“Some day they're gonna write a blues for fighters.
It'll just be for slow guitar, soft trumpet and a bell.”—Heavyweight champion
Sonny Liston quoted in Gordon Marino, “Bookshelf: A Slugfest for the Ages,” The Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2012
Few boxers have merited “a blues for fighters,” from
birth to death, more than Sonny Liston.
With his perpetual ring glare and numerous scrapes with the law, he contrasted sharply with his immediate predecessor and successor: Floyd Patterson, whom he dethroned on this day 50 years ago, and
Muhammad Ali, who as Cassius Clay, did the same to him.
As with Babe Ruth, Liston’s talent was recognized by
a Roman Catholic priest when the athlete was in a facility for those deemed
troubled. But the future Yankee great was lucky enough that, after his parents
had given up on raising their seven-year-old streetfighter, he was placed in St.
Mary's Industrial School for Boys, where Brother Matthias Boutlier taught him
at least a measure of self-discipline and encouraged his better instincts.
Liston had taken far harder blows, and for longer,
than Ruth when his clerical mentor discovered him. He was the 24th
of 25 children of a tenant father who was an abusive alcoholic. Living with an
aunt in St. Louis after he turned 13 didn’t help matters. Arrested more than 20 times, he was
already at least 20, perhaps as much as 23, years old (documentation of his
birth is unclear) and serving time in a penitentiary for larceny and robbery
in 1952 when the prison athletic director Father Alois Stevens, noticed his gift for
boxing.
It would take another 10 years before Liston (by
this time, having relocated to Philadelphia) would get his shot at the
heavyweight title. Patterson lost in the first round to the punishing Liston—the
first time in history that a sitting champ lost the title in the first
round.
Americans were confronted with a new champion who
made them profoundly uneasy. Patterson--a gentlemanly sort who would even hand
opponents back their mouthpieces, an underdog who had gained the championship after a rematch with Ingemar Johansson--had been succeeded by a hulking boxer who not
only had an extensive prison rap sheet, but also, it was widely believed, ties
to the Mob that had enabled him to get his shot at the title.
A large, violent black man: 1960s racist America’s worst
nightmare.
The year before his bout with Patterson, Liston had gotten
into two more scrapes with the law. Again, he sought the help of a Catholic
priest, the Rev. Ed Murphy, pastor of a predominantly African-American church
in Denver, as a spiritual counselor. But it was becoming increasingly hard for
the fighter to shake his reputation as a hard case, as well as the substance
abuse that had bedeviled his father. Almost as soon as he awoke, he would start
drinking again. “Oh, poor Sonny,” a priest friend of
Murphy’s said. “He was just an accident waiting to happen. Murph used to say,
'Pray for the poor bastard.'"
One of the most attention-grabbing Esquire covers of the 1960s showed
Liston showed Liston dressed in a Santa Claus cap. It was all the more
remarkable because the facial expression most Americans associated with Liston
was the scowl. That, along with his fists of steel, seemed enough to reduce
opponents to masses of jelly in the ring. (Or before stepping into the ring: the manager for another contender, Henry Cooper, observed: "We don't even want to meet Liston walking down the same street.")
But within only 18 months of winning the heavyweight
crown, the boxer that Ali dubbed the "big ugly bear" shocked the sports world by losing, as he sat
in his stool at the start of the seventh round, unable (or unwilling) to answer
the opening bell, complained of a shoulder injury that many believed a phantom. In 1965, in a controversial rematch, Liston suffered the same
ignominy he had directed at Patterson: Though a punch of Ali’s barely seemed to
graze him, Liston hit the mat and couldn’t (or wouldn’t) get up. In the wake of
these puzzling losses, all sorts of speculation arose,
with the most common being that Liston had thrown at least one at the urging of his Mob
handlers.
The heavyweight crown had brought Liston the
attention, but not really the respect, of fight fans and the media. The boxer
felt particularly unappreciated in his adoptive city of Philadelphia. Though he
fought more than a dozen matches after his second loss to Ali—and only lost one—Liston
only continued because he really had nothing else to keep the money coming in.
After being unable to reach Liston for a dozen days,
his wife discovered his corpse in their Nevada home on January 5, 1971. At this
point, the questions about his life only multiplied. Puncture wounds were found
on his body and a syringe nearby. But friends insisted he hated needles and
that his major form of substance abuse was alcohol.
Boxing bios have been created about Gentleman Jim
Corbett, Jack Dempsey, Rocky Graziano, Jake LaMotta, and, of course, Muhammad
Ali, but it is doubtful if one will ever be made about Liston. His story is
overwhelmingly downbeat, even more so than LaMotta’s (who, after all, has
survived into his 90s with his faculties reasonably intact).
No blues song, so far as I know, has ever been
created about Liston, by the way—but he has been mentioned in tunes by the
likes of Billy Joel, Sun Kil Moon, The Animals, Tom Petty, Mark Knopfler, Phil
Ochs, Morrissey, The Mountain Goats, Freddy Blohm, treysuno, Chuck E. Weiss,
This Bike is a Pipe Bomb, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
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