Once They Heard the Cheers Read online

  "My wife is very personable," he was saying now. "She talks to all, and they tell her things they wouldn't tell me. She told me about this Thruway attendant who had a couple of kids, and every night he used to stop at a bar on the way home. Since he got into the boxing here, he hadn't done that, and I kept the gym open."

  "How old are these fighters?"

  "The one I told you about is twenty-one. He was about nineteen then, and I have several fifteen-year-olds. I have one— Andrew Schott—who feels as I did. It's like a religion. The kid is here every day. He has had twenty-five fights, and he can recall every fight he's had. There's no chance of him ever getting involved in drugs."

  "How many of them," I said, "do you take to tournaments and get fights for?"

  "There are fifteen actual fighters," he said. "Then there are two firemen from Poughkeepsie and a councilman from Rosendale that work out and spar to keep in shape. The councilman lost forty-five pounds, and he's been coming here a year and a half, and the gym is open seven days a week, except when we have fights."

  "I would think that the town would appreciate what you're doing," I said.

  "I like the town," he said, "and I like the people. I have no trouble whatsoever with the people in general, the old as well as the young, as long as I keep away from politics."

  "You have a right to be interested in politics," I said.

  "It would cause a lot of flak," he said. "Everybody knows me as just plain Floyd. I'm liked by most people, but not by all. No one has done anything to harm me, but I know, given the opportunity, the ones who don't like me would hurt me. I don't know how to say it, and I don't want to say it."

  "But you went down to Alabama with Jackie Robinson at the time of all the trouble in Birmingham and Selma," I said.

  "Jackie asked me," he said. "A lot of name people went, and I remember landing at the airport and for the first time in my life I saw different rest rooms for blacks and whites. I took movie pictures of the signs—actually there was no film in the camera—so the people would know it was unusual to me, and I was taking it back."

  His two daughters were standing in the doorway, and he called them in and introduced them—Janene, who was nine, and Jennifer, seven. We shook hands, the older one looking right at me, and the younger, her head down, examining me out of the tops of her eyes.

  "How is school?" I said.

  "Fine," the older one said.

  "Excuse us a minute," Patterson said. "I have to ask my wife something."

  He left, with the girls following him, and I walked around the room, looking at his two championship belts, the plaques and trophies he had been awarded, and the framed photographs. There were pictures of him with Eartha Kitt, Jimmy Durante, Harry Bellafonte, Jack Palance, Bob Hope, Jackie Gleason, Lauren Bacall, one with James Cagney and Roland Winters, that I remembered being taken at Newtown, and another, taken in the White House, with Patterson, his wife and their two girls standing with Richard Nixon. There was, also framed, the gate-fold I had put together for The Fireside Book of Boxing in 1961 of pictures of all the heavyweight champions in succession from John L. Sullivan through Patterson. I had discovered three photographs that, when placed together, showed the crowd of 80,000 crammed into Boyle's Thirty Acres in Jersey City on July 2, 1921, for the Dempsey-Carpentier fight, the first million-dollar gate. I needed something for the other side of the fold, and lined up photographs of all the twenty champions in their fighting poses, Patterson twice and on either side of Johansson.

  On a shelf at the right of the bar were record albums of Percy Faith, Johnny Mathis, Roger Williams, Jackie Gleason, André

  Kostelanetz, Hank Williams, and Jo Stafford, the music I remember Patterson listening to in his training camps. Behind the bar the glasses were neatly aligned, the only bottles being two fifths of Seagram's Crown Royal, the tax seals on them unbroken.

  "Do you do much business at this bar," I asked, when Patterson came back.

  "It was here when we bought the house," he said. "Like those animal heads up there. My wife takes a drink now and then, but I can't stand the smell of the stuff."

  "Don't fight it," I said.

  "I was going to have an appointment, like at 3:30," he said, "but the man didn't come. He's the piano teacher, and I told him, 'I'll call you if I'm not going to be here today.' I just called him now to see where he was, and he assumed I would call if I wanted him to come."

  "Who's taking the lessons?"

  "My daughters and I. I take them because Jennifer is a perfectionist, and she hates to make a mistake and she won't play in front of the teacher. She has taken one lesson and Janene has taken three and I've taken three, and Jennifer plays better than both of us. She's the only one who doesn't have to look at the keys, so I reasoned I should take lessons with her and maybe that would help her.

  "She's a natural athlete, too," he said. "She has tremendous coordination, but she hates to be the center of attraction. I remember when she was small and her birthday came and we got her a cake. My wife and I and my older daughter started to sing and she was crying, 'Don't! Don't!'

  "In the school she'll play all the games with team participation, but when it comes to her doing it alone, she won't do it. She took ballet. The teacher, he told me she was fantastic, the best of all, and he had about fifty between the ages of six and twelve, but we took her out because she wouldn't do it alone in front of the others."

  "I think I can understand that," I said.

  "It's understandable to a certain degree," he said.

  "I mean," I said, "that I remember a fella who was very shy."

  "Yes," he said. "I know."

