BoxRec

Jaclem wrote:I think this title is the one by nick tosches.

drongo wrote:While Liston and his times are fascinating - not least Liston's role as the godfather of all subsequent bad-ass African-American sports and music celebrities - their treatment by Tosches is decidedly pedestrian. There is little about boxing, with almost no description of any of Liston's fights and little about the overall scene or the other leading contenders. Tosches' main focus is on organized crime. Unfortunately, most of this material is second-rate. Apart from the problem of a relative lack of documentation, the would-be Mob historian writing of decades-old events is also confronted by the fact that many of the principals are dead, while the survivors may be afflicted by (genuine) memory loss and were all habitual liars to begin with anyway. Tosches wastes space with transcribed filler from various public inquiries (does anyone really want to read about Blinky Palermo or Barney Baker taking the fifth a dozen times?). But he fails to tackle the big question of the narrative - were the fights against Ali fixed? Tosches has his opinions, but adds no new evidence. Nor does he address the obvious fact that the motive for a fix was highly problematic. Allegedly, Liston's owners deliberately gave up a valuable, high-prestige and revenue-generating property - the heavyweight championship. For what - so they could bet on a fix at 8-1? And then how did they get Sonny to take a dive? While it might be rational to throw a fight in pursuit of a title shot, as Jake LaMotta admitted to having done, the championship itself is what fighter live, train and suffer for, the rewards are enormous and the alternatives bleak, as most fighters have neither skills nor interests outside the ring. The notion that a fighter would throw away the title, his lifetime goal, simply to satisfy his manager's machinations requires a little explanation. And even if the first fight was rigged, why not recapture the crown in the second, where the 8-5 odds offered a much less lucrative payoff? The evident dive against Ali notwithstanding, the fix theory raises as many questions as it answers.

Self-Defeated.(Review) (book review)
National Review, Oct 9, 2000, by Randy Roberts

The Devil and Sonny Liston, by Nick Tosches (Little, Brown, 266 pp., $24.95)

It's official: Writing about boxing is hip again. I had thought Joyce Carol Oates's compassionate 1987 essay "On Boxing" had effectively extracted every ounce of testosterone from the favorite sport of Hemingway and Liebling, but I was wrong. In 1998, New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote a hymn to Muhammad Ali, and last year Denzel Washington starred in a movie about Rubin "Hurricane" Carter. Ali was great, noble, and brave, a credit to the best of America, Remnick said. Carter was sensitive, misunderstood, and framed, a victim of the worst of America, Washington said. Now Nick Tosches, contributing editor of Vanity Fair and biographer of Dean Martin, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Mafia financier Michele Sindona, has weighed in, taking for his exegesis Charles "Sonny" Liston, a heavyweight boxer who fought 54 fights, scored 39 knockouts, held the title between 1962 and 1964, and died in 1971 of a likely drug overdose.

Until now, hardly anyone has had anything nice to say about Liston. The best that could be said was that he rarely pretended to be anything other than the ex-con and recidivist thug that he was. Prison was never far from Liston's mind, and perhaps in one form or another prison was all he knew. His first confinement was in Arkansas, on the Morledge plantation where he was born sometime in 1929, 1930, 1931, or 1932; as with so many other aspects of Liston's early life, nobody bothered to remember. Liston's first jailer was his own father, who sired a passel of children and maintained that if they were big enough to go to the dinner table they were big enough to go to the fields. "The only thing my old man ever gave me was a beating," Liston would later say. The copper-colored scars on his back said more than he ever did about a childhood that left him, as Tosches (over)writes, "a man as hurtful as he was hurt, as deadly as he was deadened, and whose soul beneath the layers of its scar tissue was to others hidden and unknowable, to himself a dark and dangerous place rarely to be visited and never to be delved."

Maybe he learned to inflict pain from his father; certainly years of hard labor gave him the raw strength to hurt other people. In the late 1940s he fled the cotton fields of Arkansas for the streets of St. Louis. He couldn't read or write; in fact, he had no legitimate skills. He was, as Tosches observes, a nobody from nowhere, "not good for a damned thing in this world except for chopping cotton and robbing people." His talents as a criminal were equally deficient: He tended to wear the same yellow-and-black-checked shirt and soon became known as the Yellow Shirt Bandit. Easily apprehended by the St. Louis police, who gave him a touch of his own brutality, Liston was sentenced to five years in the Missouri State Penitentiary.

