The Top of His Game: The Best Sportswriting of W. C. Heinz: (A Special Publication of The Library of America) by W. C. Heinz

Author:W. C. Heinz [Heinz, W. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781598534191
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2015-03-09T23:00:00+00:00

AMONG THE MONUMENTS

The Shy One

The Quiet Power of Floyd Patterson

“Floyd is a kind of a stranger.”

Cus D’Amato, 1954

ON THE TELEPHONE two nights before, he had told me to turn off the New York Thruway at the New Paltz exit and then left on Route 299. He has said that I should follow that through the town, across a railroad track and over a bridge, and then take the first road on the right.

“What’s the name of the road?” I had asked.

“Springtown Road,” he had said. “You go half a mile to a fork and then take the right. Two-tenths of a mile after that it’s the first house on the left.”

“And what time do you want me to show up?”

“Three o’clock,” he had said. “I’m looking at my schedule. I may have an appointment, something to do, for a half hour at three thirty, but three o’clock is all right.”

It was just after 2:00 when I turned off the Thruway. There was a motel off to the left, but I decided to drive into the town and, perhaps, find one that would be closer and more a part of the town.

The terrain there, west of the Hudson and just south of the Catskill Mountains, is hilly, and the town, with Route 299 as its main street, spreads down over the western slope of a ridge. The stores, restaurants, and other places of business are close-packed on both sides of the steeply slanting street that was congested now with traffic, and off to the south and on the crest of the ridge there is a multistoried high-rise, an architectural aberration erected without regard for the still-rural nature of the countryside. Seeing it towering alone there on the ridge like the beginning in New Paltz of a new Bronx, I surmised that it would turn out to be a part of the college, a branch of the State University of New York.

Coming down off the ridge, the road crosses the railroad tracks with the old wooden station on the right, and there was a sign on the station offering it for rent. Beyond the tracks I drove over the bridge and out onto the flat of a valley with farming lands on both sides of the blacktop road. Ahead I could see another blacktop to the right, and when I reached it and saw the Springtown Road sign I backed around and drove the way I had come and back up the hill through the town.

There was a small motel on the left, and when I got to the top of the hill I pulled off and into a gas station. The attendant came out, a young man with red hair and wiping his hands on a rag.

“Fill it up?” he said.

“Please,” I said, “and maybe you can tell me something. Do you know where Floyd Patterson lives?”

I wanted to get an idea of how well a former heavyweight champion of the world, this former heavyweight champion of the world, might be known in his adopted town.

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