King of the World

by David Remnick

  Ali’s refusal to go to Vietnam touched young people, especially young African-Americans, profoundly. Gerald Early, a professor of literature who has written deeply on the “culture of bruising,” recalled that moment in 1967 in his essay “Tales of the Wonderboy”: “When he refused, I felt something greater than pride: I felt as though my honor as a black boy had been defended, my honor as a human being. He was the grand knight, after all, the dragon-slayer. And I felt myself, little inner-city boy that I was, his apprentice to the grand imagination, the grand daring. The day that Ali refused the draft, I cried in my room. I cried for him and for myself, for my future and his, for all our black possibilities.”

  Ali was sentenced to five years in prison and a ten-thousand-dollar fine—the maximum. Eventually, in June 1971, the Supreme Court would vindicate him in a unanimous decision, but after knocking out Zora Folley one month after refusing the draft, he would not fight for three and a half years, the prime of his boxing life. He would not regain the heavyweight championship until 1974, when he outfoxed George Foreman on the ropes in Kinshasa, Zaire. “I figure that decision cost him ten million dollars in purses, endorsements, and the rest,” said Gordon Davidson. It also cost him the goodwill of many Americans who thought that he was a rich young man in perfect health avoiding military service and using religion as an excuse. But Ali would never regret the price. He watched his old friend from Louisville, Jimmy Ellis, and then Joe Frazier, take his title. His title, which he had coveted from the time he was twelve. But even for a young man in love with his fame, there were greater priorities. “I was determined to be one nigger that the white man didn’t get,” he told Black Scholar magazine. “One nigger that you didn’t get, white man. You understand? One nigger you ain’t going to get.”

  AS ALI FOUGHT THE COURTS, HIS OLD ANTAGONIST SONNY LISTON stumbled toward oblivion. In 1966, Liston bought a house on Ottawa Drive in Las Vegas. The house was a pastel-green split-level just off the sixteenth fairway of the Stardust Country Club. The business magnate Kirk Kerkorian had lived there. The Listons had two Cadillacs: black-and-green for Sonny, pink for Geraldine. Geraldine had her silver tea service plated with gold. You didn’t have to polish it as often. There were two pairs of boxing gloves in the living room: a bronzed pair from one of Liston’s fights and a mink pair in honor of Geraldine.

  Liston renewed his friendships with Ash Resnik and assorted undesirables. He played a lot of blackjack, and at night he either drank at the casinos or drank at home in front of the television. In Las Vegas, the police gave him the sort of breaks he never got in St. Louis, Philadelphia, or Denver. When they pulled him over in his black Fleetwood and could smell the J&B on his breath, they let him go on home.

  “It’s really nice for us here, I gotta say that,” Liston told a reporter from Sports Illustrated. “At all the hotels I never have to pay for nothin’, they always pick up the tab.”

  For a while Liston talked about regaining the championship, but the truth was that after the Ali fights he defeated a string of second-raters and then got knocked out by one of his old sparring partners, Leotis Martin. For his next—and last—fight, Liston took on Chuck Wepner in Jersey City, a brawl that left Wepner, “the Bayonne Bleeder,” with gashes requiring fifty-seven stitches. The purse was thirteen thousand dollars. “The trouble was that Sonny had bet ten thousand on another fight—Jerry Quarry–Mac Foster—and lost. Plus, he owed three thousand to his corner,” said his friend the gambler Lem Banker, who flew back home with Sonny. “He handed over the cash in brown paper bags and went back to Vegas with zip. Zip exactly.”

  Liston would often drive out to Lake Mead and, sitting alone in a small motorboat, drink beer and drop a line for fish. Perhaps the sweetest moments of his last days were the early mornings when he took long runs with his friend Davey Pearl, a referee, who had worked his corner in Jersey City. “We’d be out there, running in the morning light with the sprinklers going on some deserted golf course, and I think for that time, anyway, Sonny was in good shape,” Pearl said. “But the thing with Sonny was that no matter how close you got to him—and we were close—you always got the feeling that there was sadness there that he wouldn’t talk about.” Liston was a man of severe limitations and an acute awareness of them. When his old friend Father Edward Murphy asked him why he didn’t get involved in the civil rights movement, Liston dropped his old sarcasm (“ ’Cause I ain’t got no dogproof ass”) and said, more poignantly, “If I was to get involved, I’d find myself at the head of some march and have to say something, and I wouldn’t know what to say.” Especially now, without the glitter of a championship belt to attract all manner of leeches, Liston was a lonely man. “Many times I was around with Sonny Liston and he said, ‘You like me, don’t you?’ Like a little kid would,” his old sparring partner Ray Schoeninger once said. “I says, ‘Sure, I like you.’ And he says, ‘You know, I like you, too.’ I think because of his terrible background, he was looking for someone who didn’t criticize him and who didn’t hit him with a club or a stick.”

