The Devil and Sonny Liston (26 page)

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"He who is by nature not his own but another's man, is by nature a slave."

Nature. Destiny. Fate. Guys like Frankie Carbo.

The writer Mark Kram recalls being with Ali many years later, in 1983, as they sat and talked by the trancing hushed crackling flames of the fireplace in Ali's Los Angeles mansion. Ali became lost in silence, and, in that silence, he looked into the fire for quite some time. He turned to Kram and whispered to him: "Liston was the Devil."

In court on May 29, Sonny was let off gently on the speeding and gun possession charges brought against him in March. Municipal Judge Dan D. Diamond handed down fines totaling six hundred dollars. "You have been an idol of mine," said the judge. "God love you and bless you in your future. I’m sorry this had to happen." On an FBI memorandum reporting the judge's words, the Director, accenting those words with his pen, wrote, "Disgusting!"

On Christmas Day, Sonny was stopped for drunken driving and hauled to jail in a patrol wagon after becoming involved in "a shoving match" with the ten Denver policemen who had answered the arresting officer's call. He was wrestled into a cell, where he spent five hours of his Christmas. Counting a penny ante speeding pinch that took place two weeks after the concealed weapon rap in March, it was his third arrest in the months since the Clay fight.

He was sporting a close razored moustache tight above his lip these days. He looked bloated some days, drawn on others. What little light had shone in those dead man's eyes could now hardly be discerned. He was described as "haggard" at the time of his arrest. While he now claimed to be either thirty - his date of birth as set forth in his license application for the Miami fight would have rendered him at that time a bit more than two months shy of his thirtieth birthday, though on the same application, he specifically stated his age as thirty - or his more customary thirty-two - a photograph taken of him early in November showed a man who appeared to have at least forty hard years behind him.

On January 30, 1965, a Denver jury found Liston innocent of the drunk-driving charges. When confronted with the police report that he had been staggering and stumbling while entering his car in front of a restaurant, Sonny explained that he had merely been just jive dancing to the music of his fine new 1965 Cadillac's fine new stereo tape player.

The suspicions and trouble stirred by the Miami fight were such that no state with a reputation for boxing would sanction the re-match. Art Laurie, who at that time was the chairman of the Nevada State Boxing Commission, told me that Senators Hart and Keating spoke to him personally about the prospect of holding the fight in Las Vegas. "They told me not to have anything to do with that fight, because our industry here was gaming, and that fight was going to stink out the place." They also told him that Sonny "only owned ten percent of himself." Laurie recalled that Ash Resnick, along with the promoters Mel Greb and Jack Doyle "came to my office and asked me for a date." (Greb and Doyle would later co-promote the Las Vegas Ali-Patterson fight with Inter Continental.) "I said, 'That fight's not going to take place here."' The governor of Nevada, Grant Sawyer, involved himself, and in the end, he told Laurie to use his judgment.

Laurie knew and liked Sonny. He had seen a lot of fighters in his time - born in 1918, he had been a heavyweight champion of the navy boxing team under Gene Tunney, and he later had refereed more title fights than any other official -but he had never seen a fighter with the brute force of Liston. Laurie was watching him work out on a sandbag one day in Vegas, and he saw something he never forgot: Sonny threw a left hook that carried such force that he blew the sandbag loose and sent it crashing to the floor. Furthermore, that force had wrenched open, straightened, and sent flying the S-hook by which the sandbag had been suspended.

Laurie said that "they" - and this, I now see, is what we truly need: a Gibbon, a full and glorious and detailed history of
them
- went for the money. "They got three hundred thousand dollars for the fight, and they bet it at seven to one. They got two point one million."

"The money was bet through Cleveland," Laurie said. "That's where they placed the money. That's what I understand."

Las Vegas was not alone in wanting nothing to do with this most suspect of sequels to the most suspect and infamous of heavyweight championship fights: and it came to be held, on May 25, 1965, before a sparse crowd at the Central Maine Youth Center, a schoolboys' hockey arena in Lewiston, Maine.

