W.K. Stanton is receiving his praise for his new book on boxer Floyd Patterson.
From the Wall Street Journal:
It is a puzzle how this boxer ever managed to climb to the top of a brutal game. W.K. Stratton’s first-rate Patterson biography attempts to solve the riddle of the most ambivalent of modern gladiators—one who would rush to lift his knockout victims off the canvas and who once even stopped in mid-round to help an opponent find his mouthpiece.
Deadspin ran an excerpt from the book. Here’s an excerpt of the excerpt:
This was Moore’s cue. He rose to his feet and began a blistering verbal attack on Patterson as the cameras rolled and the sportswriters scribbled notes. Patterson was completely taken aback. He believed in treating the opposition with dignity. There was nothing dignified about the words spewing from Moore’s mouth. Finally, Patterson could stand it no longer. He fled the room and hurried through the lobby and out onto the street, where he sucked in some deep breaths of fresh air.
He found a pay phone, called Sandra, and poured his heart out. She was always effective in those days at calming him down. But now he had even more reason to check in with her. Sandra was pregnant and their baby was due to arrive about the same time as the heavyweight title fight. Sandra directed the conversation to the soon-to-arrive baby and how she herself was feeling. She soothed his anger over Moore’s tirade.
Patterson returned to the hotel and completed the interview, although he was irked by later questions about how he planned to stand up against a fighter with Moore’s decades of experience. Floyd believed that he’d learned as much in a short time as Moore had learned over many years, but no boxing prognosticators seemed to consider that possibility.