SONNY LISTON 2.0
at 1:28 of the ninth round. There was nothing phantomlike about this one. Liston lay face down on the canvas as if he’d been dropped there from the showroom rafters. He was still as a stone for a full minute. When Liston finally recovered, he responded with a beautiful, pithy comment. “If I knew what happened,” Liston said, “maybe it wouldn’t have happened.” The win did Martin no good. He suffered an eye injury in the bout and never fought again. Liston’s future was also in question, but if boxing wasn’t panning out, he’d found an unlikely side gig: showbiz. In between fights, Liston was quietly compiling a list of acting credits. He played a boxer in Harlow (1965), while in
had an image of Liston somewhere in their music collection. A few generations of Beatles fans have stared at that cover trying to identify the 60-plus people in the lineup. They are probably stumped by the dour boxer on the far left. Thanks to The Beatles and Blake, the fighter shunned by society was in homes all over the planet. However, being a pop culture totem wasn’t as lucrative as one might think. Liston was nearly 40 and needed money. It was inevitable that he’d return to fighting. Promoter Willie Gilzenberg wanted to bring Liston to New Jersey to face the large but limited Bayonne heavyweight Chuck Wepner. After convincing Liston that the state would grant him
own bedroom without leaving any evidence. There have been countless documentaries and books about Liston, even a 1989 segment of NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries , but he was inscrutable during his lifetime and is no easier to understand in death. Was he murdered? Was it an overdose? We’ll never know, any more than we’ll know Liston’s real age or the exact number of stitches in Chuck Wepner’s face. Still, there’s nothing like a mysterious death to raise one’s stock. When Liston died, he went from being a short-term, embarrassing champion to an emblem of boxing’s dark side – boxing’s version of the Delta bluesman who makes a deal with Satan. Gravesite visits became a rite of passage for certain hardcore fans, as the former subject of scorn became a subject of pity. Liston’s old quotes became heavy with portent and meaning, while the growing Liston cult helped flesh out his image. There was Liston, the champion no one wanted, with scars on his back from childhood whippings; Liston the ex-con who couldn’t read or write; Liston the drunk; Liston the drug dealer; Liston the police informant. His death was the final defilement of a carefully guarded private life, as we all scratched around for clues, trying to better understand Liston’s shadowy existence. Even in death, the mysterious image was
Head (1968), a comic satire starring the TV rock group The Monkees, Liston appeared in a fantasy sequence where he punched out teen idol Davy Jones. In Moonfire , a low-budget 1970 feature, he was a truck driver taking on bikers, Mexican bandits and Nazis. These movies flopped, but Liston was no worse than any other professional boxer who tried acting. After a guest spot on ABC’s Love, American Style , Liston said he was turning to acting because the opponents he wanted “are afraid to fight me.” Liston also appeared in a marketing campaign for Braniff Airlines. He’d already proven to be a willing photographer’s subject, having once appeared on the cover of Esquire wearing a Santa Claus hat (a stunt that cost the magazine some advertisers), but in 1969, sometime between Davy Jones and Leotis Martin, Liston joined the reigning master of Pop Art, Andy Warhol, in a commercial to help sell Braniff. The scene
Liston playfully taps The Monkees ’ Davy Jones in 1968.
The former champ married his wife, Geraldine, in 1957.
had Liston in a well-tailored suit sitting next to Warhol, who yammers on about his artwork. The quirky ad was a success. Liston’s strangest appearance during these years came courtesy of The Beatles. While designing the cover for the famous Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album in 1967 – a sort of collage that featured the musicians surrounded by dozens of famous figures – British artist Peter Blake contacted Madame Tussauds wax museum to borrow a waxwork version of the band. Blake learned the museum had a wax likeness of Liston, which was about to be melted down since he was no longer the champion. The band members had not mentioned Liston on their list of people to feature on the cover. Blake, a boxing fan, decided to include him. The wax Liston arrived at Blake’s studio with its head detached, but it was quickly assembled and propped up for the photoshoot. Liston looks odd among such iconic characters as Karl Marx, James Dean and Albert Einstein, but the tableau remains one of the enduring images of the decade. After the photo session, Blake kept the Liston statue in his studio, sparing it from being melted. Meanwhile, the Grammy-winning album went on to be one of the top sellers of all time, with more than 32 million copies sold worldwide. That means a lot of people
preserved, thanks partly to the ongoing rumors of a sinister cover-up. Stories emerged. True, not true, it didn’t matter. We took these fragments and constructed a new Liston, the result being no more than another wax figure, upon which we could project whatever we wanted. To some, he was another example of a Black man destroyed by white society. To others, he was another victim of Las Vegas, the thorny tentacles of the place reaching across the bright lights to throttle him. Armchair sleuths reckoned Liston was a scary character, and the bigger his legend grew, the greater the need for his killers to be unimaginably vicious. That’s where the Mob fits in, for no matter how mean Liston was, La Cosa Nostra was meaner and hit harder. Yet gangland figures might not have been necessary to bring Liston down at that point. Liston’s meanness was gone in those final years. Even as he rammed his jab into Wepner’s face, he seemed bored. His intimidating quality had vanished as soon as he went belly-up in Lewiston. He didn’t even try to pretend anymore. Was some of Liston’s meanness only in our imaginations, suckers as we are for a media-made image? Geraldine once summed her husband up: “He don’t say much, and he got that look – so he scare you. But he’s lovable. I wouldn’t live 14 years with no man that wasn’t.”
a license, Gilzenberg made the Liston-Wepner bout for Monday, June 29, 1970, at the National Guard Armory in Jersey City. Gilzenberg hoped the fight would launch a revival of big-time boxing in New Jersey, but the contest was a bore, like two lumbering animals battling at the mouth of a cave. With Wepner bleeding buckets, referee Barney Felix stopped the fight after the ninth and gave Liston the win by TKO. The number of stitches needed to sew Wepner’s face shut became legendary (Wepner claimed it was 72, though a doctor at the time said it was no more than 20). Liston made about $13,000 for beating Wepner, but the Jersey City bloodbath would be his final victory. Six months later, he was dead. Liston’s wife, Geraldine, discovered his body in their Las Vegas home in January of 1971. He’d been dead for days. Investigators found heroin and marijuana in the house, though medical examiners said Liston died of natural causes: heart failure, lung congestion. Such an earthy explanation wasn’t enough. When Liston died, it was supermarket tabloid time.
Heart stuff? The morbid among us demanded more, which led to stories about Liston trolling the dirtiest corners of Las Vegas, mingling with junkies and the Mafia. This, apparently, was the story people craved. There was no homicide investigation, but an industry has grown around the belief that Liston was murdered, that he’d been hanging with an evil crowd and crossed the wrong guys. Some of the theories were ridiculous, as a variety of casino creeps, cocktail waitresses and gym rats came forward, each promising to reveal the truth at last. The parade of potential killers has included an all-powerful Las Vegas godfather, rogue cops and Black Muslims, all supposedly with reasons to want Liston dead. People didn’t know what to believe, and one story was as good as another. When boxing endured some dull periods, we amused ourselves with nostalgic tales of bad old Sonny, the legend gone stale from repetition: Liston could knock down buildings with his jab, could freeze you with his stare, but ran afoul of genius criminals who could snuff a guy in his
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