Blood Simple

“The Devil and Sonny Liston” is about a former heavyweight champion of the world, a man “[b]orn with dead man’s eyes,” whose career was controlled by the Mob. It is about Charles Sonny Liston the criminal, and it is about Liston the fighter, the most devastating of punchers, who went into the tank during his championship rematch with Muhammad Ali. He may have taken other dives, as well.

Sonny’s involvement with the Mob aside, Nick Tosches’ portrayal of Liston and his life of crime and deceit is of a man who was his own Devil. We first meet him as a bloated corpse on a coroner’s metal slab. For the author, the faint scars on his back indicate slave-like beatings by his father. But given Sonny’s record, the question becomes whether the scars are from the beatings of a cruel father, or from scrambling under a fence in full flight from a crime.

Meanwhile, we are asked to believe that Sonny Liston was a victim of devil mobsters like Frankie Carbo and Blinky Palermo. Yet respected championship referee and long time Vegas insider, Davey Pearl, is quoted: “Oh, he [Liston] loved Blinky. He once told me that of all the guys that he had, Palermo was nicest to him.”

Victim?

According to Tosches, “ . . . what there was of wisdom in him told him that, between breaking one’s back and breaking the backs of others, between being a victim of sinful injustice and being its deliverer, it was better to break than to be broken. F--- right and wrong, neither of which had been a friend to him; and f--- that honest-pay shit. Let others get it, and he would take it from them. For Charles Liston knew one thing: it was easier to rob folks than it was to chop cotton.”

Though the case of the fighter-crook is not unheard of, in my experience the successful fighter-crook is uncommon. It takes a long, long time to make a fighter, and the crooks usually quit or self-destruct early on because of drugs, or they prefer violence to work--crooks like to inflict pain, but don’t want to overcome it on the field of battle. Because of the rigors of boxing, most flee the ring once they take a shot to the liver or when they hear that unforgettable crunch when their nose gets bent and that explosion of fire spreads through their face and eyes. Liston was both fighter and crook, a sadness for those of us who love boxing. He was an embarrassment, as Mike Tyson often is, but not the tragic and mythic figure Tosches’ epigraph from Aeschylus, or his reference to Odysseus, would have us believe.

We are told that mob guys enslaved Sonny.

Enslave Liston?

Sonny was a mugger, a boozer and a drunk driver, a rapist and an armed robber who ruled the yard while doing hard time in a Missouri state pen, where his boxing career began. After being paroled from prison, he was an enforcer for a mob-run union. Even after his early success as a professional fighter, he assaulted a cop in an alley, broke his leg and robbed him of his .38. Liston was charged with “assault to kill” and got nine months in a workhouse--a light sentence for busting up a cop, especially after stripping him of his service revolver. But not long after his release, Sonny was told by the St. Louis police to leave town or end up in an alley. Sonny understood and left town, though his long rap sheet didn’t end in Missouri.

The author tells us as much about himself as about Liston: “I think now that my boyhood fascination with Sonny Liston had to do with his being as feared and hated by blacks as by whites. He was the ultimate outlaw . . . his badness transcended race.”

Tosches adds elsewhere: “ . . . the more I learned of boxing, and the more fighters I saw fight, the more I knew that there was no other fighter like Sonny Liston. There never had been, and there never would be. And the more I lived and learned of other things, the more I began to feel that the secret history of Sonny Liston would reveal one of the greatest mob tales ever told, a tale that ended in a murder mystery whose solution seemed to be lost forever. . . . I did not know that it would also reveal the forces of another, unexplored darkness, an underworld unto itself. And I did not know, above all, that it would reveal a soul that, even amid the darkness in which it dwelt, eluded all concepts of good and evil, of right and wrong, of light and darkness.”

Such is the style and substance of “The Devil and Sonny Liston.”

But what of Liston the fighter? Was he indeed the invincible warrior his baleful scowl and the author would have us believe? As an amateur just out of the penitentiary, he smashed his way through tough competition to become the World Golden Gloves Heavyweight Champion, an amateur title though nonetheless an honored one. It took him only four months, a remarkable feat.

Liston’s professional boxing record, dating from 1953 to 1970, is an excellent one. Sonny was a solid if mechanical fighter with a big punch. But was he indeed a fighter unlike any other? Liston’s professional record is 50 wins and 4 losses, with 39 knockouts. Two of his losses were KOs that occurred in 1964 and 1965 at the hands of Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali). In 1969, Liston lost by another knockout.

But in his first 10 fights, from 1953 into early 1955, Liston was 9 and 1, with only three of his nine wins by KO. His loss by decision came at the hands of a man 20 pounds lighter than himself who broke Sonny’s jaw in the process. Nine wins out of 10 fights is a fine record, but Sonny was not, during this period, the spectacular puncher he would later become. This could be attributed to lack of experience. It could be because he and the mob had yet to connect, or because the mob hadn’t decided how to best exploit Sonny’s career. Regardless, Liston the destroyer had not yet arrived.

His power would become evident in May of ’55. Including 1955, his knockout power would dominate opponents through the next nine years, until he lost the title he won from Floyd Patterson to Clay in ’64. But in those 26 fights before losing, Liston won three of his fights by decision--two 10-round fights and one 12-rounder. This proves that when in shape, Sonny could go the distance. It also shows that a good boxer could keep Sonny the KO-puncher at bay. He won the other 23 fights by KO. Two of these KOs were in the eighth round, while 14 came in four rounds or less. Of the 14 KOs he won in four rounds or less, two were one-round KOs of Patterson, known for his weak chin.

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Following his losses to Clay, as noted, Liston was knocked out but once in his remaining 16 fights, and that was a questionable KO loss to former sparring partner Leotis Martin, a 3-to-1 underdog. Sonny also won eight of those last 16 fights by KO in four rounds or less, a puncher to the end. But the problem with big punchers is that they often get lazy, especially when they know the results in advance. They lull themselves into believing they can knock out everyone in the early rounds. They forget that every fighter has two opponents, himself and the guy in the other corner. They forget the dread that overcomes a fighter when his heart and lungs crash; when he runs out of gas and his body turns to concrete; when his brain becomes oxygen-starved and the radar of his eyes can no longer react to incoming bombs aimed at his utter destruction. Vince Lombardi once said fatigue makes a coward of every man.

What most fans don’t know is that it is usually the boxer, not the puncher, who takes the better punch. This is often because the puncher is moving in while he’s swinging shots and gets caught, but the boxer is slipping shots, moving away, countering off the puncher’s miss. It’s also because the puncher may be operating on fumes, may have gone dead in the chest. We only have to remember the Ali-George Foreman fight in Zaire in 1974; Tyson-James “Buster” Douglas in Japan in 1990; the first Tyson-Evander Holyfield fight in 1996.

Tosches’ contention is that it was about the time of Sonny’s first loss, which came in 1954, after seven wins--or maybe even as early as 1953--that the mob took control of Sonny and the huge sexual equipment that Tosches describes Liston as having. Given the mob’s ability to squeeze such equipment, it would seem that Sonny’s first loss may have been engineered. If so, Sonny took a dive, though there is no evidence of that in “The Devil and Sonny Liston.”

But if the mob was indeed in control of boxing, and therefore of Sonny’s career, just how devastating a puncher would Liston have to have been to knock out fighters ordered to take a dive? Were all the fights fixed? Probably not. Were many or most rigged? To be sure, rigged meaning opponents without ability; or guys with chins like Patterson’s, whom even Pete Rademacher--the Olympic champion fighting as an amateur for no pay--or Roy Harris from Cut and Shoot, Texas, knocked down; or fighters who knew they couldn’t stand against Liston and therefore looked for a soft place to lie down--cupcakes that you peel and eat, or tomato cans, as Angelo Dundee would call them. Which brings us to whether Liston was the baddest badass of them all.

He was illiterate and ignorant, but he certainly wasn’t stupid. Since he passed almost immediately from the bars of the pen into the arms of the mob, surely he believed that the best thing that ever happened to him was the mob. Sonny knew a good thing when he saw it, knew where he fit. Yet his biggest error may have been with the mob, not the law, thinking he was badder than the guys in the silk suits.

Tosches would have us believe Sonny was a victim, was somehow enslaved by the mob, and proposes that he may have been killed by the mob. The truth is that the success and money Liston learned to enjoy came because of the mob. Is the mob good? Certainly not. Was it good for boxing to be ruled by Frankie Carbo? Of course not. But the mob was good for Sonny. And if indeed the mob snuffed Sonny, it would have been only because Sonny somehow screwed with it.

It was Sonny, as the heavyweight champion, who would sexually assault a hotel chambermaid as well as the wife of his bodyguard and friend, a retired Chicago cop. It was Sonny who died relatively young, though he looked much older than the 38 years he claimed to be. Was he into hard drugs, despite his fear of needles? Why not? If needles terrified him, as Tosches claims, snorting heroin or cocaine were options. Was he dealing drugs, moving in on someone’s territory, mob or otherwise? Why not? According to Tosches, Sonny knew no boundaries of right and wrong. Did he owe gambling money he couldn’t or wouldn’t pay? A bartender friend of mine was strangled for that, his genitals sewn into his mouth. Did Sonny presume to mess with a mobster’s old lady? That got Argentine heavyweight Oscar Bonavena blasted at the Mustang Ranch.

But Tosches cites no evidence that the mob iced Sonny. So why does he take us through his razzle-dazzle speculations regarding Liston’s last hours . . . a bogus autopsy; black gangsters did it; white gangsters did it; Vegas police did it. One is left to wonder how much book there is without the razzle-dazzle.

Tosches relates the story that Liston was deathly afraid of hypodermic needles, that his fear was so great that he once had a root canal done without Novocain. If you believe the root canal story, I’ve got a herd of unicorns I’d like to sell you. Something not mentioned by Tosches, however, is that Liston could not stand the sight of his own blood, something known to fight guys, a fear profoundly important to the understanding of his character. Which takes us to Sonny’s seventh-round loss by TKO to Clay when he quit in the corner in 1964, claiming numbness in his shoulder and arm. Tosches speculates that Sonny took a dive in that fight. I would disagree.

