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to harm the fellow—it was a mere pas de danse. The judges didn’t disqualify him, however, and since the boo had warned him to get down to work, he hit the Rumanian once and knocked him out. After that, there was “the Olympic ceremony.” Three portable platforms were moved into the ring. Patterson stood on the highest, with the resuscitated Rumanian at his right, on a lower level, and a Finn, the winner of third honors, at his left. A girl in Finnish National costume had handed Patterson a big bouquet, and he held it in his left hand. A band played the Olympic fanfare and then “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and, tucking his right forearm into his belly, Patterson made a deep, dancing-school bow.

Later, Lee won the hundred-and-seventy-eight-pound final, and got a special cup for being the most skillful boxer in the Olympics. He has a classic stand-up style that goes over big with Europeans. Sanders won the heavyweight title; he was so big that his final opponent, a Swede, simply ran away. The judges disqualified the Swede, who said afterward that it had suddenly occurred to him he might be killed.3 The American boxers won five first places out of a possible ten. The mass of unofficial points the Americans picked up in the boxing competition went so far to offset the unofficial points the Russians scored in gymnastics that in the unofficial point score covering all events the United States won a psychologically important unofficial victory. And that was the last time I had seen Patterson in the flesh before I went to the Garden the night he fought Gannon.

In the meanwhile, I knew, Patterson had been doing well, without being rushed unduly. In any art the prodigy presents a problem. Given too easy a program, he goes slack, but asked too hard a question early, he becomes discouraged. Finding a middle course is particularly difficult in the prize ring; in comparison, the management of juvenile orchestra conductors, mathematicians, and billiardists is simple. The fighter must be confirmed in the belief that he can lick anybody in the world and at the same time be restrained from testing this belief on a subject too advanced for his attainments. The trick lies in keeping the fellow entertained while enriching his curriculum. In my young manhood, there were two Wunderkinder in the light-heavyweight class whose handlers failed to bring it off; one, Young Stribling, was made overcautious by doting parents, and the other, Jimmy Slattery, was made overconfident by adulation. Slattery, like Icarus, made a great splash, though. He was a boy Mozart, a honeydew melon.

In the two years following his return from Finland, Patterson had had seventeen professional fights. Of these, the first thirteen had been with opponents of progressively diminishing unimportance, each picked to contribute something to his education. From the beginning Patterson was a fair television attraction, because of his Olympic fame, and his TV fees served as a kind of scholarship for him. Almost all his fights were on Monday nights—television nights—at a club called the Eastern Parkway Arena, in Brooklyn. His graduation exercises took place in June, 1954, when he went eight televised Eastern Parkway rounds with Joey Maxim, who was still tough and a cutie, or opportunist. Maxim was never a great hitter, though, so he didn’t figure to knock Patterson out. I watched the fight from a stool in the Palace Bar & Grill, on West 45th Street, and what impressed me was that Maxim couldn’t make Patterson look foolish except at infrequent intervals, and then only for a second or two. He would have handled the Helsinki Patterson the way a rodeo clown handles a bull. In the Olympics, Patterson had wasted much time in aimless body-weaving, and had often launched himself through the air like a man trying to get through a closing subway door before the train pulls out. Against Maxim, he held himself together better and hit more often, with shorter, quicker blows. Also, he had got pretty cute himself. His greater vigor more than made up for Maxim’s slight margin in acuity, I thought, and