When Gay Talese came to write the story of Floyd Patterson, he decided to call it The Loser. Which was an odd choice, since Patterson won a gold medal at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952 and the heavyweight championship of the world, twice. But then a champion’s legacy can be defined by the few contests he lost as well as the many he won. And Patterson was beaten twice by Sonny Liston, in the defining fights of his life, and twice more by Muhammad Ali. He was a great boxer who had the bad luck to live in an era when others were greater still. Talese’s profile was a study in defeat, of what happens to a champion when he runs into an opponent just that much better.
“It’s easy to do anything in victory,” Patterson once said, “it’s in defeat that a man reveals himself.” If Andy Murray’s career had ended in the summer of 2013, he would still have gone down as one of the greatest of all British sportsmen. Like Patterson, he was an Olympic champion, and he was the first British man to win Wimbledon since Fred Perry in 1936. But having scaled those heights, Murray travelled on in search of peaks beyond. And he found himself, like everyone else, chasing after Novak Djokovic. Murray beat Djokovic in the final when he won Wimbledon in 2013, then lost 12 of their next 13 matches.
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