by Nick Tosches
That first hour at that station, in that desolation between two and three in the morning on the Lord's given day, when he, Charles Liston, Unknown Negro Number One, confessed as openly and wildly as any mourning bench Baptist beset with the speaking in tongues - it must have been an hour of brutality as awful as any that Charles Liston himself had brought down upon another. An eye for an eye, maybe, a tooth for a tooth, one cold January night for another. He was a man who had forsaken wrong and right. and in that desolate station, he did not know what hit him, wrong or right, justice or vengeance, or just that sort of shit that happens when animals get to mixing, a pack of one kind against a stray of another. He had hunted lone defenseless prey with his little pack, all right, attacking from behind, silent as a big nightstalking cat. Dirt, fist, feet. And now he was the prey.
Helen Liston remembered how her son got the scar between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. It was back on the plantation, and he was splitting stove wood. "I told him to be careful with that ax, and I just walked into the house when he hit his hand and cut it bad. We soaked it in coal oil to stop the bleeding." But she never knew where those other scars came from, the one on his cheek, the one on his forearm.
"They say he confessed," she would say. "I don't know."
Captioned "Man Caught 25 Minutes After $37 Cafe Holdup" and describing him as "a bandit," a small item in the St. Louis Globe Democrat of January 16, gave "Charles Liston. 22, Negro," his first notice in the press. A St. Louis Post Dispatch item of that day began: "A flamboyant yellow lumberjack-type shirt worn by a young Negro walking in the 1000 block of O'Fallon street early yesterday attracted the attention of Patrolman David Herleth."
On May 23, he pled guilty on all counts to three charges of first degree robbery and two charges of larceny, and was sentenced to five years on each charge, the terms to run concurrently, at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City.
David Herleth, who now advocates boot camps or tent towns for young criminals, never saw much good in sending them to prison. "Shit," he said, prison was where "they learned to do the job right." Charles Liston knew the job: it was to survive, any way he could. But as for doing it right, he had not a clue.
Upon entering prison, on June 1, 1950, Liston stated his age to be twenty and his residence to be Wynne, Arkansas, which appeared misspelled as "Wynn" on the prison identity card that carried the first pictures ever taken of Charles L. Liston, right profile and facing front, with a tag around his neck: Mo. State Prison 63723, dated 6-2-50. His weight was recorded at 199 pounds, his height at six feet, his build as Heavy; his complexion was described as light brown, his hair as black, his eyes as dark brown. In the pictures, those eyes say nothing.
"I’m not sure how he happened to get into so much trouble," Helen Liston would say. "You know, it's sometimes the company you keep which run your luck into a bad string. He was just a country boy. He didn't know to do nothing." She simply could not understand it, she would say. He had, after all, taken religion in the Methodist church down home in Arkansas. "I heard him confess. I used to tell him he had to cultivate his religion. He said he would."
All things considered, she said, "He was about as good a conditioned child as I had."
By the time Charles entered prison, Helen was gone again, off to another daughter, in Gary, Indiana. She and Charles were never to see much of one another from that time on. And by the time he got out of the joint, Charles was no longer a bandit. He was a boxer named Sonny.
Charles Liston fucked with no one in Jeff City, and no one fucked with him. "I didn't mind prison," he would later say.
The prison population was about two-thirds white, one-third colored, and the three dominant gangs were white. After Liston became the heavyweight champion of the world, he was mythologized into a hero of the Jeff City cultus. There was the legend about the time the prison gang leader Hank Calouris gave shit to some black kid, and Liston walked across the yard, smacked Calouris across the face with the back of his hand, and told him, "I’ll do that every time I hear you touched a colored boy. If you don't like it, I'll see you in the Hole" - a storage room beneath the cellblock - "at six"; about how he went to the other prison gang leaders, Nick Baroudi and a guy named Frankie, and told their white asses the same damn thing; about how when he emerged from the Hole that night, he left the three of them lying battered behind him on the concrete floor.
In reality, his disciplinary record showed only three minor violations: shooting dice, wasting food, and "chewing gum rubber bands in his cell." He was enrolled briefly in the prison school program, but he dropped out.
