The Sweet Science - A. J. Liebling [91]
My interest in Patterson goes back to the summer of 1952, when he was a member of the United States boxing team at the Olympic Games in Helsinki, which I attended. There was no boxing ring at Olympic Village, on the outskirts of Helsinki, and the American boxers used to go into town by bus every morning to train in the gymnasium of a workingmen’s club in Häkäniemi, the proletarian quarter of town. The club, in a great granite building known as the People’s House, stood on a small square, in the center of which was a statue of a completely naked boxer. The daily bus trip gave the American boxers a closer contact with Helsinki and its residents than most of the other athletes got; every morning, a knot of admiring, towheaded small boys and not-so-small girls would wait for the American bus to draw up at the curb outside the People’s House, and they would all be there again an hour later to see the boxers leave. The trip made excellent counterpropaganda to the Communist legend of the Land of Lynching, for eleven of the fourteen members of the boxing squad were Negroes. They looked very sharp in their American sports clothes, and the girls quite evidently thought they were beautiful.
There was one working coach with the squad, a jolly, sagacious fellow named Pete Mello, who is head coach of the Catholic Youth Organization boxing team in New York; he had as colleagues a couple of free riders in blue blazers and white buckskin shoes, who stayed far from sweat and Vaseline. On the first morning I met the team, Mello tipped me off to Patterson, who was seventeen and entered in the hundred-and-sixty-five-pound class. Mello picked him as the surest winner for the United States, although the rest of the team included boys who had been amateur stars for years and had won enough watches to stock three hock shops on Sixth Avenue.
Patterson was having no trouble making the weight; he was a tall, straight stick of a boy, slender except for big shoulders. He had a long, straight nose and wore long sideburns; there was something humorously dandified about his appearance. Outside the ring, his favorite position was horizontal. If he saw a bench, he would lie on it rather than sit. Inside the ring he fought with a wild exuberance. He would begin from a crouch, with shoulders and forearms protecting his head, and then would start to wing punches, being as likely to lead with a right as with a left. His style was crude, but his reflexes were so fast he got away with it. His leverage was perfect—his blows hurt, and after throwing one he was almost always in position to hit again. Furthermore, he liked to fight and was as strong as a snake, grabbing his sparring partners and whirling them off balance—an unconventional and technically illegal maneuver that draws only a warning from referees here but is likely to lead to disqualification by the more precise European judges. Mello’s one worry about Patterson was that this would happen, and he kept cautioning the boy on the subject. All Patterson’s hard fights in Helsinki were in the training ring, against heavier teammates. We had a huge heavyweight there named Ed Sanders, who was a football player from Idaho State College, and an alternate named Norvel Lee, who weighed a bit over a hundred and eighty and had won dozens of amateur titles. Lee, who was twenty-eight, was a law-school man heading for the F.B.I., and he knew as much about boxing as an amateur can know. There was a hundred-and-seventy-eight-pound class in the Olympics, and Lee decided to aim for that. Patterson and Lee liked to fight each other, and Lee, even with his extra twenty pounds and his big edge in experience, couldn’t quite hold Patterson even.
There was nothing much to Patterson’s Olympic bouts themselves. In the hundred-and-sixty-five-pound final, Patterson met a Rumanian. The fellow was frightened, as well he might have been, and Patterson clowned a bit. He whirled the Rumanian clean around once, and I could imagine Mello blanching. The crowd booed, although he hadn’t done anything