Few people know his name, yet he is in one of the most iconic photographs of the 20th Century. In fact, the photo may be the most iconic sports picture of the 20th Century.
Yeah, that's the one.
Sonny Liston captured the heavyweight title from Floyd Patterson on September 25th, 1962. On February 25th, 1964, Liston lost the title to Muhammad Ali, then still known as Cassius Clay. Yet Sonny Liston's story is much, much bigger than a simple fight record. He fought as a heavyweight boxer during an era when boxing was one of the three major sports in the United States and the heavyweight champion had a larger than life cultural narrative attached to them. Liston had his own narrative thrust upon him, and it wasn't pleasant.
Charles "Sonny" Liston was probably born some time between 1929 to 1932. Yes, "probably", you read that right. His real date of birth isn't actually known. His parents were Tobe Liston and Helen Baskin, who lived in extreme poverty as sharecroppers in Arkansas. Growing up, Liston's father beat Sonny and his siblings severely. His mother left his father in 1946; she brought some of her children with her to St Louis, Missouri, but wasn't able to bring all of them. Sonny was one of the ones who got left behind.
Liston worked various odd jobs until he could finally afford to run away to St Louis to be with his mom. When he moved to the new city he tried to go to school, but was mocked for his illiteracy and quickly dropped out. With no prospects for education or decent work, he turned to crime to feed himself and his family. He had numerous run-ins with law enforcement, his first arrest coming in 1950 for armed robbery of a diner and two gas stations. Sentenced to five years, he famously said "at least I'm guaranteed three meals a day." During his time in prison, he learned how to box thanks to one of the Catholic priests who held services there.
Liston was released on parole in October of 1952. Soon thereafter, he began his professional career as a boxer. However, because of his criminal record, the only people who would finance him were those with connections to organized crime. Having no other options- boxing was the only legitimate work he found that he could make a living off of- he became signed professionally under management connected to the underworld. He also worked as an enforcer for them to supplement his income as a boxer.
Thus, the narrative around Liston as a boxer became that of a violent "thug."
Sonny Liston in his earlier days as a professional.
As a boxer, his style unfortunately supplemented the thug narrative. He had the largest hands of any heavyweight champion ever, at 15 inches around, and an otherworldly power in his punches. He scored many knockouts, which excited fans but further added to the negative image of him in the media. To them this wasn't someone using "the sweet science" to defeat his opponents, but rather someone so strong he was almost more beast than man.
During the rest of the 50's Liston found success in the ring, but encounters with the law outside of it. As a youth he had been pushed into a life of crime by desperate circumstances, which wasn't helped by his large and threatening appearance. Now he found himself stuck in a vicious cycle of being monitored and confronted by cops simply for being Sonny Liston, which created tensions between him and law enforcement that only added further to his demonization. He was arrested multiple times while working for the mob enforcers that society had all but literally thrown him toward.
By the dawn of the next decade, however, he finally became a serious contender for the heavyweight championship. He could no longer be ignored. He could be, and was, very much loathed, however. Especially in comparison to the reigning champion, Floyd Patterson.
Patterson was born January 4th, 1935. On November 26th, 1956, he knocked out the elusive, all-time great Archie Moore to become the youngest ever heavyweight boxing champion at age 21. Like Joe Louis over a decade before him, he was adored by everyone, even a good portion of white America. He was quiet, thoughtful, and very open about his insecurities. He supported integration and the Democratic Party, as opposed to the black militancy that Muhammad Ali would later come to represent. He was, in many ways, the 'Good Negro' archetype to Sonny Liston's 'Bad Negro' archetype.
Floyd Patterson
Floyd Patterson grew up in conditions not too different from Sonny Liston: extreme poverty and hunger, which caused him to eventually resort to crime. Specifically, petty theft. There was one major difference between the youth of Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson, however, which defined the vastly different trajectories their lives would take: instead of ending up in prison, a teenage Patterson was sent to a reform school named Wiltwyck (a school championed by Eleanor Roosevelt, who Patterson became friends with). The class sizes were small, the teachers were excellent, and, above all, Patterson was taught that he was worth something in a positive, affirming environment. He spent two years there, and he credited it with completely turning his life around.
