The Devil and Sonny Liston (21 page)

Preparing for the biggest fight of his life [reported
Newsweek
], Liston fortifies himself with two meals a day (five strips of bacon, three soft-boiled eggs, two glasses of fruit juice. and two cups of tea for breakfast; 2 pounds of steak for dinner), walks 7 miles in 7 pound shoes, shadow boxes four rounds, and skips rope nine minutes to a jazz recording of "The Night Train." For diversion, he watches television, pitches nickels with members of his entourage, or stands on his head. Sometimes he rides a red bicycle.

In late August, after Sonny had moved camp to the site of an abandoned racetrack in Aurora, Illinois, he was asked by a reporter what his fight plans would be if he won the title.

"If I win, I might fight Johansson. But first he must fight Cleveland Williams. There is a one year return match in the Patterson fight, but my plan is to make him not want a return fight.

"I hear Johansson say I'm slow. I saw him fight Patterson twice. He was lucky. He should be locked up for impersonating a fighter. "I went the full eight rounds with Eddie Machen. It's the longest I ever went. It takes two to tango, and Machen wasn't in the mood to. I don't think Patterson will run. I caught Machen, and I don't think anybody can run as fast as him.

"As for Archie Moore, I don't think I would fight him. If I could hold the title for as many months as he has years, I would retire.

"As for Cassius Clay, I'll probably fight him, but he would have to fight Williams first.

"Williams was the hardest puncher I've fought. No one wants to fight him. He can punch as hard as I can, but he can't take it like I can."

A week later, he told reporters that Patterson "will be the first fighter I have ever met that I actually have been mad at"; that "never before have I had such a feeling against any fighter I have ever met."

He revealed that he had foreseen the fight in a dream a week or so ago. "The dream told me just how the fight would end; but I'm not going to say anything about it." He would say only that he was "certain that the fight won't last long and I'll be the winner."

On September 16, Patterson spoke from his training camp in Elgin, Illinois: "I have met Sonny Liston several times and I believe there is much good in him. Should he be fortunate enough to win the heavyweight championship, I ask that you give him a chance to bring out the good that is in him."

"If Liston should be lucky enough to win.'' he said on another occasion, "I hope you'll accept him the way you've accepted me. You know, there's a little bit of good in everybody."

Sonny would have none of it. There were no kind words. "I’ll kill him," he said. "I’d like to run over him in a car."

"Liston is as ill-mannered and insolent as a chain gang boss. Hatred seems to ooze out of his every pore," wrote Dan Parker, a columnist with a pencil-thin moustache, on the eve of the fight.

A week before the fight, Liston had been an eight-to-five favorite in Las Vegas. In Chicago, the odds narrowed to seven and a half to five.

The boys at the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City were gathered round radios, hoping that their most celebrated alumnus would do them proud. As William P. Steinhauser, the deputy warden, put it, he was their kind of guy. "He don't box," Steinhauser said, "he fights."

The night of the fight, September 25, 1962, was a chill one, and the cold of Chicago cut through the dark and glare of Comiskey Park, the ballpark where Sonny's hero Joe Louis had won the title back in '37.

In boxing, nothing is better for business than a fight between a black man and a white, such is humanity shorn of hypocrisy. Short of that, nothing is better than a fight between good and evil. Here, in Comiskey Park, on this chill gray night, there was such a fight, perhaps the most dramatic of them all; and barely had breath been drawn by the more than eighteen thousand gathered there, and by the half a million gathered before the closed-circuit screens of America, when an astounded silence overtook them, and then a loud and roaring anger.

It lasted two minutes and six seconds. Liston struck with a left hook, and in the next breath moved to follow that blow with a right uppercut. But there was no one there to take that uppercut, for Patterson was down, unconscious, and deposed.

The loud and roaring anger grew into a howl of execration that was greater than the wind. But it was over; and there was no fucking with the dream-book of Charles L. Liston.

James Baldwin mourned the moment. He had left the fight sadly, he said, and gone "off to a bar, to mourn the very possible death of boxing, and to have a drink, with love, for Floyd."

It was the fastest heavyweight title drop since Joe Louis took Max Schmeling in two minutes and four seconds in June of 1938.

"I definitely wasn't afraid." said Patterson after the fight. "I wish to emphasize that. I was definitely not afraid."

He left the stadium disguised in a theatrical beard that he had brought with him. His reckoned share of the take was $1,185,253, which surpassed by almost two hundred grand the thirty five year old record for the largest individual purse that had been set by Gene Tunney in his 1927 Chicago fight against Jack Dempsey. Sonny's take was $282,000.

