Once They Heard the Cheers Read online

Page 6


  "You did all right," he said. "You did okay."

  "You do it," Joe said. "I couldn't get my hands up in there, but you do it."

  Jimmy went on in the walk-out bout after the main event, with the Garden emptying now. For whatever reason, the few who stayed got to rooting for Jimmy's opponent, and when Jimmy lost the decision and came up the aisle where Joe was waiting, there was a loudmouth hollering at him.

  "Go back to New Haven," he was hollering. "You're a bum!"

  I walked back to the dressing room with them and said I was sorry that they hadn't won, and I wished them luck. They thanked me and we shook hands and I walked out of the dressing room and out of the war again. Some of what I walked into, some of what I came to know about those I came to know, is what follows in the rest of this book.

  1

  The Shy One

  Floyd is a kind of a stranger.

  Cus DAmato, 1954

  On the telephone two nights before, he had told me to turn off the New York Thruway at the New Paltz exit and then left on Route 299. He has said that I should follow that through the town, across a railroad track and over a bridge and then take the first road on the right.

  "What's the name of the road?" I had asked.

  "Springtown Road," he had said. "You go half a mile to a fork and then take the right. Two-tenths of a mile after that it's the first house on the left."

  "And what time do you want me to show up?"

  "Three o'clock," he had said. "I'm looking at my schedule. I may have an appointment, something to do, for a half hour at 3:30, but 3 o'clock is all right."

  It was just after two when I turned off the Thruway. There was a motel off to the left, but I decided to drive into the town and, perhaps, find one that would be closer and more a part of the town.

  The terrain there, west of the Hudson and just south of the Catskill Mountains, is hilly, and the town, with Route 299 as its main street, spreads down over the western slope of a ridge. The stores, restaurants, and other places of business are close-packed on both sides of the steeply slanting street that was congested now with traffic, and off to the south and on the crest of the ridge there is a multistoried highrise, an architectural aberration erected without regard for the still rural nature of the countryside. Seeing it towering alone there on the ridge like the beginning in New Paltz of a new Bronx, I surmised that it would turn out to be a part of the college, a branch of the State University of New York.

  Coming down off the ridge, the road crosses the railroad tracks with the old wooden station on the right, and there was a sign on the station offering it for rent. Beyond the tracks I drove over the bridge and out onto the flat of a valley with farming lands on both sides of the blacktop road. Ahead I could see another blacktop to the right, and when I reached it and saw the Springtown Road sign I backed around and drove the way I had come and back up the hill through the town.

  There was a small motel on the left, and when I got to the top of the hill I pulled off and into a gas station. The attendant came out, a young man with red hair and wiping his hands on a rag.

  "Fill it up?" he said.

  "Please," I said, "and maybe you can tell me something. Do you know where Floyd Patterson lives?"

  I wanted to get an idea of how well a former heavyweight champion of the world, this former heavyweight champion of the world, might be known in his adopted town. He had always run from renown, and even as champion had sought seclusion. The fame that came with his title seemed to embarrass him, as if he could never forget that he was a refugee from the black ghetto of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. As a child, he had been so shy that he could never look others in the eye and so maladjusted that only special schooling saved him. I liked him very much because, although he was always so serious—even appearing troubled—that I never heard him laugh, his observations were perceptive and reflected a supreme sensitivity, and his answers were honest. He always seemed to me, though, to be the most miscast of fighters, for while he had the physical attributes to be a great fighter—always excepting his inability to absorb a heavyweight's big punch—he also had the compassion of a priest, and I never knew anyone else in sports whose antennae were so attuned to the suffering of others.

  "Are you bothered by the sight of blood?" I asked him once.

  "How do you mean?" Patterson said.

  "Have you ever been scared, as a child or since, when you've been cut?"

  I asked this question because a fighter must regard lightly the changes his profession makes upon his physical person. He must also be relatively unaffected by the hurt he inflicts upon others.

  "No," he said. "I've seen my blood flow from me when I was younger. One time I got a nail stuck in my foot, and I kept it there for three hours, until my mother came home from work. You see, there was this lady baby-sitting for us, and I was scared to tell her about the nail because she was very mean and she would beat you. So when I got this nail in my foot I kept it there and stayed in the front room for three hours until my mother came home and I told her about it."

  "What about seeing blood on others?" I said.

  "On somebody else?" he said. "Well, this hasn't happened lately, but in the wintertime, when it's cold and my nose feels cold, I'd sometimes see two people fighting in the street. I'd actually see a guy with a big fist hit another guy square on the nose or face. You know?"

  "Yes."

  "Well," he had said, "when I'd see that, I'd feel it myself. It really seemed that I could actually feel it, and I would rather be fighting the one guy and taking the punishment than to see the other guy taking it, because I could just imagine how it feels to get hit when you're cold like that."

