The Devil and Sonny Liston (24 page)

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, "Perhaps 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.

Within a month, it was announced in Las Vegas that Liston and Clay would sign in Denver on November 4 for a fight to be held in February. As it developed, the fight would take place in Miami Beach, under the aegis of Frankie Carbo's old friend Chris Dundee, the big brother of Clay's trainer, Angelo Dundee.

Like the man said:
La commedia e finita
.

ASTROLOGY

IT WAS THE END OF THE ROAD. HERE HISTORY took the pen from the player's hand, where, for a moment, a heartbeat, no matter how tentatively, it had seemed to rest. What remained was epilogue and epitaph, chords like wind of death song, of threnody.

America did not want Sonny as her champion. "It is hard to discern any merit in Liston," wrote Dan Parker in his column of February 13, 1964. And America saw Liston much as Parker saw him: "a sinister creature, full of hatred for the world." Liston had likened boxing to a cowboy movie. "There's got to be good guys, and there's got to be bad guys." The "bad guys are supposed to lose. I change that," he had said. "I win." But in his winning, he seemed invincible. There seemed no good, or other bad, that could conquer or stay him: and, in the cowboy movie of his championship, the good guys never had a chance. There was no show down in the ring, no battle, no melodrama - only fast and predictable victory for the villain America despised. The cowboy movie of his championship was a box office failure, and in a racket built on suckers' money, Sonny as a champion was bad, bad news.

Moose Grayson had said that there had been a "settlement."

Yes, said Foneda Cox. "They made a settlement with Moose."

By "they," he meant the Mob. "They paid Moose off. I don't know how much, but a lot. I think they even bought him a house. The Mafia picked up all of Sonny's tabs when Sonny got into trouble. I think maybe they got sick of it."

As the Clay fight approached, Liston was not only a bad draw and an unwanted champion. He was a man who could be exposed as a rapist at any time. This exposure would not only certainly cost him his title and end his career: with his record and reputation, he very likely could be returned to prison as well. Whoever had power over this exposure had power over Liston.

It was at this time that Ben Bentley quit, claiming that he was owed money and that the Nilons had reneged on an agreement to let him have the rights to the Chicago closed circuit action for the Clay fight. "I don't blame Liston at all," said Ben.

Before the fight, the sportswriter Jimmy Cannon spoke with the former light heavyweight champion Billy Conn, whose career had spanned the years 1935-1948 and who was now forty six years old.

"The first punch Liston hits him, out he goes," said Conn. "He can't fight now," he said of Clay, "and he'll never be able to fight. He hasn't the experience. The only experience he'll get with Liston is how to get killed in a hurry", Conn said -as Cannon noted bitterly - that Clay "took all the dignity away from the heavy weight title by acting like a big phony wrestler."

Look
magazine ran a story entitled "Sonny Liston: King of the Beasts,"' in the February 25, 1964, issue. "In essence, Sonny epitomizes the Negro untouchable, the angry dark skinned man condemned by the white man to spend his life in the economic and social sewers of his country." A photograph pictured him at home in Denver, sitting on a couch between two matching and ornate fringed lamps: "
The Listons pose for their first family portrait: from left to right, daughter Eleanor, 13, wife Geraldine, Sonny, his mother Helen and daughter Arletha, 17."

Of the Negro untouchable: "His pleasures are simple: he drives a two toned 1964 Fleetwood Cadillac and likes
The Beverly Hillbillies
on television ('Whatever mah wife's watchin', Ah'm watchin')."

The night of the fight was February 25,1964. It had been barely three months since the Kennedy assassination, and this was the first blood revelry that a post hysteric America had allowed herself. The crowd that gathered at Miami's Convention Hall, and all the other crowds that gathered in the closed circuit showrooms and theaters throughout America were there not so much to see a contest, for no contest was foreseen. This sense of the inevitable was evinced by the lackluster gate at Convention Hall, where only about half of sixteen thousand tickets, priced from twenty to two hundred and fifty dollars, were sold. What crowd there was seemed to be a part of a masque in the season of psychic plague, a ritual, a spectacle that pitted the embodiment of callow spirit and whistle in the dark braggadocio against that of the Adversary of the American Dream. The air of festive anticipation was unsettling. The scent of dear perfume and fancy cologne mixed with that of cheap aftershave, smoke, and sweat. The oversized head of tough guy manque Norman Mailer was no longer alone in blocking the view at ringside. Beside him sat fellow tough guy Truman Capote and Gloria Guinness of
Harper's Bazaar
.

Clay's pulse had raced to 120 during the weigh in, and the adrenaline of fear seemed still within him as he entered the ring. That fight or flee rush drove him forward and into Liston with a frenzy, and he took the first round. Sonny began to grind him down in the second, but his blows were delivered with none of the awesome power that in the past had felled man after man. In the third, Clay opened a cut under Sonny's eye, drawing forth what Sonny had given no other man since the days of those whippings. In the fourth, Sonny connected repeatedly, but again, his blows seemed oddly restrained, and Clay came in again to bruise Sonny's fearsome face.

At the end of round four, Clay came to his corner screaming surrender. "I can't see," he wailed to his trainer, Angelo Dundee. "Cut off my gloves. Call off the fight." At the sound of the bell, Dundee pushed Clay to his feet.

In the fifth, Clay, who claimed difficulty seeing, had no difficulty in dodging Sonny's punches, which seemed at times designed not so much to hit Clay as to punctuate the air of his blind bob and weave. Clay reached out his left arm, rested his gloved fist against Sonny's nose, as if to keep the beast at bay; and, though Sonny's reach was greater, he never struck or swatted that arm away.

At the end of the round, Clay's vision returned, and Barney Felix, the referee, who had been about to stop the fight and award a technical knockout victory to Liston, allowed the match to continue. After six rounds, the fight was even on points. When the bell sounded to signal the start of the seventh round, Liston just sat there, refusing to rise and telling of a numbness that ran from his left shoulder down to his forearm.

In the halls and cellblocks of the Jefferson City penitentiary - the one true stronghold of Sonny's popularity as a champion - the blare of radios was suddenly overtaken by howls of anger and disgust. The son of a bitch had thrown the fucking heavyweight championship of the motherfucking world. Shit, some reckoned: a thief for a penny, a thief for a pound.

A few days after the fight, there came to light a contract that caused no small amount of speculation. Long before the fight - the contract was dated October 29, 1963 - Inter Continental Promotions, of which Sonny was a partner, had contracted with the eleven man Louisville Group to purchase for fifty thousand dollars the rights to promote Clay's next fight after the Liston match. This was a staggering amount to pay for the future rights to a single bout by a fighter who was seen as facing almost certain defeat in his upcoming match with Liston. Jack Nilon, trying to explain the suspect pre fight contract, said that "Clay represented a tremendous showbusiness property."

Liston later said that he had injured his shoulder in the first round of the fight. Jack Nilon said the injury came long before the fight, during training.

But the training and training camps of both fighters had been the object of much coverage by the press, and there had been no hint of any injury. During training just a year earlier, the news of a less debilitating injury, to Liston's knee, was pursued and covered as a major story, and that knee injury had been sustained off the training grounds and away from the eyes of the press.

When the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly announced, on March 1, that it intended to investigate the contract between Clay and Inter Continental, Nilon said, "We never dreamed Sonny would lose the title." The contract, he said, was just "a lucky fluke."

That was two days after the Internal Revenue Service filed liens totaling $2.7 million against Sonny; $876,800 against him and Geraldine; $1,050,000 against Inter Continental Promotions, Inc.; and $793,000 against Delaware Advertising and Management Agency, Inc., a Nilon run sister corporation of Inter Continental.

Sonny was taken after the fight to be examined at St. Joseph's Hospital. Three hours later, it was announced by Dr. Alexander Robbins of the Miami Beach Athletic Commission that Liston did indeed show evidence of an injury to his left shoulder that was "sufficient to incapacitate him and to prevent him from defending himself."

Officials at the fight had withheld the fight purse on suspicions that things were not right. The announcement by Dr. Robbins served to counter those suspicions and expedite the release of the purse.