In a quiet moment during the flight back to Philly. Liston saw it somewhat differently and with more compassion for Patterson than he had allowed himself before the fight. Fear was sometimes a good thing, Sonny said of that force of many colors, that force that could stop men, or impel them, or save them, or destroy them. "Patterson had fear in him, but he wasn't no coward."

Sonny seemed sincerely inspired to be a champion who would do good and make people proud. He had brought in Father Stevens and Father Murphy for the fight, and he posed smiling broadly with them for photographers at his late-night victory celebration at the Regency Room of the Sahara Inn, northwest of Chicago. He did not share in the champagne, but sat abstemious, even though Geraldine suggested that he truly deserved a taste on a night such as this. As the good priests present knew and said, Sonny did not drink.

"I have reached my goal as heavyweight champion," Sonny said to the press. "When you reach your goal, you have to be proud and dignified. You represent something and you have a responsibility to live up to it." As a champion, he said, "I can do something good for somebody else. As champion, I have the opportunity to do things that would not be possible otherwise." He said that he would model himself on Joe Louis, "who I think was the greatest champion of all and my idol. He did everything I want to do. I intend to follow the example he set and would like to go down as a great champion, too." He went so far as to make a rare allusion to his childhood: "I had nothing when I was a kid but a lot of brothers and sisters, a helpless mother, and a father who didn't care about any of us." He seemed to speak from a newly found cove of placidity within the lake of his heart when he said, "I promise everyone that I will be a decent, respectable champion."

Acting to satisfy tax claims against Championship Sports, Inc., the federal government placed liens on the promotional proceeds of the fight, delaying due payment to the fighters. After further difficulty in getting the money owed them, Liston and Jack Nilan swore that they were through with CSI. Where was one to turn in this new inchoate day when one was forced to wear the cloak of legitimacy? Men such as Carbo put their arms around your shoulders and reached into their pockets and paid you. The dice in every deal may have been loaded against you, but you went in knowing that. It was man to man, and there was no secret about those house dice. But how was one to survive when men were not men, when they had been replaced by such hideous changelings of legitimacy as Roy Cohn, sportsman.

As Jack Nilan would say, "Lawyers have come into boxing and run it into the ground."

Back in Philadelphia, at about half past eight on October 5, Sonny took another pinch, again in Fairmount Park, where he was stopped for driving his 1962 Cadillac at the unusually slow speed of fifteen miles an hour. As it turned out, he had just sideswiped a car on Girard Avenue.

Park guard Aaron Smith said that Sonny "became very nasty, and he said that I was prejudiced because he was colored." When Sonny stepped from his Cadillac, Smith said, "he swaggered and swayed," and "he had the smell of alcohol on his breath." He refused to enter the patrol wagon because a "white man" was driving. Finally, he agreed to go to the guard house in a car driven by a sergeant of color.

Alfred Klein, who as a member of the state athletic commission had suspended Liston's license for less, this time came to Sonny's support, describing the incident as nothing more than "harassment."

Sonny's attorney, Morton Witkin, stated that it was incredible that liquor could have been smelled on his breath. "He never touches a drop," Witkin said. "Somebody must be picking on him."

Foneda Cox said, "Sonny loved to drink, and he loved to drive while he was drinking. So this was one of the things that they kind of relied on me for, was to drive him around to try to keep him out of trouble. But then I couldn't stay with him twenty four hours a day."

Sonny, he said, "was a good guy. I really hated to see things happen to him like they did because he would get drunk and then he would get outrageous, see. And when he'd go into his little rages - he's a big guy, anyway; you'd be scared just looking at him." When Sonny got upset, "he would blow off," Foneda said. "He didn't care who it was. But he would blow off, tell 'em off, and all this stuff, especially when he'd drink."

As Foneda recalled, Sonny went for that J&B Scotch. But he "would shut off his drinking when we would go into training. I mean, just like you turn off a faucet, this is the way he would turn it off."

"He never touches a drop. Somebody must be picking on him."

Morton Witkin was a distinguished Philadelphia attorney with an office in the Finance Building. Born in 1895, he had been practicing law for over forty years, and had served as majority and minority leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.

Blinky Palermo was still free on bail. Morton Witkin was his lawyer. He had become Sonny's lawyer too around the time that Sonny bought back his contract from Pep Barone, in a show of severing his ties to the Mob.

