Champion
Johansson earned his shot at the world heavyweight crown when he KOed top ranked contender Eddie Machen in the first round of their elimination match on September 14, 1958. In front of 53,615 screaming fans in Ullevi football stadium, Johansson downed Machen three times, finally flattening him for a knockout at 2:16 of the first round. Johansson then signed to fight champion Floyd Patterson.
Johansson was a colorful figure in New York as he trained for the fight. Eschewing the monastic training regimen favored by Patterson and other fighters, Johansson trained at the Catskill resort of Grossingers. He didn't seem to train particularly hard, and was often seen at night spots with his attractive "secretary." Accordingly, he entered the ring in Yankee Stadium on June 26, 1959, as a 5-1 underdog.
Johansson spent the first two rounds of the encounter retreating and flicking a light left jab at the champion. In the third round, Johansson threw a wide left hook that Patterson blocked with his right hand. When he moved his right hand away from its protective peek-a-boo position before his chin, Johansson drilled him with a short powerful right hand. Patterson went down, arose on unsteady legs and was out on his feet. Johansson followed up his advantage and sent Patterson down 6 more times in the round before the bout was stopped by referee Ruby Goldstein. Johansson celebrated with his girlfriend and future wife Birgit Lundgren and the next day a headline in a New York newspaper expressed the city's amazement. It read: "Ingo -- It's Bingo." When Johansson returned to Sweden, he flew in on a helicopter, landing in the main soccer stadium in Gothenburg, his home town, and was cheered by 20,000 people. He appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated, as well as the cover of Life Magazine on July 20, 1959, alongside Birgit.
Johansson was a flamboyant champion - a precursor to the "Swinging Sixties". One publication dubbed Johansson "boxing’s Cary Grant" and in 1960 he appeared the movie All the Young Men as a Marine, alongside stars Alan Ladd and Sidney Poitier. Wherever he went, in the U.S. or in Sweden he had a beautiful woman on his arm and paparazzi snapping pictures.
To train for the fight with Patterson, Ingemar sparred with Muhammad Ali, known then as Cassius Clay. After Ali had "boxed his way around the ring, as if it was he, using Ingo as a sparring partner," somebody offered $100,000 to Ingemar to fight in a televised event with Cassius Clay, but Ingemar declined saying that the fight wouldn't draw three ticket holders and that Clay didn't have the ability to step in the ring with him at that time.
Read more about this topic: Ingemar Johansson
Famous quotes containing the word champion:
“What a terrible thing has happened to us all! To you there, to us here, to all everywhere. Peace who was becoming bright-eyed, now sits in the shadow of death; her handsome champion has been killed as he walked by her very side. Her gallant boy is dead. What a cruel, foul, and most unnatural murder! We mourn here with you, poor, sad American people.”
—Sean O’Casey (1884–1964)
“But now Miss America, World’s champion woman, you take your promenading self down into the cobalt blue waters of the Caribbean and see what happens. You meet a lot of darkish men who make vociferous love to you, but otherwise pay you no mid.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“Let’s not quibble! I’m the foe of moderation, the champion of excess. If I may lift a line from a die-hard whose identity is lost in the shuffle, “I’d rather be strongly wrong than weakly right.””
—Tallulah Bankhead (1903–1968)