Patterson, his manager/trainer Cus D'Amato, and company had set up camp at a Chicago horseracing track closed for the season, Sportsman's Park. It was a bizarre experience for Floyd. He did his roadwork on a course designed for racehorses and sparred in a makeshift ring erected in the grandstand penthouse. He shivered through the nights with his friend and unpaid trainer Buster Watson on cots in the jockeys' quarters. D'Amato was consumed by fear that one of his enemies would attempt to poison Patterson, so he slept on a cot positioned so that it barred the door to Patterson's room.
D'Amato's peculiar behavior did not go unnoticed by sportswriters. At other training camps, they'd seen D'Amato actually sleep in the same bed with Floyd. Whatever his explanations, D'Amato's actions seemed to go beyond propriety. He seemed obsessed with his fighter, but what was the source of his obsession? Was the guy a genius or was he half-mad? Or was there something else?
"I remember a story that Patterson told me," author Gay Talese, who knew both Patterson and D'Amato well, once said. "I got the impression that D'Amato had a sexual thing for Patterson—not that Patterson reciprocated. Patterson told me he was lying in bed and D'Amato was lying next to him, slipped perhaps into bed, I don't know. It was a training camp, you know. Prizefighters in training camp are intimately open, not sexually, but you are naked, you are free, there is a lot of openness. But this one time in bed, D'Amato had his foot on Patterson's foot, sort of playing with his toes." Perhaps it was totally innocent, an involuntary action by a man deep in slumber. But Talese was not alone in speculating about D'Amato's feelings toward Patterson. It was hard to tell the truth of the matter, for D'Amato was such an off-center man. "D'Amato was an eccentric," Talese said, "amusing, but I think probably borderline psychotic or paranoid." But Floyd himself once gave a curious answer to a question about his relationship with D'Amato, one bound to raise eyebrows in the 1950s: "He makes mistakes, but the more they try to turn me against him, the more his quality comes out. Lucky he isn't a woman. I might have married him."
