by Nick Tosches
At the press conference afterward, he was asked what he thought when the crowd had booed him.
"The main thing that went through my mind was, "I’ll fix them."'
He felt it, and he said it: "The public is not with me. I know it. But they'll have to swing along until somebody comes to beat me." When the fight ended, Cassius Clay ran in from his fifth row seat and vaulted into the ring. Three members of the Nevada sheriff's guard grappled him down in a corner of the ring, but he managed to slither free and rush to a closed circuit microphone in another corner of the ring.
That rush to the microphone - and Clay's career was becoming one big rush to the microphone - said much about the youthful Clay.
And, hell, man, fuck youthful: he was twenty one years old, a grown man, and it was not so much youth that he was full of but childishness.
A photograph taken before the fight that night shows Clay in a checkered sport jacket, eyes bulging, mouth open and as wide as the Holland Tunnel, screaming his praise for himself, while entertained white onlookers smile.
He was, at this point in his career, seen as an audacious but enamouring child, a frivolity of the noble white man, who perceived in Clay's persona none of the visceral, deep rooted threat of a Liston, none of the implacable and troubling earnest of a Martin Luther King, or the incendiary aggression of a Malcolm X.
In his frenzy to self aggrandize and to endear through his antics, his sense of humor, so central to those designs, was not much developed beyond the playground realm. Beloved, or tolerated, as he was by the great white middle class - and by many blacks, who found in this time of repression something fine and freeing about the rare black man who spouted off, seemingly without care or restraint or fear, in the very midst of white America - he was not a funny man, and his act was trite. Neither an Amos nor an Andy was he. Certainly Liston possessed a far more cutting and subtle sense of humor, as when he told the Big Brothers gathering that "I would find stuff before it got lost"; as when on his way to court one day in Philadelphia, he asked his lawyer, in the event that he should ever be sentenced to the electric chair, to please try to arrange it so that George Katz got "ten percent of the juice." He wasn't as funny as Pigmeat Markham or Moms Mabley or Dick Gregory or none of them. But he was benign.
That image of Clay rushing for the microphone on that night of another man's victory, so ravenous to hurl himself down the gullet and into the immense maw of mediocrity: it was an image to be reckoned with.
The best actors are often the most vapid. This is simply because, almost without exception, they have been in show business since childhood and have been playacting rather than living ever since. I remember Christopher Walken being asked if there was a role that he felt he could not play. Yeah, he said, he couldn't play a human being, because he'd never been one, as he'd been on the stage since childhood.
Clay had not been a child actor. He had been something more bizarre: a child boxer, whose life had been given over to the game at the age of twelve. Since then, from the Golden Gloves to the Olympics to that night in Vegas, he had boxed rather than lived, and his intelligence and involvement with life were as atrophied as any actor's.
His tiresome and trying wit, his harmless and drably colourful shows of playfulness, and his affected audacity were perfectly suited for the media of the day. Mediocrity and media, it should be remembered, are cognates of the same Latin root.
With his dangerous ways and his dangerous airs and his love of that rhythm and blues that the white man held to be dangerous, too, Sonny was to become the new hero of a different, younger minority, that minority of black street punks, and white street punks, who could not afford the ticket price to have their own voices heard at the fights when Sonny was booed and execrated. If Sonny is to be regarded as the first rock 'n' roll champ, Clay should be regarded as the first made for TV boxing idol. As he danced and cavorted in acceptable and inoffensive outrageousness before the masses and the cameras and the microphones of mediocrity, so mediocrity embraced him.
"Cassius," said the New York Times, "is a delightful young man."
White sentiment would later change when Clay allied himself with the Black Muslims and refused to enter the service. But in the summer of 1963, he was a child of the light who seemed to be all that Sonny Liston was not: a good, clean middle class boy who instead of bringing shame and hostility to America had brought her a gold medal from the 1960 Rome Olympics. And, even as his image changed and the maw of mass mediocrity vomited him forth, he became the darling of a more elite mediocrity, a white intelligentsia who sought meaning and metaphor in boxing. Unlike Sonny, who ignored or sneered at writers, Clay knew their value, and he accommodated them. Many of these writers, who could write no better than they could fight, found in him a willing and suitable accomplice in their conceits of the intellect and their deceit of themselves and others. It was through Clay, and with his implicit approval, that they were enabled to play out the marked deck - the dream cards of manliness, racial understanding, provocative sensibility, and bond between writer and warrior - that in reality were less of the soul than of fancy.