Tosches does not sentimentalize Liston, describing him as a thug, an urban nightmare, a man "who looked at you like he didn't know whether to drink your blood or spit on you, or, worse, like he didn't even see you with those deep dark grave-dirt-colored dead man's eyes of his." Nor does he suggest that prison reformed Liston. It did, however, introduce him to a legitimate form of violence. Physically and psychologically, Liston seemed to have been constructed with boxing in mind. He was big, powerful, and quick, with huge hands and long arms. He was also merciless, remorseless, and terribly fond of dishing out pain. By 1952 he was out of prison-though he would return a few years later-and on his way toward a new career.

From the retirement of Joe Louis in 1949 until Muhammad Ali won the title in 1964, two men monopolized championship boxing. On the surface, James Norris Jr., head of the International Boxing Club, promoted most of the important bouts. Under the surface, Norris answered to mob boss Frankie Carbo. Exactly when Carbo began to control Liston's career is difficult to date . Yet it is fairly certain that Liston belonged to the mob almost from the start of his career, that they arranged his fights and perhaps even orchestrated a few of the results.

With friends like these, Liston could not help but succeed. Except for another brief stint in prison for beating up a cop, Liston's boxing stock rose steadily. He didn't just defeat the best heavyweights in the world, he hurt and destroyed them. Cleveland Williams, Nino Valdes, Zora Folley, Eddie Machen-few went the distance with Liston. For a few years, heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson ducked Liston, an act of prudence that was roundly applauded. But in 1962, Patterson agreed to fight Liston. "You know, there's a little bit of good in everybody," Patterson said generously. "I'd like to run over him in a car," Liston retorted. The contest lasted two minutes and six seconds.

Between winning the title from Patterson and losing it to Ali a year and a half later, Liston had only one fight, a rematch with Patterson that he won almost as quickly as the first. Some of Liston's friends believed that he entertained fleeting thoughts of being a champion/role model, but his penchant for carrying guns and driving while drinking made it difficult for Liston to present a Boy Scout image.

Perhaps the ease of Liston's victories over Patterson convinced Tosches that Liston was simply unbeatable; hence any loss he suffered must have been fixed. Tosches shows little respect for the beloved Ali, the darling of the media and white intelligentsia. In Tosches's view, Ali was a performer whose act lacked grace and humor, while Liston was the hero of every street punk, black or white, who couldn't afford the price of a boxing ticket. Unlike Remnick, Tosches doesn't see Liston as an overmatched fighter but a victim of bad publicity and his own poor decisions. According to Tosches, Liston's loss to Ali had nothing to do with old age and the outrageous fortunes of youth: He threw the fight, and the 1965 rematch as well.

There have always been such rumors: Liston was afraid of the Black Muslims in the first Ali fight, hooked on smack in the second; the Mob told him to take a dive and like a good soldier he did. Norman Mailer once even suggested that Ali, the great artist, perfected the ability "to make the other fighter fall secretly, helplessly, in love with him," resulting in a sort of unconscious surrender. One thing is certain: After the fights, Ali continued to display greatness. For the most part, Liston didn't.

Liston's end surprised no one. He died in Las Vegas sometime in early 1971, most likely of a drug overdose, though the exact time and cause of death were never established. Early in The Devil and Sonny Liston, Tosches writes that only Liston "and the man who killed him knew the date of his death ," a fine tease if ever there was one. But at the end, after considering a few general suspects-cops, mobsters, drug dealers-Tosches wearily concludes, "I think he took too much dope and died . He rode a fast train from nowhere, and it dumped him at the falling-off place at the end of the line. There is only one real cause of death, and that is death."

Clearly, Tosches has not written a traditional biography. Attracted to the "umbrous" side of life, Tosches was drawn to Liston in the same way that he was previously drawn to Jerry Lee Lewis and Dean Martin-because they were men whose dysfunctional personalities helped them succeed, only to carry them over the edge to self-destruction. Tosches admires Liston because he never tried to court white integrationist politicians, as Patterson did, or curry the favor of black separatists like Ali; because after a few minutes with Vice President Lyndon Johnson he was ready to "blow this bum off," and because at the height of Afro-American chic he never wore a dashiki. Liston was what he was, "the ultimate outlaw," feared and hated by whites and blacks alike: "His badness transcended race." Liston is Nick Tosches's nihilistic answer to the coaches who preach that sport develops character; his response to such writers as Norman Mailer and George Plimpton who seek "meaning and metaphor" in boxing.

In the end, Liston's life makes a compelling story but offers no edifying moral. He came from the bottom, reached the top of his profession, then self-destructed. Along the way, he was a problem for everyone, particularly liberals who felt he was a poor racial representative for a country moving away from segregation. Even the Mob gave up on him. In a country that celebrates second chances and the reinvention of self, Liston had ample opportunities to become more than a thug, but he never quite succeeded. He was an early version of Mike Tyson or Dennis Rodman, quietly insisting that he would be as bad as he wanted to be. And as his own opponent, he was undefeated.

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