  According to friends who are still around, Liston was always hard up for cash and worked, on the side, in his old job, as an enforcer—this time for loan sharks and, possibly, drug dealers. Banker, who was one of the most successful gamblers in town and a close friend of Liston’s, said that in the last weeks of 1970 he got a call from a Las Vegas sheriff who told him that Sonny was getting involved with the “wrong people” and that he’d better watch it if he didn’t want to get caught up in an imminent drug raid.

  In late December, Geraldine left Las Vegas to visit her mother in St. Louis. When she came home on the evening of January 5, 1971, she found a corpse. Sonny lay dead in his underwear on a bench at the foot of their bed. His body was bloated and dried blood came from his nose. Geraldine had not spoken to Sonny since she’d left. Newspapers were stacked up outside the door. Police estimated that Liston had been dead around six days. Las Vegas police sources said that Geraldine called her lawyer but may have waited as long as two hours to call the police. The police found a small amount of marijuana, a syringe, and a “balloon” of heroin, a few hits’ worth, in a cabinet. They also found a .38 revolver and a glass of vodka on a table near the bed. The autopsy revealed traces of morphine and codeine of a type produced by the breakdown of heroin in the body, and yet the report listed the cause of death as lung congestion and heart failure.

  The most prevalent theory of Liston’s death, among both his friends and the police, is that he was murdered, that he was given a “hot shot”—a lethal dose of heroin—by someone he’d crossed, someone who wanted him out of the way. Gary Beckwith, a sergeant and an undercover narcotics detective on the scene, said that the police were never satisfied with the death report and began investigating the possibility that a former Las Vegas police detective might have been involved in a hit on Liston. The detective in question, Beckwith said, was also convicted of some robberies in the area. The theory had it that the detective killed Liston on behalf of Resnik, who was furious at Liston for not taking a dive in one of his last fights.

  “We tried every way in the world to prove that,” Beckwith said. “We went after this former detective for the robberies and we tried to corroborate this part of his story, but we were never able to come up with a shred of evidence along these lines. I have doubts myself.”

  Harold Conrad talked to various mobsters and cops in Las Vegas in the years after Liston’s death, and he, too, heard the theory of a bad cop killing him on contract. But Conrad was sure only that Liston had come to the sort of end that was always expected, the end Sonny Liston always expected himself. “I talked to a guy I knew in the Vegas sheriff’s office, and here’s what he said: ‘A bad nigger. He got what was coming to him,’ ” Conrad said. “I don’t buy that. He had some good qualities, but I think he died the day he was born.”

  LISTON GOT A TRUE LAS VEGAS FUNERAL. GERALDINE SAID that Sonny had always said that if “anything happened to him,” his last wish would be to go down the S
trip one last time. The funeral began with a service for four hundred people at the Palm Mortuary. The pews were filled with Vegas royalty and near-royalty: Nipsy Russell, Ed Sullivan, Ella Fitzgerald, Jerry Vale, Jack E. Leonard, Doris Day. Joe Louis came a little late because he was shooting craps. “Sonny would understand,” he said before putting down the dice. Father Murphy flew in from Denver to deliver the eulogy. “We should only speak good of the dead,” he said. “Sonny had qualities that most people didn’t know about.” A choir sang “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” The Ink Spots sang “Sunny.”

  As the funeral cortege inched down the Strip, gamblers came out of the casinos, blinking in the sunlight, to watch the heavyweight champion in his steel coffin go by for the last time. “People came out of their hotels to watch him pass,” Father Murphy said. “They stopped everything. They used him all his life. They were still using him on the way to the cemetery. There he was, another Las Vegas show. God help us.”

  Liston was buried in Paradise Memorial Gardens, a green oasis in the desert at Patrick Lane and Eastern Avenue. The cemetery is right near the airport landing strip. The grave is in row one of the “Peace” section. A plaque one foot square reads, “Charles ‘Sonny’ Liston, 1932–1970. A Man.”

