A Neutral Corner by A. J. Liebling

Author:A. J. Liebling
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466896376
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

A Space Filled In

While in training for a fight, Mr. Floyd Patterson, the heavyweight champion of the world, spends most of his time sleeping. He sleeps regularly from nine in the evening until six next morning, rises, runs, eats four or five eggs or a few chops, and sleeps from eight to ten. Then he sometimes takes a nap until noon, when he does his gym work and boxes, and after that, if he is not worried, he takes a long walk and, on his return, sleeps until suppertime. If he has anything on his mind, he sleeps instead of taking the walk. “Fighters have different ways of reacting to tension,” he has been quoted as saying, although the choice of words is not characteristic. “Some get nervous and jumpy and can’t eat. Others eat a lot and do practical jokes. Others just sleep. That’s me.”

Sleeping has made Patterson’s success possible. In the years since he won the Olympic 167-pound boxing title at Helsinki in 1952, he has had to put on more and more solid weight to become an authentic heavyweight. (In 1956, when he fought Archie Moore for the championship that Marciano’s retirement left vacant, he weighed about 180; in his 1959 bout with Johansson, which he lost, he weighed 182; in the 1960 Johansson fight, which he won, regaining the championship, he weighed 190.) The only effectual way to “build” a fighter is to feed him quite a lot and make him work hard enough to turn part of the fodder into muscle. There is no way to induce his bones to grow, and simple stuffing will do more harm than good; nothing is worse for a fighter than surplus weight. Patterson picked up eight solid pounds between the 1959 defeat and the 1960 win, but he trained for ten of the twelve months that intervened between the two fights. A fighter who sleeps poorly or who frolics about during his waking hours will either fret or burn away the hard-won gain in fighting weight. Patterson sleeps and holds it. Dan Florio, his trainer, told a London interviewer, “If we put him on a diet, we’d soon have a middleweight on our hands.” This confirms my own inexpert opinion completely; I see Patterson not as a light-heavy in a padding of fat but as a tall middleweight in a carapace of smoothly flowing muscle. He has to keep after the muscles to hold his weight and their fluidity. (A muscle-bound boxer is in as bad a state as a fat one.)

Patterson’s sleep performs more than a physiological function. He thinks a lot, subliminally, while sleeping. Once he dreamed of a new blow that nobody could block, and, waking, leaped from his bed and ran to a mirror to try it out, like a poet carrying a couplet to the escritoire. “It wasn’t any good,” he admitted afterward, which put him one up on most poets. Because of the essential part that sleep plays in his career, he has carefully refrained from building up any hobbies that might keep him awake.

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