King of the World Read online

  Compared to most fight trainers and managers, who ritually described what the fighter ate for breakfast, how many miles he ran, and other such pabulum, D’Amato, with his sweat-scented philosophies and his strange habits, made for great copy, and writers came to his Gramercy Gym counting on a good story. D’Amato read, of all things, military history and Nietzsche, and out of that came a philosophy of pain and endurance. Norman Mailer began coming to the gym not long after his success with The Naked and the Dead. Young newspaper reporters—Gay Talese, Pete Hamill, Jack Newfield—came even when they had no story in mind. D’Amato, for them, was the moralist in Babylon, the one fight manager of importance who talked up against the gangsters who ran nearly every fighter and arena in the country. They wrote about him, sometimes idealized him, as a figure of authenticity, the decent cornerman in the film noir world of fifties boxing. D’Amato, Mailer once wrote, “had the enthusiastic manner of a saint who is all works and no contemplation.… He reminded me of a certain sort of very tough Italian kid one used to find in Brooklyn. They were sweet kids, and rarely mean, and they were fearless, at least by the measure of their actions they were fearless. They would fight anybody.”

  Patterson was fourteen when he walked up the two flights of wooden stairs to the Gramercy Gym. D’Amato always liked to see how kids came up the stairs for the first time. He watched their expressions, and then he’d wait and see how they came in the next day—if they came at all. Cus did not wait long to unleash his philosophy. He wanted Floyd, and the others, to begin digging into their own heads almost as soon as they hit their first heavy bag. For other managers, self-doubt was unthinkable; for D’Amato, a fighter had to understand himself or he would lose. A fighter isn’t merely knocked out, he would say, he wants to be knocked out, his will fails him. “Fear is natural, it is normal,” he said. “Fear is your friend. When a deer walks through the forest, it has fear. This is nature’s way of keeping the deer alert because there may be a tiger in the trees. Without fear, we would not survive.”

  Patterson proved to be a quick fighter, with a good left hook. He could sneak inside his opponent’s jab and, with a combination, take him out. As a middleweight, he won a gold medal at the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki. Red Smith, writing for the New York Herald Tribune, was impressed. Patterson, he wrote, “has faster paws than a subway pickpocket and they cause more suffering.” That same year, Floyd went pro, and fighting in New York he got a lot of attention beating, in succession, Eddie Godbold, Sammy Walker, Lester Johnson, and Lalu Sabotin. For all his fears, Patterson had learned enough discipline and ring sense to take out all the top club fighters of his day, all the hard young men who fought at Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn and St. Nick’s on the West Side. Floyd’s older brother Frank told Lester Bromberg, the fight writer at the New York World Telegram & Sun, “I’d like to say that I always knew it was in Floyd, but I have to be honest about it. I can’t get used to my kid brother being a name fighter. I remember him as the boy who would cry if you hit him too hard when we boxed in the gym and as the green kid who would blow up if I pressed him.”

  Floyd showed an unusual concern for his opponents. When he was training for a bout to be shown on television’s Wednesday Night Fights against a Chicagoan named Chester Mieszala, D’Amato suggested that in the week before the bout Patterson work out at the same Chicago gym where Mieszala trained. Patterson refused. He said he didn’t want to take “unfair advantage.” In the fight itself, Patterson knocked out Mieszala’s mouthpiece, and Mieszala, in a daze, went looking for it. Instead of stepping in and belting Mieszala, Floyd bent over and helped him. Eventually, Patterson went back to work, finishing Mieszala with a TKO in the fifth round. Even in a title fight, Floyd was capable of kindness. Against Tommy “Hurricane” Jackson, he kept trying to get referee Ruby Goldstein to step in and save the challenger from unnecessary punishment. Goldstein, touched to the core, complied.

  Patterson’s emotional makeup contained not one ounce of schadenfreude. Even on the sweetest night of Patterson’s career, the night at the Polo Grounds in March 1961 when he came back to avenge his humiliating seven-knockdown loss to Johansson, he derived no great enjoyment from his opponent’s pain. Going into the fight, Patterson felt rage for the first time. He hated the way Johansson had bragged after taking his title, and he wanted back what had been taken away. In the fifth round, Floyd clubbed Johansson with two terrifying hooks, dropping him to one knee for a nine-count. When Johansson got up, Patterson was right there with one of his great leaping punches, and the champion went down like a dropped board. Johansson lay on the canvas, blood trickling out of his mouth and his left foot vibrating, like a man in a grand mal seizure. For a moment, Patterson betrayed a smile as he faced the crowd, but when he turned to see Johansson, still out cold, his foot twitching, he was repulsed, terrified that he had killed a man. Patterson ripped himself out of the jubilant grasp of one of his cornermen, knelt on the canvas, and cradled Johansson in the crook of his arm. Patterson kissed Johansson on the cheek and promised him another chance, a third fight.

  Later, Patterson admitted he had come to the arena with his beard and mustache, just in case. “He lacks the killer instinct,” D’Amato said. “He’s too tame, too nice to his opponents. I’ve been trying all the psychology I can think of to anger his blood up, but he just doesn’t have the zest for viciousness. I have a big job on my hands.”

  ON DECEMBER 4, 1961, PRESIDENT JOHN KENNEDY WATCHED A televised boxing doubleheader held in different cities: Patterson’s fourth-round knockout of Tom McNeely in Toronto and Liston’s first-round destruction in Philadelphia of the fighter he called Albert “Quick Fall” Westphal. Like any other sports fan in the country (and even the non—boxing fan took notice of heavyweight title fights), Kennedy had been saying that the real fight would be between Patterson and Liston. After the second Johansson fight, Kennedy had even invited the champion to the White House, partly to congratulate him on being the first man ever to regain the heavyweight title, but also to encourage him. It was a seemingly routine visit—sports stars had been visiting presidents for decades; both won some easy and harmless publicity—but the session made Patterson uneasy. The president asked the champion whom he would be fighting next. Cassius Clay, the brash Olympic champion, was tearing his way to the top of the division, but no one was demanding that fight yet. Clay was not yet twenty. Patterson knew what the president meant.

  “Liston,” he said. “I’m gonna fight Liston.”

  Instead of merely wishing Patterson well, Kennedy said, “Well, you’ve got to beat this guy.”

  Liston, for his part, was convinced that the White House meeting was the reason Patterson had finally agreed to a match. “Frankly, I don’t think Patterson would have fought me if he hadn’t promised the president,” he said. “I believe Floyd found himself in a position where he couldn’t go back on his word. After all, you don’t tell the President of the United States that you are going to do something and then fail to do it.”

  Floyd admitted to his own confusion in the Oval Office. “I felt all alone in there, completely terrified,” he said. “You’ve got to remember how young I was, what my background was, and now I was getting advice in the Oval Office. What was I supposed to do? Disagree? I had to take the challenge. I was always afraid of letting people down and now I was in a position where I had to worry about letting down the president.”

  Patterson was now fighting for the Good, and Sonny, whether he liked it or not, was the Bad. Liston understood his role well. “A boxing match is like a cowboy movie,” he said. “There’s got to be good guys and there’s got to be bad guys. That’s what people pay for—to see the bad guys get beat. So I’m the bad guy. But I change things. I don’t get beat.”

  It was far from automatic that Liston would even be allowed to fight Patterson. Madison Square Garden, still the most prestigious site in America for boxing, was out of the question. The New York authorities were (rightly) convinced that Liston had never cut his ties to the Maf
ia and refused him a license. Where could they go? Dr. Charles Larson, president of the United States National Boxing Association, said he would do all he could to prevent the match. “In my opinion Patterson is a fine representative of his race, and I believe the heavyweight champion of the world should be the kind of man our children could look up to as they have always done, as hero-worshipers,” he said. “If Liston should become champion before he had rehabilitated himself, it might well be a catastrophe.” The same camp said that a Liston victory would be worse for boxing than the horrible night six months before when Emile Griffith killed Benny “Kid” Paret in the ring. It took Sir David Harrington Angus Douglas, the twelfth Marquess of Queensberry, a descendant of the rule maker of boxing, to lift the whiff of moralism from the match. “I would have rather thought it wasn’t all that relevant whether or not Liston was a good character. If he’s not in prison at the moment, he must currently be legally straight. If he’s a good boxer, he must be entitled to a fight with Patterson.”

