Patterson’s dignity floored doubters
PHILADELPHIA – It’s hard to believe now, but Floyd Patterson was on his way to becoming Mike Tyson before Tyson was even born.
The parallels between the young Patterson and the young Tyson are almost eerie. Patterson, the two-time former heavyweight champion who was 71 when he died Thursday after a lengthy bout with Alzheimer’s disease and prostate cancer, was trained by Cus D’Amato, as was Tyson. His trademark style, later taught by D’Amato to Tyson, was the peek-a-boo, in which he held his gloves in front of his face and, bobbing and weaving forward, was always in position to launch leaping left hooks.
Perhaps more significant, Patterson was, like Tyson, a troubled youth. He was only 10 when he was sent to a juvenile detention facility, where he learned to box – the same path Tyson followed into boxing.
But, unlike fellow Brooklynite Tyson, the perpetually lit fuse who replaced him as the youngest man to win the heavyweight championship, Patterson had a gentle nature that survived his hardscrabble days on the street. While that penchant for kindness might not always have served Patterson well in the ring, it established him as one of the most beloved gentlemen in a blood sport that always has tended to more reward the violent and the profane.
“While not one of the great heavyweight champions, I put him at the very top of the nicest men I’ve ever met,” boxing historian and author Bert Randolph Sugar said of Patterson.
Once, when informed that he held the dubious record of having been knocked down 17 times in heavyweight title bouts, Patterson said, “That’s true, but I also hold the record for getting up the most times.”
Patterson – who weighed as much as 200 pounds only once in his 64 professional bouts – was a lithe, graceful athlete whose dignity, if not his talent, eventually won over almost everyone who once doubted him.
He was a near unknown on New York’s amateur boxing scene when he burst into prominence by winning that city’s Golden Gloves championships in 1951 and ‘52. Patterson was just 17 when he made the U.S. Olympic team that traveled to Helsinki, Finland, in 1952. Fighting in the 165-pound weight class, he won four consecutive bouts, the last of which, a first-round knockout of Romania’s Vasile Tita, earned him the gold medal.
Upon his return to America, Patterson turned pro under D’Amato, who had begun working with him three years earlier. Patterson rocketed up the ratings, compiling a 30-1 record, with 20 knockouts, to earn a spot opposite Archie Moore for the heavyweight championship vacated by Rocky Marciano.
The fans’ favorite was Moore, 42, then the oldest man to fight for boxing’s most prestigious title, but Patterson, 21, walked away with the prize when he stopped Moore in five rounds on Nov. 30, 1956.
Patterson’s June 26, 1959, title bout in New York against Sweden’s Ingemar Johansson was the most widely anticipated heavyweight bout in years. Johansson, whose nickname for his crushing overhand right was the “Hammer of Thor,” knocked Patterson down seven times in the third round before referee Ruby Goldstein finally stopped it.
The rematch with Johansson, on June 20, 1960, was billed as a grudge match but, when the Swede was left stretched out and unconscious on the canvas, his right leg shaking from the effects of a perfectly timed left hook in the fifth round, a compassionate and concerned Patterson knelt over his vanquished foe. That gesture made Patterson, once a villain in Sweden, hugely popular there. After he won the rubber match with Johansson in six rounds on March 13, 1961, he fought four times in Stockholm.
But, following another easy defense against Tom McNeeley, Patterson couldn’t put off a bout with fearsome No. 1 contender Sonny Liston. Much bigger and more powerful, Liston knocked out Patterson in the first round, as he did in the rematch.
Patterson – the first man to lose and regain the heavyweight title – got his last shot at a belt in 1968, when he lost a decision to Jimmy Ellis for the vacant WBA crown. His most memorable post-Liston bout, however, came against Muhammad Ali, whom Patterson had continued to refer to by his birth name, Cassius Clay.
Before their Nov. 22, 1965, meeting, Ali called the former champ an “Uncle Tom” and, instead of going for the quick stoppage, mocked, humiliated and punished him before knocking him out in the 12th round.
Patterson (55-8-1, 40 KOs) later served as chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission, but, by 1998, the effects of his Alzheimer’s no longer could be overlooked.
To the end, Patterson remained upbeat. Sugar recalled a lunch at Patterson’s New Paltz, N.Y., home that was attended by former world champs Jose Torres and Gene Fullmer.
“We were in Floyd’s living room,” Sugar recalled. “He had a grandfather clock that struck once. Bong. And then there was silence.
“After about a minute, Floyd looked up and said, ‘If anyone else will admit they heard that, I’ll admit it, too.’ “