The Devil and Sonny Liston [Hardcover]

Nick Tosches (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2000

Now in paperback: Nick Tosches's brutal, stunning, and widely praised biography of Sonny Liston -- the world heavyweight champion who hit harder than any man alive, and who embodied everything that is compelling and terrifying about boxing.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Tosches has always been drawn to the lives of dark and mysteriously flawed or fallen public figures--Jerry Lee Lewis in Hellfire, Dean Martin in Dino--and in one-time heavyweight champ Charles "Sonny" Liston he has found his biggest and darkest figure yet. Born in abject poverty in eastern Arkansas, Liston grew up to be a quiet, inarticulate youth who, after moving with his mother to St. Louis, put his only talent to work: intimidation. Knocking over gas stations and grocery stores, he ended up in a penitentiary doing eight years. His brawny build and huge hands made him an invincible force in the prison boxing program, which earned him an early release but delivered him into an enslavement from which he never escaped. Tosches marshals prodigious research to prove that, early on, Liston became captive to organized crime at a time when boxing was ruled by a mob syndicate. This is a very sad tale of an illiterate man who became useful to figures who had their own agenda: making money. Tosches finds people close to Liston who claim the fighter told them that his first bout with the man then known as Cassius Clay was fixed (with the mob taking down $2.1 million by betting on the 7-to-1 underdog); others strongly imply that the outcome of the second fight--that of the infamous "phantom punch"--in Lewiston, Maine, was also a foregone conclusion. Events around the beleaguered and bewildered Liston whirl at dizzying speeds--the Kefauver investigation of boxing, the war in Vietnam, the rise of the Nation of Islam, the cultural roar of the 1960s generation--and Tosches is a master at keeping his finger on the pulse of the period and his eye on the pitiable Sonny. Throughout, though, what is most remarkable is Tosches's empathy for the fighter derided as "a bear," a "hoodlum" and, by the loquacious Ali, as simply "ugly." In Tosches's hands, Liston is an unfortunate victim of people much worse than he, and the boxer emerges with a kind of mute dignity: this man "who neither knew his age nor felt any ties of blood upon this earth nor saw any future knew only that he was nobody and that he had come from nowhere and that he was nowhere." In a prose style that runs like a hot improvisational jazz riff, Tosches makes a somebody of a nobody, and along the way brings more than a few reputations down a good notch. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

" "Sometimes I think [Tosches is] the only writer out there who still stands up when they piss." -- Jim "The Hound" Marshall

"...Tosches' hardbitten prose is well-suited to the task of bringing Liston...to vividly seedy life...A" -- Entertainment Weekly, 4/21/00

"...[Tosches'] exhaustive research paints as clear a picture as we're likely to get of his enigmatic subject..." -- Wall Street Journal, 4/21/00

"...at once biography and meditation...boast[s] the author's trademarks: insight and raving excess. One doesn't so much read a Tosches book as experience it..." -- The Denver Post, 4/23/00

"...hard, tough writing suited to a hard, tough subject..." -- New York Times Book Review, 4/30/00

"Tosches is smooth and cool and in control here...tells a captivating, tragic tale." -- Austin Chronicle, 4/21/00

"Tosches' hard-bitten prose is well suited to the task of bringing Liston...to vividly seedy life...A" -- Entertainment Weekly

Tosches has a talent for getting inside the skin of such men, as he does for drawing out meaty stories from the denizens of shadowy worlds--neither an easy task. -- The New York Times Book Review, Vincent Patrick

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (April 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316897752
• ISBN-13: 978-0316897754
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (68 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #313,256 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #93 in Books > Sports & Outdoors > Individual Sports > Boxing

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23 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Tosches botches it, September 28, 2003

By 

drongo (Toronto) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Devil and Sonny Liston (Hardcover)