One thing is certain: in that rematch - it was Liston-Ali then, not Liston-Clay -when Sonny lay down in the first, he showed less acting ability than in the episode of
Love American Style
in which he later bizarrely appeared. That fight was not merely a fix - a fix that common lore attributes to physical intimidation by the legion of Black Muslims reportedly gathered there. These Muslims were, in fact, fewer than legion and were present to protect Ali from reprisal by the followers of the late Malcolm X. whose apostasy in breaking with Elijah Muhammad had been loudly denounced by Clay in his ever-increasing role as party-line mouthpiece - it was a flaunted fix.

When fights were tampered with, for the benefit of a fighter's career or the benefit of select few gamblers' pockets, or both, they were most usually rigged rather than fixed. Rigging was a simple and not illegal procedure whereby one fighter of greater capability - whether or not that capability was yet known to the general population of suckers - was pitted against another of lesser capability, who indeed might have been made to look better than he was in previous rigged fights. It was a straightforward matter, known as mismatching. (The 1954
Boxing Reference Dictionary
of F.C. Avis offers the following definition of the noun
mismatch
: "a contest between two boxers of very different standards of ability." Sometimes mismatches occur unforeseeably, by nature, as it were; sometimes they occur by design.) As Truman Gibson said, all out fixes were rare: when the same interests profited equally from a fight, no matter who won, what did it matter? Only when an extraordinary gambling payoff presented itself was a debt of fate called in. And only the designated loser knew. The preordained winner was never told, for the main burden of making the fix look real rested on him; for him, the fight must
be
real, and he must fight naturally and in ignorance. As a knowing accomplice, he would be not only a potential danger to the success of the fix, but also potentially nothing more than an unneeded and unwanted expense. Thus, the winner of a good fixed fight never knows that he is a party to the fix. It has been said that it is harder to throw a good fight than to fight one. But human vanity on the part of a victor does much to compensate in his heart and mind for any suspicion of inauthenticity on the part of his foredoomed opponent. The performance in Lewiston, however, was so bad that even Ali must have known.

Sonny - the eight to five favorite, despite the prior loss - could not repeat his Miami Beach routine of merely slouching on a stool while Jack Nilon announced his woeful incapacitation. For one thing, the physician at the prefight examination found no evidence of shoulder injury and declared him to be "the fittest man I have ever examined"; for another the most willing suspension of disbelief would not countenance it. And so, in the first round, when Ali hit him, he went down. Sonny, who had been knocked down only once before - by a fighter whom the risen Sonny then had proceeded to give the most ferocious beating of his life - here was felled by a blow so slight that few could see it: a short right that seemed intended only to fluster and to fend off, a short right followed by a left hook that missed.

"Liston collapsed slowly, like a falling building, piece by piece, rolling onto his back, then flat on his stomach, his face pressed against the canvas." This account, from a front page story in the next day's
New York Times
, describes the halting, unnatural, and awkward amateur choreography of a man who is performing a fall rather than the sundering spontaneity of a man knocked down unawares.

It was a shambles. The referee, Jersey Joe Walcott, the Camden, New Jersey, assistant director of public safety and promotional shill of InterContinental, lost control of the goings on after the knockdown. While maneuvering Ali into a neutral corner, Walcott failed to follow the knockdown count of the timekeepers at ringside. After the fight was declared over upon the count of twelve, Sonny rose only to find out that the fight, which was over, was still going on as far as Jersey Joe was concerned. Confused, he squared off, like Ali, as if to fight again, while Walcott simultaneously and belatedly became aware of the timekeepers' twelve count. "Twelve? You counted to twelve?" he asked.

"Yes, twelve. The fight's over," they replied - whereupon Joe rushed across the ring and raised Ali's arm in victory.

The crowd stood and chanted. "Fake, fake, fake," again and again, until the last of them dwindled and dispersed in disgust.

"Fake, fake, fake." Some of them rushed the cordon of state troopers that surrounded the ring, yelling, "Fix, fix, fix," as Ali yelled back telling them to shut up, telling them that his was a righteous victory, a triumph of the "righteous life."

