1.
By the time Gay Talese caught up with Floyd Patterson at his training camp in late 1963, the one-time boxing champ was solidly on the downside of a career that had begun, in a professional capacity, less than a decade earlier. Seven years before Talese visited the fighter, gathering rich material for an Esquire profile of the boxer, Patterson had become the youngest man ever to claim the heavyweight crown, a title he had held—with the one set-back a quickly avenged loss to Swedish boxer Ingemar Johansson—for half a decade. But then one night in Chicago, he faced off against an intimidating upstart named Sonny Liston, who made quick work of the heavily-favored Patterson, ending his night via a first-round knockout. This fight occurred in September 1962 and, along with the July 1963 rematch, which featured an identical result, signaled the effective end of Patterson’s time as an interesting fighter. By the end of ’63, Patterson had retreated to his Upstate New York training camp, a dilapidated former resort that Patterson preferred to his $100,000 Scarsdale home and which his young children referred to as “daddy’s house,” to refocus his efforts and try to rebuild what was left of a suddenly teetering career.
In truth, Patterson had always been a somewhat awkward fit for the swagger-demanding role of heavyweight champ. An introverted and reflective man filled with a fair degree of self-loathing, he was, as James Baldwin noted “quite probably the least likely fighter in the history of the sport” with a “personal style… which strongly suggests that most un-American of attributes… the will to privacy.” This is a man who brought a disguise to every fight so that, if he lost, he could sneak away without being recognized. It is also the man who, opening up to Talese during the journalist’s visit to his training camp, admitted to being a coward. “It’s in defeat that a man reveals himself,” he told Talese. “In defeat I can’t face people. I haven’t the strength to say to people, ‘I did my best, I’m sorry.’”
Patterson also had to carry a heavier burden than your average heavyweight champion. He was, in the somewhat mocking words of Talese, “the Great Black Hope of the Urban League,” at a time when the Civil Rights Movement was just hitting its stride. Despite his impoverished Bed-Stuy upbringing, Patterson had transformed himself into “an intelligent, sensitive, law-abiding citizen” (Talese’s words), the proper representative of his race, especially when compared to the surly, frightening Liston, who shared Patterson’s petty criminal background, but unlike Floyd, still retained the menacing air associated with illicit activity. Both the NAACP and President Kennedy had warned Patterson against taking on Liston, worrying what a Patterson loss would mean for the image of Black respectability, but Patterson assumed the burden of playing the hero, losing twice in brutal fashion to his shadowy counterpart. And, as he admitted to Talese, this role was very much a burden. “I became the good guy,” he recalled. “After Liston won the title, I kept hoping that he would change into a good guy too. That would have relieved me of the responsibility, and maybe I could have been more of the bad guy. But he didn’t… It’s okay to be the good guy when you’re winning. But when you’re losing, it is not good being the good guy.”
*****
Patterson’s willingness to come clean to Talese is the product of his reflective nature, but also of his intimacy with the writer. Talese wrote an astonishing 37 pieces on Patterson, ranging from two-page squibs in the New York Times to his probing Esquire profile, which appeared in 1964 under the cruel but apt title, “The Loser.” Beginning with a description of the abandoned clubhouse at Patterson’s training camp (“dusty dance floor, upturned bar stools, and an untuned piano”), Talese’s piece finds the fighter in a candid mood, expounding on the odd, but not unpleasurable sensation of being knocked out, the intensive self-doubts that followed his defeats by Liston, and the intolerable weight of carrying the hopes of a nation in his balled fists. But the most revealing part of the profile comes halfway through when Patterson leaves training camp to fly to Scarsdale and confront the teenage boys who have been taunting his seven-year-old daughter, the only Black student at her school, by repeatedly lifting up her dress. On his way down, Patterson talks big about visiting violence on the kids who are “old enough for a left hook,” but when he finally confronts them, they are utterly unfazed by the former champ’s presence. The boys repeatedly deny that they have been harassing his daughter and to save face, all Patterson can do is tell the boys to not do it again, explaining that he will refrain from telling their mothers, that he doesn’t want to get them in trouble.
