The Loser
From MURRAY KEMPTON
NEW YORK
THE end of Floyd Patterson was both appointed and not to be resisted, being a bull- fight where the bull was sixteen pounds lighter and eight years older than the matador.
The American Broadcasting system had in- vited its more cherished clients to witness the affair on closed-circuit television in its studios. It was a comfortable place cool with indifference; our economy seems to have reached that con- dition where the truly snot-bLs.h person is the one who does not pay.
While it waited, Floyd Patterson's audience laughed at the radio commentary when. Rocky Marciano mentioned how frequently Floyd Pat- terson goes down. It laughed again when Sonny Liston, fat with dishonour,' came laughing into the ring. And it laughed in patches, in the same indifferent fashion, after the seventh round when Floyd Patterson came hobbling to his corner and one of his trainers lifted him up on the chance that some accidental pull might ease his back and when he hobbled out again with no option except to endure.
One reflected at first that advertising men are altogether colder and crueller people than the primitives who go to fights for pleasure. But there must have been that sort of laughter in the dark all over the country; film has done that to us, protecting us as it does from the intimacy of pain and th6 tactile fact of glory. We have no use for living actors any longer; at one extreme of the intellect there is a whole class of critics who take only the film seriously and at the other extreme
there are men who drive miles to motor courts to watch football on television; everyone agrees now that film is better than the real thing.
Film remains, however, impossible to translate; and we live our lives watching huge shadows, until at the end there is no difference among them: Cassius Clay is the joyless boy clown, and Sonny Liston the retired clown who got away with it, and Floyd Patterson just the other clown with the funny walk.
The medium had cheated us of all tactile values; and hurting his back was the final swindle on Floyd Patterson. He was showing us how a champion of great heart wishes to be remem- bered at the end; and his infirmity cheated-him even of that rare and special dignity. He deserved to depart as lions die; and it was his fate that he could only lunge as a middle-aged man with a displaced disc in his back. There was never a moment when it seemed that it could end other than badly. Once in the third round Patterson hit Clay in the body and then to the head and Clay's eyes seemed to convey a certain annoy- ance at being even transiently other than the centre' of attention, rather as though someone had thrown a rock into Narcissus's pool. Then
he returned to being a brilliant fugitive shadow; he is a magnificent piece of machinery. •
He seems also to be a thoroughly nasty bit of goods. He began the fight cursing Patterson; afterwards the referee remembered being pained by Black Nationalist imprecations; in any case the" mouthmight as well have been saying 'nig- ger' and the expression was some fraternity boy's yelling at the first Negro to be admitted to some Southern college. You close the eyes and listen to the voice, mean, high-pitched, and then you know that we have had the final judgment we deserve: the gods have given us a Negro heavyweight champion of the world with the mind and cadence of any resident of the Kappa Alpha fraternity house at the University of Georgia.
They are fortunate, perhaps, who have never been laughed at and have never needed to make their dignity out of their naked selves alone. Still, one thinks of the honour that Floyd Patterson held up when everything else had gone and of the lonely years he had endured holding that honour intact to be spent so prodigally and grandly at the last; and this whole life, with the laughter around him and only the sadness inside, seemed suddenly like one of the very few that have been lived knowing what to spend and what to save.
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