  TWENTY-SIX YEARS LATER, ANOTHER FORMER HEAVYWEIGHT champion and former inmate, Mike Tyson, went out to Paradise Memorial Gardens to lay a bouquet of flowers on Liston’s grave. They were the only flowers there and they baked and dried quickly in the early summer sun. Tyson was fighting for the title in a few days against Evander Holyfìeld. When he was not watching gangster movies late into the night, Tyson would occasionally slip a tape into the VCR and watch Liston working out to the tune of “Night Train.” To watch Liston work, Tyson said, was “orgasmic.”

  “Sonny Liston, I identify with him the most,” Tyson said one afternoon at Don King’s house on the edge of Las Vegas. “That may sound morbid and grim, but I pretty much identify with that life. He wanted people to respect him or love him, but it never happened. You can’t make people respect and love you by craving it. You’ve got to demand it.

  “People may not have liked him because of his background, but the people who got to know him as an intimate person have a totally different opinion. He had a wife. I’m sure she didn’t think he was a piece of garbage.… Everyone respected Sonny Liston’s ability. The point is respecting him as a man. No one can second-guess my ability, either. But I’m going to be respected. I demand that.”

  It was uncanny, the similarities between Tyson and Liston: both poor kids who grew up in unstable homes, criminals at an early age, who learned that their only way out of a humiliating life was through fighting. They were men who trusted no one, not when they had the title and not later. Tyson did his time for rape, Liston did his for armed robbery. Like Muhammad Ali, Tyson had the advantage of fluent speech and money (he made tens of millions), but he wasn’t Ali-like in any way. There was no pleasure in his talk; his wit was acid, self-lacerating. Tyson felt alone and headed toward a bad end. He felt like Sonny Liston.

  “I have no friends, man,” Tyson said. “When I got out of prison, all my old friends, they had to go. If you don’t have a purpose in my life, man, you have to go.… Why would you want someone around in your life if they have no purpose? Just to have a pal or a buddy? I got a wife. My wife can be my pal and buddy. I’m not trying to be cold, but it’s something I picked up.… If I’m gonna get screwed, I’m not gonna get screwed over by the people that screwed me before. I’m gonna get screwed by the new people.…

  “I’ve been taken advantage of all my life,” Tyson went on. “I’ve been used, I’ve been dehumanized, I’ve been humiliated, and I’ve been betrayed. That’s basically the outcome of my life, and I’m kind of bitter, kind of angry at certain people about it.… Everyone in boxing makes out well except for the fighter. He’s the only one who suffers, basically. He’s the only one who’s on Skid Row. He’s the only one who loses his mind. He sometimes goes insane, he sometimes goes on the bottle, because it’s a highly intensive, pressure sport, and a lot of people lose it. There’s so much you can take and then you break.”

  A few nights later, Tyson went into the ring with Holyfield, and when he discovered that he was no longer what he once was, that he could not muscle Holyfield around the ring, he snapped. He bit off a chunk of Holyfield’s ear. And then he bit him again.

  “My career is over,” he said in the locker room after the fight. “It’s over. I know that.”

  AFTER HIS FIGHTING DAYS WERE DONE, FLOYD PATTERSON RETIRED to New Paltz, New York, where he ran the Huguenot Boys’ Club and trained young boxers at no charge. “That’s what kept me off the street when I was a kid, so I wanted to do the same for someone else,” he told me. In 1995, the new governor, George Pataki, appointed Patterson head of the New York State Athletic Commission, which handled the state’s boxing and wrestling shows. The salary was $76,421 and the job was not very demanding. Boxing had long ago faded from New York and migrated to Las Vegas and Atlantic City. There wasn’t very much for Patterson to do. And yet it was clear that he could barely handle his duties, and did so mainly through the efforts of a few discreet aides in the various state offices. There had been rumors for years that Patterson’s memory was failing, that he was feeling the effect, at last, of sixty-four professional bouts and countless knockdowns, but no one was eager to embarrass a decent man. Patterson’s condition was an open secret among boxing reporters, but for a long time no one printed anything. So what if he held the office? It was a patronage sinecure for a guy who deserved it.

  When I interviewed Patterson, he looked, at sixty-three, almost exactly as he had as heavyweight champion: the same trim, sinewy build, the same wide, pleading eyes, the same little pompadour. To meet him was to realize how incredible it was that he had ever been heavyweight champion or that he had ever been in the ring with Liston or Ali. He was of mortal size. Only his hands, which were swollen, sandpapery, and huge, gave any hint of power. As we talked, Patterson repeated himself occasionally and forgot names and places and dates, but he wasn’t “out of it” so much as he was insecure about his ability to stay on a subject and remember details.

