"I Was Wrong!"

Cassius Clay looks ahead. Not to his next $1,000,000, of course: that is already assured if Sonny Liston can only learn how to drive a Cadillac in a straight line. But after Liston, what? Champion Clay thought he had just the thing: Canada's George Chuvalo, 27, a slabsided, 208-lb. heavyweight who had won 29 out of 39 fights, 23 by knockouts. Chuvalo seemed to be a pressagent's dream: broken-nosed, granite-chinned, he had never been knocked off his feet ("Belt him in the face," said one admirer, "and all he does is spit"), spent his spare time chopping wood and reading Freud. All he needed was a victory last week over ex-Champ Floyd Patterson--and a lot of publicity.

White Hope. Clay handled the publicity himself. He touted Chuvalo as "the white hope," nicknamed him "The Washerwoman" for his rough, free-swinging style. Patterson was "The Rabbit"; Cassius went so far as to visit his training camp and present him with a bunch of carrots. The campaign worked like a charm: every one of Madison Square Garden's 18,400 seats was sold three days before the fight, and sidewalk scalpers were getting $10 for standing-room tickets. Closed-circuit TV carried the fight to 51 cities across the U.S. and Canada--with Clay doing the between-rounds commentary (at a fee of $10,000). Odds makers favored Patterson at 7 to 5, but Cassius left no doubt where his money was riding: "Chuvalo by a knockout in five," he predicted.

It took him only one round to find a brand-new challenger. Discredited as he was by two quick knockouts at the hands of Sonny Liston, Floyd Patterson, 30, is still one of the most interesting fighters ever to climb into a ring: a problem child, a moody, monkish man who at 21 became the youngest heavyweight champion ever, without even becoming a real heavyweight. Floyd weighed 182 1/4; lbs. when he knocked out Archie Moore in 1956; for last week's fight he weighed 197 1/4 lbs., the heaviest of his career--and the bulge of fat around his middle was obvious. He had also been taking ultrasonic treatments for a sore knuckle on his left hand. But in the first round he bloodied Chuvalo's nose; in the second, he unleashed a series of six straight combination punches that buckled Chuvalo's knees; in the fourth, he raised a nasty mouse under Chuvalo's eye, and went on to box rings around the plodding Canadian. At ringside, Clay shouted into his microphone: "I was wrong! I was wrong! Floyd is fighting just the way I fought Liston! He's a real threat to my title."

Bloody Welts. Only the referee had it close at the final bell after twelve rounds.

But he voted for Patterson, 6 to 5 (one even), and the judges made it unanimous by a wide margin. Patterson had been rocked by solid punches to the head; the skin around his kidneys was covered with bloody welts. "I kept telling myself, 'You can't be knocked out, you can't be knocked out,' " he said afterward. He talked longingly about a title fight with Clay and another shot at Liston, and chided sportswriters who predicted that Chuvalo would put him down as soon as he tapped him on his china chin. "I proved that I could take a punch much better than you gentlemen gave me credit for," he said. "I would say that I am deserving of a chance to fight Cassius Clay for the heavyweight title. And if I didn't feel that I could win it, I wouldn't be fighting."

Could Patterson beat Clay? Or Liston? Maybe not. But he had at least won his right to one more big payday.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.