King of the World Read online

  As challenger, Liston entered the ring first. He wore a white robe and a white hood that was peaked like a monk’s. His shoulders, which were already the size of cantaloupes, were even bigger now; Liston had stuffed towels in his robe. The crowd out beyond the press rows booed him. Liston began warming up, stretching his neck, rolling his shoulders, flicking languid jabs at the floor, like a fop shooting his cuffs. He bounced on his toes, sliding back and forth. If ever a man looked collected, powerful, if ever a fighter looked ready, it was Sonny Liston at that moment.

  Then came Patterson and his entourage. They came bobbing down the aisle, a bubbling stream of heads. D’Amato had been cast out as official manager—Patterson could not accept D’Amato’s lack of confidence in him, nor was he pleased to read press accounts alleging that D’Amato, for all his denials, had played ball with “Fat Tony” Salerno to finance the first Johansson fight, an enormous scandal in New York—but, for all that, D’Amato was still there with him, leading the way toward the ring. With his white buzz cut and Roman jaw, D’Amato kept up a brave face, no matter what intimations of blood he was seeing now. Patterson, for his part, could not hide his terror. He bent through the ropes and into the ring, but he did it stealthily, nervously, with quick glances all around, like a thief climbing in a window on the night he knows he will be arrested at last. He was in a terrible state. His eyes flicked around the ring. Rarely had fear been so visible in a fighter’s face. In later years you’d see it in Ken Norton before his fight with George Foreman, then later with Michael Spinks before facing Mike Tyson—both fights that lasted a few minutes. Fighters know.

  All along, Liston had been possessed of an almost unseemly calm. The morning before, the two teams of seconds had argued over the gloves to be used for the fight; it was one of those fantastically comic scenes at sporting events that are customarily played out with angry expressions and threatening tones. Grown men arguing over sporting equipment. Such disputes give the reporters something to use for their “setups,” their “these two men just plain don’t like each other” stories for fight day. At one point, Liston’s man, Jack Nilon, claimed the gloves were a whisper heavier than the called-for eight ounces, a difference, Nilon insisted, that might deprive his fighter of some fraction of his power. The shouting became fierce until, finally, Liston stepped in.

  “What the hell’s going on?” he said.

  He was shown the gloves.

  “Oh, they’re all right,” he said. “Let’s use them. I’m going to hit him so hard that extra quarter of an ounce isn’t gonna be any more than just an extra quarter of an ounce he’s being hit with.”

  During the referee’s instructions, Liston stared down at the champion. The champion stared at his shoes. They went back to their corners and waited. The bell rang. The fight was scheduled for fifteen rounds.

  “YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW IT IS IN THE FIRST ROUND,” FLOYD would tell his confidant, Gay Talese. “You’re out there with all those people around you, and those cameras, and the whole world looking in, and all that movement, that excitement, and ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ and the whole nation hoping you’ll win, including the president. And do you know what all this does? It blinds you, just blinds you. And then the bell rings, and you go at Liston and he’s coming at you, and you’re not even aware that there’s a referee in the ring with you.…”

  Some great athletes experience a round, a play, even an entire contest, in slow motion, as if their superior speed, their gift of judgment and coordination, provides them with a more usable perception of time. The athlete who sees the contest this way has invariably won; he has beaten his opponent to the punch, run down the quarterback, read the seams on a curveball and hit it out of the park. But for the overmatched, time does not so much slow down as lose its coherence. Floyd experienced time in Chicago as a confusion of pressures and noise, as anxiety, like drowning, like falling out of a plane, and afterward he could barely remember what had taken place over the span of two minutes and six seconds. Even the pain would be a while in coming. He would complain of terrible headaches, for Liston hit harder than any other heavyweight alive, but that would not come until an hour later.