  He was that way in the ring, staying away from a cut when he opened one on an opponent. The day of his second fight with Ingemar Johansson they weighed in at noon at the Commodore Hotel. The big room was crowded with sportswriters and photographers and members of the fight mob, and I was talking with Johnny Attell, who had been matchmaker around New York for many years, when Billy Conn, who had been one of the best of the all-time light-heavyweights and enough of a heavyweight to give Joe Louis one of his toughest fights, walked over.

  "Who do you like tonight, Bill?" Attell said to him.

  "Me?" Conn said. "I like the Swede for his punch."

  "I don't know," Attell said, shrugging. "Patterson's got the equipment to take him if he fights him right."

  "You hear what somebody had Patterson say?" Conn said.

  "What?" Attell said.

  "Patterson said that when he gets a guy cut he lays off the eye and hits him in the belly," Conn said. "You know somebody told him to say that, because he'd pour salt in a cut if he could."

  "No he wouldn't," Attell said.

  "Are you kidding?" Conn said.

  "No," Attell said. "This guy Patterson is really that way."

  "Then he's got no business being a fighter," Conn said.

  But he was a fighter, an Olympic champion, and then the youngest ever to win the heavyweight championship of the world and the first even to regain it. I hadn't seen him to talk to since 1963, before the second of his two fights with Sonny Liston in which he never got by the first round. Liston, I knew beforehand, would out-body and bully him, and I had given Patterson no chance, and then on television I had watched Muhammad Ali humiliate him twice. Howard Cosell, who knew him well and had seen much of him while Patterson's career was running down, had written in his own autobiography that Patterson had come to live off martyrization and sympathy. Then I had heard that he had been appointed to the New York State Athletic Commission and was living in New Paltz, and I wondered how he was totalling the wins and losses of his life.

  "Floyd Patterson?" the attendant said now. "Sure."

  "You know where he lives?"

  "Sure," he said, pointing. "You go down through town here and across the steel bridge and you take the first right. That's Spring-town Road. At the fork you take a right, and I think it's the second house on t
he left."

  I was thinking that no, Floyd said it was the first house on the left, and the young man's earnestness and sincerity made me a little ashamed of my deceit.

  "Fine," I said, "and tell me something else. Is that motel beyond the top of the hill the best around here?"

  "Right," he said. "That's a good one."

  I checked into the "good one" that would have been better if someone had washed the woodwork in recent time. When I turned the thermostat on the air conditioner-heater the sound that came from behind the bent vanes of the grill low on the wall was of a spin-dry washer gurging a load of nuts, bolts and aluminum pie pans. The bathroom had been scrubbed clean, however, and over all, it was an improvement over some of the places where I had known Patterson while he was a fighter.

  First there was the Gramercy Gym, on East Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, with the two flights of stairs that groaned and gave underfoot and led up between the mustard-colored walls that were dusty with soot and stained with grime. At the top of the stairs, and low in the door into the gym, there was a jagged hole covered with heavy wire mesh, and behind the door and snarling through the mesh there was a German shepherd that Patterson or Cus D'Amato, who managed him, would chain in a back room before they would let a visitor in. D'Amato reasoned that this approach would weed out the faint-hearted who just thought they might like to be fighters.

  Then there was La Ronda, in the woods outside of Newtown, Connecticut, where Patterson lived and where he trained almost as a recluse most of the time, for nine months through the autumn of 1959 and the following winter and spring, to get his title back from Ingemar Johansson. It was an otherwise abandoned road-house that was owned and had been operated by Enrique Madriguera, who had finished second to Xavier Cugat in the battle of the big Latin dance bands. Set into the wall beneath the stairway to the second floor there was a cracked ornamental tile of a young boy playing a violin, and that had been Madriguera when he had been a child prodigy, and once, scattered amid the debris in the back yard, I had found pages of sheet music, blowing in the wind. The place was infested with rats that Patterson shot with a .22. While Johansson lived in a private cottage at Grossinger's, the luxury resort in the Catskills, and had his meals served in style, Patterson and Dan Florio, his trainer, cooked for themselves and the sparring partners in the vast kitchen and on the big ranges and in the oversized pots and pans that had been intended to hold the Iberian edibles for the multitudes of music lovers and conga dancers who never came.

  When I turned onto Springtown Road now for the second time, I went to the fork and took the road to the right. I watched the odometer, and after two-tenths of a mile, as Patterson had said, on the left on a rise beyond a field of golden-brown stubble, I saw the two-storied, white-shingled house. The blacktop driveway rises for almost a hundred yards between tall pines, and as I drove up it I saw the two gray metal boxes, one on either side of the driveway amid the trees. At the top I turned left and parked by a stone wall in front of the garage doors under the house, and got out. There was an off-white dog of good size and indefinite breeding confronting me and barking at me as I got out of the car, and I could hear a male voice calling.

  "Cotton! Cotton! C'mere, Cotton!"