Many people didn't want the Patterson vs Liston fight to happen. Everyone from the NAACP leadership to President JFK himself urged Patterson not to fight Liston. The boxing press alternated between calling Liston a brute who didn't have the character of a champion to calling Patterson a coward for dodging Liston. The bout was eventually signed, however, thanks in large part to Patterson thinking Liston deserved a chance at redemption. Everyone from Frank Sinatra to Jackie Robinson heartily endorsed Floyd Patterson.
The fight itself was brutal. Patterson used his wily head movement and landed his trademark left hook a few times. It worked at lessening the severity of Liston's assault, but ultimately Liston was too much for him. Liston used his signature approach of leading with his left hand, which was his dominant hand, a strategy Bruce Lee would be proud of. Not only did he have power, but he had strong fundamentals and varied his jabbing technique as well.
Patterson vs Liston
Everyone in the world not named Sonny Liston seemed to be disappointed. In a casual interview with writer James Baldwin before the fight, in which Sonny Liston opened up because Baldwin was one of the few people who ever approached him like a human being instead of a monster, Liston had said "I wouldn't be no bad example if I was up there. I could tell a lot of those children what they need to know because I passed that way. I could make them listen."
The day after winning the championship, Liston boarded a plane to Philadelphia. He told one of his friends with him, reporter Jack McKinney, his plans for turning his image around. "There's a lot of things I'm gonna do. But one thing's very important: I want to reach my people. I want to reach then and tell them, 'you don't have to worry about me disgracing you. You won't have to worry about me stopping your progress.' I want to go to colored churches and colored neighborhoods. I know it was in the papers that the better class of colored people were hoping I'd lose, praying even, because they were afraid I wouldn't know how to act... I don't mean to be saying I'm just gonna be champion of my own people. It says now I'm the world's champion and that's just the way it's gonna be. I want to go to a lot of places- like orphan homes and reform schools. I'll be able to say, 'kid, I know it's tough for you and it might even get tougher. But don't give up on the world. Good things can happen if you let them.'"
When he arrived at the airport after the fight, he walked from his seat to the outside with anticipation. This was it, his new beginning. He would move beyond his troubled past and start life anew, the heavyweight champion of the world, a man who'd made some mistakes but ultimately came to grow as a person. A real underdog story in the flesh.
...except, the only people awaiting him outside were an adversarial boxing press, and a small group of them at that. Not a single fan had shown up.
As McKinney said about their arrival: "You could see Sonny literally deflate like a balloon with the air being let out. It was a good forty five seconds or minute before he finished taking in the whole scene, confirming to himself that there was nothing there, and then the next thing you know, his back stiffened and his shoulders rose, as if he was saying to himself, 'well, if this is the way it's going to be...'"
Holy shit, here's a picture of kittens to counter how depressing that was.
And so it was that Liston remained the "thug" heavyweight champion. He faced Patterson in a rematch less than a year later, one which wasn't warranted after such a decisive victory, but was nonetheless demanded by the world in the hope that Patterson would regain his former title. He quickly defeated Patterson once more, then faced a brash young challenger named Cassius Clay on February 24th, 1964. The rest is history.
Liston never regained the title, but continued his mob-backed boxing career until his death in December of 1970. He was found January 5th, 1971, by his wife, dead in their Las Vegas home after she returned home from a trip she had been on for two weeks. His body was badly decomposed, and they couldn't figure out if it was a heroin overdose or lung congestion and heart failure that did him in, as he had a history of both heart and lung disease. Like with his birth, Liston's exact date of death couldn't be determined, though the coroner estimated it to be December 30th.
To go back to James Baldwin's interview before the first Liston/Patterson fight, Baldwin said he went away from their meeting liking Liston. "While there is a great deal of violence in him, I sense no cruelty at all. Anyone who cared to could turn him into taffy. [...] it seems to me that he has suffered a great deal. It is in his face, in the silence of that face, and in the curiously distant light in the eyes- a light which rarely signals because there have been so few answering signals."
Liston was the product of systematic racism and classism in a country that didn't like to acknowledge the uncomfortable reality, or even existence, of either of those forces. When the reality of his experiences came with him into the limelight, society at large turned on him for his desperate responses to them. Even the liberals.