  It was only three weeks after he had knocked out Archie Moore to win the heavyweight championship and it was just before Christmas, but he was back in training at the Long Pond Inn at Greenwood Lake, New York. The inn burned to the ground some years ago, but there used to be a bar and restaurant on the first floor with the living quarters and the gymnasium over it. When I checked with OUie Cromwell, who was one of the owners and tended bar, he said that Patterson was up in his room, and I went up there where he was lying on the bed and listening to that music, and we shook hands.

  "What time is it?" he said.

  "One o'clock," I said.

  "I'll be down in the dining room in a half hour," he said.

  I waited in the dining room for three and a half hours. As I sat there, the place came alive with teen-agers who had been ice skating on the lake, and who had come in to play the juke box and dance. Finally, at 4:30, one of Patterson's sparring partners came in and walked over to the table where I was sitting.

  "Floyd says he'll meet you in the gym in five minutes," the sparring partner said. "He apologizes."

  "That's fine," I said, annoyed. "Where has he been?"

  "Up in the room," the sparring partner said. "He came down a couple of times, but when he saw all these kids here, he went back. He was embarrassed to come in."

  I said nothing about it when I met him in the gym, but two nights later we were standing and talking by the pool table beyond the bar. A couple of sparring partners were shooting pool, and I was working Patterson around slowly when I mentioned it, trying to get him to elaborate on the feelings he had had when he saw the dining room jumping with those kids.

  "You're heavyweight champion of the world now," I said. "Doesn't that give you the security to walk through a room of teen-agers?"

  "No," he said. "I still don't like to be stared at."

  I thought of John L. Sullivan, this country's first sports hero, who used to stride into saloons and announce, "I can lick any man in the world!" The next morning we were standing in front of the Long Pond Inn, waiting for one of the sparring partners who had been sent to town to buy the morning newspapers, when I came back to it.

  "But you're going to be stared at a lot," I said.

  "I know," Patterson said.

  "When did you first realize that this was going to be a problem?"

  "The day after
I won the title," he said. "Just before the fight my wife gave birth to our daughter, so right after the fight, these friends and I, we got in the car to drive back from Chicago. The next day we stopped at one of those roadside restaurants and went in. By then the fight was all over the pages of the newspapers, pictures and all, and I could see the people around the place recognizing me and starting to whisper. I figured we better get out of there quick, so we didn't even finish our meal."

  Just before he won the title, Patterson had bought a ten-room house in Mount Vernon, New York, for his mother and the eight youngest of her eleven children. After Patterson beat Moore, the mayor of the city, who was an ex-fighter, staged a torch-light parade for him, and I asked Patterson what that was like.

  "I was ashamed," he said.

  "Why?" I said.

  "Me sitting in an open car and waving to people," he said. "Those are things you only see kings and Presidents doing."

  A heavyweight champion has to spend some of his time banquet-hopping, and Cus D'Amato made Patterson buy a tuxedo. He said it embarrassed him to wear it because, in his view, formal clothes were for those who had been born and raised to them, and he was not. When he was not in camp he lived with his wife and daughter in St. Albans, on Long Island, and he would do roadwork in a park there a couple of days a week.

  "What time do you run?" I asked him once.

  "I get up at 5:30, so I finish before the people start to work and see me," he said.

  "Doesn't anybody ever see you?" I said.

  "Usually I run on Saturday and Sunday when everybody don't get up so early," he said, "but one day I ran during the week. It was a Thursday, and after I finished in the park the fella who was supposed to pick me up was late. About an hour passed before he came, and there I was sitting on the park bench with my heavy clothes on and all sweaty and a towel around my neck. All these people were going to work by then, and they were looking at me like I was crazy."

  "Didn't anyone recognize you?" I said.

  "No," he said. "I was the champion, so I hid my face."

  "Shyness is so deeply ingrained in you," I said to him another night at the Long Pond, "that I suppose one of your earliest memories is of being embarrassed in public."

  "I guess that's right," he said. "I remember when I was just a little kid. I used to have long hair and my father would comb it. Then he'd send me around the corner for cigarettes, and I remember one day a lady stopping me and running her fingers through my hair. I was so embarrassed that I wanted to cry, and I ran."

  He thought about it. It was after dinner and we were still sitting at the table.

  "I had to be just a tiny kid for a lady to do that," he said, "but I never forgot it."

  So all of that was twenty years before, and now he was supplying a gym and running a boxing club to provide a port for the young of the area who need it. At forty-one he was starting to take piano lessons to help a daughter in whom he saw himself.

  "I hope she can come out of it by herself," he said now. "The first time somebody asked me for my autograph there were like twenty people waiting, and the guy gave me the piece of paper and I forgot how to spell my own name. I got a mental block."

  "I remember you saying how long it took you to be able to look people in the eye."

  "It took years," he said, "and I don't want her to have to go through what I went through. When I came back from the Olympics—and I won the Olypmics when I was seventeen—I went to a dinner and they handed me a microphone. I panicked. Fortunately the gentleman before me had said something, and I stopped to think about that and I commented. Thousands of microphones have been handed to me since then, and it's easier, but it's never easy."