Sonny Liston was one of the real bad boys of boxing, although the term "bad boy" is undersized, like the gloves Liston had to wear until he could afford a custom-made pair to cover his massive fists. One of the baddest of bad men, then, one of the three truly fearsome heavyweights of the last fifty years, a brutal ring warrior who dispatched his opponents with ease until his career was clipped by Cassius Clay under what many view as suspect circumstances. Subsequently overshadowed, his reputation has been revised recently and a growing minority now view him as the greatest heavyweight of all. Nick Tosches' biography is certainly aptly timed.
Liston's early life was mysterious. His birth date is unknown, but was apparently some time between 1928 and 1932. His father, Tobe, was born four years after the abolition of slavery in the almost unfathomably distant year of 1870. Next to nothing is known of Sonny's childhood, but it was evidently hard. He came to St Louis as a young man who couldn't read or write and followed the all-too-well-trodden path of petty crime, prison and boxing. He turned out to have outstanding ability, including tremendous punching power. Opponents described his blows as paralyzing or excruciatingly painful. By the late 50's he was a leading heavyweight contender. He finally got his championship shot against Floyd Paterson, whom he demolished in two fights in a total time of four and a half minutes.
Liston's career by this point had been severely tarnished. He was managed by the Mob, drank heavily, had run-ins with the police, even during his tenure as champion, and apparently settled his way out of being charged with sexual assault. In February, 1964 his 18-month reign as champion ended when he refused to rise from his stool at the start of the seventh round against Cassius Clay, claiming that his left arm was numb and thereby becoming the first champion since 1919 to go out sitting down. In the rematch Liston was knocked out by one punch in the first round. The fight film (surely the second-most scrutinized strip of film from the 60s) has failed to satisfy fans that a blow of any force was delivered. But real or not, the "Phantom Punch" didn't just stop Liston, it ended his career. An attempt to get into movies was a complete failure (although his commercial spot for Braniff Airlines, co-starring Andy Warhol, sounds memorable). Sonny mounted a comeback bid in the late 60's but it was derailed when he was KOd by Leotis Martin (although the fight also ended Martin's career, as he suffered a detached retina). In his last fight, in 1970 (100 years after the birth of his father), Sonny banged up Chuck Wepner. His shady life ended in shady circumstances. He was found dead at home by his wife in January, 1971. As he had already been dead several days, however, the precise date of death is unknown. The cause of death, likewise, could not be established with certainty.
While Liston and his times are fascinating - not least Liston's role as the godfather of all subsequent bad-ass African-American sports and music celebrities - their treatment by Tosches is decidedly pedestrian. There is little about boxing, with almost no description of any of Liston's fights and little about the overall scene or the other leading contenders. Tosches' main focus is on organized crime. Unfortunately, most of this material is second-rate. Apart from the problem of a relative lack of documentation, the would-be Mob historian writing of decades-old events is also confronted by the fact that many of the principals are dead, while the survivors may be afflicted by (genuine) memory loss and were all habitual liars to begin with anyway. Tosches wastes space with transcribed filler from various public inquiries (does anyone really want to read about Blinky Palermo or Barney Baker taking the fifth a dozen times?). But he fails to tackle the big question of the narrative - were the fights against Ali fixed? Tosches has his opinions, but adds no new evidence. Nor does he address the obvious fact that the motive for a fix was highly problematic. Allegedly, Liston's owners deliberately gave up a valuable, high-prestige and revenue-generating property - the heavyweight championship. For what - so they could bet on a fix at 8-1? And then how did they get Sonny to take a dive? While it might be rational to throw a fight in pursuit of a title shot, as Jake LaMotta admitted to having done, the championship itself is what fighter live, train and suffer for, the rewards are enormous and the alternatives bleak, as most fighters have neither skills nor interests outside the ring. The notion that a fighter would throw away the title, his lifetime goal, simply to satisfy his manager's machinations requires a little explanation. And even if the first fight was rigged, why not recapture the crown in the second, where the 8-5 odds offered a much less lucrative payoff? The evident dive against Ali notwithstanding, the fix theory raises as many questions as it answers.
Tosches' investigation of Liston's death is similarly inconclusive. Tosches states at the outset that Liston was murdered, but later admits that there is no evidence to support this; nor is there much evidence for any other cause, such as drug overdose.
Tosches success is in drawing his subject as a man who never escaped servitude, who could handle himself in the ring but not in life, but who, for all his bad side also maintained a kind of dignity. At the same time, the portrait of Liston is sketchy and unsatisfying. The main research effort having been wasted on minor Mob figures, and the writing style being classic blowhard, this is a book with some shortcomings. But its subject is a remarkable figure, and the photos are good, especially the cover and the last one. Bad as he was, Sonny Liston deserves a better biography.

