Let’s remember when Floyd Patterson beat the shit out of Pete Rademacher at Sicks’ Stadium, on this day in 1957 (August 22)
I don’t think there’s been a lot of top-tier boxing matches that come through Seattle, but this is one of the few.
Per HistoryLink:
On August 22, 1957, Yakima Valley native and Olympic boxing champion Thomas Peter “Pete” Rademacher (b. 1928) fights for the world heavyweight championship in his first professional bout, facing Floyd Patterson (1935–2006) in Seattle’s Sicks’ Stadium. It is an unprecedented event in boxing history and focuses national attention on Seattle at a time when the city has no major sports teams. And it is conceived and arranged by none other than the challenger himself.
Rademacher was a four-time Northwest Golden Gloves champion, national amateur champion, and Washington State College (now University) graduate who was continuing his boxing career while serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He was in the army hospital at Fort Benning, Georgia, recovering from an arm injury suffered while qualifying for the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, when he had an audacious idea. He started thinking about winning the gold medal and then doing something no fighter had ever done, making a direct leap from the amateur ranks to a professional title fight.
Rocky Marciano (1923–1969) had retired, leaving the heavyweight championship up for grabs. Archie Moore (1916–1998) and Floyd Patterson were scheduled to fight for the title on November 30, 1956, in Chicago. Moore was 39, old for a boxer, and Patterson was 21, extremely young for a championship contender. Rademacher figured he could beat either one.
How did it go for Rademacher?
Patterson knocked down Rademacher in the third round. He knocked him down four more times in the fifth round and again early in the sixth. Each of those times the challenger stayed down, saving his strength until the count reached nine, and then continued to fight. Finally, as time was running out in the sixth round, he went down for a seventh time and was counted out. “It had been exciting at first, and then it petered out in dreary punishment,” observed legendary sports writer Red Smith. In the final round, Brougham wrote, “the totally exhausted challenger was reeling on rubber legs like a defenseless giant.”
Rademacher had lost his bid for the championship, but won widespread admiration for his courage. A Post-Intelligencer story under the byline of Loughran, the referee, said Rademacher had “the heart of a lion and take it from me the guy is a formidable opponent in the ring. I’ll state here and now that the fight was not a mismatch as so many people thought it would be.” Rademacher’s mistake, Loughran concluded, was that he did not rush in and try to finish off Patterson after knocking him down.
Read the whole thing here:
