What Floyd Patterson Taught Me

Floyd Patterson, the former heavyweight champ, lowered the red punching mitts on his hands as he settled his brown caring eyes into me. I knew he was choosing his words. I didn’t know he was about to say something that would influence the rest of my life.

I was then a 15-year-old, 130-pound kid who’d been training in the barn next to Floyd’s home in New Paltz, New York, with dozens of other boys and a revolving cast of pro fighters for a year. I thought I was getting pretty good and wanted to know how good. So I’d paused between throwing a jab, right hand, left hook combination into those worn punching mitts and asked over the smashing clamor of the boxing gym if I had what it takes to be a champ.

Heavy bags were being pummeled around us. Their heavy chains were ringing. Someone was jumping rope, making its leather cord smack the barn wood planks under our feet. Another fighter was using his wrapped-up hands to make a speed bag go bang, bang then bang, bang as he shifted from left to right. Music was thumping Bruce Springsteen and a round counter was ringing at one- and three-minute intervals.

Floyd’s brow furled under that lip of hair he always kept at the front of his head. He straightened his back while keeping his eyes locked in mine. I knew he’d adopted a lot of children and that he helped any who came to his gym. We all knew it didn’t matter to him what our ethnicity was or whether someone had money or not. He just liked helping kids. So yeah, he was our role model, a giant among men.

Floyd knew this, so he carefully, a word at a time, said, “Only a really great fighter should make a go at being a professional boxer. Boxing destroys a lot of good fighters.”

I was young, but not so cocky that I thought I was the next Sugar Ray Leonard. My expression must have shown this because Floyd took the punching mitt of his left hand by pulling it off in his right armpit and placed his left hand on my right shoulder. He then said just loud enough for me to hear in the smashing rhythm of that boxing gym, “I was younger than you when a teacher took me aside in reform school and told me to take a good long look at the people I thought were my pals. He said I should ask myself, really ask myself, if I wanted to be one of those kind of guys, and not just right then, but all the way.”

I glanced around the gym and back to Floyd’s brown eyes as he said, “When I really looked at the guys in that reform school I knew I didn’t want to be one of those mugs, not all the way to prison. But when I got out and saw a fighter I knew I wanted to be him all the way.”

Floyd was a man of few words, and that was a mouthful of advice, so he slid his left hand back into the punching mitt and raised the mitts up again.

As I again tried to perfect my technique, I knew I wanted to be like Floyd, of course. He wasn’t just a champ; in all the years I knew Floyd I never saw him do an unmanly thing. He did everything with deliberate pride. He had the stoic strength and self-satisfaction of a man who’d done what he’d set out to do. There was no bully in him. There was no bravado. He was humble. He treated everyone with the same gentlemanly respect. If we stepped out of line he’d set us straight, but never with anger in his eyes. He was our shining example of what a man should be.

My favorite Floyd story—and he liked to tell this—was that when, late in his professional boxing career, a snide reporter asked him, “So Floyd, what’s it like to be the heavyweight knocked down the most times?” Floyd politely replied, “Pretty good. Because I’m also the heavyweight champ who got up the most times.”

That was the honorable nature of the man.

Still, as I took his advice and really looked around at the pros in the gym I saw that I didn’t want to be them, not all the way.

A few years later, as he signed a college recommendation letter for me, Floyd winked at me as he said, “Remember to ask yourself if you want to be one of those guys, and not sort of, but all the way. That will make a man of you. The man you really want to be.”

He didn’t say anymore, but like any great teacher he was handing me the keys to a lot more—if I’d only take them.