  Patterson was frozen from the start. Like a singer who begins an aria in the key of A in B-flat and can’t make the subtle transposition to the right key, Floyd had it all wrong from the bell. Anything that had ever made him effective in the past, his quickness, his jab, his ability to read the other fighter, was forgotten. Patterson set his gloves at his temples, the peekaboo stance taught him as a teenager by D’Amato, but all he did was wait to get hit. His strategy was inexplicable. Patterson went toe to toe with a slugger, with an opponent who had an incredible thirteen-inch reach advantage.

  Liston began by banging an inquiring left jab into Patterson’s face. Patterson’s head shot back as if he’d been smacked by a bat. Then, after a series of missed and pawing punches, Patterson ventured his lone experiment in the offensive, his one attempt to see if he had any chance at all. He tried one of his leaping hooks. Liston seemed to shock himself by how easy it was to dodge. He did it by taking an even step backward, as if to avoid a stream he’d just noticed at his feet. Nothing dangerous. From then on, Liston simply did what he wanted to do. He jabbed; he banged short hooks with both hands to Patterson’s ribs and liver; then he started loading up with enormous hooks and uppercuts. In the clinches, he pounded at Patterson’s kidneys. Patterson tried to grab Liston’s arms, tie him up, but he could only muffle the right, while Liston poleaxed him with the left.

  Only a minute had elapsed. But now the big punches started to land, first a right uppercut that made Patterson’s face seem, in flash-frame, as contorted as putty dropped to the sidewalk from a fifth-floor window. He would never recover from that. The right was not the punch that put him down, but, as it happened, it was the one that ended all hopes of a contest. From then on, butterflies flew free in Patterson’s brain. To clear his head, to rest, Patterson tried desperately to clinch. Liston shoved him away and hit him with two left hooks. The punches were not especially fast, they did not have that short, dense, quickness of Louis’s best blows—Liston had a way of saying “Ahem” and then throwing a punch; he was not especially deft—but that made no difference at all, not against Patterson. Dazed, his eyes drooping, Patterson headed to the ropes and, with his left hand, he tried to find support there, some balance, a more sober friend. This was a very bad idea. With that hand draped over the ropes, Patterson was inviting the end; perhaps D’Amato was right: the fighter who gets knocked out wants to be knocked out. Liston put all his weight into a left hook that caught Patterson square on the jaw and suddenly Patterson’s body described a right angle. His legs stiffened straight and he bent at the waist, but it was a posture that held only an instant and then the legs gave out.

  “The way he fell I knew he wouldn’t get up,” Liston said later.

  The referee, Frank Sikora, began the count. Patterson rolled over on his side. By nine, he was on one knee. He made it to his feet, but only after Sikora had counted ten and waved his arms.

  “One minute I had a fight, the next I didn’t,” Sikora said. “I was all prepared to see them warm up.… Then came a tremendous right to the head and I had a new champion’s hand to raise.” At ringside, the reporters for the dailies were either barking lead paragraphs to dictationists at home or typing furiously and handing pages of copy to the runners for Western Union. They all knew their second paragraph: this was the third-fastest knockout in the history of heavyweight title fights. In 1908, Tommy Burns knocked out the challenger, Jem Roche, at 1:28, in Dublin, and in 1938, Louis beat Max Schmeling in 2:04 at Yankee Stadium.

  Gay Talese had a daily deadline, but he could not help feeling overwhelmed with sadness for his friend. Very often young reporters will find a single object of attention and even affection—for Talese it was Floyd Patterson. He spent hours with the fighter, he interviewed him at home and in training camp, he watched him nap in dressing rooms before fights, he k
new his fears, his secrets, and now he had witnessed his friend taken apart in a ballpark. “I felt that part of me had been destroyed,” Talese said many years later. “Fighters are so alone. They can’t spread the blame around. It’s a humiliation witnessed by millions. Liston was the most menacing human being of my lifetime, a born destroyer of other people. I didn’t think anyone could survive him. I thought Floyd had such courage, he almost seemed to welcome the punishment. He risked annihilation in public to a much bigger man. And then I watched the two men embrace. Only in boxing do you have that ritual, of two men, nearly naked, exhausted, the smell and taste of each other, after such serious battle, the strange intimacy of that.…”

  As Liston and Patterson drew away from each other, Liston’s cornermen rushed through the ropes to hug him. Willie Reddish, his trainer, put his palms on Sonny’s cheeks.

