Customer Reviews

The Devil and Sonny Liston

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

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.

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.

"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.

This Nick Tosches book focuses primarily upon, (1) Nick Tosches, and (2) organized crime, rather than upon Sonny Liston. Tosches' writing is overwrought and self-indulgent; the history he provides is thin and unrevealing; and the portrait he draws of Liston - a truly fascinating, troubled, and battered figure - is cartoonish. Tosches skips over the two Liston-Clay (Ali) fights in a couple pages, despite their importance to the Liston career and the national mood at the time. He instead embraces Chuck Wepner, who may be a nice guy but lacks any significance in the fight-game. In sum, the Tosches misses the story almost entirely, and his narcissistic writing style ends up wasting the reader's time.

Fortunately I wound up picking this book up at the library. If I had paid for it I would have been doubly disappointed.

I'd never read anything by Nick Tosches before but if this is an example of his writing style I think I'll pass on the rest of his catalogue. Most of the information was interesting but the rambling and disjointed chronology had me hoping for the end by the time I reached the 3/4 mark. At times Tosches is all over the place; talking about some event in Liston's life and then jumping to an interview with somebody who gives comments totally unrelated to what we just read.

I'm not sure if Tosches is trying to impress the reader with his tough-guy image but he liberally laces the book with expletives which, if they were direct quotes from someone would be fine. But these are the words of the author, who apparently feels that he has to insert a little street slang in the narrative to show that he is a man of the streets. It just doesn't work.

I learned a fair amount about Sonny Liston that I didn't know before. But the unfortunate part is that I had to wallow through too much extraneous information to do it. Maybe it's my shortcoming but I found it difficult at times to follow the webwork of gangland connections that seemed to be a centerpiece of the book.

By the last chapter I found that I couldn't care less whether Liston had died of natural causes or been murdered. The evidence provided for murder is very thin and may not have even been worth a mention. Tosches could have written a well thought out and enticing biography of Sonny Liston but this wasn't it.

Nick Tosches is not a conventional biographer, which may eitherdelight or disappoint you as you read this book.

Depending on yourattitude about life, as an old friend of mine used to say.

I was delighted. I didn't really set out to be a Tosches fan, but I realized a couple of years back that I own and have read every single book he's ever written.

The thread that runs through all of Tosches writing, fiction and non, is that "the real history isn't in the books." Yes, a straightforward facts-and-dates biography would be a useful companion piece to this book, but Tosches would say that the real truth about Sonny Liston is the subterranean truth, the truth that didn't make it into print, or if it did, only as hints and rumors.

As for the charge that this book is just a re-hash of old magazine articles, clearly it is not. Tosches tracked down and talked to a large number of people who knew Liston in various stages of his life, and obviously consulted primary sources as well. The book is not a "fight biography" with gripping accounts of blows traded. It's more like a series of flashlight stabs into a nightmare.

Fourth-rate Mailer? Nah, Tosches has little of Mailer's self-importance (God love him). More like a Northeastern relative of music jouranlist Stanley Booth. As he did in "Dino," Tosches uses a novelist's technique to draw a portrait of a man who remains unknowable. END

I saw the cover, I saw the title, and I thought to myself--I have to get this book. Finally, a detailed account of Liston's life!

I was expecting a lot from this book--maybe too much. After reading it, my expectations were not met. A much better account of Liston can be found in William Nack's brilliant 1991 article "O Unlucky Man," in Sports Illustrated (perhaps the best sports piece ever written); so is David Remnick's "King of The World." Those two books, though smaller works than Tosches' Liston book, have more detail and probe into further depths of Liston's psyche. Tosches obviously knows about and likes to write about the underworld and Liston's connection with them--unfortunately, that wasn't all Liston was about--Tosches misses on Sonny's human side, seeing him as just a piece of meat passed around from mob boss to mob boss.

Tosches virtually ignores the two fights with Ali--speculating on a fix but offering no hard evidence--and barely touching on his title winning effort and rematch with Floyd Patterson, the stuff of high drama, given the time these fights took place in. He also uses the annoying postmodern glitch of interrupting the flow of the book at times to put his own cute comments in the book (hint to Mr. Tosches--just because you're writing about boxing doesn't mean you have to say the f-word every time you interject the story).

