Everyone was always feeling sorry for Floyd Patterson, who died yesterday at 71, and if you had to pick someone to feel sorry for, Floyd had all the qualifications. He was the first heavyweight champion of the liberals, a veritable poster boy for the Martin Luther King era, and one of the first black athletes to actively take up the banner for civil rights.

Patterson was born in rural North Carolina in 1935,one of eleven children, and raised in the Bed-Stuy area of Brooklyn, which would later produce Mike Tyson and Riddick Bowe.At age 10 he was classified as a juvenile delinquent – the then-fashionable term for young thug – and sent to Wiltwyck School for Boys, a genteel title for a reform school, in upstate New York. At Wiltwyck, he took up boxing. “If it wasn’t for boxing,” as he phrased it in his autobiography,”Victory Over Myself,” “I would probably be behind bars or dead.” In interviews through the course of his life, he would repeat the sentence verbatim.

He came under the eye of veteran boxing trainer Cus D’Amato, who saw in him a steely determination that no one else had detected. D’Amato taught Floyd his peculiar “peek-a-boo” stance — fists clenched high at forehead level, eyes peeping out behind the forearms – which, in the words of heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano, “should only be used by someone looking at an accident.” But it worked for Patterson, who had the fastest hands boxing had seen or would see till Cassius Clay made his appearance in the early 1960s.

At 17, he won the Middleweight Gold Medal at the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, the same Olympics in which a Swedish heavyweight named Ingemar Johansson was disqualified for refusing to fight. Before the decade was out, the two would make boxing history.

Patterson was too young and too small — just 182 pounds – and too disadvantaged to become a champion, but he didn’t know that, and in 1956, following Marciano’s retirement, he knocked out Archie Moore in the fifth round to become the youngest fighter, at 21, ever to win the heavyweight title. Some tried to diminish Floyd’s achievement by pointing out that Moore was at least twice Patterson’s age; they must have forgotten that only a year before Archie had gone nine rounds with Marciano and had knocked down the heavyweight champ.

That was the high point of Patterson’s career for the next five years.Cus D’Amato was vocal about the mob’s influence on boxing, continually singling out Charles “Sonny” Liston for his ties to organized crime. He wouldn’t let his fighter in the ring with Liston. Patterson fought such nonentities as Rot “Cut’n’Shoot” Harris, a journeyman from Texas who, in the immortal words of Burt Randolph Sugar “wasn’t a household name in his own household,” and even an amateur, Pete Rademacher.

In 1959, he found a more formidable opponent, Ingemar Johansson, who had rebounded from his 1952 Olympic humiliation to KO the leading contender, Eddie Machen, in one round. “Ingo,” as he was affectionately called by the American sporting press, had but a single weapon, a terrific right hand – dubbed “The Hammer of Thor.” In the third round of their first match, Johansson decked Patterson with a flash right, one of seven times Floyd would go to the canvas before the fight was stopped. The following year, as a 2-1 underdog, he knocked Johansson out in the fifth round with a spectacular leaping left hook that had the Swede out cold. (The enterprising cameraman focused on Johansson’s twitching foot as he lay unconscious, one of the most stunning cinema verite bits in sports history.) Thus Floyd accomplished what Jim Corbett, Jack Dempsey, and Joe Louis before him had failed to do – winning back the heavyweight title.

The next year they fought a rubber match. Ingemar knocked Floyd down twice in the first round, after which Patterson, as he would later recollect, “Suddenly realized that I was in danger of losing back everything I had regained.” He got up and decked Johansson before the round was over and went on to retain the title with a sixth-round KO.

The Johansson fights notwithstanding, Patterson’s pride was stung by criticism that he was ducking Sonny Liston. He broke from D’Amato and fought Liston in 1962. As Norman Mailer would later suggest in a famous piece for Esquire, Patterson was carrying an enormous psychic burden, namely carrying the banner for the rising black middle class and white liberals who saw him as symbol for aspirations of the black underclass. It was imperative, many thought, that Patterson defeat Liston, a former strong arm man for mobsters who had spent a fair portion of his adult life in jails and prisons. Civil rights leaders visited Floyd to wish him luck; Frank Sinatra and the Rat Packers openly rooted for him.

His new celebrity friends deserted him after Liston, who outweighed Patterson by nearly twenty-five pounds, knocked him out in the first round. Scorn was heaped on the former Olympic and two-time heavyweight champion when he was spotted leaving the arena in a false beard and dark glasses to avoid the press. A year later, his humiliation was increased when Liston again KOed him in the first round of their rematch.

It was then that Patterson began his second and greatest comeback. From 1963 and early into the next decade, he was repeatedly ranked as one of the division’s leading contenders, and though he never regained the heavyweight title, he came close in 1968, losing a hotly disputed decision to WBA champion Jimmy Ellis. Curiously, Patterson, who remained a spokesman for civil rights, had become, for a while, a symbol of reaction in 1965 when he fought the hugely controversial champion Muhammad Ali. In the eyes of many younger black fans, Patterson represented the outdated integrationist views of Martin Luther King, Jr.; many of them flocked to Ali, whose youth, brashness, and dedication to the Black Muslim faith was more timely and appealing.

Patterson fought perhaps the most courageous fight of his career against Ali. Crippled with back pain, he lasted into the twelfth round, battered by hundreds of Ali’s punches and almost unable to retaliate. Even Ali, who had ridiculed Patterson before the fight, was impressed by his courage. In his defeat, Floyd won back the respect of both black and white fans, who still had vivid recollections of the Liston disasters.

Curiously, Patterson’s loss to Ali helped open up his personality. For the first time in his career, he was able to overcome his painful shyness and open up to both fans and media. He had once said, “When I retire, that’ll be it. You won’t see me up on a stage, singing or something,” perhaps referring to the embarrassment of the great Sugar Ray Robinson pretending to be a singer in Las Vegas. But Patterson became a pretty good actor, appearing in the mid-sixties on such TV shows as Wild, Wild West and Bonanza. (Westerns, he said, were his favorite form of entertainment.)

He fought professionally for seven more years. In 1972, at age 37, he agreed to an ill-advised rematch with Ali and was stopped in seven rounds. The fight, as Patterson should have realized, was a mistake. He had absorbed enough punches in the first Ali fight alone to damage lesser men.

He twice served as the chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission, but in 1998 he resigned after publicly admitting to severe memory lapses. He could no longer remember, he told an interviewer, the year he won the heavyweight title or lost it to Johansson and Liston.

Over the last few years, Patterson lived on a farm near New Paltz, New York, and counseled troubled children for the New York State Office of Children and Family Services. Six years ago, in one of his last interviews, he admitted that John F. Kennedy was one of the people who urged him not to fight Liston back in 1962. He said he later apologized to the President, saying, “The title is not worth anything if the best fighters can not have a shot at it. And Liston deserves a shot.”

Floyd Patterson was nowhere near the best heavyweight of his or any other era. But to those who knew him and followed his life and career, he was, in the words of the late boxing publicist Irving Rudd, “The undisputed heavyweight champion of men.”

Mr. Barra is the author, most recently, of “The Last Coach: A Life of Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant.”