William P. Steinhauser, who worked at the prison during Liston's term and later became the assistant warden, told the sports writer Andrew Sturgeon Young that "as well as I can remember, Liston was assigned to the kitchen and worked on the docks where they bring the vegetables in and unload them from the farm." He remembered him as a formidable character all right. "I don't think you could hurt the man," and if he hit you, "it's just too bad." But.as long as nobody fucked with him, "he didn't fuck with nobody." "He was a reserved sort of fellow," Steinhauser said. "He was the sort of fellow you almost had to draw a conversation out of. We had no trouble with him at all. He was all right." Though men have claimed to know where Liston's nickname came from, and some have taken credit for bestowing it on him, no one knows for sure who it was in prison that gave Liston the nickname of Sonny. But the man who first put gloves on his fists was the Reverend Edward B. Schlattmann, the prison chaplain.
Born in 1909.Father Schlattmann was retired and in his eighty ninth year when I spoke to him. He clearly recalled Liston's arrival at the Missouri State Penitentiary in the spring of 1950.
"The Catholic chaplain," he explained to me, "was also director of athletics. No extra pay, of course." Liston "was a big husky guy and always getting in fights with other men."
Like other brawling inmates, he was put into the main-yard ring by Father Schlattmann. "After four weeks of fighting, nobody in the penitentiary would get into the ring with Sonny."
From the outset, there was the problem of gloves. It was a problem that would remain for years to come. Sonny's hands were bigger than other men's. Almost all heavyweight fighters have fists that measure a foot or less in girth. But Sonny's fists - which gave pause to men merely on seeing them - were between fourteen and fifteen inches around. Aside from the poor, pitiable giant Primo Carnera in the early thirties, the only heavyweight champion for whom a fourteen-inch fist was claimed was Jess Willard, the six and a half foot champion of the late teens. Standard boxing gloves simply were not made for fists like Sonny's. They did not fit. His hands could be forced into the biggest of them, but then they could not be properly laced and tied. Eventually, there would be money for custom fashioned gloves from the Sammy Frager Company in Chicago. Until then, he would use what he had to use.
Father Schlattmann was the first of several Catholic priests who became important in Liston's life. He was drawn to men such as Schlattmann - the real ones, the rare ones who devoted their lives to God through their devotion to other men - and their voodoo over him was strong. He showed to them a side of himself that few saw. It was not a hidden side, but it revealed something in that it was a manifestation both of how he wished to be and how he wished to be seen. In many respects, the priests knew and loved a Sonny Liston that did not exist. It was part honest and heartfelt desire to be otherwise and part con job, the way of a half wise man: wise enough to sense beatitude, fool enough to think it could be boosted with the right line of shit.
"He never drank," Father Schlattmann said, as every priest who knew Liston would say. "He never used cuss words. He was a good Joe." And then, for a moment, it was as if Father Schlattmann had always known that there was another Liston, the one beneath, or apart from, the Liston that Sonny allowed the priests to see, the Liston, part wishful and part real, that they drew from him. And it was as if, in that moment, he still saw something good. Liston, he said, had "no religi
on." But, in a way,"he had his morals."
Schlattmann said that while Liston beat every opponent in the prison, he had no proper knowledge of boxing. His first "trainer" in the joint was another black prisoner who had boxed on the outside. Schlattmann vaguely recalled that this other prisoner may have been called Sonny and that the nickname of his conquering protege may have been passed from the one to the other, either directly or as Sonny's Boy, then Sonny Boy, then simply Sonny.
Liston watched the prison heavyweight champion and strongman, a man called Booker, go down before him and a crowd of nearly three thousand howling inmates, and he very nearly killed another convict, a man called Earl.
Later, when Liston was on the outside, he never forgot the priests. "Every fight that Sonny had," said Schlattmann, "he invited us to come to the fight. We had free tickets. That was Father Stevens" - Schlattmann's successor at Jeff City -"and myself. We'd go to his dressing room before the fight." The fights got bigger, and still Liston never forgot. "We both tried to pay our way, our airline and all that, and his manager at that time, I forget who he was, he spit on the sidewalk and said, 'It's like that in the ocean."' When Father Schlattmann was transferred to a parish, he was replaced at the prison by Father Alois Stevens, who previously had been chaplain at Algoa, an intermediate reformatory nearby. Monsignor Jack McGuire, who at the time was an assistant at the Jefferson City parish, remembered the day Father Stevens came to him about Sonny.