George Katz, who had bought that contract, was still getting ten percent of Sonny. "I could choke him," Sonny said of Katz. "I don't have no manager. Katz is my manager of record. My contract with him runs until October 1963. There's nobody going to be my manager until my contract with Katz runs out." As he said, "I don't need no manager." Though Jack Nilan would often be described in the press as Sonny's manager, and though he performed the functions of a manager, his appointed role, according to Sonny and others, was that of "adviser."

"Actually Sonny didn't have a manager," as Foneda Cox expressed it. "What he had was Jack Nilon."

Nilan, said Foneda, "was a pretty nice guy," and he "did his duty for Sonny as a manager." He was "the guy that was around us mostly." He was "the main guy. He was the guy that went with us, and he was the one that brought orders."

Orders?

"Jack Nilan handled the situation between Sonny and the Mafia," Foneda said offhandedly. "He would do things, he would tell Sonny what he wanted done. This is what Sonny did, this is what we did. We relied on him for doing different stuff."

As Sonny's friend Lowell Powell said, Sonny both loved and feared Blinky, and he minded him. "But Jack Nilan and them, shit, they was just boys, so to speak, with Sonny. Sonny would sass 'em. He cursed Jack Nilon out. As a matter of fact, he called Jack Nilan up and said, 'I've got some friends here and I'm trying to show them a nice time. You get on that plane and bring me some money.' Shit, when that plane rolled in, about five or six o'clock, we met at O'Hare Field and he had one of them grocery sacks, one of them sixteen pound bags full of money, hundred dollar bills. Sonny gave it to me and said, 'You hold the bag.' "

Six days after Sonny's slow-driving pinch, at a Washington, D.C., meeting of ten U.S. Attorneys called by United States Attorney General Robert Kennedy, U.S. Attorney Drew J.T. O'Keefe of Philadelphia requested that a new investigation be conducted by the Department of Justice into the background and associations of Sonny Liston. This request, he said, was made after receiving "varied reports" that Liston might still be tied to the underworld.

In late November, Sonny took a trip to Chicago, where he let it be known that he was sick of Philadelphia. It was another fucking St. Louis. "I’d say I have been treated like a champion everywhere, except in my hometown of Philadelphia, where I'm treated like a bum." On November 30, he and Geraldine left Philadelphia for good.

Encountered in a Chicago hotel lobby, he was asked. "Is Chicago your official residence now, and are you going to stay here permanently?"

"Yeah."

"Where are you living?"

"Apartment."

Liston moved into his new home on December 4, a three story, twenty one room mansion enclosed by a wrought iron fence in an area of Chicago that thirty five years ago had been the South Side's millionaire row. The mansion had belonged to the jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal, who had moved out a few days before. There was a twenty by forty foot living room carpeted in pale blue, oak and walnut paneling, library cases, and a grand old fireplace. The Listons moved in their purple upholstered chairs and their gold colored chairs upholstered in pink and white. Moving into the house with Sonny and Geraldine were Geraldine's mother, a niece named Marjorie Wilheit, and Sonny's friends Foneda Cox and Ted King, the latter of whom served as Sonny's valet.

As he showed a few friendly newsmen around the house, someone asked him what the future held, and he paused unsurely before speaking.

"I would rather fight Cassius Clay than anyone. He's a young boy, and if I wait too long, age might catch up to me like it did Archie." (In mid
-
November, forty eight year old Archie Moore, a light heavyweight champion of many years, had been knocked out by Clay in four.)

"But I'm going to keep fighting about ten more years and can wait for Cassius. I'll let him keep talking, but not too long, though. Maybe it would be better for me to fight Ingemar Johansson before giving Clay a chance. Or maybe Clay should fight Patterson. I think Patterson would win. I don't think Clay can hit hard enough to break an egg."

While the Listons were moving in, four squad cars pulled up outside, lingered, then were gone.

Before the first drumbeat comes down, the voice of James Brown:

All aboard! Night Train!

The Patterson rematch was set for Miami Beach, April 10, 1963. In February, while training in Miami for the rematch, Sonny befriended an eleven year old boy named Mike Zwerner. They met one morning at the Normandy Shores Golf Course, where Sonny did his roadwork, and close to where the boy lived. Sonny's new found little pal called him, "the best friend I've ever had." It was while fooling around with the boy, chucking golf balls at the landscaped trees of the Normandy Shores course, that Sonny was said to have suffered an injury to his left knee. The injury was said to have worsened. Daily cortisone shots and deep sound treatments were said to have healed the inflamed ligaments of his left patella, but there was said to remain a piece of torn cartilage that could be treated only by surgery, to which Liston would not submit himself.