One of my boyhood heroes, North Carolina native Floyd Patterson, has died. Why our little group of guys living on Getzen Drive in Augusta, Ga., in the late-’50s took to Patterson so, I can’t recall.
Maybe because he was the youngest heavyweight champ ever. Maybe because one of our favorite books in the Wheeless Road Elementary School library was the biography of Jack Dempsey, the “Manassa Mauler,” which contained stirring accounts of his famous fights against Gene Tunney and Luis Firpo.
But I do remember that the three fights Patterson had with Ingemar Johansson in 1959, ’60 and ’61 captured our imagination like no other sporting events from that period. Even the World Series.
Years later, the soft-spoken Patterson would occasionally do pre-fight analysis for big fights and he’d always refer to Muhammad Ali, the man who defeated him in fights in 1965 and 1972, as Cassius Clay. I sort of liked that too.
