Floyd Patterson: the boxer as reluctant knight

A man divided against himself

[ More on boxing and masculinity at the end of this post. ]

Floyd Patterson began his boxing career at the top. In 1952 he won the middleweight gold medal at the Helsinki Olympics, and in 1956, when he was 21 years old, he defeated Archie Moore and became the youngest heavyweight champion on record. Divided against himself, he did not stay at the top for long.

Patterson lost the title to Ingemar Johansson in 1959. In 1960 he challenged Johansson and became the first heavyweight to regain the title. He successfully defended it against Johansson in 1961. Those were the peaks. The valleys followed. They include two devastating losses to Sonny Liston (1962, 1963) and two losses to Muhammad Ali (1965, 1972). Late in his career, Ali was declared the winner of fights most observers believe he lost. Patterson lost fights that most observers thought he won.

Boxers tend to be admired for their success in the ring, not for their standing as men. Books and essays tend to make the opposite point about Floyd Patterson. His fans admire him as kind and considerate, a “sensitive male” before his time, but they puzzle over his deportment as a fighter.

Biographies by Alan H. Levy and W. K. Stratton are edged with reservations about Patterson’s uneven performance in the ring. Both emphasize divisions in his self-image. Levy calls Patterson “a boxer and a gentleman,” and Stratton dubs him “boxing’s invisible champion.”

These divisions were self-generated. Patterson worked to make himself invisible, or at least hard to see. He also sought to be both gentleman and boxer. But it seems that his body was in one place and his brain in another. His was a divided self, not the self of a whole man. Speaking as a medievalist and as an amateur boxer, I suggest that Patterson resembled a masculine figure who joined the instincts Patterson himself could not reconcile: the knight, the whole man of the Middle Ages.

Today’s gentleman is the knight’s descendant. The Oxford English Dictionary says that a gentleman is “a man having the characteristics traditionally associated with high social standing; a chivalrous, courteous, or honourable man” (sense 2.a).

The gentleman boxer is an established irony. The OED cites an 1867 novel called Guardian Angel in which the hero’s blackened eyes are said to be “‘in mourning’, as the gentlemen of the ring say” (sense 6). The novel’s readers would have been amused to learn that boxers used gentlemanly euphemisms. The OED draws a counter example from a 2007 newspaper that describes someone named Ray (not specifically a boxer) as “a true gentleman and a real sportsman” (sense 2.a). To be both a true gentleman and a real sportsman was still remarkable 140 years after Guardian Angel appeared.

Where do we see the gentleman in Patterson’s boxing? In a 1953 fight in Chicago, Patterson knocked the mouthpiece of his opponent, Chester Mieszala, to the floor. Mieszala got to his knees to find it, a dangerous thing for a pro boxer to do. Following amateur rules, which did not constrain him as a pro, Patterson did not hit Mieszala when he was down. Instead, he “allowed himself to be chivalrous.” The crowd and Patterson’s manager, Cus D’Amato, disapproved of “the unusually gentlemanly composite that was Patterson’s nature” (Levy, p. 32).

In 1961 Patterson knocked out Johansson. Patterson danced in his corner and shouted “I showed you” at the press corps that had doubted him. But chivalry followed: he rushed to Johansson, knelt at his side, embraced him, and promised him a rematch. Johansson was unconscious, more seriously injured than ring officials thought. Paterson later swore that he would “never again inflict as much damage on another fighter as he had on Johansson” (Levy, p. 124).

When Johansson stood up, Patterson kissed him. Some dismissed the gesture as “girlish,” Patterson said, “but it was my expression of admiration for a man who had fought me well” (Stratton, p. 132). At least Patterson got that right: affection based on admiration, not compassion. The kiss was chivalrous and courteous: it is the fraternal kiss of the knight, and I call it the boxer’s kiss (Boxing and Masculinity, ch. 20).

Patterson occupied still another chivalric role, that of pilot. In World War I, pilots were idealized by foot soldiers as knights of the air. Men in the trenches admired the flyers’ freedom and skill and envied their highly visible valor (see my book, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War, pp. 157, 173-74). Patterson was afraid of flying. What did he do? He learned to fly.

Patterson was told that his daughter was being racially targeted. Accompanied by a pilot, Patterson flew a Cessna from his upstate training camp to the New York suburb where he lived. Once there, he admonished the boys—“Don’t do it again”—and took his daughter home (Stratton, p. 168; Levy, pp. 164-65). Few boxers learn to fly. But even fewer would end a rescue mission so inconclusively. A knight might retreat from defeat, but he would never pull back from victory. Patterson did.

