One of the fight's promotional problems will come when McNeeley goes on public exhibition in training. Boxing in the gym, he looks rather like an awkward but angry child. Speaking with a certain depressed passion, Fuller said:
"Tom is a miserable gym fighter. Absolutely horrendous. There are days when he puts on the most horrendous workouts. There's gray in my hair and that's what it's from, just from watching him box in the gym. If you saw McNeeley against guys he's fought in the gym you'd pay 10 times more for one of his opponents than you would for him."
He sighed, the memory of some of those horrendous workouts overwhelming him. But he brightened up in a moment.
"In the ring,"he consoled himself, "he's altogether different."
In the ring McNeeley has been so different that boxing commissions have threatened to set him down for ignoring the rules — rules like "Don't hit a man when he's down, please" and "If you have to elbow and butt, make it look like an accident."
McNeeley excuses himself for these breaches. There was, he feels, sound reasoning for every one of them — well, almost every one. Like in his first professional fight against Richie Norton. Some nerves on the left side of his rib cage had been pinched by a blow in training. The area was so tender that even a firm caress was agonizing. That's just where Norton hit him, by no means caressingly, and McNeeley, turned savage by the pain, lashed out like a wounded panther and with appoximately a panter's esteem for the boxing code. He stopped Norton in the second round.
"That time I fought Art Mayorga," McNeeley went on, a low growl forming deep in his throat, "he kept hiding behind his gloves. It was frustrating. When I finally got through and he started to fall, he dropped his gloves. I was so crazy at seeing his face for the first time that I let another one go."
The one-round Charlie Lopes mayhem, some of which was accomplished by shoving aside the referee as an impertinent meddler in a private fight, was undertaken because Lopes insulted McNeeley's intelligence.
"First," McNeeley complained, "he went around town making comments about what he was going to do to me. But then, after the weigh-in, he followed me and jumped into my car with me. He kept telling me about how his wife was sick and his kids needed things and if I'd just go easy on him and let him look good maybe he'd get some more paydays. I know now he was giving me the con, because right at the opening bell he walked out and tried to knock my head off. It was a hard punch and I thought he'd cut my eye, and I lost my head."
McNeeley battered him down and then, with Lopes on one knee, crunched a finisher to the jaw. He came very close to slugging the referee for trying to protect Lopes when that official stepped in to end the fight.
"The commission gave me a good chewing out," McNeeley said.
And, finally, there was the second Lou Jones fight in New York.
"Jones is very cute," McNeeley explained. "He knows how to butt and use his elbows so the referee can't see it. The only way I know how to do those things is out in the open, which is where I did it." McNeeley won the fight by a fourth-round knockout, but afterward the New York boxing commission threatened to bar him from the state.
By this time it had become apparent that if McNeeley continued on this fiery path he might well be banned everywhere. Fuller considered this possibility dourly, then called the fighter to the huge Cadillac-Oldsmobile agency he owns in Boston. He told McNeeley that he wanted him to see a psychiatrist.
It was a suggestion that McNeeley took as an insult.
"You think I'm some kind of a nut or something?" he demanded.
"I'm sorry," Fuller told him. "You're going to go or I'll put you on the shelf."
After contemplating the emptiness of a life without an occasional fist fight, McNeeley agreed.
"I love fighting," he said. "To me there couldn't be a better way to make money and yet be doing something I like. If I had a good income from something else I'd still be fighting for the pure love of it. It gives me a sense of competition and personal accomplishment, being in there alone. I loved football, but you're part of a team there. In boxing you do it all yourself."
So, after evaluating Fuller as "a very stubborn fellow" who really would make good on his threat to retire him, McNeeley went to a psychiatrist. It turned out that he needed very little treatment.
"We finally figured out," he said, "that the cause of my wild temper was my intense desire to win. You see, my father [Tom Sr., onetime New England heavyweight] always impressed on us kids the necessity of being first — not just in boxing, in everything. He didn't like us to be second-best. When I realized that was the reason for my temper, I learned to keep it under control."
Patterson, McNeeley has heard, does not enjoy fighting but is in the game solely for the money. To McNeeley this approximates a moral defect and somehow encourages him to believe that he has that "good chance." But he does not underestimate the champion a whit.
"Patterson has terrific speed for a heavyweight," he said, "and he's cute and cunning. He's tricky in his own fashion. And he's pretty hard to hit with that peekaboo defense. Hooks don't do any good with those glove covering the sides of his head. You have to go straight through."
And that is why Fuller and Trainer Jackie Martin have been working so hard to straighten out McNeeley's right-hand punching. After all, the straight rights of Ingemar Johansson proved mighty effective in the first and third of the Swede's fights with Patterson.
"Actually," McNeeley said, "my best punch used to be the right, then I seemed to lose it. I lost it in the finesse of developing a left hook. It's coming back, though, and my left hook has been coming real good in the last year.
"I and Pete have some ideas about how to fight Patterson and we'll keep those quiet, but it's no secret that I intend to stay on top and carry the fight to him. That might not work, of course, and I might have to revert to Johansson's technique of running away from him until I have a chance to get in a good shot. But the best way is to be the aggressor. I'll try to wear him down. I'm not the type that takes you out with one shot. I'm not that good a puncher. But if I get in trouble — well that's when I'm at my best.
"If I have him as Johansson did in their third fight [when a stunned Patterson, knocked down by a straight right in the first round, may well have been saved by the mandatory eight-count], there's no doubt in my mind that I'll be heavyweight champion of the world."
The second Patterson-Johansson fight (which Floyd won easily) is the only Patterson fight McNeeley has attended.
"But I've seen eight to 10 of his fights on film," McNeeley said, "and I've watched the last fight a dozen times. Before the fight I'll see the movies a hundred or more times."
Later he'll be able to see the film of his own fight with Patterson. But he might not enjoy it quite as much.
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