A Writer's Life Read Free Page B

with each breath, Patterson allowed me to go to his home for a postfight interview, in which he replied to questions that I might not have asked had other reporters been in the room. In 1964, after a first-round knockout by Liston, and after an assignment editor at the
Times
told me that the paper was at this point satiatedwith my stories about Patterson, I spent a weekend with him in order to do an article for
Esquire
, in which, among other things, he described what it is like being knocked out.
    â€œIt is not a
bad
feeling when you’re knocked out,” he told me. “It’s a
good
feeling, actually. It’s not painful, just a sharp grogginess. You don’t see angels or stars; you’re on a pleasant cloud. After Liston hit me in Nevada, I felt, for about four or five seconds, that everybody in the arena was actually in the ring with me, circled around me like a family, and you feel warmth toward all the people in the arena after you’re knocked out. You feel lovable to all the people. And you want to reach out and kiss everybody—men and women—and after the Liston fight somebody told me I actually blew a kiss to the crowd from the ring. I don’t remember that. But I guess it’s true because that’s the way you feel during the four or five seconds after a knockout.…
    â€œBut then,” he continued, pacing the room, “this good feeling leaves you. You realize where you are, and what you’re doing there, and what has just happened to you. And what follows is a hurt, a confused hurt—not a physical hurt—it’s a hurt combined with anger; it’s a what-will-people-think hurt; it’s an ashamed-of-my-own-ability hurt … and all you want then is a hatch door in the middle of the ring—a hatch door that will open and let you fall through and land in your dressing room instead of having to get out of the ring and face those people. The worst thing about losing is having to walk out of the ring and face those people.…”
    Although he had never complained that he had perhaps been too open with me in the long and revealing piece that appeared in
Esquire
—indeed, I later coauthored a shorter piece with him in the same magazine, and we continued to see each other socially until we approached our senior years and his memory began to fade, and he could not always remember my name—my own lingering regret about that piece was that the editors had entitled it “The Loser.”
    While it is true that Patterson was never a match for Liston or Ali, and that he had probably been knocked down more times than any highly ranked heavyweight in history—he went down
seven
times in a
single
fight in 1959 while losing his title to Sweden’s Ingemar Johansson—it is just as true that Patterson was the all-time heavyweight leader in getting up off the floor. He was climbing to his feet after Johansson had decked him for the final time in 1959, but the referee stopped the fight. In a return matcha year later, Patterson knocked out Johansson, becoming the first man ever to regain the heavyweight title; and he subsequently stopped Johansson in their third and final fight. And so instead of thinking of Floyd Patterson as a “loser,” I consider him an exemplar of perseverance, a man who never quit and always tried to get up, even during moments of staggering disappointment and defeat.
    Not long after Patterson had retired from the ring, the Yankees also became known as losers, having fallen from first place in the American League in 1964 to sixth in 1965, tenth in 1966, and ninth in 1967. The Yankees were owned by CBS, which had become the controlling partner in 1964, but I never knew what, if anything, the network’s ownership had to do with the team’s uncharacteristically poor record. I myself was now out of New York regularly, and I rarely went to see games in Yankee Stadium. After leaving the
Times
in 1965 to