I appreciate the detail Tosches went to in writing the book--he obviously did his homework with interviews and documents---if he had just focused more on Sonny the person instead of Sonny the piece of meat, he would have captured Liston's essence much better.

Nick Tosches attempts to take us into the world of what was Sonny Liston and help us get to know the man in death that nobody really knew in life.

Tosches nails the Liston mystique and the essence od Sonny Liston in this book. It gives a great account of the early environment that shaped the life and attitude of what would become a brooding, sullen and hated Heavyweight Champion.

I am a boxing-historian who has studied boxing for twenty years and there are some revelations in this book that I had never heard of. Tosches has done his homework and talked to all the people he could that are still alive that could tell Liston's tale of woe.

It's not a particularly happy tale, and there is no happy-ending in this one. It's a story of a man who was controlled in one way another his entire life and was "enslaved" even as Heavyweight Champion of the World.

I particularly liked how Tosches covered Liston's life after he slumped into possible drug dealing and shylocking in Las Vegas. It gives a whole new insight into Liston's life and it also helps us understand his idolozing of his boyhood hero Joe Louis.

If you're looking for a "Sonny" book this one isn't for you. But, if you want to finally get to know the real Sonny Liston then I recommend it wholeheartedly.

If you rolled your eyes when you read the title of this review, then you'll want to steer clear of Nick Tosches overwrought, insipidly pretentious prose. Here's a snapshot:

"Truman Gibson told me a story, in that way he has of delicately spinning out a web that can be plainly seen only from a distance, the gossamer of a tale that seems to have no meaning in itself, but which, when the moon of understanding waxes, shines softly with the light of meaning that was there all along."

The writing is comical, but the source from which it springs is Tosches meglomania, which is what truly ruins the book, unless you want to read it as comedy, with Tosches as the unintended punchline. Because to Tosches, he is as historically significant as his subject, and for this reason his own ego keeps bumping into everything he tries to write about. Try this:

"Lowell was not in the best of shape. Like Frankie Carbo, like me, like a lot of people, he had diabetes, and the complications were getting the better of him."

There's Nick again, inserting himself into the story. I'm sorry he has diabetes, but he's not asking for sympathy. Oh no. You see, Nick's talkin 'bout diabetes. The big D. Lots of tough guys have it. Guys like Frankie Carbo, lord of the underworld. And guys like him. You know how it is.

And just in case you've come to the end of the book and you still haven't figured out that Nick Tosches is every bit as big and bad as Sonny Liston, don't worry, cuz he's not gonna hold back on you no more. He's just gonna come right out and say it. Try this one on for size:

"I write this on a cold night as one millenium, a dead wisp in that supernal breeze that we call time, becomes another. It is black outside, a little after half past four, when the joints too are dead. In the background--f*** the neighbors--the melancholy violin and viola, the mean self-threnody of Iggy Pop's "No S***," from his brutal, beautiful and courageous "Avenue B." I remember a night a few months back, at Manitoba's, a joint on Avenue B. I was there to read poetry, and Chuck Wepner, one of the last of the stand-up guys--a guy who fought not only both Sonny Liston and Muhammad Ali, but also, for charity, a Kodiak bear--had come in to introduce me. 'This guy,' he said, 'writes like Sonny Liston hit.'"

By the end of it all, I realized that I'd just consumed far too many supernal gossamers, filigrees of wisdom, and wispy moons of understanding. More than anything, though, I realized that I'd had enough of Nick Tosches to last me until the Great Self-Threnody in the Sky. Come to think of it, though, Wepner may have been right. Reading Nick Tosches might be just about as pleasant as being hit by Sonny Liston. And you know how hard he hit.

All you have to know about this book and how much the author knows about boxing, is this: Nick Tosches stated that Archie Moore threw his fight with Rocky Marciano. Moore, if he were to thow a fight could have found a bit easier way of doing so than than taking the pounding he did from the Rock. Just watch the last three rounds of the fight and you tell me if this was a thrown fight. Fair or not, this one seemingly innocuous passage, lost total credibility of the author for me. I paid for this book and now regret it. If you want good stuff on Liston from credible sources (though you may no agree with everything they write) read William Nack' SI piece, Nigel Collins' Boxing Babylon or The HBO documentary on Liston. Tosches may have done some incredible research here, but I don't view him as a reliable source.