In reality, Ali seemed to have noticed the winning punch no more than anyone else. He would describe it after the fight as the "anchor punch," the secret weapon of Jack Johnson as passed on to Ali by Stepin Fetchit, the elderly comedian and old time movie player who was now a part of Ali's ever stranger retinue. In time, it became known in legend as the "phantom punch." Studied frame by frame, the film of the only camera that captured it showed what those who saw it that night in Lewiston saw - among the many who saw nothing - a punch that seemed too ineffectual to knock down, or even to ruffle, the leviathan that was Charles Sonny Liston.

"I overtrained for that fight," Sonny would say.

Maybe it said something, too, that he trained no longer to the nasty horns and pistol rhythms of "Night Train," but to "Railroad Train No. 1" by Lionel Hampton, who was from Ali's hometown of Louisville. It was as if that song. "Night Train," which was the beat and synesthesia of his deepest pulse, had now been taken utterly and without outward sound into the secret part of him, that secret part that was indeed becoming the whole of him.

But it was the damnedest thing: for once, finally, he had been cheered going into that ring in Maine. What a hell of a time to have it all taken from you.

Six months later, in November, he was talking about recruiting Cus D'Amato to manage him in a comeback. D'Amato called Sonny "a challenge" and said there was "a distinct possibility that I could make Liston the heavyweight champion again if he divests himself of the people around him." When told of D'Amato's statement, Sonny said, "It's the onliest way." And that was that.

By Christmas, his home in Denver was up for sale. On March 29, 1966, Sonny bought Kirk Kerkorian's place in Vegas for sixty four grand: split level, pastel green, with a swimming pool and a backyard that looked out over the sixteenth fairway of the Stardust Country Club. The address was 2058 Ottawa Drive, in the exclusive area of Paradise Township, less than a mile from where his hero and buddy, Joe Louis, lived, at 3333 Seminole Circle, in a house bought from Johnny Carson.

The tie between Vegas and St. Louis was not a tenuous one. Later, during Sonny's final days, one casino owner was known to associate with Charles "the Blade" Taurine, who in turn was implicated in dealings with John Vitale in St. Louis. Still later, it would be said by police intelligence sources that between one and two million dollars in gambling revenues were "illegally diverted from the Aladdin Hotel's casino in Las Vegas" and "channeled to underworld figures in St. Louis." This report of November 1980, said: "as much as $50,000 was brought to St. Louis each month by couriers, often businessmen who went to Las Vegas ostensibly to gamble. The sources said that both these couriers and Aladdin employees delivered the money to John J. Vitale, an alleged underworld boss.

"Until last month, the gambling resort was owned largely by St. Louis interests. Wayne Newton, the entertainer, bought the casino for about $85 million."

Sonny's first fight after the downfall in Lewiston came more than a year later. In Stockholm, on June 29, he knocked out Gerhard Zech of Germany in the seventh round.

"Blood streamed from Zech's eyes and mouth in the sixth round," said a wire service report, "and the flow continued in the seventh until Liston mercifully knocked him out."

His next three fights were in Sweden as well: a third round knockout in Gothenburg of Amos Johnson, on August 19; a first round knockout against Dave Bailey in Gothenburg on March 30, 1967; a sixth round knockout of Elmer Rush in Stockholm on April 28, 1967.

"This fighting is for the bird," he wrote to a friend in January 1967. From Sweden, in May of 1967, the Listons returned with a three year old boy, Daniell, who lived with them as an adopted son.

"I’m my own manager now," he declared in the summer of 1967. "When they try you for murder, they got to produce a body. But nobody can produce anybody who is managing me except me." Later, within the breadth of that same day, he said, "All I need is a manager. Somebody with a nice, clean record."

He talked about leaving Vegas, buying a farm somewhere, maybe Colorado.

In the fall of 1967, it was rumored and reported that Sammy Davis, Jr., was to be Liston's new manager. "Why would Sammy want to get involved with managing a guy nobody wants any part of?" asked Dick Young in his
New York Daily News
column of November 18.