FOR Floyd Patterson, as for so many poor children, boxing provided a ticket out of Brooklyn. As W. K. Stratton writes in a brief new biography, ''Floyd Patterson: The Fighting Life of Boxing's Invisible Champion'' (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25), Patterson's first prizefight, in 1952 at the St. Nicholas Arena in Manhattan, was the beginning of an extraordinary escape. ''As he rode the subway home, he had money in his pocket and the prospect to make more, in a sport he loved,'' Mr. Stratton writes. ''Such good fortune was beyond the fantasies of poor kids from Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant. For people who had known Floyd Patterson as an invisible ghetto child -- a child indistinguishable from thousands of others trapped in urban poverty -- his becoming a professional boxer was nothing short of miraculous.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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