  Patterson could endure or ignore the politics of boxing and its various commissions, but not the concerns of men like Ralph Bunche and Martin Luther King. The civil rights movement was gathering momentum in the South and was setting off a profound backlash, especially in the Deep South, and the leaders of the movement worried that, in a moment, they would lose an upstanding champion, a worthy standard-bearer, in Patterson and get Sonny Liston, a convicted felon, instead. The civil rights movement had problems enough—the fight came in the midst of James Meredith’s attempt to integrate the University of Mississippi and the battle between the Supreme Court and Governor Ross Barnett, who vowed that the state “will not drink from the cup of genocide.” Martin Luther King’s rebellion represented the most powerful social upheaval since the war. To tens of millions of Americans, integration was unthinkable and every breakthrough of the civil rights movement, every court case, every march and sit-in, seemed an offense against nature. Fair or not, the last thing the movement’s leaders needed was to have the most visible black man in America be a graduate of the Missouri penal system, a thug who’d been jailed for armed robbery. Percy Sutton, head of the Manhattan chapter of the NAACP, said, “Hell, let’s stop kidding. I’m for Patterson because he represents us better than Liston ever could.” They saw Patterson as one of theirs, a black man who had fought his way up (literally, in his case); he was a race man, but one whom enlightened white men could accept, could talk to. When Patterson’s wife was refused an appointment by a masseuse near their house on Long Island, he sued under the local antidiscrimination code. When Patterson later bought a house in northern Yonkers, near Scarsdale, his white neighbors made his life miserable; a dentist next door immediately threw up a six-foot fence. When Patterson built his own fence, the dentist, a Dr. Morelli, shouted to the workmen, “Touch on my property and you had better have a court order for it.” Eventually, Patterson gave up the fight and moved out.

  “I am just part of the social history of our time and our country, and I can’t lag behind it—or run too far ahead of it,” he said later in his autobiography. “If you keep walking around with the bitterness in you, sooner or later it’s got to turn into a pain that makes you want to strike out at the injustice. I would never want to do that. If I can’t go some place legally, I don’t want to go there at all. If I can’t fight back legally, I don’t want to do it viciously. At the same time, you can’t overlook it and pretend it doesn’t exist.”

  Fame was no protection against humiliation. In the spring of 1957, after Patterson had become champion, he and two of his sparring partners were refused seating at one restaurant after another on a Saturday afternoon in Kansas City. They bought cheese and crackers instead and went back to their hotel. They heard that Jersey Joe Walcott was in town to referee a professional wrestling match and they called on him in his room. When they arrived they noticed that Walcott was also eating his lunch in his room; all he’d been able to come up with was a bag of cookies and a quart bottle of milk. Walcott offered Patterson and his friends some cookies.

  “We’ve just had a bite,” Patterson said, “just the way you’re having it.”

  “Ain’t it something?” Walcott said. “The former world’s heavyweight champion and the present champ, but in this town it’s all the same. The oldest champ and the youngest, but both have to eat in their rooms. This is a nice town. Not too bad if you walk with your eyes just looking ahead and don’t listen to what folks are saying. That’s why I stay in the room here. Less chance of being misunderstood.”

  Liston and Patterson trained for several months—Liston in Philadelphia, Patterson at his camp in upstate New York. In the last weeks before the fight, they both set up camp in the Chicago area. The facilities they chose might have been predicted. Patterson’s camp resembled a monastic retreat, a series of cabins in the town of Elgin called Marycrest Farm. Marycrest was a Catholic Worker settlement house, not much different from Wiltwyck. One building that had been converted into a press headquarters was decorated with religious mosaics and a set of crucifixes. The two doors to the room where the press agents worked were marked by Latin signs: Veritas over one, Caritas over the other. In ordinary times, Veritas and Caritas marked barns for cows. Patterson trained in a tent with a sign outside reading So we being many are one body in Christ. His press conferences took place in a refectory under a mural of saints. Patterson felt at home here. He had converted to the Roman Catholic Church and now he was being advertised as the fight game’s St. Francis.