On the way back upstate, Patterson is clearly bothered by his encounter, by his failure to inspire the boys with fear, by the thought, as Talese imagines it, that “had those same boys heckled someone in Liston’s family, the school yard would have been littered with limbs.” Back at his training camp for a final interview with Talese, Patterson confesses his cowardly nature, and Talese wonders why Patterson pursued boxing, rather than another profession for which he might have been better suited, “perhaps a social worker or…” To which Patterson cuts him off, explaining how, as a child growing up in trying circumstances, filled with self-hatred, when he discovered that he was finally good at something and that that something could provide a direction and meaning to his life, well, there was really no choice at all. After learning that he could succeed in his chosen profession, all Patterson had to do was sacrifice. And, as he tells Talese, for someone in his position, denying himself comfort and ease is not so terrible, considering he had never experienced much of those qualities to begin with. “You wonder how I can sacrifice, how I can deprive myself so much. You just don’t realize where I’ve come from,” he explains. “To anybody who comes from the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, sacrifice comes easy.”
2.
Bob Gibson’s remove from his fellow ballplayers, his air of mystery, of perpetual unknowableness—an impression enhanced by his ever-present glower as he peered out from his perch atop the mound—was both a calculated gesture of competitive advantage and a direct result of his no-time-for-bullshit personality. The stories of his professional rectitude are legendary. Taking his disdain for cross-team fraternization to its absurd endpoint, whenever he pitched in an all-star game, he would leave the ballpark after his outing to avoid having to talk to his enemies-temporarily-turned-teammates and thus surrender any mental edge that might be compromised by the appearance of friendliness. After pitching arguably the most dominant game of his career, Game 1 of the 1968 World Series, in which he set a still-standing postseason record by striking out 17 Tigers, he assumed his customary crustiness at the post-game news conference, answering each question briefly and with an utter lack of either humor or any kind of pleasure. Refusing to assume the pose of false modesty, he shocked the assembled writers by telling them, in response to a query about whether he was surprised by his performance, that he was never surprised by anything he did. According to Roger Angell, New Yorker writer and unofficial baseball poet laureate of the last third of the 20th century, “Ballplayers, particularly Black ballplayers in near-Southern cities like St. Louis, did not talk outrageously to the press” at that time. “Bob Gibson, however, was not projecting an image but telling us a fact about himself. He was beyond us, it seemed.”
Angell’s 1980 profile of Gibson, one of the very best of the writer’s many worthy pieces, is appropriately entitled “Distance.” The meanings of the title are multiple: the distance from the mound to the plate; the distance Gibson creates between himself and other ballplayers, the fans, the media; the inevitable distance between a man of immense, otherworldly talents and the comparative peons he plays alongside and against; and, ultimately, the distance between the dominant pitcher in his prime and the retired ballplayer unsure of his position in the world now that he can no longer do the thing that defined his life for two decades. In 1980, Angell read that Gibson was up for Hall of Fame consideration and not being able to reconcile the image of the ’68 titan with the “soft, sweet rituals with which newly elected baseball immortals are inducted into the Hall,” he decided to pay Gibson a visit at his suburban Omaha home and attempt to close this distance by direct observation.
After retiring in 1975, Gibson held a number of gigs, including a brief stint as an analyst on ABC’s Monday Night Baseball and pursued investments in several businesses that served Omaha’s Black community, such as the Community National Bank and a local radio station, but when Angell caught up with Gibson in 1980, his primary occupation was running his restaurant, Gibson’s Spirits and Sustenance, a noisy bar-oriented establishment with a cosmopolitan clientele. Angell visits the restaurant, at which Gibson puts in long hours and which seems to be an unqualified success, but sensing a dissatisfaction in the ex-pitcher, “an air not of something held back but of a space within him that is not quite filled,” he begins to probe deeper. Asking Gibson if he likes Omaha, Angell is surprised when Gibson answers that he doesn’t like it all that much, that it’s simply what he knows. Gibson is similarly blasé about running the restaurant, noting only that “it sure is better than doing nothing.” What he really wants is to return to baseball, but for a Black ballplayer with a reputation as a surly fellow, the opportunities aren’t exactly forthcoming. In fact, the year after the article appeared, Gibson’s old friend and teammate Joe Torre, then manager of the Mets, would give Gibson a job, hiring him for the newly created position of “attitude coach.” Moving along to the Braves the next year, Torre brought Gibson with him to serve as pitching coach for the next three seasons, and then rehired him for a brief stint at the same position with the Cardinals in 1995, but no one else in baseball seemed inclined to follow Torre’s example.
A year before he landed this final job in coaching, Gibson penned his second memoir, Stranger to the Game, with Lonnie Wheeler (the first being his 1968 volume From Ghetto to Glory), a book whose running theme is Gibson’s inability to gain employment with a Major League team. Reflecting on the ironic fact that the very qualities that made him such a great pitcher—his stubbornness and intensity—are the very things keeping him from landing a gig, he is under no illusions about his unwished-for erasure from the game. “What I specifically have to deal with,” he writes, “is the fact that baseball seems to want nothing to do with me because (a) I’m a Black man, (b) I have an attitude, or (c) I’m a Black man with an attitude.” Of course, as he explains, he does not really have an attitude; his perceived meanness is part a pose assumed for competitive purposes and part his unwillingness to deal in small talk or platitudes. To friends like the eternally loyal Torre, though, he is a man full of deep reserves of humanity. “He can seem distant and uncaring to some people,” Torre tells Angell, “but he’s not the cold person he’s been described as. There are no areas between us where he’s withdrawn.” Or as Angell himself puts it, reflecting on the gap between Gibson and his public image, “He is there if anyone really wants to close that space—the whole man, and not a piece of him or an image of him—but many of us may prefer not to do so, because at a distance… he stands whole and undiminished, and beyond our envy.”
Angell’s profile ends with a final conversation with Gibson, in which the writer detects a note of sadness in the ex-star, along with a sense that he hasn’t yet staked out his proper place in the post-baseball world and may not ever do so. “When you’ve been an athlete,” Gibson tells Angell, “there’s no place for you to go,” as civilian existence simply does not offer the heightened experience of life that pitching in the World Series—or simply a meaningless April ballgame—freely provides. “I’m like millions of others now, and I’m finding out what that’s like. I don’t think the ordinary person ever gets to do anything they enjoy nearly as much as I enjoyed playing ball… Maybe I’ll still find something I like as much as I liked pitching, but I don’t know if I will. I sure hope so.”
3.
When Billy Cox retired, he returned home. Newport, Pennsylvania, where Cox was born, is a tiny borough 30 miles from the state capital whose chief employers, the tannery and the ironworks, had long been shuttered by the early ‘70s when the former ballplayer was employed as a bartender at the local Owls Club. Cox had once been part of a glorious enterprise, the slick-fielding third baseman for the first integrated team in modern baseball, joining the Brooklyn Dodgers the year after Jackie Robinson, but after his career puttered out in 1955, he left the relative cosmopolitanism of Major League Baseball for a location that, with the exception of a few steelworkers living in cabins on the outskirts of the town, was exclusively white. This was a long way from the mid-century Dodgers. By the time Jim Gilliam joined the Brooklyn club in 1953, the team was filled with so much Black talent that it toyed with the idea of fielding a starting lineup with five non-white players, only to send Sandy Amorós to the minors to avoid crossing the unwritten 50-percent color line. Cox, a white man, did not relish the idea of losing his job to anyone, but especially not to the young Black infielder Gilliam, who was called up with just this purpose in mind. In his classic 1972 book The Boys of Summer, part reminiscence of his time covering the early ‘50s Dodgers as a young man, part account of his tracking down the now-retired players from those teams nearly two decades later, Roger Kahn recalls participating in an ugly conversation with Cox and his fellow white teammate Preacher Roe during the pre-1953 exhibition season. When Kahn joins the ballplayers at a hotel coffee shop, a deeply unhappy Cox turns to him and asks him point-blank how he would feel if a Black man were to take his job, pointedly employing a racial slur in his question.
When Kahn catches up with Cox years later, it is easy to see where the third baseman’s racial attitudes come from. Kahn joins the ex-ballplayer at the Newport, Pennsylvania VFW Hall, where the aging third baseman—inarticulate but possessed of a “sorrowful, inward expression”—is shooting pool. All around him, a barroom atmosphere rages. The locals make casually racist comments, many ruing the changed ethnic makeup of the baseball world, while a woman takes a swing at her cheating boyfriend who can’t even be bothered to try and defend himself. It’s a dismal scene and one that Cox tries to simply ignore, focusing his attention on practicing his shots. “Get the fuck down,” he yells at a ball, his frustration with his pool game mirroring his frustration with his post-baseball life, a massive diminution of the world he once inhabited. It’s not easy going back where you came from, returning from the greater world with nothing in hand and nothing to expect going forward. Especially when, as Kahn puts it in his perennially sentimental but not unaffecting prose, no one present in the VFW poolroom at 2 a.m. on this dark Pennsylvania night will ever realize or even care who “this broad-shouldered, horse-faced fellow tapping billiard balls” ever was, or that, even as he stands “sad-eyed, among people who would never be more than strangers, [he] was [once] the most glorious glove of the most glorious team that ever played baseball in the sunlight of Brooklyn.”