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'The Devil And Sonny Liston' by Nick Tosches

Liston's demons defeated him, but not his legend

Sunday, June 04, 2000

By Gene Collier, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

	The Devil And Sonny Liston By Nick Tosches Little, Brown $24.95

All up and down the great and celebrated roster of 20th-century sports figures, maybe 5 percent are truly compelling people, maybe 1 percent of their life stories complicated enough to sustain perpetual or even enduring intrigue.

Within that 1 percent, none could approach the delicious, dark mystery that was Charles L. “Sonny” Liston.

I’ve never read a story about Sonny Liston that I wanted to end. On and on into the night, the way Liston numbly engineered his sordid and doomed existence, I could devour just about any Liston piece, lunging through it for one more anecdote, mythic or not, one more putative insight into a man who lived some 40 years but “died the day he was born.”

It is much the same with Nick Tosches’ biography. I did not want it to end, but there were paragraphs that I did. Like:

“In the Saturday night cigarette smokehouse neon dark of that dive, Charles Liston, who neither knew his age nor felt any ties of blood upon this earth nor saw any future beyond the drink in front of him and the smoky dark spare refuge of this barroom from the bone-cutting, river-heavy dank and freezing chill, knew only that he was nobody and that he had come from nowhere and that he was nowhere. He did not see that one could be nobody with a capital ‘N.’ It was the name that Odysseus took -- Nobody -- when he killed the great Cyclops.”

In the words of Howard Cosell, “Somebody stop it, please!”

It’s unfortunate for Tosches, an esteemed writer of runaway ability, that he is, in this volume, given to multiple literary orgasm again and again. While it is fascinating to watch from a writer’s perspective, it is not the kind of mechanism that will easily pull your typical pay-per-view-buying boxing fan through 254 pages.

It’s not as close to blow-by-blow as it is to a literal explanation of Aristotle:

“But democracy precluded slavery no more than did the other perversions of government. A nation without slavery, a world without slavery, was unimaginable; and in the end the helix of Aristotelian rationalism became lost in a swirl of equivocating subtleties.”

Yeah, I hate when that happens.

Two elements of the Liston mystique, as formidable today as when he was the most terrifying man in boxing in the early 1960s, are explained here with unprecedented clarity and understanding. They are Liston’s roots and his inextricable ties to organized crime.

The mob moves through “The Devil and Sonny Liston” in its full ’50s and ’60s glory, right up and through Explanations 1,689 to 1,708 of how and why Sonny likely threw the first fight against the then Cassius Clay, Feb. 25, 1964:

“As the Clay fight approached, Liston was not only a bad draw and an unwanted champion. He was a man who could be exposed as a rapist at any time. This exposure would not only certainly cost him his title and end his career: with his record and reputation, he very likely could be returned to prison as well. Whoever had power over this exposure had power over Liston.”

Tosches then quotes longtime Liston friend and sparring partner Foneda Cox: “The Mafia picked up all of Sonny’s tabs when Sonny got into trouble. I think maybe they got sick of it.”

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in mob money was bet on Clay with Liston a 7-to-1 favorite, it says here, and in a long-distance phone call from his brother after the fight, Liston, asked what happened, said, “I did what they told me to do.”

It was one of the most unforgettable canary-eats-the-cat episodes in sports history, even if it did, in the betting vernacular, stink. Billy Conn, the original Pittsburgh Kid himself, predicted to the great sportswriter Jimmy Cannon before the fight, “The first punch Liston hits him, out he goes. [Clay] can’t fight now, and he’ll never be able to fight. He hasn’t the experience. The only experience he’ll get with Liston is how to get killed in a hurry.”

A strain of real bitterness toward the man who in the next few days would become Muhammad Ali runs through this book, which doesn’t particularly help it. The author mocks Ali, describing a “tiresome and trying wit” in the new champion. “Mediocrity embraced him,” Tosches writes. What embraced Liston were forces that could not conceive of mediocrity, that being too lofty a notion.

Save for its evident erraticism, Tosches’ book essentially builds itself a formidable challenge and does its damnedest to meet it. He puts floodlights to the bottom-of-the-ocean blackness of Liston’s psyche and then tries to find the good in him.

No one will ever get that done. Liston’s badness, if you will, liberated him from hopelessness. He loved his badness. He was perhaps never so alive as when he was a St. Louis hood, robbing and drinking and whoring and fighting. Though boxing would elevate him economically, and he would often undertake earnest behavior patterns that indicated he wanted to be “respectable,” he was never comfortable with “goodness.”

His death at the end of 1970, likely from a heroin overdose but not necessarily self-inflicted, had almost as many sinister aspects as his life. “The gossamer web becomes clearly visible,” Tosches poignantly writes. “But the spider is nowhere in sight.

“. . . The places where Sonny Liston’s past existed, and the places where he claimed it to have existed, when he owned to any past at all, are places of ghosts. More than anything else, that is what this is, I now feel: a ghost story, a haunting unto itself. A whisper through the savanna, a whisper through the pines, a whisper unto itself through the dark of the blood.”

Sonny Liston was a dark train through the night of this culture. It is great to hear the far-off whistle again.