But in that summer of 1963, as Clay ran about proclaiming his self greatness, the estimation of him as a fighter was otherwise among writers and observers who knew what they were talking about. "At this stage of his fistic development," wrote Nat Fleischer, "Clay must be regarded as no more formidable an antagonist for Liston than was Patterson.
"In fact, were Clay to fight Patterson I would pick Floyd to knock him out in six rounds, or less. Nothing that Clay did against Henry Cooper in London or Doug Jones in New York's Garden justifies throwing him to the Wolf."
Fleischer said "the widely advertised Lip" was no match for the Wolf. "Liston," he wrote. "should dispose of Cassius in a couple of heats, and then what?" There were no credible challengers in sight.
Said Joe Louis, "Nobody's gonna beat Liston 'cept old age." Returning to Denver after the fight, Sonny received what Philadelphia had not given: a champion's welcome.
"He's happier than he's ever been," said Father Murphy. "When he flew back to Denver Wednesday night, there were several thousand people waiting for him at the airport, including the mayor."
Murphy said of Liston, "Now, this is a man who won't make any more mistakes.''
Sonny made a homecoming visit to the Missouri State Penitentiary. He had his picture taken, smiling as he shook the hand of Warden E.V. Nash. He was greeted wildly by former cellmates in the old A Hall, gave five dollar tips to prison barbers, and ate in the general population dining hall instead of with the officials. It was the biggest story ever to run in the prison newspaper, The Jefftown Journal.
Jim Hackett had been studying a Liston fight film and was transfixed by a fleeting glimpse of a figure in Liston's corner, a presence he had not seen before. The figure seemed strangely familiar. "This guy had a straw hat on," he said. Then it hit him. He knew the guy. The guy in the straw hat had been a cop years ago in St. Louis. If he was alive, and if we could find him, Hackett was sure, he could unlock a door that no one else could. Hackett put the word out. With the help of his friend William Anderson, the guy in the straw hat was found. Hackett called him a number of times. Anderson called, and went to his home as well. But he was not forthcoming. Among the three of us, we had left many messages on an answering machine we were not sure was his. Then I dialed one morning, and he picked up.
"Wasn't no straw hat. Was a little old stingy brim, porkpie."
I was talking to Lowell Powell, who was born in 1923, and who, like William Anderson, was a black cop who had known and befriended Sonny in the early days. Lowell was not in the best of shape. Like Frankie Carbo, like me, like a lot of people, he had diabetes, and the complications were getting the better of him. He had already lost a leg and a lot of his sight. But he was a hell of a guy and not past flirting with the pretty lady from the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Chris Dickinson, who was doing legwork for me. Lowell died in 1998.
I came to him, he told me
, through good people; and he would talk to me. I went to see him the next day, the first of several visits.
He told me that he had known Sonny in the old days; that it was in 1963, when he retired from the force that Sonny hired him as a bodyguard and righthand man, to replace Moose Grayson.
Though Sonny and Geraldine had a childless marriage, Geraldine had a daughter from a previous union, and Sonny, though no one knew it, had fathered a daughter of his own before going to prison. Now, after moving to Denver, he asked his new righthand man to bring him to her.
"He hadn't seen her in life" Lowell said, but he knew who the mother was.
I found her and presented her to him, and, boy, you could look at her and tell she was Sonny's daughter. She looked like he spit her out.
So, we were sitting at the dinner table, and she had done some things that he didn't like. She had taken some money off him or something, and he said. "Here's this police detective, and he's gonna get you"; and I said, "No, baby, I'm not gonna bother you." So he didn't know how to admonish me. He said. "You know, you're not nothing, you just ain't nothing," and blah-blah-blah.
