Two Minutes of Nothing

In the visitors' dressing room deep beneath the stands at Chicago's Comiskey Park, Charles Sonny Liston, 28, sat swaddled in towels and a white terry-cloth bathrobe. He stared at the green cinder-block walls for a moment, then turned his baleful, red-flecked brown eyes on Jack Nilon, his "investment adviser." "It's cold outside," grunted Sonny. "I'm gonna make it quick."

Only two heavyweight championship fights in boxing history have ended quicker.* And none has seemed more of a mismatch. It took Liston just 2 min. 6 sec. of the first round to club Floyd Patterson into oblivion and install himself as the new king of a tarnished sport. He accomplished it without even trying. A series of deceptively mild left jabs pried Patterson out of his peekaboo crouch. Three times the ineffectual champion attempted to clinch; contemptuously Listen shoved him away. At last, Liston bounced a left hook off Patterson's head, followed it with a chopping right to the heart. Patterson lurched dazedly back into the ropes, rubbing his right eye with his thumb, unable to fight, or even to run. Another ponderous left and he was out. His eyes glazed, his hands pawing feebly for the ropes, he sank to the canvas and rolled over on his back while the referee counted to ten.

"Terrible Hoax." In the astonished silence, Sonny Liston stalked around the ring. Then came the angry, roaring boos from the 18,894 spectators. Many had not seen the knockout punch; those who had felt cheated. In 258 locations across the U.S., some 500,000 people, who had paid between $4 and $10 each to witness the fight on closed-circuit TV, started filing out in bitter disgust. "It was the stinkingest exhibition I ever saw in my life," said one. At Brooklyn's Fox Theater, 3,800 people did not even have that to say; their screen went blank seconds after the fight started. Screaming for their money back, they staged a melee that brought 50 New York City cops on the run.

Delivering an ex-champion's blunt verdict, Gene Tunney, who won his crown from Jack Dempsey in 1926, called the fight "a terrible hoax," adding that "it's shows like this that are killing boxing." They surely do it no good. In the prefight ballyhoo, everyone had been told to expect a classic which matched Patterson, the swift and stouthearted Good Guy, against Liston, the hulking, oft-arrested Bad Guy.

Doing nothing to dispel that image, Patterson said shortly before the fight: "If Liston should be lucky enough to win, I hope you'll accept him the way you've accepted me. You know, there's a little bit of good in everybody." For his part, Liston snarled: "I'll kill him. I'd like to run over him with an automobile."

Call Me Mister. Just before the fight, sentiment for Patterson had run so high that a poll of boxing writers turned up 51 experts who thought Patterson, at 189 lbs., would win. Only 32 favored the 214-lb. Liston, realistically noting his obvious advantage in size, reach and strength. He had won 33 of 34 fights, 23 of them by knockouts; no one had ever knocked him down.

When it was all over, a benumbed Patterson was unable even to say which punch had finished him. Disguised in a beard that he bought before the fight, he drove home to Scarsdale, N.Y., to await his $1,185,253 share of the $2,183,750 take. In the dressing room, newsmen pressed in on the new champion, himself $282,015 richer for his brief night's work. "Wait a minute. Wait a minute," hollered Liston's pressagent to the yelling mob. "This here is the heavyweight champion of the world. This is Mr. Liston. Let's treat him as you would the President of the United States."

* In 1908 Tommy Burns halted Irish Jem Roche in Dublin in 1 min. 28 sec., and Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling in 2 min. 4 sec. in their rematch in June 1938.

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