The Devil and Sonny Liston (20 page)

On the afternoon of the fight, Sonny had a party at his home on Dunlap Street. There was champagne for everybody but him. He played records.

"Where Dave Brubeck at?" he wondered aloud as he searched through his collection until he found what he was looking for: Brubeck's "Take Five" on the 1960 album Time Out.

"Hey, get this," he said, pulling out a recent album on the Chess label,
"
Pigmeat Markham at the Party
. This guy's the best."

Sonny was the first rock 'n' roll champ. Foneda remembered those tapes blaring fine and loud as they drove through the night. Sonny liked Ray Charles, Bo Diddley, Little Milton. "We had records going back to all the great artists. The black artists," Foneda said. "This is what Sonny loved to listen to."

Back in February '61, James Brown and his Famous Flames had recorded a version of "Night Train": same night, same train, but with a rhythm like a nasty automatic instead of Jimmy Forrest's big bad long revolver. "Sonny was crazy about that record," said Foneda.

"Sonny," one guy asked him as the records played and Sonny danced the Twist with Geraldine at that party before the Westphal fight, "don't you like to talk about boxing?"

"When I met my wife," Sonny answered, "I didn't talk too much. So why should I talk to a man?"

After a dinner of steak and peas, Sonny excused himself and took a nap.

The crowd at Convention Hall numbered 3227, with gross receipts figured to be $19,020. The money was in the closed-circuit action.

Sonny disposed of Westphal in one minute and fifty eight seconds, which was less time than it took to do the Twist with Geraldine.

The West German boxer was asked how he felt. "My body feels good, but my soul not so," he said. He declared Liston to be the "best fighter I saw ever."

Would he like to fight Liston again?

"No."

Westphal at the time was ranked fourth among heavyweights. When Liston was asked how he himself would rank Westphal, he hesitated, then smiled. "He's all right," he said. "He's a nice fighter."

In the next day's
New York Herald Tribune
, Jerry Izenberg would write: "Westphal, a blond master baker from Hamburg, said yesterday that he has never been knocked off his feet. For a while last night it looked like it would be a long time before he was on them again. "

Having barely broken a sweat, Sonny walked with a quiet pulse to the press room under the stands. He sat there on a wooden chair in his white robe, sipping orange juice and watching Patterson beat McNeeley on a closed circuit monitor.

"If he were here, I'd go back and fight without even takin' a shower.''

The guys in the press room started asking him questions. How had he taken care of Westphal with such devastating haste?

Sonny shrugged distractedly: "Left jab, right hand. "

That right had knocked Westphal unconscious for almost two minutes, almost as long as the fight itself. "How did it feel looking down there at Westphal? I mean, with his eyeballs rolling around and his tongue sticking out like that," a reporter asked.

Sonny looked at the reporter with an expression that said nothing. "It felt good," he said.

Sonny leaned forward in his chair during the postfight interview with Patterson, who was asked if Sonny Liston was among his future plans. Patterson would say only that he had "the greatest respect for Sonny Liston - in the ring."

Upon his return from Denver, he had been asked by a reporter in New York what he had learned in his rehabilitation.

"I’ve been learning to be around different kinds of people." Sonny said.

"What kind?"

"The right kind."

The reporter wished him to elucidate.

"There are only two kinds of people. Good and bad, right?" A wire from the Religious News Service, datelined Philadelphia, December 5,
1961: "Re-established in boxing's big time after taking only 118 seconds to knock out his first opponent in nine months. Sonny Liston is heading back to Denver to continue the 'rehabilitation' and '3R's' course conducted by Father Edward P. Murphy, S.J."

He had been after Floyd Patterson and the title for a long, long time. Patterson was the first heavyweight in history to regain the title; but from the time he regained it, from Ingemar Johansson, in June of 1959, until the December 1961 closed-circuit double header he had fought only one other fight, and that had been yet another rematch with Johansson.

In December 1960, when Sonny appeared before the Kefauver Committee, Patterson and his manager Cus D'Amato had accepted no challengers for almost a year and a half.

SENATOR DIRKSEN: I would think after seven years of hard experience, you would have some recommendations to make to improve boxing if it is to survive. Have you any suggestions?

LISTON: Well, the onliest thing that would bring it back to life is a guy that would fight like Louis, who would fight anybody and everybody, and just fight.

D'Amato wanted to see a big gate? Sonny offered to fight Patterson
and
Johansson on the same night.

Patterson was not alone in his resolution that he must not fight Liston. Black champions had ruled heavyweight boxing from 1937, when Joe Louis won the title from James J. Braddock, to 1952. when Rocky Marciano took it from Jersey Joe Walcott. Patterson brought it back in 1956, after Marciano had retired undefeated. Floyd, so unlike Joe Louis in many ways, was like Louis in that he was a champion beloved both by blacks and by whites. In the eyes of black leaders, such a champion was among the greatest of ambassadors in the cause of acceptance by, and advancement in, white society. He was also among the greatest sources of pride for black people to draw upon. Patterson was a soft-spoken, erudite, and mannerly champion. He was, as they said in those days, a credit to his race. In those days, bad niggers were not the darling middle-class iconic commodities and consumers of a white ruled conglomerate culture. In those days, bad niggers were bad news. And the bad made it hard for the good. Black leaders and their followers feared the prospect of Sonny Liston as a champion as much as Patterson feared fighting him. A champion such as Liston, it was believed, would bring disgrace and trouble; would impugn and abrogate black respectability; and would be like gasoline to bring white hatred flaring forth anew. His infamy would become theirs. He was anathema.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was against the idea of a Patterson-Liston fight. Its president, Percy Sutton, came right out and said it: Patterson "represents us better than Liston ever could or would." Liston was seen, by black as well as white, as the Bad Nigger. Of course, if the NAACP had any faith that the Good Nigger had a shot in hell at vanquishing the Bad Nigger, they would have supported the fight. This lack of confidence, shown him by the very ones who laid upon his shoulders the responsibility of protecting his race from dishonor, placed Patterson under pressure that was difficult to bear. And it was not the black community alone that burdened him. White political leaders who made a show of supporting civil rights invested Patterson with the same duty, as if the course and furtherance of those rights would be endangered should Patterson allow Liston to represent his race.

The writer Peter Heller interviewed Patterson in 1970 for his book
"In This Corner ...!" 42 World Champions Tell Their Stories
. In that interview, Patterson recalled what was then not yet a decade past.

"The president of the United States, Ralph Bunche, all the big celebrities, all the big leaders of the country," he said, "they made Liston a bad guy, and I was a good guy. I don't ever want to endure that kind of pressure again. To me, fighting is fighting. It's a sport. I met the president of the United States, and he even said to me, 'Make sure you keep that championship.' His brother Bobby Kennedy said I was good for the youth. In fact, he gave me a trophy that night for the youth of America and all that, 'keep your example up.' It was nice but I would have much preferred to have went up in the mountains somewhere, seclude myself away until I fought, and then come out and let everyone tell me this after it's done if I was successful. I don't think anyone should be compared, 'This guy's better than him because he's a nice guy. This guy's been in jail, this guy's no good.' "

Patterson said that all the kind words he increasingly put forth regarding Liston were in part a subterfuge designed to free himself from onus.

"I constantly went on TV and made interviews and said, 'Liston is all right. Give him a break.' I tried to yell for him, but actually this was to save me, so to speak, because I figured if I could get people to see him the way I was saying you should see him, then they wouldn't look to me so much."

How had boxing become psychomachia? How had it come to be charged with such meaning and such moment and such madness? How could one man, in all human weakness and vulnerability and insignificance, come to bear the fate of others? Was there no subcommittee to probe and to ponder this sort of underground control, this sort of hidden interest? Were the Suttons and the Kennedys any less constraining and demanding and imposing than the Carbos and Palermos of this world? Had the Carbos and Palermos ever in their grasping exerted such pressure on any fighter?

Sonny may not have been able to read, and he may not have been able to write, but in his way, beneath that taciturn and deathward brooding, he was brilliant. Jose Torres, the writer and former light heavyweight champion, has said, "I have never met an athlete in baseball, basketball, or football who is smarter, more intelligent than Sonny Liston." And Sonny knew that beneath the anxiety that Patterson felt, deep in that quiet, complicated, and insecure man, there was, as in most men, a shackled and secreted child whose greatest fear was to have his fear exposed. Fear stops men, as Homer said. It also impels them. And so Sonny's ceaseless and rising implications of that fear within Patterson, his taunts that Patterson was afraid of him, were the lashes that provoked his prey and commanded the attention, excitement, and expectations of the masses.

"Patterson says it's the Mob that keeps him from fighting me," Sonny said: "but I'm the only Mob he's worried about." Patterson, beloved and beset, was nearing his judgment day. It was inevitable. That other, greater mob, those roused masses, the vast and thirsty populace of bread and circuses, demanded it.

Blinky was back in Philly, out on bail appealing his case, looking at those fifteen years that lay ahead.

Sonny was looking to dump his new, clean manager, George Katz.

The previous summer, a Chester, Pennsylvania, food concessionaire named Bob Nilon had made Katz and Liston an offer for the rights to promote a proposed Liston-Johansson match. Now, in the first days of 1962, Bob's younger brother and partner, forty three year old Jack Nilon, applied to the state athletic commission for a manager's license. On January 10, it was announced that Jack Nilan was to take over the management of Sonny Liston from George Katz. He would be referred to not as Liston's manager, but as his "adviser." The Irish Catholic Nilon would say that he came to Sonny by way of a recommendation by Father Murphy. Sonny entered into a contract with Jack Nilan more than eighteen months before his contract with Katz was due to expire. Their memorandum of agreement, executed on March 1, 1962, stated that "I, Charles 'Sonny' Liston, do hereby appoint Jack Nilon of Ridley Park, Pa., as my sole and exclusive manager." The agreement, which entitled Nilon to a third of "all purses," was stipulated to remain in effect until April 27, 1965.

By the end of January, a deal for a Patterson-Liston fight was on the table. After negotiations with Patterson's manager Cus D'Amato, Tom Bolan of Championship Sports offered Liston a guarantee of $200,000 against twelve and a half percent of both the gate and the ancillary rights. Sonny balked. He wanted twenty percent. Even Joe Louis's many challengers had gotten that much.

Irving B. Kahn, the president of TelePrompTer, said the fight could gross seven and a half million dollars in ancillary rights. (As usual, the promotional ballyhoo exceeded the eventual actuality, which was a total gross of some four million dollars in stadium and theater ticket sales combined.)

Sonny sought a fair-price ruling from the National Boxing Association. A compromise was reached. Sonny would take the twelve and a half percent this time around, but he would get twenty-five percent of the rematch money.

At the contract-signing ceremony on March 16, Sonny and Patterson - both in dark conservative suits, white silk shirts, and hyperbolical cuffiinks - faced the press with Tom Bolan, Roy Cohn, and other principals. Sonny was asked if he was now happy with the terms of the agreement.

"No," he said.

In a report of the signing and press conference, Time magazine quoted Liston: "A boxing match is like a cowboy movie. There's got to be good guys, and there's got to be bad guys."

Later, he put it another way: "I’m the bad guy - O.K., people want to think that, let them." As in the cowboy movies, the "bad guys are supposed to lose. I change that, I win."

Arrangements were pursued for the fight to be held in New York, where, at a place such as Yankee Stadium and a top ticket price of a hundred bucks, a gate of two and a half million dollars was not unthinkable.

But Benny Paret had recently died following injuries inflicted in the ring at Madison Square Garden on March 24 - he died in a coma on April3, the same day newspapers reported that Liston's driving license had been suspended after he had been pulled over for doing more than seventy miles an hour on the New Jersey Turnpike - and the state was wary of any further controversy surrounding boxing. On April 27, under the direction of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, the New York State Athletic Commission denied Sonny a license to fight in New York, on the grounds that his past "provided a pattern of suspicion" that could be "detrimental to the best interests of professional boxing and to the public interest as well."

On that same day, Gay Talese interviewed Patterson for the
New York Times
. "One night in bed, I made up my mind," Patterson said. "I knew if I'd want to sleep comfortably. I'd have to take on Liston even though the N.A.A.C.P. and the Kefauver committee didn't want me to take on the fight. Some people said: 'What if you lose and he wins? Then the colored people will suffer,' By the end of the month, Al Bolan, the vice president of Championship Sports under the presidency of his brother Tom and the untitled steering of Roy Cohn, announced that eight cities had come forth with offers to host the fight that New York had banned.

As he went about the business of promoting his newly published autobiography,
Victory over Myself
, Patterson tried to speak kindly of Liston, but the press seemed intent on countering his words as he spoke them. A
New York Times
writer, Arthur Daley, quoted him as saying, "Liston is a nice guy." Daley then immediately followed that quotation with the terse editorial statement, "He isn't at all."

The fight was set for Chicago, in September. On May 2, Sonny left for training camp at the Pines Hotel in South Fallsburg, in the New York Catskills.