  Patterson walked toward his corner and, through his daze, spotted D’Amato coming toward him. D’Amato held out his arms and Patterson’s legs nearly gave out again, but this time from grief, not pain. He found D’Amato and rested his forehead on his teacher’s shoulder.

  “What happened, Floyd?” D’Amato said.

  Patterson could only say that he had seen all the punches except the last. He was still dazed. He could barely talk for the shame of it all. It was only months later that he started making sense of the moment: “It’s not a bad feeling when you’re knocked out,” he said. “It’s a good feeling, actually. It’s not painful, just a sharp grogginess. You don’t see angels or stars: you’re on a pleasant cloud.… But then this good feeling leaves you. You realize where you are, and what you’re doing there, and what has just happened to you. And what follows is a hurt, a confused hurt—not a physical hurt—it’s a hurt combined with anger; it’s a what-will-people-think hurt; it’s an ashamed-of-my-own-ability hurt … and all you want then is a hatch door in the middle of the ring—a hatch door that will open and let you fall through and land in your dressing room instead of having to get out of the ring and face those people. The worst thing about losing is having to walk out of the ring and face those people.…”

  It was not long before Floyd’s thoughts turned to his escape plan, his disguise. He could not avoid the press entirely. On his way out of the ring, he remembered to say something nice about Liston, and he asked people to let the new champion prove himself not just as a fighter, but as a man. “I think Sonny has inner qualities that are good,” he said. “I think the public should give him a chance.”

  But there was more. In the dressing room, a reporter asked what had happened. What did they think had happened?

  “I got caught with a good punch,” Patterson said.

  “A right hand, wasn’t it?”

  “I think it was.”

  “Did you hear the referee counting over you?”

  “Not clearly at first. When I did begin to hear, I thought I heard him say ‘eight’ and I jumped up.”

  At one point, Patterson said, yes, he wanted to fight Liston again.

  “Fight him again?” one reporter said. “Why didn’t you fight him tonight?”

  “Could you have gone on, Floyd?” another reporter asked.

  “Sure, I thought I could go on. But then, I guess every fighter thinks that.”

  The reporters wanted to know what Liston was really like, how good a champion he would be, how brave.

  “That remains to be seen,” Patterson said. “We’ll find out what he’s like after somebody beats him, how he takes it. It’s easy to do anything in victory. It’s in defeat that a man reveals himself. In defeat I can’t face people. I haven’t the strength to say to people, I did my best, I’m sorry, and whatnot.”

  EVERYBODY AROUND SONNY LISTON SAID THE BEST THING ABOUT him was his wife, Geraldine. He was not the most loyal husband in the world, he played around everywhere he went, he drank, he gambled, but when Geraldine was with him, Liston was at ease, even gentle.

  Geraldine couldn’t bear to go to the stadium to see her husband fight. Instead she stayed up in their room at the Sheraton-Chicago, her hair in curlers and her face smeared with cold cream. In her bathrobe, she waited for a phone call from one of Sonny’s cornermen.

  “If it were up to me,” she said, “I’d never have let Sonny do it. I’d take poverty over prizefighting. If we have kids, I won’t let them fight either. True, we wouldn’t have the money. But if I didn’t have it, I wouldn’t know about it.… I know Charles has done wrong, but if he weren’t in the public eye, it would be forgotten. The sportswriters always keep bringing it up. It’s like they don’t ever want him to be good. How’s a man going to be good, if folks won’t let him? Many nights we talk it over. Sonny knows himself, and he knows if he becomes champ he only wants to live to make everybody realize he’s a better person.”

  That was precisely Liston’s intention. Now, in his dressing room, the reporters started to bombard him with questions.

  “Hold it,” one of the promotional hands said, silencing the room. “This is the heavyweight champion of the world. This is Mr. Liston. Let’s treat him as you would the President of the United States.”

  Indeed. With the room now more in line with White House protocol, Liston made a special plea for himself, a request for forgiveness. He had served his time. He would try to stay out of trouble, do some good. “If the public allows me the chance to let bygones be bygones, I’ll be a worthy champ,” he said. “If they’ll accept me, I’ll prove it to them.” He said that he had thanked Patterson after the fight for the opportunity. “Then I told him, ‘I’ll be as much of a man toward you as you were to me. And you were a heck of a good man.’ ”

  Liston even defended Patterson as a fighter. When someone asked if Floyd lacked guts, Liston said, “That’s got to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. I felt enough of him under my glove on that last hook to know it was a good enough punch to put any man down hard. I looked at him close when he was going down and I took another good look when he hit the floor. He was gone. He surprised me for a tiny second when he got up on one knee, but then I could see he was like a man reaching for the alarm clock while he was still asleep.”

  Then someone asked if he’d been hurt at all in the fight.

  “Only once,” he said. “That was when the man said ‘nine’ and it looked like he might get up before ‘ten.’ ”

  WITH HIS DRESSING ROOM CLEARED, PATTERSON SHOWERED, dressed, and pasted on his beard. He waited awhile until he thought the stadium had emptied out and then found his friend Mickey Alan, the singer who had performed the national anthem that night. He and Alan got in a borrowed car that had been parked in an agreed-upon spot by Patterson’s chauffeur, and they headed for the expressway—due east.

  Patterson and Alan rode in silence. A couple of hours outside of Chicago, they stopped to stretch their legs by the side of the road. A police officer pulled up and asked Patterson for his driver’s license. Floyd started to tear away his beard.

  “What are you, some kind of actor?” the police officer said.

  Then the cop looked at the license and realized he had stopped Floyd Patterson. He wished him luck and let him go.

  Patterson did not drive home to his house in Yonkers. He went instead to his upstate training camp in Highland Mills. The trip took around twenty-two hours. When they arrived, Patterson asked Alan to leave. Patterson’s head was throbbing. Liston had hit him hard and now he was feeling it. He started thinking that maybe he should start working out, get ready for another fight with Liston. He walked over to the gym. He flicked on the lights and realized most of his equipment was in Chicago.

  Patterson’s family and friends were still in Chicago, too. They never knew about his flight until news of it appeared in the papers. When reporters started asking Patterson’s mother where her son had gone, she said she didn’t know. “Floyd’s a man that has a lot of pride, and I guess he just wants to be alone,” she said. “I guess he just don’t want to face the people because he always liked to give them his best.”
Cus D’Amato roamed the lobby of his hotel, wondering what would become of his fighter.

  Not long after, Floyd decided to get away entirely. He went out to New York’s Idlewild Airport carrying his passport, a suitcase, and his disguise. Before he got to the ticket counter, he put on his beard and mustache. He looked up at the departures board, scanned it for the next few flights, and bought a ticket to Madrid. It made no difference—anywhere but here. When he got to Madrid, he took a cab straight to a hotel and registered under the name Aaron Watson. For several days, Patterson wandered around the poorer sections of the city, faking a limp. The people stared at him. Patterson got the distinct impression they thought he was mad. He ate most of his meals in his hotel room. The one time he ate at a restaurant he ordered soup, not because he liked it—he hated soup—but because he figured that soup is what an old person would eat.

  “You must wonder what makes a man do things like this,” Patterson told Talese later. “Well, I wonder, too. And the answer is, I don’t know.… But I think that within me, within every human being, there is a certain weakness. It is a weakness that exposes itself more when you’re alone. And I have figured out that part of the reason I do the things I do, and cannot seem to conquer that one word—myself—is because … is because … I am a coward.”

  WHILE PATTERSON WAS ON HIS ROAD TRIP, LISTON WAS STILL IN Chicago. The morning after the fight, he appeared for the customary next-day press conference so that the writers would have some fresh quotes for their follow-up feature stories and profiles of the new champion.