Patterson fits a familiar pattern: the boxer grew up in poverty, survived youthful skirmishes with the law,  did time in an institution, and saw boxing as the path to success and wealth. He blamed himself for his family’s poverty and sought invisibility in a nook Brooklyn subway tunnel. He went there to skip meals and ease the family’s food bill. As heavyweight champion, Patterson visited the hideout, which he called his boyhood “room,” and said, “Now I can get it off my mind” (Levy, pp. 10-11). However, his need to hide persisted. 

After he lost to Liston in 1962, Patterson left Chicago secretly and in disguise. “The night was his friendly protector,” Stratton writes (p. 157). That was as true for the boxer at 27 as it had been for the boy at 7. Driving back to New York, Patterson stopped to stretch. When a state trooper showed up, the boxer struggled to get his fake beard and mustache into place. Then, to keep from being arrested, he removed his disguise. Patterson had left his driver’s license in Chicago, but the trooper recognized him. “I lost a fight last night,” Patterson said. “Do I have to lose again?” The trooper let him go. Alone in Chicago, Patterson’s wife did not know where he was until he called her from the road (Stratton, p. 158).

In New York, Patterson drove to his training camp, another hiding place. Only days later did he go home—again in disguise. His wife “scarcely recognized him,” Stratton writes (p. 158). Then, after deciding to take a rematch with Liston, Patterson bizarrely fled to Spain, once more in disguise. There he acted like an old man, affected a limp, and ate soup, which he hated.

In a conversation with journalist Gay Talese, Patterson tried to explain his self-defeating behavior. “Part of the reason I do the things I do, and cannot seem to conquer that one word—myself—is because . . . because . . . I am a coward,” he said (Stratton, p. 159). It is hard to believe that anybody who won 55 fights (40 by knock-out) and lost 8 (one draw) would think of himself as a coward.

Patterson was not a coward, but neither was he a great boxer. W. C. Heinz writes that he had “the physical attributes to be a fighter—always excepting his inability to absorb a heavyweight’s big punch.” This is a modest compliment. Physical attributes are not rare; the skill to use them is. Patterson “also had the compassion of a priest,” Heinz says, adding, “I never knew anyone else in sports whose antennae were so attuned to the suffering of others” (“The Shy One,” p. 53).

Patterson was also attuned to his own suffering. For him, suffering was a form of expiation, a sacrifice, which is how suffering was seen by knights. Few boxers convert to Catholicism or make Christian charity a key feature of their public conduct. Patterson did both. He championed civil rights during the Kennedy era and was invited to the White House (Stratton, pp. 139-40). His sacrifices and subsequent recognition did not increase Patterson’s sense of worth, earn redemption, or bring wholeness. He could fight the battles of others, but he could not win his own.

Heinz didn’t believe in chivalry. He maintained that Patterson regained his title from Johansson in 1960 because the boxer became “vicious” and turned the match into “a kind of street fight.” Patterson destroyed “this guy’s [Johansson’s] classic style. . . . This was your greatest fight, because for the first time you expressed emotion.” In answer to this, Patterson said, “I just hope that I’ll never be as vicious again.” And he never was, Heinz notes, even in his fights with Ali and Liston, when “anger translated into viciousness might have given him the only chance he had” (“The Shy One,” p. 71).

Levy seconds Heinz’s view that Patterson had the “compassion of a priest” (p. 253). I disagree. The biographers should have remembered that, as history shows, good priests know how to fight and even die for what they believe in. How compassionate was it for Patterson to leave his wife alone in Chicago after he lost to Liston, or to show up at his own home in disguise? Did his daughter feel that her father made it clear to her bullies that he would protect her in the future?

Patterson’s problem wasn’t that was a coward. His problem was that he thought he was a coward. The lesson for every man is plain: if a negative self-image can defeat a champion boxer, it can defeat you.

Patterson’s history contradicts my claim that boxing helps us find the whole man. Because Patterson didn’t want to fight, success in the ring did not develop his masculinity. To him, boxing was a job, not an expression of manly wholeness. Like knights, boxers struggle to balance the instinct to fight with a code of honor. Patterson did not command the fighting spirit that would have put his chivalry to the test and helped him pull these two sides together. He boxed to forget who he was, not to find out. No man who gets into the ring should pass up this life-altering opportunity. That’s what Patterson did. He was defeated by his divided self before the bell rang.

More from Allen on boxing and masculinity

Interview with Janice Fiamengo & Tom Golden. https://menaregood.locals.com/post/3233543/boxing-and-masculinity-fighting-to-find-the-whole-man

Allen’s book, Boxing And Masculinity: Fighting to Find the Whole Man
https://www.amazon.com/Boxing-Masculinity-Fighting-Find-Whole/dp/1667851829