32 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Fortunately Liston is bigger than Tosches, June 13, 2000

By 

richard_t "richard_t" (Overseas) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Devil and Sonny Liston (Hardcover)

Nick Tosches is a wannabe. A fellow who tries too hard to be a tough-guy New York scribe, a hard-boiled Jimmy Breslin been-there badge-out type, who uses too many gratuitous obscenities and throwaway racist insults. A guy who writes in his own cover-blurb bio that he was "schooled in his father's bar...and his poetry readings are legend." Give me a break. He wastes a lot of over-research trying to set a dark mystical ambience for this Liston bio, so we get pages of pseudo-Joseph Conrad stuff about Dahomey slavery and Mississippi Choctaw, boll weevils and a 5th century bishop. Show-off meaningless riffs on Janus the god and Aristotle on slavery. Of course, this from a guy who thinks Aristotle is a "pillar of Judeo-Christian thought". Who gives us three pages on the history of slavery as he contemplates Liston's condition like he would his own navel. Yawn. And then a bunch of hard-guy talk about God's "white a**" and racist nonsense from an oh-too-black white guy, despite his comment that Liston was remarkably free of racial prejudice.

Finally, about fifty pages in, we get to Liston and his boxing career. If you've made it this far, you can make it to the end. Tosches' research has yielded infinitely more about dozens of long-forgotten hoods than about Liston himself, what he thinks, what he says. The fights are barely mentioned at all. But just when Liston's life gets interesting, Tosches lapses into another unreadable passage about wind and blood and incomprehensible tough-guy jargon that must pass for profundity at Toshche's `legendary' poetry readings. He twice mentions, apropos of absolutely nothing, that Joe Kennedy earned dirty money, calling JFK "the brat offspring of a criminal fortune". Wha? Why is that here? It doesn't even rhyme with the line before it.

He has lots of unsupported conspiracy theories. "America did not want Sonny as her champion", the Black Muslims "got to Sonny", this after earnestly explaining that "Islam was a religion of slavery" (p.217). Finally, with no evidence except his own attitude, he opines that "to accept the premise that Sonny was murdered is, by necessity, to accept the involvement and the malfeasance of cops in that murder." Um, ok, Nick.

Strangely enough, the book is not an utter failure. Sonny Liston as a character is so outsized and compelling that he manages to seize the reader's interest in spite of Tosches' very best efforts to reduce the story to nonsense. It's hardly recommended, but if you find yourself on a deserted island with it, and you tear out the first fifty and last ten pages, well, the rest of the book would be passable with some judicious editing.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Where's the Bear?, July 13, 2005

By 

Smoten (Philadelphia, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Devil and Sonny Liston (Hardcover)

"The Devil and Sonny Liston" is so shallow that it can be read in an hour. Be forewarned that it would be a wasted hour. The book rambles and meanders and ducks down many a rabbit hole with the end result that the public perception of Sonny Liston as nothing more than a cloddish, criminal thug remains unchanged. There is no depth here at all. Stale rumors, recycled innuendos, and anecdotes by Liston flunkys hardly add up to a serious character study.

Much of this book deals with the mob's influence on professional boxing during the Liston era and mob-groupie Tosches is not above flat-out invention to move his narrative. He blithely claims that Rocky Marciano's last fight, against Archie Moore, was "fixed" by the mob, that Moore took a dive. What nonsense. Moore was a 4-1 underdog in that fight. The whole point of "fixing" a fight is to get the favorite to agree to lose and then clean up by betting on the underdog. It makes no sense to pay the expected loser to lose. Moore took an incredible battering in that fight and it never appeared like he was looking for a comfortable place to flop.

Sonny Liston here is more of a lengthy footnote than a biographical subject. He's not so much elusive as he is MIA, lost under a welter of trivialities. At one point Tosches waxes poetic about the length and girth of Liston's manhood. Testimonials are included.