Later, a Detroit physician, Dr. Robert C. Bennet, would state that he had been treating Liston for bursitis in both arms and shoulders for the past two years. He said that Sonny had been taking cortisone shots for this bursitis almost continuously in the months preceding the fight. In his medical opinion, the bursitis was not connected to the injury that had stopped the fight in Miami.

"I think Liston's problem in the fight was that he swung and missed, severely stretching or rupturing his arm four or five inches below the shoulder," the doctor said. "In our post fight examination, we could see the swelling and the blood."

Bennet was Joe Louis's doctor. When Joe had a dope seizure in New York in 1969, it was Bennet who helped to protect the fighter's image by covering the details of his emergency hospitalization. Bennet was also the physician for the Michigan State Boxing Commission. When I discovered this obscure circumstance, I could not but recall Truman Gibson's story about his encounter long ago at the offices of the Michigan commission, a story that also involved Joe Louis, as well as many other things.

Where were the doctors before the fight, and where were the doctors during the fight? Why would a man who had gone the distance in agony with a busted jaw in an insignificant fight - why would such a man fold in a world championship title match from a pain or a numbness in his arm? Why would a man with the most devastating right in boxing, a man impervious to punches, allow an injured left arm to move him to such passive and compliant surrender?

There are stories of the immense losses Ash Resnick incurred in Miami by betting on his friend. There are other stories of suitcases of money being sent by Ash to New York, where other, less ostentatious bets were made.

The night after Bennet's disclosure, Sonny was arrested back home in Denver. Doing over seventy five in a thirty mile per hour residential zone, he was carrying a seven shot .22 revolver in his righthand coat pocket, along with six cartridges and one spent shell. The arresting officer, Patrolman James Snider, asked him about the pistol.

"It's mine. I shot at my girlfriend."

He was in his Cadillac. There was a girl in the car with him. The cop told her to get the Cadillac out of there. He could barely force the handcuff around Sonny's wrists. Another cop arrived, and together they got him cuffed.

Sonny was drunk - he told the cop he'd had half a bottle of vodka - and he got belligerent during the ride downtown, asking the cop if he wanted to "mix it up" or "go round and round" and once trying to escape when the car slowed for a stop sign.

"I really didn't know who I had," Snider said, "until I got to headquarters and another patrolman said, 'Hi, Sonny."'

Sonny refused to take a Breathalyzer test. He was charged with speeding, driving without a valid Colorado license, and reckless and careless driving. He was let off easy on the pistol. Under Colorado law, it was a felony for an ex convict to be in possession of a concealed weapon, but it was charged against Sonny only as a misdemeanor.

On the following day, Sonny was served by federal marshals with a notice of a $115,000 lawsuit that Ben Bentley had filed against him the previous Friday in U.S. District Court in Chicago. The suit claimed fifteen grand in overdue wages and a hundred grand in lost income pursuant to Inter Continental's failure to honor its commitment to grant him Chicago closed circuit rights.

On March 23, State Attorney General Richard E. Gerstein of Florida announced that, after a month's investigation of the Liston-Clay fight, it had been decided that there was no evidence of foul play. However, he said, several other circumstances surrounding the fight were "questionable." He spoke of "a well known gambler and bookmaker" - he did not name him, but he was talking about Ash Resnick - who "enjoyed the full run of the training camp and was present in Liston's dressing room prior to the fight." Gerstein also said he wondered why Liston would pay fifty thousand dollars for the right to choose Clay's next opponent and promote his next fight "unless he or his managers knew the outcome of the fight in advance."

Kefauver was dead, but his spirit lived. On March 24, the day after Gerstein's guarded announcement, Senate investigators in Washington questioned Sonny's partners in InterContinental Promotions. The first called to answer was Garland Cherry, the Pennsylvania lawyer who held five percent of the corporation. He revealed that Liston had signed over more than half of his stock in December to Sam Margolis.

Sam was a big heavy guy, fifty-one, who smoked and chewed on a cigar as he sat before the committee.