Life at La Ronda

The contracts were signed, the tickets went on sale at $10 to $100 a seat, and the promotional drums began going rub-a-dub-dub. Off to a fancy Catskills resort last week went World Heavyweight Champion Ingemar Johansson, accompanied by a horde of newsmen, handlers and hangers-on, as he began training to defend his title in Manhattan's Polo Grounds on June 20.

His opponent had been training for months, but under very different circumstances. In a shabby, shut-down Fairfield County, Conn, nightclub, with a ring set up on the dance floor and punching bags slung over the sagging bandstand. Floyd Patterson talked broodingly to the only reporter (from TIME) who had come to watch him work out.

At 25, Patterson is sleepy-eyed, smooth-muscled and filled with the melancholy of defeat. Over and over, he relives in his mind the third round of his fight in Yankee Stadium last June 26, when a series of Johansson right-hands made him the ex-champ. "I don't remember going out." says Patterson. "When I heard the referee say 'neutral corner,' I thought I'd knocked Ingemar out. Then I got up and started to talk and I had this pain in the back of my head and I'd have laid odds that it was the referee who hit me there from behind."

"When You Take a fall . . ." Patterson's defeat embittered him. "When I was champion," he recalls, "everybody was patting you on the shoulder, telling you this and that all the time until you thought, 'Holy mackerel, these people really like me.' Then, when you take a fall, you can see who your real friends are." After the Johansson fight, Patterson shut himself off from his friends and from the press for weeks. Then, last September, he rented the La Ronda nightclub in Newtown, Conn, and started training again. He has been at it ever since.

At La Ronda, Patterson's life is monas tic. Says his trainer, Dan Florio: "Even his wife can't go upstairs to his room." In his tiny, pink-walled room, equipped only with necessary furniture, a crucifix and a certificate naming him an honorary Fairfield County deputy sheriff, Patterson gets up at 6 a.m. He puts on khaki pants a leather jacket, paratrooper boots and a cream-colored cap, runs from three to five miles before breakfast. He chops wood, skips rope, works for hours on the bags. In the dance-floor ring, he takes out his frustrations on his sparring partners, particularly a pug named Ed Bunyan."He's broke my nose and ribs already," says Bunyan. "Every time I go in there, I say to myself, 'This may be my day not to get killed.' Pretty soon he'll have knocked me down every possible way." Four or five times a day, Patterson tele phones his wife, who spends most of her time at their Rockville Centre home on Long Island.

"This Time . . ." Most of all, Patter son plans for his return bout with Jo hansson. He does not intend to change his "peekaboo" style, with hands carried high in front of his face, which has been criti cized on the ground that it inhibits his punching power. Says he: "You'd be sur prised at the number of times I've felt their gloves hit my gloves and how grate ful I was that my gloves were there.

Otherwise it would've been my head.Anyway, I won a championship with it. didn't I?"

Patterson is now determined not to be overly aggressive against Johansson. "He's a very patient fighter," says Patterson. "He's waiting for you to make the one mistake so he can one-punch you. Last time I was champion. People expected me to finish him off. But I was afraid they'd start booing because it started out dull, and I can't stand hearing people boo. I got nervous about it and that made me careless. This time maybe he'll have to be more aggressive than he'd like to be." The ex-champ shrugged. "This time he's the champion."

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