  "I recall," I said, "how you used to say that some day you wanted to own a place in the country and have horses. Do you own horses?"

  "No," he said. "We've got three dogs and a cat and we travel. I take the family wherever I go, to England, to Sweden, to Portugal, to Spain, and to get somebody to take care of horses, too, would be too difficult. Even for me it would be difficult, because I devote so much time to my family. I get up with the kids, and I put them to bed at night. I try to do as much with them as I can, because in my first marriage that was lacking. I was in camp all the time."

  "How are your other children?"

  "My son spent three weeks with me this summer, and he's thirteen now. The two daughters I see occasionally, but they live in Springfield, Massachusetts, and I don't see them as much as I'd like."

  "How did you meet your present wife?" I asked.

  "Janet?" he said. "It's strange how I met her: After I had rewon the title—not right then but in 1962—the secretary I had got married. I used to get thousands of letters, and I needed someone to answer the mail. I have this friend, Mickey Allen . . ."

  "I remember him. He wanted to be a singer, and once you arranged for him to sing the National Anthem at one of your fights."

  I remember how pleased and excited about it Allen was. He reasoned that the exposure on national television would launch him on his vocal career.

  "That's right," Patterson said. "He owns a discothèque and a catering service now, and he said, 'My wife's sister can type. She was secretary to the vice-president of the New York Stock Exchange.' So she worked for me once a week, and that's how I met her. She was born in Rosedale, New York, but her parents moved to Greenwood Lake. I have a house right here for her parents when they come here, and they may stay a week or a month."

  "I'd like to meet your wife," I said, "and I'm wondering if I might take you both to dinner tonight?"

  "That would be nice," he said, "but I'm not sure. There's this seventy-five-year-old woman my wife got to know, and she just lost her husband. She's lonely, and I know it's on the calendar that we're supposed to visit her tonight. Maybe she can change it to tomorrow night, and I'll ask her."

  He went out and I walked around the room again reading the inscriptions on the plaques, and there was a framed hand-lettered quotation from Vince Lombardi that had been presented to Patterson by the 501st Replacement Detachment of the First Armored Division. It was about making winning a habit, even as losing can be, and about doing things right not once in a while but all of the time.

  "I'm sorry," Patterson said when he came back. "My wife says the lady is expecting us, and she's very lonely and she doesn't want to disappoint her. She's sorry."

  "I understand," I said.

  "It's time I went over to the gym," he said. "You want to come along?"

  "Yes, indeed," I said.

  We walked out through the entry hall and the dining room and into the kitchen. The two girls were in the kitchen.

  "I'm going over to the gym now," Patterson said to them, "and you lock the storm door after us. All right?"

  Outside he turned and waited while one of them locked the door. We walked across the parking area at the top of the driveway to the white-painted two-story barn. The ring is on the first floor, with stairs leading up to the loft, like a balcony, overhanging the first floor. In the loft were a couple of heavy punching bags and one light bag and two full-length mirrors. At the back of the loft is the dressing room with steel lockers, and there was a handprinted notice on the wall:

  TO ALL CLUB MEMBERS

  Do Not Invite Anyone To The Gym Without

  First Telling Me—I Do Not Want Strangers

  Wandering Around My House—Casing the Place

  —Should Anyone Violate This I Will Have

  To Ask Them To Leave.

  There were four young fighters, who seemed to be in their teens, undressing in front of the lockers and getting into their ring trunks and boxing shoes. It had been chilly all day and it was cold in the locker room and, after he had stripped, Patterson put on thermal underwear and a sweat suit.

  "You see," he was saying, sitting and lacing one of his ring shoes and looking up at one of the young fighters, "if anybody quits, they can't came back. I take the time. I take the punches, so they can't come back."


  "I know," the fighter was saying, nodding. "I know."

  Two more young fighters came in, and when Patterson finished lacing his shoes and got up, the ones who were ready followed him down the stairs to the gym. It was 5:15, and it was 7:15 when Patterson called it quits. Others came in, the two firemen from Poughkeepsie among them, and Patterson took them on one after the other, moving around on the worn canvas patched with green plastic tape, blocking and picking off their punches, occasionally countering and the sweat beading on his neck and face so that between rounds he had to towel. For two unbroken hours there was the thwack sound of gloves against gloves and the thup sound of gloves landing to the body, the shuffle sound of the shoes on canvas, the rhythmic sound of heavy breathing, and over it, Patterson's comments.

  "You're not bringing your second jab back. Bring it all the way back," he was telling one. To another, "The moment you get close you tend to rear back. Keep your distance. That's it, but don't pull your shoulder back. Keep it relaxed, and when you throw the right hand, throw it from there. If you hold the shoulder up you force the right hand down." To another, "When are you gonna get your hair cut? Every time you lower your head your hair covers your eyes and you have to raise your head." To another, "Why move in? You're smothering your own punches. You have to keep your distance, and you know why you're missing so much? I know what punches you're gonna throw before you throw them. You have to mix them up." To another, "Keep your head down. Every now and then touch your chin to your shoulder." To another, "Throw the right. No good. You're just putting it there. Throw it. That's better. Again. Good."