  “Do I sound to you like someone who’s been damaged by boxing?” he said at one point. “Don’t I sound perfectly normal? I love boxing. Boxing is wonderful. Boxing’s given me everything in the world.”

  A few months later, in March 1998, Patterson was called on to give an extensive deposition in a legal case involving the promoters of “ultimate fighting,” a brand of organized mayhem banned in New York. The deposition was a disaster for Patterson. He was questioned under oath by a lawyer named David Meyrowitz for more than three hours:

  Question: Who did you fight [for the heavyweight title in 1956]?

  Patterson: I’d have to think about that.… I can’t remember the opponent I fought, but I wound up beating him to become heavyweight champion of the world.…

  Q: Where did the fight take place?

  Patterson: I really don’t know. I think it was in New York.…

  Q: Do you know the name of your predecessor?

  Patterson: Yes, I am going to get that out. Just a minute. (Searches his pockets.) I have it here. (He is unable to find it.)

  Q: Mr. Patterson, do you know the name of your predecessor, chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission?

  Patterson: Yes, I do know, but, uh, I didn’t get that much sleep last night to tell you the truth and I am very, very tired and it’s hard to think when I’m tired.…

  Q: Do you know the names of the other two commissioners who were commissioners at the time you were appointed?

  Patterson: No.…

  Q: Do you know the names of the other commissioners of the New York State Athletic Commission?

  Patterson: Uh, yes and no. I know them, but it’s hard for me to think. I didn’t get to bed till very late last night.…

  Q: The other two commissioners?

  Patterson: One’s a lad
y and one’s a man.

  Q: Do you have the telephone number of that office [the commission in Poughkeepsie]?

  Patterson: I have the number at home.

  Q: Would you know it here?

  Patterson: No.…

  Q: What’s the secretary’s name?

  Patterson: Oh boy.… I see her quite often, I know her very well. I just forget the name.…

  And so on. The painful session took place on March 20 and made the papers ten days later. Patterson couldn’t place the name of the commission’s lawyer, he didn’t know the most basic rules of boxing (the size of the ring, the number of rounds in a championship bout), and he generally seemed lost. The fact that he could not remember the greatest night of his life—his win over Archie Moore in Chicago, in 1956, to win the title—devastated him. “What are we talking about?” he said at one point. “I’m lost.” He allowed that when he was tired he was bad with names: “Sometimes, I can’t even remember my wife’s name, and I’ve been married thirty-two, thirty-three years.”

  When the New York Post made it clear that the paper was going to publish a story about the deposition, Patterson quickly wrote a letter to Governor George Pataki resigning his post.

  “It’s hard for me to think when I’m tired,” Patterson said. “Sometimes, I can’t even remember my own name.”

  ALL THE BEST HEAVYWEIGHTS DURING ALI’S TIME AND AFTER—Patterson, Liston, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Larry Holmes, Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield—have languished in his shadow. They have all been good fighters, even excellent ones, but they could never hope to achieve Ali’s resonance, his brilliance. “I came to love Ali,” Patterson told me. “I came to see that I was a fighter and he was history.”

  Ali may turn out to have been the pinnacle of boxing and also its end. His successors came at a time when boxing itself is fading away. One by one, the most famous gyms in the country are shuting down. The Fifth Street Gym, the Gramercy Gym, Stillman’s, the Times Square Gym: all gone. Arenas like Madison Square Garden put on, at most, a few shows a year. Boxing is becoming the anachronistic entertainment of gambling towns, on a par with Wayne Newton and Siegfried and Roy. More and more women are watching and participating in sports like basketball, baseball, even hockey, but they will not watch boxing; as a result, the networks show almost no boxing at all on the Olympics broadcasts. And, not least, boxing, a sport designed to stun the brain, is finally indefensible. Boxing has come to represent an utter lack of opportunity, not opportunity itself. There is beauty in it—there is terrible beauty in battle, too, particularly for the noncombatant—but if you meet enough former boxers, if you try to decipher their punch-drunk talk, you begin to wonder. What beauty is worth this? What is worth Floyd Patterson’s confusion? What is worth Jerry Quarry left so damaged after all the pounding or Wilfred Benitez left raging at his ghosts? And these were the top fighters, the men who meted out more punishment than they got. What of the would-bes, the professional opponents with records of 47–44, their ears cauliflowered and their minds forever rattled? What of them?