Sport is often burdened with a freight of symbolism it is unequipped to carry and proof of how regrettable the consequences can be was amply provided by the boxing career of Floyd Patterson. The former heavyweight champion’s death on Thursday, at the age of 71, triggered memories of a time when politicians and social leaders were guilty of pressuring him to produce triumphs against the Mob-controlled ex-convict Sonny Liston that he had neither the physical capacity nor temperament to deliver.
My close contact with Liston was confined to brief conversations while he was touring this country for a series of training exhibitions soon after he had blasted Patterson out of possession of the world title, so my personal impressions aren’t worth much as testimony. But the sense of him I absorbed then has been reinforced since by everything serious and persuasive I have heard and read about his ill-starred existence and the unavoidable conclusion is that he was, for all his faults and offences, much more of a victim than a villain. The criminal associations that condemned him ultimately harmed nobody more than Liston himself.
What is certainly obvious is that the eagerness to send out Patterson as a good black man to bring down an adversary characterised as a bad black man, Liston, was a reprehensible folly cruel to both men. Leaving aside the dubious morality of the crusade, the inadequacies of its chosen instrument were always likely to cause him extreme psychological pain. More than 40 years on, it is natural to be moved by Patterson’s plight. He was not an outstanding heavyweight champion and his extraordinary record of early success in the ring never quite obscured that reality — least of all, we may suspect, from him. From his troubled childhood onwards, his inner landscape seemed to be a place of shadows where neurotic doubts and the impulses of the fugitive frequently reigned.
Yet for a while it appeared that boxing, and his precocious aptitude for it, might banish his demons. Having moved from his North Carolina birthplace to New York and taken to gloved fighting as a 10-year-old in reform school, he developed so swiftly as an amateur that at 17 he won a middleweight gold medal in the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki. As a 21-year-old professional, Patterson stopped Archie Moore, who was a fraction more than twice his age, to become the youngest man ever to hold the undisputed heavyweight title.
Cus D’Amato, the eccentric guru who would later nurture a more fearsome prodigy, Mike Tyson, applied zealously protective management to steer Patterson clear of menacing opponents to the championship and on to riches. Caution was warranted, since the client was small for a heavyweight (he came in as light as 13st for a couple of title defences and was usually well under 14st) and had a short reach, for which he tried to compensate by leaping in with his hooks, exposing himself to the danger of being shot down like a rising pheasant. He was athletic, quick and brave and he could punch, but he was too easily dazed and floored.
Still, even when D’Amato crucially under-estimated the technically limited but brutally powerful Swede Ingemar Johansson, the damage, though spectacular, was temporary. In their first fight Patterson was knocked down seven times in the third round before the referee rescued him from the battering. But in the summer of 1960 he made himself the first heavyweight to regain the world crown, punching out Johansson in the fifth round, and nine months later he confirmed his supremacy with a stoppage in six. Those comeback performances deepened the loving support of fight fans, especially the tough but sentimental New York audiences, that he would keep until the end of his days.
Looming, however, was the defining nightmare of his fighting life: his two confrontations with the brooding might and considerable skills of Liston (25 September 1962 in Chicago, 22 July 1963 in Las Vegas), in which the aggregate duration of the loser’s resistance was barely four minutes. I wasn’t at ringside for either of those slaughters but the first heavyweight championship fight I covered in the United States was Patterson’s implausible attempt in November 1965 to prove that Muhammad Ali’s recent double demolition of Liston’s ogreish aura, the humiliation of the humiliator, was a false form line (12 crushingly one-sided rounds would show it wasn’t). In advance of the action in Las Vegas, the challenger was familiarly gloomy and introverted, though he promised that if defeated he would not resort to the false beard and dark glasses with which he had vainly tried to contrive an anonymous exit after devastation by Liston in Chicago. Yet he admitted that prior to beating George Chuvalo earlier in 1965 he had not only prepared an elaborate disguise but had taken his brother along to Madison Square Garden as a potential decoy.
He recalled that when he fought Liston a succession of the most formidable national figures (from the Kennedy family to the Nobel peace laureate Dr Ralph Bunche to Dr Martin Luther King) had taken pains to tell him how much his own race and the rest of enlightened America were depending on him. It sounded like torture by exhortation but he seemed willing to embrace more as he talked of overcoming “Mr Clay” to strike a blow against the Black Muslims’ segregationist policies.
Elsewhere along The Strip, Muhammad Ali was merrily proclaiming his invincibility: “If I say a mosquito can pull a plough, don’t ask how — just hitch it up, man.” Before Alzheimer’s disease and prostate cancer took him on Thursday, Floyd Patterson had added big satisfactions to his championship exploits, including serving as chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission and training a boxer son to win a world title. But at key points of his life he was dragging something heavier than a plough.
Walcott gamble hard to justify
All those who tell us it was perfectly understandable that Arsène Wenger should be ready to acclaim Theo Walcott’s credentials for inclusion in England’s World Cup squad while declining to grant the 17-year-old as much as a place on the Arsenal bench at the Champions League final in Paris on Wednesday evening might care to ponder a question or two. If, by some miracle of transposition, Wenger had been in Sven-Göran Eriksson’s shoes, would he have allocated a seat on the plane for Germany to a teenager he had never seen play competitively? Would Wenger as a national team coach have decided the boy’s total lack of top-class action had been outweighed by the evidence of a couple of training sessions and the enthusiasm of his club manager? I know about Arsenal’s wealth of strikers and England’s poverty, but I still can’t believe Wenger’s professional logic could have accommodated the wild punt Eriksson is taking on Walcott’s promise. The gamble may come off (long shots do occasionally) but lunging guessers hit more brick walls than jackpots. Cheerleaders tell us Sven has seen the light over the need to be bold and adventurous. Epiphany? This looks more like a touch of the Mystic Megs.
Drugs taint Bonds
As Barry Bonds, the greatest and most controversial slugger in modern baseball, starts swinging left-handed for the San Francisco Giants on their home diamond today, two historic challenges will confront him.
First, against the Giants’ arch rivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers, he will be seeking to hit the two homers he needs to pass Babe Ruth’s career total of 714 and take second place in the all-time rankings behind Hank Aaron (755). His other challenge is to persuade sceptics that the cloud of drug-abuse allegations hanging over him has not invalidated his record-breaking. The scale of that task has been conveyed by a leading baseball chronicler, Thomas Boswell: “Bonds’ s reputation has lived by his statistics. Now, let it die by them. Forever.”