The J&B was talking. I introduced him to J&B and he started drinking J&B all the time he was champion. So I said. "Well. I'm sorry you feel that way." He said. "You know, I'm tired of you," and this, that, and the other, blah-blah-blah. I thought about all the guys that he had hit, you know, that worked at our stable, and I said. "Well, Sonny, let me say this in front of Geraldine." I said. "Geraldine, I'm talking with Sonny, and we're doing some arguing, and I'm no match for Sonny in a fight. I know that he's the heavyweight champion of the world, and I'll admit that I'm no match for him, so he doesn't have to prove anything." I could see at first he had balled his fists up. "All I want you to do is stand out of my way and let me out of here." He stepped to the side and I shot out the door. The next day, he was crying and telling me he was sorry and all that. I said, "What you wanted was to pop me in the jaw and then apologize. But if you hit me in the jaw, it's not gonna be like that. There won't be no apologizing. It's gonna be some time drawn, and in all probability it'll be me, because if you miss and you don't knock me out, I'm gonna have to kill you. I'm gonna have to shoot you."
So we made up and we got even closer after that. He understood me, and I understood him.
The girl's name was Eleanor. They called her Choo Choo. She did not stay too long in Denver.
Years after Sonny's death, an aspiring prizefighter from North Carolina would claim to be the offspring of a St. Louis tryst between his mother and Sonny. Fighting as Sonny Liston. Jr., he made his professional debut at the Tropicana in Atlantic City in 1985. "Let's just say he got absolutely creamed," said the publicist for the fight. "No. let's say he was the worst fighter I've ever seen."
"When the J&B started working, that's when his personality changed. He was Dr. Jekyll as long as he was sober, and when that whiskey took over, he was Mr. Hyde."
As far as is known. Sonny's sexual assaults occurred during his championship reign. Lowell Powell recalled one incident involving a motel chambermaid.
The girl's crying and everything and getting ready to call the police. She said. "I’m gonna call my husband." I said. "It's all right to call your husband. You tell your husband but don't get the police right now." I allowed her to get her husband. I talked with him and I told him what the deal was, and I got about two or three thousand dollars in tens and twenties and fifties, and I laid 'em on the table. I said, "She said he did, and he said he didn't. I'm not trying to buy him out of it, but money beats nothing." That guy picked up that money and didn't look back.
A few days after the second Patterson fight, Jack Nilon announced the formation of InterContinental Promotions, Inc., of which Sonny Liston was to be the president, and of which Jack and Bob and a third Nilon brother, James, were to be the principal officers. A lawyer named Garland Cherry, known as Bill, was to be the attorney for the corporation, which henceforth would promote all of Sonny's fights, and in which Sonny would hold forty seven and a half percent of the stock; the Nilan brothers, the same amount; and Cherry, five percent.
Dan Parker, in his New York Mirror column, implied that the corporation had secret associates. "It would seem that there's room for a lot of explaining from Liston and his errand boys before this piece of business is permitted to get out of hand. Sic him, Estes." On July 28, Estes Kefauver announced that he would open an investigation into InterContinental Promotions.
Three days later, the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission refused to grant a promoter's license to the new corporation, in accord with an opinion by state attorney general Walter E. Allesandroni, who said that Liston could not own substantial stock in a corporation that was promoting his own fight.
Jack Nilon was eager to arrange the Clay fight, and eager to have it take place in Philadelphia, as soon as four weeks later. An alternate plan was proposed whereby Bob and James Nilan would promote the fight. Jack said that he was willing to withdraw as Sonny's adviser, "in order that there shall be no confusion about interests." No mention was made of the 1962, contract that had appointed Nilan as Sonny's manager.
By mid-August, the fight had been postponed to the following year, and they had given up on Philadelphia. Sonny had tax problems, and was avoiding a subpoena from the Joint Legislative Committee on Sports and Physical Fitness, formerly the State Legislative Committee on Boxing.
"Mainly," said one of the committee's legislators, Hayward Plumadore, "I want to know what relations, if any, he has had with Blinky Palermo since he has testified before the Kefauver Committee."