  It was Patterson's voice, and as the dog turned from me and started up the steps toward the back of the house, I followed it. Patterson was holding an aluminum combination storm and screen door open, and when the dog disappeared inside, he came out and we shook hands. He was wearing freshly laundered blue jeans and an immaculate white T-shirt, and he didn't look much heavier at age forty-one than he had at age twenty-five when, that night in the Polo Grounds, he landed that wide left hook on Johansson's jaw and became the first fighter ever to regain the heavyweight title.

  "Nobody can sneak up on you here," I said.

  "That's right," he said.

  "I mean with the dog and those boxes down on the driveway. Is that a warning device?"

  "It rings a bell in our bedroom," he said. "It's mostly for at night."

  He was the third oldest of eleven children, born into poverty and an overcrowded world that he found frightening and from which, from his earliest years on, he tried to escape. Once he told me that when he was six he used to hide all day in the basement of P.S. 25, the school he was supposed to be attending. As he became older, and when he had the eighteen cents for admission, he hid in the Regent and Apollo and Banko movie theaters, and some nights he slept in Prospect Park and others in subway stations.

  "You have a lovely home here," I said.

  He had led me through the kitchen and the dining room and, ofi the entry hall, into a family room. There was a twenty-foot field-stone, mahogany-topped bar curving in front of the far wall, the mounted heads of two mountain goats above it, the windows behind it looking out onto the driveway. Across the entry hall I could see the living room, with a baby grand piano, and I was impressed by the orderliness of everything, the furniture precisely placed and none of the incidental leavings of daily living lying about.

  "It's nice," he said.

  "How many rooms are there?" I said.

  "Well," he said, "there's four bedrooms, one play room, the living room, the kitchen, the dining room, the bar room and four baths."

  "Does your wife have help?"

  "Help?" he said.

  "Someone who comes in to clean?" I said, and his own mother, whom I remember as a serene, soft-spoken and sensitive woman, had been a domestic before she found a job in a Brooklyn bottling factory.

  "Nope," Patterson said. "I help her."

  "How much land do you have?"

  "Forty acres," he said, and he walked to a window and pointed down at the field between the house and the road, the grass stubble in it that golden brown in the sunlight. "You see that field? I did it with a hand scythe and with a hand saw, all summer long."

  "That's good," I said, "but what's that monstrosity over there on the ridge?"

  "The what?" he said.

  "That tower," I said.

  "Oh, that's the college."

  "That figures," I said. "We're trying to teach people to live with the environment and not abuse it, and a college does that."

  A yellow school bus had stopped at the foot of the driveway. Two small girls had got out and were starting to walk up the drive.

  "That's my daughters," he said. "They go to the Duzine school. That's the public school, what they call the Duzine school, but next year they'll go to the Catholic school in Rosendale, and I'll have to drive them over."

  "You don't like the public school?"

  We had walked back from the window. He was sitting on one of the bar stools, and I was sitting on another.

  "The public school's all right here," he said, "but New Paltz was number two in the nation for drugs. Los Angeles was number one."

  "Can that be correct?" I said.

  "That's right," he said. "Three or four years ago I read it in the Daily News. That's why I started my boxing club. The Huguenot Boxing Club."

  I had read somewhere that he was training young amateur fighters. As a fighter himself he was prone to errors, as the naturally gifted in anything often are. In most of his fights, however, his great hand speed and mobility covered his mistakes and let him get away with them although, of course, they were still there.

  "There's this Father Daniel O'Hare," he said, "and he's the founder. It's called AMEN—Americans Mobilized to End Narcotics—and he founded it. He used to be in the rectory here, and about three years ago I got to know him. He's now in the rectory in Newburgh, and he's a very down-to-earth priest. I've gotten to know him so close that sometimes I say a word you don't say to a priest."

  "I know what you mean."

  "I joined up two years ago, and he takes care of the educational parts, and I take the physical."

  "About this drug problem," I said. "I keep reading that it's been with us always. Were there drugs around when you were growing up?"

  "No," he said, "the only thing was cigar
ettes."

  "Not even in Bedford-Stuyvesant?"

  "Nope," he said. "There were no drugs around in the fifties, but I remember as a youngster I was always getting in trouble, stealing fruit, and from the five-and-ten small stuff. Who knows what I'd be now if it wasn't for boxing."

  "You're not the only one," I said.

  "So I opened the boxing club," he said. "If you give a youngster something to do that he enjoys, he won't hang around on corners."

  "That's right."

  "About a year and a half ago," he said, "I opened the gym in this building right out here. It was a barn and a chicken hatchery, and I took young and old. Then I said I was going to close it because they were abusing the equipment, but my wife told me things I didn't know."

  In 1956 Patterson had married Sandra Hicks, when he was twenty-one and she was eighteen, and they had three children. I had heard that they had been divorced, and that Patterson had married a white woman, and that they had two daughters, the two girls I had seen starting up the driveway.