Fast forward to the United States today. We make up only about 5% of the world population, but almost 25% of the world's prison population. Since 1970, our prison population has gone up about 700%. About 37.6% of the prison population is black, despite making up about 13% of the total population. Our bloated criminal justice system is still taking people who could be so much more, doing so because lobbying by large corporations keep legal penalties harsh so they can pay pocket change for prison labor, rather than pay normal employees proper wages.
Their board of directors are still hard at work trying to figure out
if there is a way to pay people exclusively in middle fingers.
I could go on about the systematic reasons behind why the prison industrial complex exists and all the ways in which prisons are so inhumane- not to mention how they create a culture of violence that often forces non violent offenders to become violent as a means of survival- but this post is about the experiences of formerly incarcerated people like Sonny Liston.
To my surprise, I've learned that most formerly incarcerated people don't go on to become heavyweight boxing champions that are loathed by the world at large. In fact, many don't even become professional boxers at all! Still, the core of Liston's experience is very common for those who serve their time in prison: stigmas attached to their status make it hard for them to transition back into life in the outside world.
Job and housing applications often require people to disclose whether or not they've been to prison, especially for a felony. Many employers, especially in a hyper-competitive job market like our current one, instantly discard applications from felonies. On top of that, the time those who have been locked up spent in prison means a gap in previous employment, credit building, and other such factors employers and/or landlords may look at when considering applicants. Thus, even the more open-minded types of employers and landlords find gaps on applications from formerly incarcerated people that others don't have.
Thus creating a tragic cycle of Cookie Crisp theft and incarceration with no end in sight.
Now imagine that same scenario we all face, but people don't want to hire you for even the minimum wage jobs, nor accept you as a tenant.
To be clear, this isn't to say that people in jail are perfect angels, or that employers and landlords don't have the right to know if applicants have ever committed a serious crime before. The problem is that we live in a time where higher education, public assistance programs, and public spaces are receiving far less funding than they were a generation ago. Meanwhile, as I mentioned above, the prison system is thriving and incarceration is at an all time high. Over half a century later, young Floyd Pattersons and Sonny Listons everywhere are much more likely to end up in prison than in a place like Wiltwyck. They'll get busted for minor offenses, get swallowed up by the prison machine, and get stuck in a cycle of incarceration that benefits no one except for the wealthy who lobby for harsh incarceration laws.
Don't take my word for it, either. Michael A Wood is one of the many current or former (in his case, former) police officers talking about the problem with policing as it is currently constructed. In a fantastic podcast interview with Joe Rogan, he recalls one kid in particular when he first started working as a cop in a unit dedicated to drugs: "I would interview these guys in the little rooms. And this one guy, Daniel Taylor, is the one I'm specifically remembering. And he was just a marijuana dealer, and he had a kid, and he was struggling to have this kid. He was young, he was trying to help. But he had gotten locked up a lot when he was younger, so he was selling weed to try to buy diapers for his kid. And he would tell me his stories, and he would be crying.
And it was just like, 'fuck!' There's no difference between this kid and me. There's nothing. The only difference is that when I had a dimebag in my pocket, there wasn't a chance in hell that anyone was gonna look. But him, he was gonna get caught eventually. And it sent him into that spiral. And this could've been a good kid. I wouldn't be surprised if he were still in jail now. There was nothing wrong with him. Our whole system created a criminal out of a decent kid."
We need to overhaul the system from the ground up so that people who are born into disadvantaged circumstances have room to grow and thrive. As things are now, people in low income neighborhoods- especially low income black or Latino neighborhoods- are far, far more likely to end up with a prison sentence than with adequate resources for success. And so there will continue to be more Sonny Listons, more Daniel Taylors, more children who could've been so much more and found so much more happiness if they'd only had the opportunity.
We need more Wiltwycks, not more prisons.
Note: all of the biographical information not linked to a website comes either from David Remnick's "King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero" (a fantastic book which also dedicates its opening chapters to both Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston to give context to the rise of Muhammad Ali) or W.K. Stratton's aforementioned biography of Floyd Patterson.