And, yes, Blinky was still out on the outside.
On the last day of August, Sonny arrived in London with Jack Nilon, Foneda Cox, Ben Bentley, Willie Reddish, and Ted King for an exhibition tour of Great Britain and Europe. The tour began well. Introduced from the ring at a Shoreditch Town Hall welterweight match, he was given a standing ovation by the crowd of over two thousand. He fought a three round exhibition with Foneda at Wembley Indoor Stadium, where he gave the British a taste of his "Night Train" skipping. He was photographed bare chested and grinning, awaiting the stroke of branches in a Norwegian sauna; he rode in a suit and fedora through Newcastle on Tyne astride a white horse; he strode through Glasgow blowing bagpipes in a highland kilt and tam o' shanter. The Scots remarked that he was not the cold and gloomy man they had expected.
"I am warm here because I am among warm people, and I feel that and react to it," he told them. "When I return to the United States, I will be cold again, for the people there are cold to me now and have treated me badly." He was presented with a blackthorn shillelagh by a local teenage beauty queen, was guided around town by a new little pal, Peter Keenan, Jr., the eleven year old son of Peter Keenan, a former British and Empire flyweight champion. Later, Sonny would have the boy flown to Denver to spend Christmas with him.
In the midst of the tour, abruptly, on September 18, Liston gathered his entourage and stormed to the London airport. Reporters sought an explanation. "All I know is that we are on the run from London," said Foneda Cox, as they stopped in Chicago en route to Denver. "I’ve never seen him in such an angry mood," said Bentley. At Stapleton Field in Denver, he swept past reporters, brandishing his shillelagh. "Boy, you can't get no word from me," he growled to the first newsman that approached, and he continued to growl as he moved through the reporters: "You ain't going to get no words from me. I don't have to answer your questions." He was said to have growled, too, in a lower voice, "I’m ashamed to be an American."
Foneda Cox told newsmen what Ben Bentley had told them in Chicago: that the anger and shame that Sonny expressed had to do with his reaction to the recent bombing of a black Baptist church in Birmingham, in which four young girls were killed.
The headline in the New York Journal American read, "Liston: 'I'm Ashamed to Be An American.'" A day later, Dan Parker headlined his Mirror column, "Hey, Fellas, Get A Load Of Who's Ashamed Of U.S.!" Arthur Daley of the Times sighed, "Perha
ps Liston is beyond redemption."
But the bombing had been on Sunday morning. Sonny's rage and distress had come three days later.
An Associated Press report of the following day quoted Geraldine as saying that, yes, Sonny had been upset by the tragedy of the Birmingham bombing. It quoted Sonny, too: "I have problems and them is my problems. I have to straighten them out myself."
He had fled Chicago the previous spring. He had run, but he could not hide. Two weeks after his sudden rage, a wire-service report from Chicago stated:
Heavyweight boxing champion Sonny Liston was named in a $100,000 damage suit filed in Circuit Court Thursday by a 33 year old Negro woman who charged that he had attacked her in an auto.
The suit, filed by Mrs. Pearl Grayson, the wife of a Chicago policeman, John, claims that while Mrs. Grayson was riding as a passenger in an auto with Liston last March 29 on Chicago's South Side he "willfully and maliciously assaulted and beat and inflicted bruises upon her body and caused her personal injuries."
Mrs. Grayson's husband served as Liston's bodyguard at Aurora, Ill., when the champion was training for his first title fight with Floyd Patterson, September 25, 1962.
The suit includes $50,000 for assault and battery and an additional $50,000 for exemplary damages.
Attorney Sheldon Mills, who filed suit, said no complaint was made to police at the time. He said he agreed to delay filing after conferring with Liston's business advisor, Jack Nilon, shortly after the alleged incident.
Then nothing more was heard, nothing more was said. In the speed of a moment, the report seemed no longer to exist; seemed to have vanished outright, before the scandal hungry eyes of the press could rest upon it. It was as if the wire had never existed. There is no telling how far, if at all, beyond Chicago it reached.