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America has lost a true friend, Sweden a true champion and my home city, Gothenburg, mourns a great son. Although the quote below is fiction (as far as I know), I think this scene from a certain tv-series depicting the flower power-generation (by Peter Birro, Swedish author/playwriter) says a lot about the spirit of Ingemar Johansson and - not the least - his feelings towards America: Anno domino 1968. Mr Johansson, sitting in a café, notices a bunch of hippie protesters shouting anti-American slogans in the street. Johansson walks out of the café, halting the group with the question: "-...

Even in the moment of his greatest triumph, Floyd Patterson was afraid. Afraid he had killed a man. On the night of June 20, 1960, at New York's ancient Polo Grounds, this most sensitive of prizefighters set out to avenge the stunning loss of his heavyweight championship to Sweden's Ingemar Johansson nearly a year earlier. He succeeded with two monstrous left hooks in the fifth round. The first put the Swede down for a nine-count. The second, a leaping and terrifying swat, made Patterson the first ex-heavyweight champ to regain his title. If Patterson did not hate Johansson -- and...

Floyd Patterson, who avenged an embarrassing loss to Ingemar Johansson by beating him a year later to become the first boxer to regain the heavyweight title, died Thursday. He was 71. Patterson died at his home in New Paltz, N.Y. He had Alzheimer's disease for about eight years and prostate cancer, nephew Sherman Patterson said. Patterson's career was marked by historic highs and humiliating lows. He emerged from a troubled childhood in Brooklyn to win the Olympic middleweight championship in 1952. In 1956, the undersized heavyweight became at age 21 the youngest man to win the title with a fifth-round...