Obituary: Ingemar Johansson

“There is something strange about my right hand,” the Swedish boxer Ingemar Johansson once said. “Something very hard to explain. The arm works by itself. It is faster than the eye, and I cannot even see. Without my telling it to, the right goes, and when it hits there is this good feeling all down my arm and down through my body.”

Johansson only lost two fights out of 28 in his professional career. Those two fights were both against American Floyd Patterson. The first time the two met, Patterson lost badly, saying later, “He hit me so hard, I didn’t know where I was.”

The two later became friends. Coincidentally, both suffered from Alzheimer's Disease in their old age. Patterson died in 2006.

Read the New York Times obituary here.

Below, footage from Johansson and Paterson's second fight: