By Joe Masterleo

It is the end that crowns us, not the fight

- Robert Herrick

 

Former heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson died recently.  Once the youngest man ever to win the coveted title, as well as the first to regain it upon losing, he was also the first of two champions-to-be street urchins adopted and groomed by the legendary trainer Cus D'Amato.  Floyd was the good son; disciplined, retiring, and mild-mannered, easy to like and warm-up to owing to his soft-spoken, almost childlike vulnerability.  By contrast, Mike Tyson's wheel turned in the opposite direction, entirely. 

Mike was the bad son.  Make that the bad egg, the hardboiled bad egg, odor and all.  Call them D'Amato's Jekyll and D'Amato's Hyde.

 

Shielding a glass-jaw via his patented peek-a-boo style, Patterson once landed what many consider to be the single hardest punch (left-hook) ever thrown by a heavyweight post-1950, KO-ing Sweden's Ingemar Johannson, twitching foot and all, in their famed title rematch.  Yet with regard to disposition and temperament, nowhere in the grisly history of the debacle known as professional boxing has there existed such a stark and unreconciled contrast between the inside of a man and the role tht man was called upon to play.

 

To the casual observer he was an enigma.  But for those intent on a closer look, he was an archangel playing a gladiator, Bambi cast as Dick Butkus, Mr. Rogers doing Pontius Pilate, St. Francis in the role of fearsome Frank Netti.  Bedecked in his dark ring robes, hooded and soft-spoken, he could have been mistaken for a Benedictine monk doing penance in a fistic hell inhabited by hoodlums, thugs, an assortment of palookas and club fighters.  They of the "deese, dem, and dose" articulations.  Society's angry and marginalized, complete with chips on their shoulders, something to prove, and enemies to combat everywhere but within themselves.

 

D'Amato, never one to pull his verbal punches, once described Patterson in the ring as one who "lacks that killer instinct", a criticism that might strike at the machismo of an impressionable young boxer at the mercy of his father-mentor, yet later become a telling compliment to a grown man in the fullness of his time.  When all is said and done, what sensible man would want "killer instinct" as central to his legacy?  And who shall forget the image of an impassioned Patterson on bent knee, gently cradling the head of an unconscious Johannson who lay flat on his back, just seconds after being KO'd by Floyd's thundering hook.

 

Wounded, reclusive, shame-filled in hang-dog fashion, even tentative at times, Patterson often fought with a detached, far-away look in his eyes.  It seemed the kind of look that bore the silent wish of a man desiring to be doing something else, someplace else, anyplace else, as long as it wasn't in the ring.  But he humbly accepted his role, surrendered to it as best he could, and was truly thankful for the opportunities that boxing afforded him.  And he more than survived, successfully occupying a distinctive niche in the loneliest, most brutish of sports.  After all, it was that or nothing, his way off the streets, the quicksand of a turbulent past, and a one-way ticket to Nowhere-ville.

 

While his many trips to the canvas were rivaled only by those of Rembrandt and Van Gogh, time and again he demonstrated courage and resolve to beat the count, even when it might have been smarter to stay down.  "They said I was the fighter who got knocked down the most", the comeback champ once observed, "but I also got up the most."

 

He once likened his love-hate relationship to the sport as that of a husband to his serially unfaithful wife; "She keeps hurting you" exclaimed Patterson, "but you keep going back to her."  Intimidated by Sonny Liston and outclassed by Ali, he retired from the toll-taking rigors of the sport reasonably intact.

 

While Patterson was indeed his own man, by virtue of his transparency personified every man who ever donned a warrior's mantle in one harrowing endeavor or another.  Mind you, not because he wanted to, but because he had to.  Wherever Patterson is now, be sure that he is doing only that which he enjoys.  Really enjoys.  Someplace that allows the lion that he so skillfully became to at long last lie down with the lamb that he always was.