Liston surely did business in his rematch with Clay as Muhammad Ali in 1965. One of Liston’s close St. Louis friends, an old fighter friend of mine who was there when Liston busted up that cop, told me of telling Liston that he had 200 down on the ’65 rematch with Ali. Sonny was the 8-to-5 favorite, even after losing his title to Clay in ’64. Two hundred was a lot of scratch in 1965. Sonny gave no explanation but said to get off the bet, which of course my friend did. He later told me, “I don’t know about that first Ali fight, but I know about the second.”

But a dive doesn’t ring true in the ’64 fight, not when a caustic substance magically got from Liston’s gloves into Clay’s eyes in the fourth round after Clay had cut Liston in the third. (Alcohol can be smeared on a glove, for example; once the damage is done, the alcohol evaporates.) The substance hurt Clay so badly that he wanted to quit, but Angelo Dundee worked on Clay’s eyes and forced him to go on.

Why would a mob corner juice Liston’s gloves in an attempt to damage Clay, if the mob wanted Clay to win? Why would Dundee, whose brother promoted the fight, and whom Tosches would use to connect Angelo to the mob, shove his fighter back into the ring if the mob had said, “It ain’t Sonny’s night”? Though the fight was even on points after six rounds, film of the fight indicates that the younger, faster Clay was putting a long-range whuppin’ on Sonny, who, like everyone else (including me) and surely the mob, expected to flatten Clay in four rounds or less. But the baddest badass of them all got tired along the way.

The real deal is a simple one. Cassius Marcellus Clay had cut Sonny, had caused the red to flow. Sonny couldn’t stand the sight of his own blood, in Miami’s Convention Hall or anywhere else, and since the youthful Clay was clearly coming on, Sonny flat quit in the corner sucking fumes, his body stone under his glistening skin. The numb shoulder and arm bit was the excuse, not the reason. For me, Liston’s quitting in the corner is his greatest shame, his greatest crime.

What Tosches does mention is Sonny’s dirt-poor childhood in East Arkansas, at the hands of a brutal tenant farmer father; that Sonny had close to two dozen full and half brothers and sisters, seven of whom didn’t survive, most of whom he never knew, or couldn’t remember, or wouldn’t talk about; that neither Sonny nor his mother was sure of the date of his birth; that he was sent to live with a half brother at 16 because of his bad behavior; that he followed his mother to St. Louis, Mo., where he was quick to fall in with bad company; that he committed a series of muggings and armed robberies; that he was given five years in the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, where he did but 28 months before being paroled; that the parole was helped along by the Catholic chaplain in the joint, who first influenced Sonny to enter boxing. It was in the pen that he began to box, and to his credit he came out a fighter.

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He drew immediate attention because of his Golden Gloves triumph and, shortly thereafter, he turned pro. This, in the early-1950s, is when Tosches asserts Carbo entered Sonny’s life and when Sonny entered the mob’s, his dead man’s eyes wide open.

“The Devil gave, and the Devil took away,” Tosches writes. “For Sonny, had the Devil not given to him in the first place, there would never have been anything to take away: because you could be the best, toughest, killingest motherf---ing fighter in the world, but without the Devil it did not much matter a good goddamn, because it was the Devil’s ring. There was no one left for Sonny to turn to; except to the Devil in himself.”

Sonny’s body lay as many as nine days before being discovered by his wife, who had been out of town. Hs autopsy report is inconclusive: maybe a heart condition, or he may have died of a drug overdose. After rotting a week or more, who could say? A “bag of reefer” and a quarter-ounce of heroin were found in his expensive home, as were a holstered .38 revolver and a glass of vodka. Stack enough of that kind of business high enough, and who knows what will happen, especially after a lifetime of serious dissipation.

If killed by others wielding a needle, and given Sonny’s terror of needles and his immense strength, why were there no signs of struggle? Maybe Sonny thought he was joy-popping with friends and hit himself with more than his system could tolerate, or maybe it was a hot shot delivered by someone with evil intent from the start, but there is no evidence of a hot shot. As Tosches notes, if someone wanted Sonny dead, a bullet to the head would have been easier. If the mob wanted him for a sand dune, I would agree. Yet there is no evidence the mob gained by Liston’s death.

And it is Tosches himself who backs off from the murder mystery idea, writing finally, “I think he took too much dope and died.”

But what if Charles Sonny Liston just did it on purpose, a self-inflicted drug execution by a man sick of looking at himself with those dead eyes? If so, simple human kindness requires that we wonder if he popped himself because of deep personal loathing, self-death inflicted by a man sick at heart for allowing himself to be debased and exploited.

A touching thought. But the problem here is that Sonny Liston had no heart. Which is why I am not inclined to shed tears on my Hollofil pillow for an outlaw who squandered and sullied the grandest thing a man could hold: the Heavyweight Championship of the World. *