the underrated patterson vs the overrated hw version of ezzard charles

Here is the timeline you are missing.

Tommy "Hurricane" Jackson was the number-one contender when Patterson defended against him in 1957. A month later, Patterson fought the recently crowned Olympic Gold Medalist for a quarter of a million dollars.

In his bio, it states that Patterson first asked D'Amato and then hired a man named Emil Lance to offer Rocky Marciano a $1 million guarantee to fight Patterson in 1958. Marciano had been training, and there were runors everywhere he was considering a comeback. Frank Sinatra, who was friends with Marciano, also got involved. Sinatra teamed up with TelePrompter Corp., the company that would become famous in the coming years staging the major closed circuit boxing cards, to offer Marciano $750,000 and a cut of the closed circuit if he'd come back and challenge Patterson.

There was a lot of back and forth with different people trying to sway Marciano to sign with them and allow them to either stage or televise the fight. Patterson didn't care who the promoter was, really, he just wanted the fight.

While this was going on, Machen and Folley, the top two contenders, fought to a draw. And by all accounts it was a terrible fight which neither guy deserved to win. So everyone was "hot" for a Marciano-Patterson fight.

But after months of people banging on his door, and while Patterson remained holed up training for the possible superfight, Marciano finally decided he wasn't going to come back. So seven to eight months of negotiating was out the window.

And then the guys Patterson was talking to from TelePrompter (who were actually the people who came up with the teleprompter that politicians use), offered Patterson the fight with Roy Harris, who was ranked #3 at the time by the WBA when the fight was signed. (He was also ranked by Ring.) And Patterson made more than $300,000 for that fight.

After the Harris fight - in August 1958 - the press began clamoring for Patterson to fight one of the top contenders. But over a six-week period, beginning in September 1958, the top three contenders all lost. First, the #1 contender Machen was stopped in one round by Johansson. Two weeks later, Brian London knocked out #3 contender Willie Pastrano. And two weeks after that, Henry Cooper beat Zora Folley.

So, when the next ratings came out, Johansson was rated #1.

Patterson wanted a tuneup before fighting Johansson, because Floyd had competed in one fight in a year, so D'Amato offered Henry Cooper $75,000. Cooper wanted $150,000. So D'Amato offered Brian London $75,000 and London accepted.

So, two months before he fought the #1 Johansson, Patterson fought London and stopped him.

Then Patterson fought Johansson and lost.

Since "negotiations" aren't included on Boxrec and other sites, you don't see that Patterson and a group of people worked hard trying to put together a Patterson-Marciano fight from the end of 1957 thru the first part of 1958. You just see that Patterson was inactive. (Same thing happened with Holmes and Coetzee, when they were both out for a year or so while their on again, off again fight never materialized in 1984.)

Clearly, a Patterson-Marciano fight would've been bigger than any Patterson-Machen/Folley fight, and Machen/Folley didn't do themselves any favors by stinking out the joint and boring everyone to death when they did fight in 1958.

But that's the "mystery" behind why Patterson was off for a year, then fought Roy Harris in 1958 ... and why Folley and Machen didn't get the fight in 1958 (because they drew in a stinker and then were beaten by the guys Patterson offered to defend against next).
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