Was Patterson rematching Johansson considered suicide?

ABSOLUTELY! POSITIVELY! It was considered suicide for Floyd to face Ingo again, CP

 

I'd imagine so. No heavyweight had ever reclaimed the title at that point, and Ingo beat the snot out of Floyd in the first fight.

 

ffoyd is very underated...took a lot of balls to rematch ingo...

 

After that, of course, Floyd had a heart as big as his hands were fast.

 

First of all Chris, excellent question ... Patterson was never highly regarded ... Keep in mind he was floored by and actually extended by Pete Radamacher ... to come back from so devestating a beating was a huge achievement ....Marciano was seriously considering a comeback v.s. Ingo and did not go through with it ... part of him had to think Ingo was a tall order ... after the Patterson rematch he was kicking himself ...

To come back and defeat a fighter that flattened you is a tremendous achievement .. one of the reasons I think so highly of Lennox Lewis ...

 

Floyd, for the first and only time in his entire career was motivated by hate in that rematch. It was a very different Floyd Patterson that fought with the expressed intent to really hurt an opponent. When they had revived Ingo after almost getting beheaded (one of the hardest punches and most devastating knockouts I've ever seen), Patterson was truly relieved and was quoted as saying that "I never want to be like that again". How many fighters in the entire history of the sport of boxing have you ever heard of to make a quote like that? True enough, Patterson never fought with that mindset of ferocity again. Maybe, it could be said, that it would have been better for him to be like that every time out, but Patterson was not that kind of man. There's a new biography out about Floyd that I can't wait to get hold of. In his autobiograpghy, written in the 60's, which I used to own and read several times, he refers to the second Ingo fight where he talks about having to endure the humiliation of not only the defeat (he remembers John Wayne sitting at ringside and the scorn he got from Frank Sinatra) but also seeing Ingo on tv all the time talking to celebrities about the ko and bragging about it. He was motivated, he wrote, to hate Johansson, and he trained harder and focused on destroying him.

 

Wow, thanks for that RC.

 

Victory over Myself ... an interesting read ..

 

i never new ingo was so well thought of going into the patterson fights

 

At the time in the U.S., c68, Ingo was considered one more D'Amato hand-picked European joke to pad Floyd's record. Ingo stunned not only Patterson but the world.

 

He wasn't ... coming out of the Olympics he was a huge disappointment ... as a pro he moved along below the radar till his huge KO of Machen .. then he blows out Paterson and for a small moment in time he is hailed as a big tough kid with a huge right hand and a good looking white boy to boot ...

For a short while Ingo was the rave of his time .. then he got crushed and the rest is history ..

 

The answer to the thread question is yes.

 

In a way, one could say that at the time Patterson-Ingo II was a bigger upset than Foreman-Frazier II would have been if it took place in 1973 and saw Frazier beat Foreman, especially since Patterson never got the same respect from the press as Frazier did.

On the other hand, it's easy to forget how loved Floyd was during his career. By the time he retired, he was considered to be one of the most popular American athletes of all time, though as Muhammad Ali came to dominate boxing in the public mind during the 1970s former heavyweight icons like Joe Louis and Floyd Patterson became very anachronistic in the US.