PATTERSON, Floyd

(b. 4 January 1935 in Waco, North Carolina), 1952 Olympic gold medalist in boxing, the youngest heavyweight champion in history, and the first boxer to lose and subsequently regain the world heavyweight title. He was best known during the 1960s for his fights against Ingemar Johansson, Sonny Liston, and Muhammad Ali.

The third of eleven children born to Thomas Patterson, a construction worker and longshoreman, and Annabelle (Johnson) Patterson, a homemaker, Patterson moved with his family to Brooklyn, New York, in 1936 when he was barely a year old. As a child Patterson was so backward and withdrawn that his mother feared he was mentally retarded. His father had gone north in search of work but found the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant detrimental to his son, who early became involved with gangs. After several arrests for truancy, shoplifting, and other petty crimes, Patterson was consigned to the Wiltwyck School for Boys in Esopus, New York, an institution identified as being for emotionally disturbed boys. At Wiltwyck he learned to read and write, and perhaps just as important, acquired the boxing skills that ultimately became the source of his livelihood and his fame. Not until his release from Wiltwyck, however, did Patterson consider boxing as a career.

Patterson's journey to the heavyweight championship began in 1949 at the Gramercy Park Gym of legendary trainer and manager Constantine "Cus" D'Amato. In January 1950 Patterson won the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) tournament in the 147-pound weight class. After winning the New York Golden Gloves light heavyweight title in 1951 and 1952 Patterson, fighting as a middleweight, captured a gold medal at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, Finland, when he took only seventy-four seconds to knock out Vasile Tita of Romania. Patterson won forty of his forty-four amateur bouts, thirty-seven by knockout.

Patterson made his professional debut as a light heavyweight on 12 September 1952, scoring a fourth-round technical knockout over Eddie Godbold. He won his first twelve professional contests before losing to Joey Maxim on 7 June 1954 and then enjoyed a string of twenty-three consecutive victories, broken by his loss to Johansson in 1959. Patterson's first shot at the heavyweight championship came in 1956 when the retirement of Rocky Marciano vacated the title. On 30 November, Patterson made short work of the heavily favored veteran Archie Moore, knocking him out in the fifth round. At the age of twenty-one years and five months, Patterson became the youngest heavyweight champion in history.

On 20 June 1960 Patterson made history when he knocked out Ingemar Johansson in the fifth round of their bout for the world heavyweight title, becoming the first man to regain the championship after having relinquished it. Nine months earlier, on 26 June 1959, Johansson had taken the crown from Patterson when he caught him with a powerful right cross that sent him to the canvas in the third round.

Because D'Amato refused to match Patterson against any fighter associated with the promoter James Norris and his corrupt International Boxing Club, Patterson fought a series of inferior opponents and meaningless exhibitions until his first confrontation with Johansson. Patterson battled Johansson a third time, a six-round melee on 13 March 1961 that Patterson won by knockout. After defeating Tom McNeeley on 4 December 1961 to retain the heavyweight title, Patterson had to defend it against the man whom critics suggested he had been avoiding: Charles "Sonny" Liston.

Patterson's title fight with Liston, held in Chicago on 25 September 1962, was among the shortest on record. Liston demolished Patterson two minutes, six seconds into the first round. Deeply humiliated, Patterson wore a false beard and mustache in public for months to conceal his identity. In the rematch on 22 July 1963 the results were the same, except that Patterson lasted four seconds longer than in the first meeting. Although no longer the champion, Patterson continued to box. After falling to Liston, he scored an eighth-round technical knockout over Dante Amonti on 6 January 1964 and went on to defeat in turn Eddie Machen, Charles Powell, George Chuvalo, and Tod Herring, though only Chuvalo posed a serious challenge. During the 1960s Patterson also fought twice more for the heavyweight championship, losing by technical knockout to Muhammad Ali, who had earlier taken the title from Liston, and by decision to Jimmy Ellis.

The fight between Ali and Patterson on 22 November 1965 was overshadowed by racial and religious tension, assuming the character of a holy war of Christian against Muslim. A convert to Roman Catholicism, Patterson said, "The image of a Black Muslim as the world heavyweight champion disgraces the sport and the nation. Cassius Clay [Patterson refused to call his opponent Muhammad Ali] must be beaten and the Black Muslims' scourge removed from boxing." To shame Patterson, Ali taunted him with racial slurs and needlessly prolonged the fight until the referee at last called a halt to the mismatch in the twelfth round.

Following the loss to Ali, Patterson's advisers urged him to stop fighting. When he refused, his wife, the former Sandra Hicks, whom he had married in a civil ceremony on 11 February 1956 and, after his conversion, remarried in a religious ceremony on 13 July 1956, filed for divorce. (They had four children.) On 29 September 1966 Patterson, still regarded as a leading heavyweight contender, knocked out Henry Cooper in the fourth round. He defeated Willie Johnson and Bill McMurray in his first two bouts of 1967 before battling Jerry Quarry to a draw on 9 June and subsequently losing the rematch in October.

When Ali was stripped of his title for draft evasion, Patterson got a final opportunity to reclaim the heavyweight championship. He lost a close decision to Ellis on 14 September 1968 in a bid for the World Boxing Association (WBA) title, a fight that many at ringside believed him to have won. Following the match with Ellis, Patterson at last announced his retirement. Yet two years and one day later, on 15 September 1970, he returned to the ring, knocking out Charlie Green in the tenth round.

Patterson continued boxing until 1972; the finale came on 20 September with a second loss to Muhammad Ali in a bout for the North American Boxing Federation (NABF) heavyweight championship. In a career that spanned twenty years Patterson compiled a record of fifty-five wins, eight losses, one draw, and forty knockouts in sixty-four professional fights.

Retiring to New Paltz, New York, with his second wife, Janet, and their three children, Patterson opened the Huguenot Boxing Club in 1973. Elected to the Olympic Hall of Fame in 1987 and the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1991, Patterson served on the New York State Boxing Commission between 1977 and 1985 and as director of the New York Off-Track Betting Commission. In 1995 Governor George Pataki appointed Patterson chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission, a position from which he resigned in 1998 after disclosing that he suffered from acute memory loss, to which injuries sustained during his career undoubtedly contributed.

Among the smallest of the modern heavyweight champions, the six-foot tall Patterson never exceeded a fighting weight of two hundred pounds. A gracious demeanor concealed the ferocity he displayed in the ring, earning him a reputation as one of the true gentlemen in his sport.

With coauthor Milton Gross, Patterson wrote his autobiography, Victory Over Myself (1961). Jack Newcombe, Floyd Patterson: Heavyweight King (1961), remains the standard biography. Although somewhat dated, John D. McCallum, The World Heavyweight Boxing Championship: A History (1974), contains a useful chapter on Patterson. Profiles of Patterson during his years as heavyweight champion include Gay Talese, "Portrait of the Ascetic Champ," New York Times Magazine (5 Mar. 1961), and Pete Hamill, "Floyd's Fight to Save His Pride," Saturday Evening Post (27 June 1964). More recent essays on Patterson are "Boxing's Last Gentleman," New Yorker (31 July 1995), and Steve Pinto, "Patterson 'Very Involved' Despite Memory Loss," in the Middletown, New York, Times Herald-Record (3 Apr. 1998). James B. Roberts and Alexander G. Skutt, The Boxing Register: International Boxing Hall of Fame Official Record Book (1997), offers a brief but informative overview of Patterson's career, including a detailed summary of his professional bouts.

Mark G. Malvasi