TWO of the most disdained and maligned fighters in the history of boxing — Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston —were also two of the most misunderstood. They met in the ring twice as representatives of two polar opposite strands of black American life in the early sixties – integration and alienation.

Patterson was a poster boy for black integration while Liston stood as a totem of black alienation. Where Patterson was sensitive and shy, Liston was angry and malevolent — this to the point where you could have been forgiven for considering them characters in a morality play rather than competitors for the heavyweight crown.

Their first clash took place on September 25, 1962 at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, home to the city’s famed Chicago White Sox baseball team, in front of 19,000 spectators. Closed circuit television was in its infancy at the time, with this fight one of the first to be aired live around the country using the new technology. Such was the interest in the fight, it was shown at 264 venues across the United States and Canada.

The incumbent champion, Patterson, carried with him into the ring the expectation of “white America” that good should and would always triumph over evil. It was this rendering of the fight that elevated it from the realm of sporting contest into the realm of allegory, with Liston cast as the surly and rebellious “field Negro” to Patterson’s domesticated “house Negro,” whose role was to keep the former in line.

Covering the fight were some of America’s most legendary novelists and writers not only of their time, but of all time. Norman Mailer, Nelson Algren, James Baldwin, Ben Hecht, and Budd Schulberg had each been assigned by various publications to mine the bout’s deeper meaning for the mass reading audience that then obtained to the extent it does not today.

Of this group, Baldwin arrived on the scene with no knowledge of boxing whatsoever. “I know nothing whatever about the Sweet Science or the Cruel Profession of the Poor Boy’s Game. But I know a lot about pride, the poor boy’s pride, since that’s my story and will, in some way, probably, be my end.”

Press agent Harold Conrad was rather more blunt when appraising Baldwin’s boxing bona fides, quipping that he did not “know a left hook from a kick in the ass.” But what Baldwin brought to the event instead was the profound sensibility of a gay black man at time in America when to be either was to be scorned, and to be both was to find yourself consigned to the status of a social leper.

Baldwin: “Patterson was, in effect, the moral favourite — people wanted him to win, either because they liked him, though many people didn’t, or because they felt that his victory would be salutary for boxing and that Liston’s victory would be a disaster.”

Sonny Liston was the Mike Tyson of his day — a man who did not just want to defeat his opponents, he desired to seriously damage them. The twenty-fourth of twenty-five children, Liston’s exact year of birth remains unknown to this day. What is known is that his father was a poor cotton picker and violent tyrant who regularly attacked his kids with a belt buckle. Under such conditions the result is either to grow up abhorring violence or embracing it.

Sonny went the latter route and wound up in prison for armed robbery. It was while inside that he took up boxing, relishing the opportunity it provided for being able to beat other men into a pulp without getting in trouble for it.

Turning professional soon after his release from prison in 1953, Liston split his time between the gym and working as an enforcer for local organised crime figures in St Louis. Growing tired of being repeatedly harassed by the police there, he moved to Philadelphia, though after defeating Patterson to become world champion he found life there equally unbearable and moved again, famously declaring that “I’d rather be a lamppost in Denver than the Mayor of Philadelphia.”

James Baldwin was one of the very few writers who saw the vulnerability and pain concealed behind Liston’s menacing exterior, writing upon visiting his training camp prior to his first clash with Patterson in 1962: “It seems to me that he [Liston] has suffered a great deal. It is in his face, in the silence of that face, and in the curiously distant light in the eyes — a light which rarely signals because there have been so few answering signals.”

Floyd Patterson’s then peek-a-boo-style was the brainchild of legendary trainer Cus D’Amato. It was designed to turn the disadvantage of small height compared to other heavyweights into an advantage by coming in low, bobbing and weaving, to get inside his opponent’s jabs and right crosses before coming up with thunderous hooks and uppercuts. It was a style that Mike Tyson, another D’Amato protege, would utilise to devastating effect three decades later.

Patterson’s biggest weakness was one that currently afflicts former heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua in our time. That weakness is over analysis. Analysis leads to paralysis, they say, and this is never more revealed to be true than in a boxing ring. 

Indeed in Patterson’s case, his mind, not Sonny Liston, was his greatest opponent when they fought. Prior to their first fight in Chicago Patterson arranged for two cars to be made available outside the stadium. One was to take him straight back to his hotel in the event of victory, while the other had been arranged to take him straight home to New York in the event of defeat. He also had in his gym bag on the night a fake beard and glasses so that he could leave the stadium without being recognised if he lost.

Not only did he lose in Chicago against Liston, Patterson was subjected to a merciless hiding. Baldwin: “It was scarcely a fight at all…Floyd seemed all right to me at first. But Liston got him with a few bad body blows, and a few bad blows to the head. Floyd went down. I could not believe it.”

The end result provided white America with its worst scenario possible  — a heavyweight champ who looked and carried himself like, per Curtis Mayfield, the “nigga in the alley” of their worst nightmares. It was a victory for black alienation over black integration. 

Little did they know then that coming down the track was the even more potent symbol of blackness in the shape of Cassius Clay, destined to represent neither black alienation nor integration, but liberation.