as a simple activity a terrible note of complexity. This is his personal style, a style which strongly suggests that most un-American of attributes, privacy, the will to privacy; and my own guess is that he is still relentlessly, painfully shy—he lives gallantly with his scars, but not all of them have healed—and while he has found a way to master this, he has found no way to hide it; as, for example, another miraculously tough and tender man, Miles Davis, has managed to do. Miles’s disguise would certainly never fool anybody with sense, but it keeps a lot of people away, and that’s the point. But Patterson, tough and proud and beautiful, is also terribly vulnerable, and looks it.24
Baldwin witnessed the tough and vulnerable aspects of Patterson when he accompanied Gay Talese to a press conference, where Patterson was asked questions likely never asked of earlier champs. Do you feel you’ve ever been accepted as champion? “No,” Patterson said. “Well, I have to be accepted as the champion—but maybe not a good one.” Why do you say the opportunity to become a great champion will never arise? “Because,” said Patterson, “you gentlemen will never let it arise.” Why are you greeted with much greater enthusiasm in Europe than in the United States? “I don’t want to say anything derogatory about the United States. I am satisfied.”
Later, Patterson spoke with Talese and Baldwin as the three men strolled around Floyd’s training camp. “I can’t remember all the things we did talk about,” Baldwin said later. “I mainly remember Floyd’s voice, going cheerfully on and on, and the way his face kept changing, and the way he laughed; I remember the glimpse I got of him then, a man more complex than he was yet equipped to know, a hero for many children who were still trapped where he had been, who might not have survived without the ring, and who yet, oddly, did not really seem to belong there.”25
Although Talese had helped gain entrée for Baldwin into Patterson’s camp, he could not get Baldwin into Liston’s camp. Baldwin was on his own for that. So Baldwin turned to journalist Sandy Grady, who put in a good word with Liston’s manager of the moment. Baldwin was granted time with Sonny and showed up knowing that Liston had no use for the press: “I was sure he saw in them merely some more ignorant, uncaring white people, who, no matter how fine we cut it, had helped to cause him so much grief . . . The press has really maligned Liston very cruelly, I think. He is far from stupid; is not, in fact, stupid at all. And, while there is a great deal of violence in him, I sensed no cruelty at all.”26 Liston reminded Baldwin of other African American men the writer had encountered, big men who encouraged a reputation of toughness to conceal an inner softheartedness.
Baldwin found himself liking Liston from the moment he sat down with him, even though Liston seemed leery of the novelist. Baldwin sensed that Sonny was prepared for verbal blows to start coming. But Baldwin felt only empathy for Liston and saw in the silence of his face a man who had suffered. Baldwin told Liston that he had not come to ask questions, because he believed all the questions had already been asked. The only thing Baldwin had to say was that he wished Sonny well.
This prompted Liston to open up to Baldwin, and, speaking black man to black man, Liston confessed that he was hurt by the fact that relatively few African Americans seemed to be backing him in the championship bout. “Colored people,” Liston said, “say they don’t want their children to look up to me.” Liston and Baldwin discussed the civil rights movement and the role prominent people like heavyweight champs should play in it. Then they talked more about the “respectable” black people who did not want Liston to be champion. Liston believed that blacks needed to come together and stop “fighting among our own.”27
“I felt terribly ambivalent,” Baldwin said, “as many other Negroes do these days, since we are all trying to decide, in one way or another, which attitude, in our terrible American dilemma, is the most effective: the disciplined sweetness of Floyd, or the outspoken intransigence of Liston.”28 In the end, Baldwin laid down money on Patterson to win the fight. Oddsmakers had it three-to-one in favor of the challenger, but Baldwin put his money on Floyd, knowing there was more at stake than just who would be the heavyweight champion of the world. It was the right thing to do, from a moral and ethical standpoint.
Liston may have had little use for white reporters—after all, some columnists had referred to him as a gorilla—but one white writer did get to sit down with him. Edwin “Bud” Shrake, a Dallas Morning News sports columnist, didn’t press Liston about his inner feelings. Instead, Shrake asked Liston about Patterson’s speed. Shrake shared with Liston that there was some belief that Patterson would be able to cut up Liston with his fast punches and that Liston would be too slow to lay a solid blow on Floyd. Liston, trademark glare firmly in place, suddenly shot one of his huge hands into the air, then brought it back, his fingers clenched into a fist. Liston slowly opened his fist in front of Shrake’s face to reveal that he’d just captured a fly in flight. “Do you think that will be fast enough to take care of that skinny-assed son of a bitch?” Liston growled.29
Shrake left the interview a Liston believer.