"He told me that there was this great big monstrous convict over there that they couldn't get anybody else to fight: they had to put two men in the ring with him at the same time." Stevens told McGuire that he thought Liston "could have a very successful career as a pro boxer, but they couldn't get him paroled because he couldn't even sign his name," and they would thus never be able to line up a promise of gainful employment for him.
Father McGuire, born in 1924, had been a sportswriter for the St. Louis Star Times, a UPI stringer, and a publicity director for the St. Louis University athletic department. He knew Robert L. Burnes, who was the sports editor of the Globe-Democrat and an active Catholic layman.
"So one day Father Stevens and I drove down to St. Louis to see Bob Burnes in his office." Burnes called his friend Monroe (Muncey) Harrison, a thirty two year old former boxer who had become a coach and trainer.
Harrison went to Jefferson City in late February 1951, in the company of his partner and fellow trainer, William (Tony) Anderson, who ran a gym with Harrison on Olive Street. They brought with them thirty two year old Thurman Wilson, considered to be the best heavyweight fighter in St. Louis.
At this time, Sonny's trainer in prison was a fellow inmate, Sam Eveland, a young 1950 Golden Gloves champion who had been sent from Algoa to Jefferson City for aiding the attempted escape of two fellow prisoners.
"I was in the pen with Sonny," Sam told me. "I had just won the Golden Gloves in Kansas City. They gave him to me to teach him how to box, and I was his coach in the pen.''
"There was a bunch of trainers in there," Sam told me, "but none of them was ever a champ. They was just guys helping out." Father Stevens "didn't know nothing about boxing." One of those "guys helping out" was an inmate named Joe Gonzalez, who claimed to have given Liston the ring name of Sonny Boy. Sam himself believes that Liston got his nickname from "his grandma." He is not alone in believing that the nickname dated to childhood. George Morledge, Jr., said that Liston was known as Sonny back on the plantation.
Eveland remembered Harrison and Anderson coming to the joint. They were "short heavyset black people. Good people." And he remembered Liston's fight with Thurman Wilson. "Sonny destroyed him. I mean, there was no contest."
Wilson is said to have gone two rounds with Sonny, then called it quits with the words "I don't want no more of him."
When I asked David Herleth, the cop who busted Liston, to describe him, he thought awhile, his words wandered, and then, plainly and firmly he answered: "Big overgrown kid." Father Alois Stevens had described him as "big but very much a boy, just barely dry behind the ears."
I asked Sam Eveland what Sonny was like back then. Was he a good guy?
"He wasn't a guy." Sam said affectionately. There was a hard edged sort of sympathy in his voice. "He was a kid. Yeah, he was an animal, all right. He was still a kid, though. A good kid. He had a good heart."
And, as fighters go?
"Nobody could beat Sonny," he said, "and they knew that." From between two pages of a tattered scrapbook, Sam handed me an old Christmas card from Sonny, the three-cent stamp on its envelope postmarked Philadelphia, December 8, 1961. He showed me a note from around that same time: Sonny had learned to write his name longhand, and the note opened to reveal one of his first autographs, which he wanted Sam to have.
"Yeah, poor Sonny," Sam said, at the end of a long talk. "Poor kid."
Monsignor McGuire remembered Liston much as Father Schlattmann had: "an enormous man," but a basically good and kind and simple man - simple, he added, "in the best sense of the word." But he also echoed the epitaph of Sam Eveland's description: "the poor man," said the good monsignor with an elliptical sigh: "the poor man."
On the night of February 22, 1951, Muncey Harrison rushed grinning into Burnes's office at the Globe-Democrat. "He was breathless," Burnes wrote many years later.
"You finally found me a live one," Harrison told him.
It was Burnes's hope that his friend Muncey Harrison would become Liston's manager, but his friend knew that he could not do it alone.
