A Lone Star Memory

In his mind, Roy Harris can still see Floyd Patterson looking up at him from the canvas.

In his heart, Roy Harris can still see himself winning.

When heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis and challenger Vitali Klitschko square off Saturday night at Staples Center, it will have been 45 years since Harris and Patterson faced each other in the last heavyweight title fight held in Los Angeles. Patterson, suffering from a form of dementia, has little or no memory of that night. But for Harris, now 70 and in his 31st year of practicing law, the memory remains painfully clear.

“This is someone I should have beaten with ease,” says Harris by phone from Buena Vista, Colo., where he is vacationing. “I think about the fight all the time. I have never stopped thinking about it.”

Perhaps it’s Harris’ memory that is faulty. Doesn’t he remember being knocked down four times? Doesn’t he recall the deep cuts suffered over both eyes, the blood streaming down his face and trickling out of his nose, the 14 stitches he required? Didn’t his father, Big Henry, and his trainer, Bill Gore, order the fight stopped after 12 rounds?

“The doctor,” Harris concedes, “was afraid my eyeball was going to come out.”

And he still thinks he should have won?

Yes, he insists, if he hadn’t overtrained and lost too much weight. He was forced to put back on 20 pounds over the last two weeks.

And how did he do that?

“For the week leading up to the fight,” he says, “I drank two bottles of beer every night. And I don’t even like beer.”

*

The Los Angeles sports community, and much of the rest of the country, was in shock over the weekend leading up to the fight, held on a Monday night. On the previous Thursday, Red Sanders, the popular, vibrant, 53-year-old coach of the UCLA football team, seemingly in good health, had collapsed and died of a heart attack.

The weekend papers were filled with memories and tributes.

The focus also was on the Coliseum where, on Saturday night, 73,164 filed in for the annual Times Charity preseason football game between the Rams and the Washington Redskins.

On Sunday, the Coliseum was site of a doubleheader between the Dodgers, newly arrived from Brooklyn that year, and the St. Louis Cardinals.

The fight was scheduled for Aug. 18, 1958, at Wrigley Field (the Los Angeles version of the Chicago landmark), which the Angels of the Pacific Coast League called home.

And despite everything else going on that hectic, tragic weekend, the public was intrigued by the match, even though most viewed it as a mismatch.

If Patterson were a heavyweight today, he would be in Roy Jones’ class in terms of size and weight if not skill, but in those days of smaller, lighter heavyweights, Patterson, who weighed 184 1/2, fit right in.

He would have been a perfect match for Rocky Marciano on the scales. In the ring, however, it might have been another matter. But fortunately for Patterson, he didn’t have to face Marciano, who had retired three years earlier.

Patterson had won the vacant crown -- yes, there was only one heavyweight title in those days -- by knocking out Archie Moore in the fifth round of a 1956 bout.

Since then, Patterson had beaten Tommy “Hurricane” Jackson, a lightly regarded pro, and Pete Rademacher, a highly regarded amateur, to improve his record to 33-1 with 24 knockouts. Rademacher, after winning Olympic gold as a heavyweight in the 1956 Games, got a heavyweight title shot in his first professional fight. He obviously wasn’t ready. Patterson knocked down Rademacher seven times, the knockout blow coming in the sixth round. But Rademacher also managed to put down Patterson once, further calling into question Patterson’s right, at 23, to be Marciano’s successor.

Harris too had questionable credentials. Although he was ranked third in the world and was undefeated at 22-0 with nine knockouts, he had fought mostly stiffs and never stepped into a ring outside of Texas.

His most impressive victory had been a decision over Willie Pastrano the year before.

But Harris also was coming off a six-month stint in the army, which, while keeping him in shape, certainly didn’t allow him to stay in fighting shape for the heavyweight champion. While Patterson trained in Oceanside, Harris was secluded in the San Bernardino Mountains at Arrowhead Springs where he went on a vigorous, high-protein diet.

Harris was largely unsupervised because his trainer, Gore, was busy elsewhere, working with another fighter. When Gore showed up in Arrowhead two weeks before the fight, he was stunned. Harris weighed 174 pounds.

“I’m going to call this off,” Gore told him. “You’re not going to be able to fight. You won’t have any energy.”

No way, Harris told him. “I might never get another chance to fight for the heavyweight title.”

With an awkward style, a lack of knockout power and a disturbing lack of speed, Harris didn’t have much of a chance that night. So little chance that he was installed as an 8-1 underdog.

But that didn’t discourage media who knew a great story when they saw one. Harris was an aw-shucks cowboy out of Cut N’ Shoot, Texas, population somewhere between 100 and 200 depending on who was doing the counting.

Which big city in East Texas was it near?

“Conroe,” says Harris.

His father was described by one reporter as “Big Henry Harris, the best knife, club or bare-knuckle fighter in all Texas.”