Many boxing insiders held out for Patterson, never mind the odds. Daniel M. Daniel, writing for The Ring magazine, said, “They will fight, and I will be surprised if Patterson does not beat him.” The Cinderella Man, James J. Braddock, also liked Patterson in spite of what the bookmakers were prognosticating: “I have news for you—being an underdog makes you a better fighter . . . Patterson is most dangerous when least is looked for from him.” Braddock predicted a decision in favor of Floyd, with Patterson controlling the final rounds of the bout. The crusty old fight manager Jack Kearns saw Patterson winning, as did former heavyweight champ Ezzard Charles and one-time Floyd foe Archie Moore. Ingemar Johansson seemed torn: “I am confused. In Sweden I pick Liston and in a magazine, Patterson. Now I don’t know.”30
Partying at the Chicago Playboy Club, Mailer and New York Post columnist and Patterson confidant Pete Hamill agreed that Floyd would win the fight. Both men thought Patterson would claim victory during the sixth round. Mailer said, “I think Liston is going to have Patterson down t
wo, three, four times. And Patterson will have Liston down in the first, second, or third and end it with one punch in the sixth.”31 But Mailer also understood that Patterson would carry into the ring a burden quite unlike anything any other fighter had endured:
Patterson was a churchgoer, a Catholic convert . . . Patterson was up tight with the NAACP, he was the kind of man who would get his picture taken with Jackie Robinson and Ralph Bunche (in fact he looked a little like Ralph Bunche), he would be photographed with Eleanor Roosevelt, and was; with Jack Kennedy, and was; with Adlai Stevenson if he went to the UN; he would campaign with Shelley Winters if she ever ran for Mayor of New York; he was a liberal’s liberal. The worst to be said about Patterson is that he spoke with the same cow’s cud as other liberals. Think what happens to a man with Patterson’s reflexes when his brain starts to depend on the sounds of “introspective,” “obligation,” “responsibility,” “inspiration,” “commendation,” “frustrated,” “seclusion”—one could name a dozen others from his book. They are a part of his pride.32
Pride—as both Baldwin and Mailer intimated—more than anything else was on the line for Floyd as he went to Comiskey Park. The members of his team argued with officials about Liston’s custom-made gloves. They weighed the prescribed eight ounces, but there was little padding over the knuckles, making them a dangerous knockout tool. But Patterson was more concerned about letting down all those people who had done so much for him over the years. Living up to their expectations of him in the ring was his pride. As he sat in his dressing room, he drifted into what he later described as a kind of blindness. It was apparent to people in the room with him that something was wrong. Joseph Triner, chairman of the Illinois State Athletic Commission, said that Patterson turned to ice in those minutes before he left for the ring.33
It was in that frozen blindness that Patterson climbed between the ropes in Comiskey Park. He heard his longtime friend Mickey Alan sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He heard Liston loudly booed when he was introduced as the challenger. He heard his own name cheered when he was introduced as the champion. As always, Patterson stared downward as the referee read the fight instructions. Meanwhile Liston glared at Patterson as if Floyd were responsible for every whipping delivered in the Delta cotton fields, every swollen knot rendered on the skull by some cracker St. Louis cop.
During those opening seconds, Floyd was fluid, bouncing on the balls of his feet as usual, attempting to set up his left hook. But as the round progressed, Floyd planted his feet and tried to slug it out with Sonny up close. It was a huge mistake. Liston saw his opportunity and went on the attack. At around the two-minute mark, Sonny battered Patterson to the ropes with lefts to the body and shoulders. Floyd reacted in a bizarre way. Rather than use his speed to escape further punishment, Patterson stood up straight and allowed his left hand to slide down the top rope, leaving his head totally exposed, almost as if he were offering himself up as a sacrifice. No one who watched the fight knew just why he did this. Maybe Floyd himself didn’t know. It gave Liston a chance to hit Floyd with a left and a short right, neither particularly sharp but both effective enough. Patterson was collapsing on himself when Liston slammed Floyd’s undefended head once more, this time with a massive left hook. Floyd attempted to wobble back to his feet in vain. The fight was over, in near record time for a heavyweight championship bout.34
Baldwin, stunned, joined A. J. Liebling at a bar to mourn the “very possible death of boxing, and to have a drink, with love, for Floyd.”35
12
Confronting a Certain Weakness
THE NEXT MORNING, the traditional postfight press conference turned into a farce as a soused Norman Mailer tried to upstage the new champ. Mailer, who’d been drinking steadily at the Playboy Club since the end of the fight, had determined that there should be a rematch: in grandiloquent Mailer style, he indicated that his cosmic understanding of what really transpired during the fight would allow him to turn such a contest into a multimillion-dollar success. He continued to believe Floyd was the better boxer.1 In the throes of spirits and lack of sleep, Mailer concocted a fantastic theory about why Patterson had lost: the Mafia had cast some sort of Sicilian evil eye on Patterson that caused him to surrender before the fight even began. Cus D’Amato, Mailer reasoned, was well schooled in matters such as warding off evil eyes. Patterson’s mistake was that he’d distanced himself from D’Amato, thus making himself vulnerable to supernatural threats.2 After tolerating this lunacy for a few minutes, the police literally carried Mailer out of the room.
Patterson saw none of it. By that time, he was closing in on New York.
A week or so before the fight, promoter Al Bolan asked Harold Conrad if he knew the name of a good makeup man in Chicago—Patterson had requested one. Conrad contacted the Chicago CBS affiliate, where he had a friend who agreed to take care of whatever Patterson needed. Conrad made an appointment for Patterson to see the man. Later, the friend called Conrad and said, “What the hell’s playing with Patterson? He asked my man to fix him up a beard.” Conrad quickly figured out it was for a disguise. He swore the man at the TV station to secrecy about the affair. But he knew that Patterson was planning an escape from Chicago.3
In fact, Patterson had taken the fake beard and mustache he’d had made prior to the second Johansson fight with him to Chicago. The mustache was still in good shape, but the beard had become somewhat unraveled, so he paid the makeup artist $65 and gave him a $50 ticket for the fight to make him a new beard. After he lost the fight, Floyd dispatched a trainer to the hotel to fetch his disguise. Just as he had for the second Johansson fight, Patterson had two cars waiting. One was the official one, his Lincoln, to be used to drive him back to the hotel if he won. The other was hidden away and pointed toward New York, just in case Patterson wanted to make a clandestine escape. Once he had the beard in hand, he fled with his friend Mickey Alan. His regular driver, Ernest Fowler, waited with the Lincoln for Patterson to show up. Because of that, reporters assumed Floyd was holed up somewhere in the stadium.
Patterson and Alan’s hurried drive was almost identical to the one he had made across the dark Midwest following his triumph over Archie Moore in Chicago almost six years earlier. Then he’d been hailed as the newly crowned champion on his way home to see his newborn daughter. But now, he traveled in disgrace. The night was his friendly protector as Floyd sat behind the wheel, navigating the lonely highways. Other than Alan, no one knew what Patterson was up to that night, not even his friends and family. In fact, Floyd had told Sandra that he would pick her up at Chicago’s Bismarck Hotel, and they would drive back to New York together. She learned about the change in plans only after he called her from a phone booth on the road to tell her to catch a plane home.
Just before dawn, somewhere in Ohio, Patterson pulled the car off the road for a break. Floyd stepped out to stretch his legs. Almost immediately, a state trooper pulled in behind them. Patterson quickly attempted to attach his beard disguise. But by the time the cop reached him, he had secured only the mustache in place; the beard hung loosely from his chin. Naturally, the trooper was suspicious and demanded to see Patterson’s license. Patterson stiffened. His driver’s license was back in Chicago, still in the hotel with the rest of his personal effects. He did have the registration for the car, which he had borrowed from a relative, and he showed that to the trooper.
“If you don’t have a license,” the trooper said, “I have got to take you in.”
Not knowing what else to do, Patterson dislodged the mustache and beard to reveal himself for who he really was. At first, the trooper didn’t recognize him and wondered aloud if he was an actor. Patterson removed the cap he was wearing, and the cop shined his flashlight into Floyd’s face. Now it registered with him.
“Aren’t you—” he began.
“Yes,” said Patterson. “I lost a fight last night. Do I have to lose again? Wouldn’t it be all right if I mail you my license when I get home? I just forgot it.”
&
nbsp; The trooper squeezed Patterson’s shoulder in a friendly way and said, “You won’t have to do that. You won’t have to lose again. You’ll get him the next time.”4 Patterson and Alan were free to go on their way.
With Alan now driving, Patterson told him to head directly to the place where he felt most comfortable—not his home in Yonkers, but the training camp in Highland Mills. After twenty-two hours on the road, he and Alan collapsed into sleep. The next morning, Floyd asked Alan to leave. Floyd wanted only solitude. He spent the day alone, mindlessly watching TV. He avoided the radio because he didn’t want to hear any news reports about Liston. Late in the day, he went for a walk and wound up entering the gym on the property. Suddenly he felt an overpowering desire to start training. But all his gear remained back in Chicago. So Floyd resumed his walk, chastising himself for throwing away all the training he’d done to prep for Liston in two minutes and six seconds.
A few days after the fight, Patterson finally made the drive to Yonkers. He arrived wearing the mustache, having discarded the beard because it irritated his chin. Sandra scarcely recognized him. Floyd stayed for a short while to play with the kids, but then left to meet with Julius November, who had just flown in from Chicago. The two men discussed business and concluded that they should exercise Floyd’s option for a rematch. It was all-important to Floyd. “I’ve got to prove to myself that I’m a better fighter than I was that night,” he said.5
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