Monroe Harrison was respected well and widely as a trainer. He had been Joe Louis's favorite sparring partner, and he had trained Archie Moore, who learned from Harrison the "shell style," or "turtle defense," that became his greatest fighting maneuver. But his career brought him less money than satisfaction, and he worked as a school custodian to make ends meet. Harrison knew that he lacked the capital to manage alone a fighter of Liston's astounding potential.
He turned to Frank W Mitchell, the forty-five-year-old publishing heir of the St. Louis Argus, which was founded in 1912 and was the oldest and most respected of several weekly newspapers serving the local black community. No stranger to boxing, Mitchell already maintained a small stable of several black fighters. He had raised Charley Riley, the St. Louis featherweight, from anonymity in the mid-forties to a shot at Willie Pep's title in 1950. He managed the man who became Liston's friend and sparring partner, the light heavyweight Foneda Cox. Another of Mitchell's light heavyweights was young Jesse Bowdry, who would begin to make a name for himself in 1955, with his professional debut at the age of sixteen.
Together Harrison and Mitchell, with the blessing of Father Stevens and Bob Burnes - church, white press, black press - campaigned for Liston's release. Meeting with officer Richard Niles of the parole board, Mitchell promised that he would see to it that Sonny would receive a job and proper training as a boxer.
"I didn't really want to get involved with Sonny," said Burnes, "and my publisher kept telling me not to get involved. This may sound like preaching, but I saw Sonny and said to myself, 'Here's a man who has his one chance, his only chance; no other way in God's world to make anything except with his fists: I tried to help him."
Father Stevens, too, had been advised not to become overly involved with Liston, and he later made it clear that Sonny was paroled to Frank Mitchell and Monroe Harrison, not to him. "I usually had to stay out of those things," the priest said.
Sonny fought what may have been his last fight in prison on July 4, 1952. He was paroled to Mitchell and Harrison on October 30, 1952. Mitchell got him a job as a laborer at a steel plant and a room at the Pine Street YMCA.
In March 1952, the tenor saxophonist Jimmy Forrest, a thirty two year old son of St. Louis, broke the R&B charts wide open with a brooding, tough rhythmed evocation called "Night Train.''
Duke Ellington had written and recorded a song called "Happy Go Lucky Local" in 1946. Forrest had played in Duke Ellington's orchestra in 1949 and 1950, and he had
stolen "Night Train" directly from the Ellington composition. He had dragged it down to the gutter to behold the starless heavens magically anew; had transformed it, yes, into a brooding, tough rhythmed evocation, a wordless siren's song, a summoning, slow and wild at once, of vague and dangerous beauty. But he had stolen it outright none the less.
How fine and fitting it was that this act of inspired robbery should become the favorite record of Sonny Liston, who at the time was in the joint for a lower form of robbery. It was the record that he would play, again and again, at every workout, until it echoed within him, the soundtrack of blow and heartbeat, until the end. It was the music, faraway and seductive, of that animus, that place inside him rarely to be visited and never to be delved, and of that scar tissue too. He had always been on that night train, had been born to it. And now, released to the dream of a golden new morning, he was about to enter the darkest tunnel of all.
BIG
TIME
THEY WANTED TO ENTER SONNY IN THE GOLDEN Gloves as soon as possible. There was no age restriction in the Golden Gloves, but legal proof of age, any age, was required.
In Arkansas in those days, an affidavit from an older family member sufficed to establish a record of birth. And so it was, in 1953, that Charles Liston, by way of a "Delayed Birth Certificate" filed with the Arkansas Bureau of Vital Statistics, came to be born on May 8, 1932: and so it was that Sonny Liston, who had been twenty two in January 1950 and twenty in June of 1950, turned twenty once again in the spring of 1952.
Harrison gave him a brand new background to go with his brand new birthday. His life of Sonny presented a young and innocent boy whom the police found sleeping one night in an alley at Twenty Third and Cole. He was cold and hungry and could not go home because there was no one there to let him in. Their compassion for him was such, and he so deserving of compassion, that they embraced him as their own.