Patterson fought good fight

The important thing to remember about Floyd Patterson, beyond his sweet nature and historic place in boxing history, is not that he went down so often, but that he got up so many times.

The youngest man to win the heavyweight title when he stopped Archie Moore in 1956, Patterson died at his home in New Paltz, N.Y., yesterday the way he had lived his life. He went with quiet dignity at the age of 71 (Obituary, A23). Patterson had prostate cancer and Alzheimer's disease.

The product of a troubled home in Brooklyn, Patterson was sent to the Wiltwyck School for Boys when barely a teenager. There he found boxing and it was a good thing for Patterson and the sport. As it has done for so many street kids bred in difficult places, boxing saved Floyd Patterson. It gave him direction and made him a national celebrity who lived his life with dignity, the same way he had conducted himself in the ring.

In 1952, Patterson burst upon the public sporting scene when he won the gold medal in the middleweight division at the Olympic Games in Helsinki. Four years later, at 21, he defeated Moore in a box-off for the heavyweight title relinquished by Rocky Marciano. That record would later be broken by a protege of sorts, 20-year-old Mike Tyson.

Both were trained by a crusty, boxing ascetic named Cus D'Amato. A latter-day Yoda, D'Amato was a fistic philosopher and a believer in the peek-a-boo defensive style. It worked well for both men for a time, so well in Patterson's case that he became not only the youngest man to win the heavyweight title at the time but also the first man to win it back.

That came after a Swede named Ingemar Johansson put him down seven times on his way to knocking Patterson out at the Polo Grounds in New York. How does a man come back from such a devastating defeat? In Patterson's case, by challenging him again and getting knocked flat twice more. Both times he got up and finally he put Johansson down before the first round was over. Five rounds later, Patterson dropped Johansson for good, becoming the first man to regain the heavyweight championship.

Shortly after that a tussle began for control of Patterson's mind. A believer in honoring his sport, Patterson wanted to give a title shot to Sonny Liston. Liston was a knockout artist with a criminal record longer than his ring record and a reputation for surliness that would have made Tyson look like Gentle Ben.

D'Amato opposed the idea, believing Liston's style was bad and Patterson's chin was worse. D'Amato was right but Patterson refused to listen. He was so adamant about giving the long-ducked Liston his due that he refused the counsel of President John F. Kennedy, who called him to the White House to plead with him not to give Liston the opportunity he'd earned.

The fear was that to have such a man win the heavyweight championship of the world, which was then the most revered title in sports, was the wrong message to send to America's kids. Others feared the idea of a man who embodied evil holding such a title.

Patterson saw the issue in simpler terms.

''The title is not worth anything if the best fighters can't have a shot at it," Patterson said he told the president. ''Liston deserves a shot."

He got it on a night crackling with meaning. There was so much pressure on Patterson to win not simply a boxing match but a fight pitting Good vs. Evil that he seemed to crack when the first bell sounded at Comiskey Park in 1962. Certainly he did after Liston landed several big hooks to the chin of the undersized champion, who weighed only 182 pounds when he won the title and not much more thereafter.

Patterson went down quickly, losing so bad in one round he left the locker room wearing a false beard and dark glasses. That he would bring such a getup to the arena says much about his state of mind that night. Always a psychologically fragile man because of his upbringing, Patterson was never quite sure of himself.

Liston gave him a rematch and dropped him three times in the second fight before again knocking Patterson out in one round. Although he would fight twice more for the world title, including absorbing a cruel beating from Muhammad Ali in 1965 during which Ali taunted him for refusing to call him by his Muslim name, Patterson would never again wear the crown he had brought so much honor to by the way he comported himself during the controversy leading up to the first Liston fight.

Down 21 times during his career, he got up 17 times and fought on, a little man among giants who refused to quit even when the odds were long and the pain high. In the Ali fight, he took a terrible thrashing as Ali rained punches on his head and then taunted him, hollering, ''What's my name? What's my name?"

Patterson took the beating but he never said Muhammad Ali. Not that night, but later in life he acknowledged Ali for the man he had become, a figure larger than life. Floyd Patterson was never quite that, but he was a champion skilled enough to win an Olympic gold medal as a middleweight and the heavyweight title twice as a professional.

Twice the chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission, Patterson was forced to resign when his eight-year battle with Alzheimer's was revealed after he was called to give a videotaped deposition in a lawsuit. Unable to remember his office phone number or his secretary's name, he was humiliated in the New York tabloids and forced out in 1998.

It was a sad end for a proud man who deserved better than he got from boxing, just like most everyone else who ever stepped between the ropes. But he also was a symbol of what is important in life -- it's not how many times you are knocked down that's important, it's how many times you get up and fight.