Floyd Patterson, 71; Enigmatic Boxer’s Two Heavyweight Titles Were High Points in Seesaw Career

Floyd Patterson, a heavyweight boxing champion with a heavyweight inferiority complex, died Thursday at his home in New Paltz, N.Y. He was 71.

Patterson had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease for about eight years and also had prostate cancer, his nephew, Sherman Patterson, told the Associated Press.

Fighting out of a defensive crouch from behind his gloves -- it came to be known as Patterson’s peekaboo style -- Patterson was a devastating puncher in some fights, a human punching bag in others, almost always a mystery as a boxer.

The first man to regain the heavyweight title when he knocked out Ingemar Johansson of Sweden in 1960, Patterson was hailed as a boxing superstar. Two years later, after he had been knocked out in the first round by Sonny Liston, he was voted “flop of the year.”

Wrote the late Jim Murray in The Times: “An intense, gentle, tormented young man, perpetually sad, perpetually bedeviled by nameless anxieties, Floyd Patterson is pathetically miscast as a pugilist.”

New York columnist Red Smith once characterized him as “a man of peace whose life has been devoted to beating men with his fists.”

After knocking out Johansson in 1960, Patterson confessed that he didn’t like what that fight had done to him.

“I was so filled with hate,” he said. “I wouldn’t ever want to be like that again.”

And yet, he took his ring failures hard. After the first-round knockout by Liston at Comiskey Park in Chicago, a shamed Patterson sneaked out of the ballpark -- in fact, clear out of town -- wearing dark glasses and a false beard. Had he not been arrested for speeding two states away, the disguise probably would have worked.

Patterson, who later fought, and was beaten by, the best heavyweights of his day -- Liston and Muhammad Ali -- knocked out an aging Archie Moore, the light-heavyweight champion, for the vacant heavyweight title in 1956, at 21 becoming the youngest heavyweight champion.

Had it not been for Johansson, though, Patterson’s career and championship might have passed with little notice.

After winning the title, he defended it successfully, knocking out light-hitting Tommy “Hurricane” Jackson and Olympic heavyweight champion Pete Rademacher, then stopping Roy Harris, a journeyman whose main claim to fame was that he hailed from Cut ‘n’ Shoot, Texas, and knocking out Englishman Brian London in 11 rounds.

Johansson, who was accompanied almost everywhere he went by an entourage that included his fiancee, Birgit Lundgren, was ridiculed by some for what appeared to be lax training practices and called a coward by others for having backed out of an Olympic championship bout several years earlier.

Even so, the unbeaten European champion loomed as Patterson’s first big test when they fought in 1959 at Yankee Stadium in New York.

As it turned out, Johansson was far too big a test. After two rounds of sparring, the Swede clocked Patterson in the third with a left to the head and a right to the jaw, dropping him for a nine count. Six more times in the round, the relentless Johansson floored Patterson. There were still 58 seconds left when the fight was stopped.

A year later, this time at the Polo Grounds in New York, a newly dedicated Patterson showed up. He took charge immediately, escaped potential trouble in the second, then gave Johansson a fearful beating in the fifth.

After working on the Swede’s closing left eye, and connecting with body blows as well, Patterson floored him with a left hook, a groggy Johansson taking a nine count.

Punching at will, Patterson unleashed a thunderous left hook that ended Johansson’s heavyweight reign six days short of a year.

The punch knocked Johansson flat on his back, where he lay, out cold, one foot spasmodically twitching.

“He lay there, kicking,” Patterson said. “I didn’t figure then that he was gonna get up.”

Johannson did get up, though, and they fought again a year later in Miami. Johansson decked Patterson twice in the first round, then was knocked out in the sixth by Patterson’s short overhand right to the head.

Patterson knocked out Tom McNeeley later that year in another defense of the title, then ran afoul of Liston, who followed up his 1962 first-round knockout with another a year later. Patterson tried twice more to win the title a third time but was battered for 12 rounds by a taunting Ali before their 1965 fight was stopped; Patterson had trained for it in a renovated chicken coop. Then he lost a disputed 15-round decision to World Boxing Assn. champion Jimmy Ellis in 1968.

Through it all, Patterson, calm, polite and well-spoken, exuded behavior that said he never quite measured up, a trait that followed him from childhood.

When he was 2, according to a 1957 New York Post story, his mother, Annabelle, had a picture taken of the young Floyd with two older brothers and an uncle, all boxers. The photo hung over Floyd’s bed and, from time to time, he would point to himself and tell his mother, “I don’t like that boy.”

When he was about 9, his mother recalled, she found that he had scratched three large Xs over his face, expunging the boy he didn’t like.

Life in the Patterson household was not easy. Floyd was born in Waco, N.C., on Jan. 4, 1935, but the family moved to Brooklyn soon afterward. His father, Thomas, worked but there was never enough money and Floyd was always deeply conscious of his ragged clothes and the family’s frequent moves.

He took to skipping school and committing petty thefts, and finally was sent to a school for delinquents, where he was urged to take up boxing.

He won the Olympic gold medal in the 165-pound division at the 1952 Helsinki Games, then turned pro under the tutelage of the legendary Cus D’Amato, who later had another heavyweight champion in Mike Tyson.

Patterson retired from boxing in 1972 with a 55-8-1 record and 40 knockouts -- he also had been knocked out five times -- but stayed close to the sport, serving twice as chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission, and helping his adopted son, Tracy Harris Patterson, to a World Boxing Council super-bantamweight title.

Besides Harris Patterson, the former champion is survived by his second wife, Janet. Funeral services will be private.