IF FLOYD PATTERSON cannot be ranked among the great heavyweight champions he was perhaps considerably better than the indelible impression of frailty left by his violent eclipse at the hands of Sonny Liston in 1962. Certainly, given the antics which afflict the fight game today, his reign as world champion scarcely deserved to be to be stigmatised as “as shabby a period of heavyweight championship boxing as I can remember” as it was at the time by the pugnacious Daily Mirror sportswriter Peter Wilson.

Shabbiness had no place in Patterson’s makeup. The disguises in which he left the scene after his two heavy defeats by Liston may have reflected his keen sense of humiliation, but his personality shone out, from an atmosphere which is often murky in the extreme, as being a thing of essential decency.

He had several firsts to his credit. He was the first Olympic gold medallist to win a world heavyweight title. And he was the first man in the history of the ring to regain the world heavyweight title. On the debit side he was the first American since 1933 to lose the title to a European (Ingemar Johansson in 1959). And his poor showing against Liston gave the impression that he was a coward — which he was not.

The truth is that it was remarkable that he campaigned at heavyweight at all. He had won Olympic gold as a middleweight and always looked more convincing at 11 or 12 stone than he did as a 13½ stone heavyweight. At 5ft 11 ins he was not tall for a heavyweight (though Rocky Marciano was no taller). But he was handicapped by a particularly short reach (71 in) which meant that he had to leap at much larger opponents to get his blows in, often landing them with both feet off the floor. This was hardly the way to get maximum power into his punching and accounts for the fact that he was often floored himself several times on the way to eventual victory.

Yet with great fighting intelligence he overcame these defects, and even after losing his title to Liston, he continued campaigning at the top level, including two more tilts at the world title. That he was able to do so owed much to his manager Cus D’Amato, whom Norman Mailer once described as “the only prizefight manager remotely comparable to a Scholastic”. To protect his fighters from unnecessary punishment, D’Amato devised an intricate system of moves, blocks, parries and feints and, especially for Patterson, the famous “peek-a-boo” style with which he protected his chin, and from behind which he fired punches at the opportune moment — and he certainly could punch.

His gracious deportment in later years tended to obscure the fact that he had grown up in unpromising circumstances. He was born in Waco County, North Carolina, one of ten children of an unskilled dockworker. When he was an infant his family moved to New York, to the tough Brooklyn ghetto Bedford-Stuyvesant.

As a young boy Patterson was involved with child gangs in acts of petty street crime and after several brushes with the police was sent to a school for disturbed city delinquents out in rural New York State.

It was the saving of him. The institution had excellent sporting facilities, including boxing, and after his release Patterson joined two of his brothers at the Gramercy Gym on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He was only 14 but the trainer in charge, Cus D’Amato, saw his potential. D’Amato coached him to a Golden Gloves championship in 1951 and the middleweight title at the Olympics Games at Helsinki the following year.

Later in 1952 he turned professional and soon made his mark, reeling off a sequence of 31 victories over the next four years, marred by only one defeat, at the hands of the former world light heavyweight champion, Joey Maxim, in June 1954.

Rocky Marciano retired undefeated in April 1956 leaving the world title vacant. After keeping a date for his 31st fight with Tommy “Hurricane” Jackson, whom he beat over 12 rounds in June of that year, Patterson was matched with the veteran Archie Moore for the vacant title in Chicago. He knocked out Moore in five rounds to become the youngest heavyweight title holder at that point, and went on to defend it against, among others, “Hurricane” Jackson, whom he knocked out in ten rounds in 1957 and Britain’s Brian London, whom he floored in round 11 at Indianapolis in May 1959.

When the match with Ingemar Johansson, the European champion, was mooted, few American commentators gave the Swede any chance. Johansson arrived at his training camp, the luxurious home of the multimillionaire Max Ackerman in the Catskill Mountains, with most of his family and his glamorous fiancée, the model Birgit Lundgren, in tow, looking for all the world like a man set to enjoy a long holiday. American newsmen who went to the camp were all eyes for the Lundgren curves, spectacular in shocking pink ski pants and tight sweaters, and had little of a complimentary nature to say of her fiancé’s performance in the training ring. The odds at New York’s Yankee Stadium on the night of the contest, June 26, 1959, were 5-1 on Patterson.

What followed must rank among the ring’s greatest upsets. After an indecisive first two rounds Johansson got his “Hammer of Thor” right hand working and, with that operating in combination with a series of vicious left hooks, had Patterson down seven times before the referee stepped in to save the beaten champion from further punishment.

But Patterson went back to the drawing board, and in the rematch, at the Polo Grounds, in New York, in June 1960, he completely outclassed Johansson, using his speed of foot and hand to overwhelm the Swede and knock him out in the fifth round. Nevertheless, Johansson was given a further chance, and at Miami Beach in March 1961 Patterson put the matter beyond all argument by knocking his man out in the sixth, though only after Johansson had had him on the floor twice in the first.

In December that year Patterson defended against Tom McNeeley, whom he knocked out in four rounds. But nemesis was at hand in the fearsome person of Sonny Liston, an ex-jailbird who outweighed Patterson by 25 pounds and outreached him by 13 inches. In Chicago on September 25, 1962 Patterson miserably failed to overcome these superior assets, crashing to defeat in 2 minutes and six seconds of the first round to lose his title again, this time irrevocably. He did little better on the return in Las Vegas the following July, lasting on his feet only four seconds longer.

He did not retire. Among his subsequent fights was a bruising battle against Muhammad Ali for the latter’s world title, which ended in his being knocked out in 12 rounds in Las Vegas in June 1965. And after Ali had been stripped of his title he fought for the WBA version of the title held by Jimmy Ellis in September 1969, losing narrowly over 15 rounds.

But he was very far from being a spent force, hammering Britain’s Henry Cooper to defeat in four rounds in London in 1966 and beating the awesomely durable Argentinian, Oscar Bonavena, over ten rounds in New York as late as February 1972. To the end he was still winning far more than he lost, but a final defeat at the hands of Muhammad Ali (still waiting to regain his world title) in September 1972, persuaded him at last to hang up his gloves. He was by then 37.

Patterson had done well from the ring and retired to his estate in the Catskills, financing a local boxing club and serving as chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission. He campaigned for boxing reform to make the sport safer and for a pension plan for boxers. He also counselled troubled children for the New York State Office of Children and Family Services.

For long, it seemed that he would be one of the lucky few who might enjoy in old age the fruits of their ring labours. It was not to be. A few years ago the onset of dementia pugilistica was all too evident and Patterson became unable to remember his wife’s name or recall the details of any of his ring triumphs. In 1992 he was compelled to resign his chairmanship of the New York State Athletic Commission.

He is survived by his third wife, Janet, two daughters and an adopted son.

Floyd Patterson, world heavyweight boxing champion, 1956-59, and 1960-62, was born on January 4, 1935. He died on May 11, 2006, aged 71.