  The promoters offered the Liston entourage a camp next to the prison in Joliet. They figured that the barbed wire and watchtowers would be the perfect backdrop for feature stories focusing on Liston’s past. Liston thought otherwise. Instead, he trained at an abandoned racetrack in East Aurora, with wire gates and a uniformed cop stationed outside. The infield of the track was a bleak expanse of withered grass. A vicious wind whipped off the disintegrating grandstands. Liston pounded the heavy bag and sparred in a makeshift gym that had once been the parimutuel shed. It was as if Johnny Appleseed were training in one place and the Angel of Death in the other, one of the writers remarked.

  The press shuttled between the two and drew out this contrast of Good versus Evil, of the Good Negro versus the Threatening Negro. This was 1962, and newspapermen were still dominant, above all white columnists from New York: Milton Gross of the Post, Jimmy Cannon of the Post (and then the World-Telegram), Red Smith of the Herald Tribune, Dick Young of the News, Arthur Daley of the Times. Liston trusted none of them. He could not read a road sign, much less a newspaper, but his wife, Geraldine, read the columns to him, and it was not long before he knew that he had few fans among the writers. Nor did Sonny have any great supporters among the white literati who had come from the various magazines: Budd Schulberg for Playboy, A. J. Liebling for The New Yorker, Ben Hecht for a Nyack paper, and Norman Mailer for Esquire.

  The literary undercard of the Patterson-Liston fight in Chicago featured the meeting of Norman Mailer and James Baldwin, who was on assignment for Nugget, a men’s magazine which would go out of business in 1965. (Liebling apparently did not care for the presence of visiting novelists. “The press gatherings before this fight sometimes resembled those highly intellectual pour-parlers on a Mediterranean island,” he wrote. “Placed before typewriters, the accumulated novelists could have produced a copy of The Paris Review in forty-two minutes.”) Mailer and Baldwin had been on friendly terms in the fifties, but by 1961, they were not getting along. Baldwin felt insulted by Mailer both personally and intellectually: personally because Mailer, in an essay critical of a range of contemporaries, had called him “too charming to be major”; intellectually because he thought that Mailer’s essay on race, “The White Negro,” was dangerous in the way it featured the black man as merely a collection of unbridled sexual and violent impulses. In a 1961 article for Esquire called “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” Baldwin said that Mailer was obsessed with power and was essentially an adolescent, a beatnik,
arrogant and naive, and had committed the folly of advertising a perverse notion of black culture to titillate the bourgeois white hipsters.

  Baldwin arrived in Chicago unsure of his subject. Unlike Mailer, who prided himself on his knowledge of boxing and knew many trainers and fighters, Baldwin was ignorant of the sport. He would never acquire Mailer’s ease hanging out at a gym, he could not rely on a ready facility with boxing history and the metaphors of sporting glory. Baldwin would rely instead on his empathy for Patterson and Liston, his understanding of them as poor black kids with an ambition. “I know nothing whatever about the Sweet Science or the Cruel Profession or the Poor Boy’s Game,” he wrote. “But I know a lot about pride, the poor boy’s pride, since that’s my story and will, in some way, probably, be my end.”

  Baldwin, with Gay Talese of the Times as his guide, visited both camps and was bewildered by the fight-week scene: the reporters gossiping away the morning and then crashing their stories on deadline, the late dinners on expense account, the customarily farcical feud between the two fighters, the inane press conferences, the parties at the Playboy Mansion, the former champions—Louis, Marciano, Barney Ross, Johansson, Ezzard Charles—milling around, dispensing opinions for quotation as a form of stature maintenance. In the pressroom, the general feeling was that Patterson had become champion by default and, pity though it might be, had little chance against Liston. Look at how he had lost to a mediocrity like Johansson! Down seven times in a single round—a human yo-yo!