The Devil and Sonny Liston
by Nick ToschesLittle, Brown, & Co., 268 pp., $24.95
The devil, it turns out, makes a hefty return whenever generosity gets the better of him. But we all know that, and Nick Tosches, the author of this strange and often confounding biography, knows we know it. He just wants to remind us: “For Sonny, had the Devil not given to him in the first place, there would never have been anything to take away: because you could be the best, toughest, killingest motherfucking fighter in the world, but without the Devil it did not much matter a good goddamn.”
“Nick Tosches writes like Sonny hit,” declares boxer Chuck Wepner in a blurb for this book, which explains that hyper-noir meditation on the devil and his relationship to Sonny Liston. Tosches has attitude to spare throughout The Devil and Sonny Liston — he’s a kind of noir dandy — but he is also agile and sublime and he has an awesome reporting ability.
Liston was not “a credit to his race.” He was a womanizer, a drunk who drove that way, a rapist, and an inveterate, illiterate criminal: You name it, he was probably arrested for it. But he was “the best, toughest, killingest motherfucking fighter in the world.”
“He hurts when he breathes on you,” boxer Marty Marshall told the Detroit Free Press in 1955 after Liston knocked him out in six rounds. “He hit me like no man should be hit,” Marshall said, which is one reason Tosches is convinced that Liston threw not just one but both of his championship fights against Cassius Clay (who announced his conversion to Islam the day after his first victory over Liston and that he would henceforth be known as Muhammad Ali). Tosches’ argument is persuasive. “Why would a man with the most devastating right in boxing, a man impervious to punches, allow an injured left arm to move him to such passive and compliant surrender?” he asks. Because Liston was owned, hand and foot, by Mafia heavies who were not content with a champion as unpopular as Liston was. Time magazine once quoted Liston as saying, “A boxing match is like a cowboy movie. There’s got to be good guys, and there’s got to be bad guys.”
Later, he put it another way: “I’m the bad guy — O.K., people want to think that, let them.” As in the cowboy movies, the “bad guys are supposed to lose. I change that. I win.”
But not when it really mattered, apparently. After his loss to Clay, Liston’s mother and eldest brother called him and asked him what happened. Tosches says that Liston’s reply was, “I did what they told me to do.”
Liston comes off as mute and befuddled in Tosches’ account, the victim of a “miserable and stillborn childhood.” But for all of Liston’s disengagement with the world, his personality fills these pages in an amazingly large way. With Tosches, how could it be otherwise? Liston never really knew the exact date or year of his birth, and no one knows the exact date of his death (his wife Geraldine came home from a vacation and found him in their home after he had been dead for about a week). Tosches, being the poet that he is, plays this absence of fixity for all of its mythological importance, to say that Sonny Liston was marked from day one as a dead man. And it’s believable. Tosches is smooth and cool and in control here (more of him can be found in the recently published The Nick Tosches Reader from Da Capo Press). He has a knack for authorial intrusion and prolix, overblown language that just never lets up, though: “More than anything else, that is what this is, I now feel: a ghost story, a haunting unto itself,” he writes on page 18. “A whisper through the savanna, a whisper through the pines, a whisper unto itself through the dark of the blood.” That is exactly what this story is, but do we really have to be beat over the head like that? When he doesn’t breathe so heavily over us, Tosches tells a captivating, tragic tale.
This article appears in April 21 • 2000.