Paret died two years before The Fight of the Week did, but only because of existing contracts between the network and the sponsors. His death prompted industry executives to reexamine its relationship with the sport. In fact, boxing’s television ratings had been declining for years, down from about a third of the available audience to a tenth. One by one, the national weekly shows that had appeared in the 1940s and 1950s went off the air by 1962. All that remained was The Fight of the Week, which ABC aired from 1960 to 1964.17
The combination of ring deaths, criminal influence, public opposition, and declining ratings made ABC reconsider the renewal of their contract with the Gillette Safety Razor Company, which began sponsoring the show after NBC canceled The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports in 1960. The fact that the demographics of boxing were all wrong—that is, its audience was not only dwindling but also generally poorer and older—was as devastating as Griffith’s punches. Increasingly, TV executives demanded shows that appealed to the youth market—ranging from The Addams Family and Bewitched to Shindig and Hullabaloo to The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and Peyton Place—not programs where men were battered bloody and killed. Boxing’s core audience of World War II and Korean War veterans, from ethnic, working-class backgrounds, with limited education and disposable incomes, were proving a poor fit for the age of John Kennedy, John Glenn, and the Beach Boys.18
Two days before Christmas in 1963, ABC announced that it planned to cancel The Fight of the Week when its new season began. The program, which had begun less than four months after the D-Day invasion, ended on September 11, 1964. Harry Markson, director of boxing for Madison Square Garden, predicted that the end of the long-running show would not be fatal to boxing—in fact, he foresaw the very opposite. But his tone sounded off-key. Most critics thought that the cancellation of The Fight of the Week was another portent of the slow death of the sport.19
WITH BOXING ON its deathbed, Cassius Clay sensed an opportunity. He understood that there was truth in the old axiom: the health of boxing follows the popularity of the heavyweight champion. What the sport needed, he calculated, was a dynamic, entertaining titleholder. In his view, Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston, the top two heavyweights, were incapable of saving the sport. Only he could remedy boxing’s ills.
At the beginning of 1962, Patterson held the title, which he had won in 1956 after Marciano retired, lost in 1959 when he was knocked out by Swedish Ingemar Johansson, and regained in 1960 when he in turn knocked out Johansson. Floyd was a good, compassionate, complex man in a profession normally dominated by men with other attributes, and the crown of Dempsey, Louis, and Marciano was an uncomfortable fit for him, a fact not lost on Clay. Cassius thought that boxing needed a champion who was great, not one who ran from challengers and lost to Scandinavians.
Patterson grew up in poverty in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. As an adult, he was so timid, shy, and withdrawn that even when he became a successful professional prizefighter, he could not look his opponents in the eyes before a fight. After one match he gently kissed the man he had just knocked out.
Sportswriters accused him of gross pugilistic malfeasance—that is, as a champion he had not defended his title against the best contenders. Most of his defenses were against mid-ranked, smaller heavyweights with overblown records, who, perhaps not coincidentally, were white. He consistently avoided top-rated heavyweights. And he steered widely clear of Sonny Liston, generally recognized between 1960 and 1962 as the top contender in the division. Unlike Patterson, Liston had fought and defeated virtually every other major contender.
Sonny, whose nickname seemed singularly inappropriate, had a past, and much of it was bad. The first murky fact about his life was his exact age. When he needed a date of birth on an application to fight in the 1953 Golden Gloves tournament, he gave May 8, 1932. His mother told one reporter that she thought it was January 8, 1932, and another, January 18, 1932. But those dates only set the upper range for the speculations that included 1931, 1930, and back into the 1920s.
Over time, Sonny developed an effective tactic for shutting down questions about his birthdate. When a scribe probed the subject, Liston would throw him a glance as cold as a gravestone at midnight and say, “Anyone who says [I wasn’t born in 1932] is callin’ my momma a liar.”20