Article about Sonny Liston

[Jim_Kidd]

The book's a pretty good read. You can buy it used at Amazon.com for under $10.

THE DEVIL AND SONNY LISTON
By Nick Tosches
Little, Brown 266pp $24.95

Sonny was never very sunny. As Nick Tosches makes unequivocally clear in his portrait The Devil and Sonny Liston, the fighter was mostly what he appeared to be: a fearsome thug who started his ring career as a criminal, and pretty much ended it that way.

But in deconstructing Sonny Liston, Tosches attempts to understand how this taciturn bully with fists from hell got to be the person he was--and why he never had much of a chance to escape the servitude into which he was born. At the same time, Tosches lays bare the brutality and corruption of the fight game in the 1950s and early 1960s when Liston was on his meat-grinding ascent to the heavyweight championship of the world.

As Tosches writes: ''A guy who knew Sonny once said, 'I think he died the day he was born.''' When and where that was remains unclear, but sometime around 1930, Sonny became one more mouth in a brood of 10 born to Helen and Tobe Liston, a tenant farmer with a mean streak.

Tosches' writing has a vision and a power that he is sometimes unable to control, but his portrayal of the poverty from which Sonny Liston emerged is riveting stuff. ''Charles Liston was a child of those Depression years in eastern Arkansas, and the child, too, of a slight, scowling man whose small breath of freedom, cruel as any bossman's, was drawn through the only tyranny that was afforded him, over the only living chattel allowed him, the chattel that his God had given him the power to create from his own soulless seed.'' Clearly, this is not a sports book in the same league as, say, Loose Balls by NBA hotshot Jayson Williams.

By 1950, Liston was living in St. Louis, where he learned ''it was easier to rob folks than it was to chop cotton.'' Liston was soon arrested wearing the same ''flamboyant yellow lumberjack-type shirt'' that he had on during every holdup.

He got five years in the Missouri state pen, where, under the tutelage of an old boxer, he learned his life's work. With the intercession of a priest, he was sprung two years later, and by 1953 he had won the Golden Gloves. Soon, he turned pro with a fight schedule that makes today's pugilists seem like part-time doily-makers.

In 1955, he TKO'd Marty Marshall in April and followed up with two knockouts in May, one in September, and one in December. Said Marshall, who the year before had broken Liston's jaw and handed him his only loss in his rise to the top: ''He hit me after that like--nobody should be hit like that. I think about it now and I hurt.''

Three years later, Liston had moved up in the mob world, too, coming under the control of big-time mafioso Frankie Carbo, whom Tosches calls the ''sovereign power'' in boxing. It was only in spite of his gangster history that Liston got a title shot against Floyd Patterson in 1962. It took him two minutes and six seconds to become the Champ.

Liston beat Patterson again the next year and reigned supreme until Feb. 25, 1964, when, in a fight against young Cassius Clay that remains suspect, he refused to come out of his corner. After the TKO, Tosches says Sonny's mother and a half-brother, E.B. Ward, called him to ask what happened.

''I did what they told me to do'' was the answer.

By CIRO SCOTTI

[Mad Bomber]

Jim, I have always been fascinated by Sonny Liston, and I bought the book a number of years ago, and found it to be a very good read. I often wonder how good Liston might have been had it not been for the periods of inactivity brought on by his brushes with the law.


Greg

[Jim_Kidd]

Originally Posted by Mad Bomber

Jim, I have always been fascinated by Sonny Liston, and I bought the book a number of years ago, and found it to be a very good read. I often wonder how good Liston might have been had it not been for the periods of inactivity brought on by his brushes with the law.


Greg

I think the game's ratings of him are pretty good. If he was as good as the book indicated, and he was ordered to lose both fights with Ali, then maybe he'd be in the top 5 on the All-Time list. According to the book, wasn't he told to go the distance with Ali the first time? I remember it quoted him as saying something like - he didn't want to take punches and not defend himself for another half of the fight.

Either way, there were a lot of unanswered questioned about Liston - his life and death. And the book's author along with the interviewed eye-witnesses seemed unwavering with their answers.