Born 90 years ago, on January 4, 1935, Floyd Patterson was the youngest of eleven children of a couple struggling to escape misery in Waco, a town of barely 200 inhabitants in Cleveland County, North Carolina. . At the age of ten he entered a reform school, an experience that he acknowledged changed his life. He learned to read and write, he began to study and at the age of fourteen he began practicing boxing, which would be his redemption.
After a dazzling series of victories in the amateur field, Patterson represented the United States at the Helsinki Games (1952) and took gold in the middleweight category. He was 17 years old. Scouting manager Constantine cus D’Amato was the one who launched Patterson’s professional career, leading him to the top in just four years.
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His career was extinguished by Sonny Liston, with whom even JF Kennedy advised him not to box.
World heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano had vacated the throne and Patterson earned the right to challenge for the title after a series of victorious bouts. On November 30, 1956, he faced veteran Archie Moore (20 years older) in Chicago, who was knocked out in the fifth round. Patterson, aged 21 years and 10 months, had just become the youngest world heavyweight champion in heavyweight history, a record no one broke until Mike Tyson (also groomed by D’Amato) in 1986. Patterson was also the first Olympic gold medal to reach the heavyweight title.
After several anodyne defenses, Patterson opened a historic trilogy against the Swede Ingemar Johansson, despised by the American press. On June 26, 1959, at Yankee Stadium in New York and with the bets 5-1 for Patterson, the scepter changed hands with unusual forcefulness: Johansson knocked down Patterson up to seven times and the referee stopped the fight and proclaimed the victory. victory of the swedish. The rematch came a year later, on June 20, 1960, also in New York, and the Waco boxer added another feat to his career, becoming the first to recover the heavyweight title. The expression was in common use “They never come back” (a film with this title had even been made, about boxing, in 1932) and thus the revenge was presented. But Patterson broke the norm and starred in the historic come back . Johanssson was knocked out in the fifth round.
But there was still a third duel with the Swede. It happened on March 13, 1961 and the American won again, this time in the sixth round. Patterson’s career was overshadowed when he faced Sonny Liston, whose connections with the mafia were openly explained. D’Amato advised Patterson against combat and it was also explained that President John F. Kennedy advised him in the same sense. At that time, Patterson had earned a reputation as an educated and friendly athlete, a champion who came from nowhere who had managed to avoid poverty and possibly crime and who even corresponded with the boxers who had been his rivals. Liston embodied the opposite prototype, trained as a boxer in prison and aggressive in his mannerisms.
On September 25, 1962, in Chicago, the world title changed hands in two minutes and six seconds. Patterson, defeated, left the facility camouflaged with dark glasses and a false beard. In July 1963 he tried to repeat the come back but again Liston won in the first round. A star had faded definitively, although Patterson’s career lasted until 1972 and he went on to box with Muhammad Ali, Henry Cooper and Oscar Bonavena, among others, while he was gaining notoriety in other areas. He appeared in episodes of two successful series in the late sixties: Jim West and Daniel Boone.
Once retired, he became friends with Johansson and they both ran the Stockholm Marathon together. Floyd Patterson suffered from Alzheimer’s although his death, on May 11, 2006 at the age of 71, came as a result of prostate cancer.
Gay Talese
“Being knocked out is nice…”
In 1964, Gay Talese dedicated a memorable article where he gave the floor to Patterson: “Being knocked out is not an unpleasant feeling. In fact, it’s nice. It doesn’t hurt, you’re just very dazed… But then that nice feeling leaves you. You realize where you are, what you are doing, and what just happened to you. And what follows is pain combined with anger; there is pain of what people will say; It’s the pain of being ashamed of my own ineptitude… and all you want is for a trap door to open and allow you to fall and land in your locker room, without leaving the ring and facing all those people. The worst thing about losing is having to leave the ring and face all those people.”
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