The Devil and Sonny Liston (8 page)

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 an
d
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 religion.
"
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 strong
m
an, 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 fello
w trainer, William (Tony) Anders
on
,
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 anima
l,
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
e
nvelope 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
pub
lishing 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
p
aroled 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

T
HEY WANTED TO ENTER S
O
NNY IN THE G
O
LDEN 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 Certi
fi
cate" 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.

"
The police liked the boy," Harrison would say. "He was handy around the station, washed cars, did everything. He was big for his age. Finally they found his aunt, and she came and claimed
the
b
oy. But it was the same thing. There was Sonny: hungry, no
money, no place to eat or sleep. He saw a boy with five dollars - money the mother had given him to buy groceries -
and he took it, strong armed him for it when he was only fifteen years old."

It was Harrison who said that Sonny had attended school for a few days and been driven to quit because the other children laughed at him. Again, however, there was never any record of his attending school
,
and it is unlikely that he would have fled the mockery of smaller children. As Bob Burnes later declared,
"
Sonny never went to school." Liston himself cottoned to Harrison's tale, but in delivering the new revised version as autobiography, he sometimes let slip morsels of revelation about an earlier and more youthful criminal career. Telling one time of how the other schoolchildren had ridiculed him, he ended the poignant performance with the point blank afterthought:
"
So I wound up in the wrong school."

"
What school did you wind up in?" his interrogator asked.

"
Well, the house of detention."

"
How old were you then?"

"
I
was about fourteen.
"

Age, according to the endless flux of the Liston calendar is, of course, highly subjective, but according to the birth date he had finally settled on, he would have turned fourteen in 1946.

"
How long did you stay there?"

"
My mother, she got me out; and then, well, I figure -
she got me out, and I went right back for the same things."

"
You did what?"

"
I went back to the same thing and wound up in a bigger school this time."

In what seems to be his most straightforward account, published in 1961, Liston said: