In the last fortnight, boxing lost two famous world champions—Ingemar Johansson and Jose Torres.

Johansson was the last white world heavyweight champion from the days when there was only one road to the title, and it was narrow and crowded with tough, accomplished men. Recently, I wrote that Johansson was an “accidental champion” whose short interregnum came to an inevitable end as soon as he rematched the man he won the title from, Floyd Patterson.

I judged him unfairly, as most did for his entire career. Johansson was a Swedish thumper who many a man underestimated in the ring. Before he threw the punches that flattened Floyd Patterson in six rounds back in 1959, he’d also kayoed world number-one, Eddie Machen, in the first, and Britain’s Henry Cooper in five. He was no white “horizontal heavyweight.”

Johansson was an enigmatic character. As soon as he arrived in New York for the world heavyweight championship fight with Patterson, he resumed his social life as though celebrating his retirement, and did very little training at all. In the ring, he continued to look the part, doing nothing to trouble the agile shock puncher Patterson for the first two rounds.

Then in round three, he released “Toonder”, as he called his right hand hammer. Patterson dropped as though shot, but somehow managed to rise. Six more times the routine was repeated in the same round, until the referee, Ruby Goldstein, belatedly curtailed it.

Patterson levelled Johansson in five the next year to regain his title, and in the third match, Johansson, in the worst shape of his career, looked as though he’d pull it off again, knocking Patterson down twice before succumbing, partly to exhaustion, in the sixth.

Johansson was never really the same after his only two professional losses and retired after almost being kayoed by British journeyman, Brian London. He and Patterson remained the best of friends until they were separated by Alzheimer’s disease, which claimed both of them long before they died. Ingemar finally succumbed to complications from the disease on Jan 30^th 2009.

Jose “Chequi” Torres was world light-heavyweight champion in 1965-66. Jose was the third Puerto Rican fighter to win a world title, and the first Hispanic to win a title above middleweight.

An Olympic silver medallist at Melbourne in 1956 in the light-middleweight division, Jose became a respected friend of Muhammad Ali, who won in the light-heavyweight division at the next Games, in Rome. In 1965, Torres stopped Willie Pastrano to claim the light-heavyweight diadem, and defended it three times before losing a close fight to the former world middleweight champion, Dick Tiger.

Jose was one of Cus D’Amato’s Big Three, along with Floyd Paterson and Mike Tyson. In 1968, in his first fight after losing the championship, he fought Australia’s Bob Dunlop. Torres was an out-of-shape ex-world champ, and many thought he might be easy pickings for the tall Aussie Adonis. It was a mistake. Torres handled the brave Dunlop easily, stopping him in six. But it was his last fight, a brawl with Charlie, “Devil” Green, in 1969, that Torres really showed what he was made of. Green was a heavy-punching wild man who had Torres on the canvas twice. But Torres, shrewd to the end, bought himself time, and when he saw the opportunity, finished Green with a typical flash-fisted combination in round two. Then he retired.

An astute and articulate analyst of the fight game, Torres became a best-selling author, thanks to two biographies of his friends, Ali (Sting Like a Bee)and Tyson (Fire and Fear), and a respected administrator. He died of a heart attack on January 19th 2009

Published in Inside Sport, March, 2009