Says Harris: “My father could have whipped Joe Louis, but only if he came down to Texas, because my father was not going to go north.”

To promote the fight, Harris was brought down from the mountains one night the week of the fight to an L.A. studio to record a song specifically written for him titled “Cut N’ Shoot.”

“It was a good song,” says Harris, “and they played it a lot around Houston and Conroe, but it didn’t do that good elsewhere because they messed up the other side. They used a ghost singer in my place who didn’t do a very good job.”

Nobody had to sell Texans on Harris. Gamblers from that state wagered about $300,000 in Las Vegas in the final days before the match, dropping the odds to 3 1/2-1.

“Even talking about betting money like that,” promoter Bill Rosensohn told The Times the day before the fight, “is enough to give me a nasty case of the shakes.”

The night of the fight, Harris was every bit the wide-eyed country boy as he was led into the ring.

“They must have had 100 police forming a line to protect me,” Harris said. “And one fella broke through and scratched me. I never seen anything like it.”

With tickets priced from $30 down to $5, a crowd of 21,680 paid their way into Wrigley Field, the live gate of $234,183.25 breaking the state record.

There was no pay-per-view then, but the closed-circuit theater business was booming. Patterson-Harris was shown on 151 screens in 133 cities.

In the theater in Cut N’ Shoot, it cost locals $7.30 a ticket to watch their favorite son.

Louis, who had fought in the most recent L.A. heavyweight title match 19 years earlier, was on hand that night, as was another former heavyweight champ, Max Baer. The governor of Texas, Price Daniels, was there as well to support Harris.

It didn’t help.

Weighing in at 194 pounds earlier that day, Harris had a 9 1/2-pound advantage over Patterson.

That didn’t help either.

Patterson did go down in the second round, but it was described as more of a left-right push than a combination. An embarrassed Patterson said he slipped.

Harris remembers it differently.

“He was staggering,” Harris said, “but I didn’t follow up. I let him get away.”

There was no question about the Harris knockdowns. The first came at the end of the sixth round, and two more followed in the eighth round of the scheduled 15-rounder.

“After the third round, I didn’t have a whole lot of energy left,” Harris says. “I didn’t have no zip. But I wanted to keep going.”

Those beer diets will do it to you every time.

Ever the gentleman, Harris retained his manners all the way through his beating. When he inadvertently hit Patterson with an illegal backhand, he said to the champion, “Excuse me.”

There were no such pleasantries in the 12th round. Patterson put down Harris with a powerful right to the jaw. His face crimson, his breath coming in gasps, Harris staggered backward, groped for the ropes and finally found the top strand, but then sank to his knees. He tried to get up once, sagged back to the canvas and finally pulled himself up at the count of nine.

When the round ended, Harris’ father, Henry, decided his son had had enough and instructed Gore to tell referee Mushy Callahan to stop the fight.

“I couldn’t see good because of the cuts, but I could see,” Harris said. “I just didn’t know anything about nutrition. I would have needed about two more weeks to get into proper shape. Then, I think I could have handled Patterson without a problem.”

Harris, who made $101,000 for the night, wanted a rematch. It had been estimated that, if Harris had won, a second fight could bring in $1 million if it were staged in Houston. Instead, Harris went home to Cut N’ Shoot where he was greeted with a celebration and then went on to try to rebuild his reputation against lesser foes.

He defeated seven in a row, but then stepped up again in class to 1960 to face Sonny Liston and lost on a first-round TKO. Harris also lost to Henry Cooper and, after being beaten by Bob Cleroux in 1961, retired at 28.

“I needed to do other things,” Harris says. “I was getting older and I’d seen a lot of fighters stay in the game too long. I didn’t want to get into those problems. I didn’t want to be an old fighter getting beaten up by young fighters.”

Instead, bankrolled by the money he had earned in the ring, Harris carved out a rich and rewarding life after boxing. He passed the bar, made several million in real estate and was county clerk back home in Montgomery County for 28 years. He and his wife of 47 years, Jean, raised six children and still live on 31 acres in Cut N’ Shoot.

Patterson, who made about $300,000 for the fight, would go on to a memorable fight trilogy against Ingemar Johansson. Patterson lost to the Swedish fighter in their first match and then came back to win the next two, becoming the first man to regain the heavyweight title. But Patterson’s career would be shattered by two first-round knockouts at the hands of Liston.

Harris says he could see problems in Patterson that night in Wrigley despite his own blurred vision.

“He seemed to need to let you hit him first,” says Harris, “so he would have an excuse to hit you back. That doesn’t work too well with Sonny Liston.”

Harris bought a film of his fight with Patterson years ago for “between $400 and $500,” but he tossed it in a filing cabinet and has never watched it.

“I suppose I’ll watch it some day,” Harris says, “but when I do, Patterson will probably win again.”