King of the World

by David Remnick

  Liston’s appearance before the committee was significant not so much for the details he provided about his particular circumstances—most of the time he either feigned ignorance or demonstrated it—no, what was more striking was Liston’s presentation of himself as a man of limitations who started out with nothing and then, having reached great public standing, had little more independence than his forefathers in chains. Even the most unforgiving viewer of the hearings got a sense that Liston’s choices coming out of jail were either to fight under the management of the mob or to face the job market as an illiterate black man in 1956. “I had to eat,” he would say, and the mob was there to mete out the gruel.

  During the course of his testimony, Liston was asked about a letter he allegedly wrote or dictated to the fighter Ike Williams. Liston claimed he didn’t remember anything about such a letter, and on this point Senator Everett Dirksen, a hoary Republican from Illinois, began to press him in his uniquely orotund way. Liston’s lawyer reminded the committee that his client did not read.

  “You do make out figures, though, don’t you?” Dirksen asked Liston. “You can tell figures? Suppose there is a dollar sign and ‘100.’ Can you tell that means one hundred dollars?”

  Liston allowed that he could.

  “Or one thousand dollars?” Dirksen said. “Well, you can make out figures. I thought I saw your name signed here allegedly by you. Do you sign your name?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you sign your address? Can you sign your address?”

  “No, sir,” Liston said.

  “Your house number? Who does that for you?”

  “Well, I can write ‘5785.’ ”

  “You can write numbers?”

  “Right.”

  “For instance, here is a signature that says, ‘Charles Liston, 39 Chestnut.’ Would you be able to write ‘Chestnut’?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You wouldn’t. But you can write your name?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And the number. Suppose your share of the purse, a fight purse, was twenty-five thousand dollars, and they handed you a check for it. Could you tell whether they were giving you a check for twenty-five thousand dollars?”

  “Well,” Liston said, “not exactly.”

  The level of condescension on the committee (and here the noxious Dirksen deserves special mention) was such that Liston was treated much like a curiosity in a circus sideshow: Sonny the Strongman. Watch him punch! Watch him speak! It seemed to be a matter of amusement to the senators that Liston—a black man, raised in the rural South during the Depression—was no scholar.

  “How much education did you get?” Kefauver asked.

  “I didn’t get any,” Liston said,

  “You didn’t go to school at all?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You didn’t have much opportunity, I guess.”

  “Too many kids.”

  “How many kids were there?”

  “Well, my father had twenty-five.”

  “Twenty-five children?”

  “Altogether.”

  “Twenty-five children altogether,” Kefauver said. “Senator Dirksen has an observation.”

  Senator Dirksen did, indeed, “I was going to say your father is a champion in his own right.” The committee and the audience in the Senate Office Building, Room 308, had a nice laugh at that.

  CHARLES LISTON STARTED OUT WITH LESS THAN NOTHING. HE may have lied to the committee about his associations with the underworld, but he told the truth about his origins insofar as he knew the details. To the end of his life, Liston never really knew the exact year and place of his birth. He tended to insist on 1932 or 1933 and he was said to have been born in various Arkansas cotton farming towns west of Memphis and east of Little Rock: Forrest City, or, perhaps Sand Slough, part of the Morledge Plantation, where his father, Tobe Liston, worked. When Liston turned professional and needed the necessary documents for the licensing process, his managers cooked up a birth certificate that read May 8, 1932, though his early arrest records pegged the date, more realistically, at 1927 or 1928,

  Later in Liston’s career, when people would press him about his age (he always looked so much older than he said he was), his customary form of reply was intimidation. He would accuse the writer in question of calling his mother a liar, which was enough to end the conversation. In those rare moments when he was with someone he trusted, Liston would say that on the day he was born someone in the family commemorated the event by carving some names and dates on a tree.

  “Trouble is,” Liston said, “they cut down the tree.”

  The Liston family was enormous. Helen Baskin had eleven children with Tobe Liston before she gave birth to Charles. Tobe Liston had had a dozen children with another woman before he met Helen. The Listons were sharecroppers who had moved to Arkansas from Mississippi in 1916 when Tobe was fifty and Helen was sixteen. They rented land from a black farm operator named Pat Heron and grew cotton mainly, and also peanuts, corn, sorghum, and sweet potatoes. “The boss man,” Helen Liston said, “got three-fourths of what you raised.” The house was a flimsy and impossibly crowded shack that was cold in winter, broiling in summer.

  Rather than send Sonny to school, Tobe Liston sent him out to the fields when he was eight. His credo was that if children were old enough to come to the dinner table, they were old enough to farm. Tobe was brutal to his children, not least to Sonny. He beat him so often that if he skipped a day, Sonny would ask, “How come you didn’t whip me today?” The welts of childhood were easy to see on Sonny’s back all his life.

  “I can understand the reason for my failings,” Sonny said years later. “When I was a kid I had nothing but a lot of brothers and sisters, a helpless mother, and a father who didn’t care about a single one of us. We grew up like heathens. We hardly had enough food to keep from starving, no shoes, only a few clothes, and nobody to help us escape from the horrible life we lived.”

  During the war and for some time after, the harvest was poor in the farmlands of eastern Arkansas. Helen Liston went off to work in a shoe factory in St. Louis and took along a few of her children. She left her youngest son behind. But when Liston turned thirteen, he decided he could no longer stand all the cotton picking and the beatings, and he thought about joining his mother.

  “One morning, I got up early, and thrashed the pecans off my brother-in-law’s tree and carried the nuts to town and sold them,” he told the sportswriter A. S. “Doc” Young. “That gave me enough money to buy a ticket to St. Louis. I figured the city would be like the country, and all I had to do was to ask somebody where my mother lived and they’d tell me she lived down the road a piece. But when I got to the city, there were too doggone many people there, and I just wandered around lost.” Liston ended up sleeping at a police station for a few nights, where he was fed bologna sandwiches and taken good care of. “One morning I told my story to a wino and he says I favor this lady that lives down the street. He took me over to the house, and I knocked on the door and my brother Curtice opened the door. From then on I stayed with my mother.”

  At first, Sonny worked for an honest wage—if a pathetic one. “I sold coal. I sold ice. I sold wood. I got fifteen bucks a week in a chicken market cleaning chickens.… On the good days I ate. On the bad ones I told my stomach to forget it. And me and trouble was never far apart. If a colored kid’s going to get by he’s got to learn one thing fast—there ain’t nobody going to look after him but him. I learned.” Liston went to school for a short while, but he suffered from the embarrassment of his illiteracy and his size. His parents were small people—Tobe was five-six, Helen five-one—but he was not. In his early teens, Liston was already man-sized, with huge hands and a burly build from years of farmwork. “Other kids would see me coming out of such small kids’ room and they would make fun of me and start laughing, and I started fighting,” Liston said. “And then I started playing hooky, and from hooky I led to another thing, so I wound up in
the wrong school—well, the house of detention.”

  By the time Liston was sixteen, he was over six feet tall and weighed more than two hundred pounds. He ran with some of the nastiest boys in his neighborhood, stealing from grocery stores and restaurants. “When I was a kid, I didn’t have nothing going for me but my fists and my strength,” Liston said. “I didn’t have nothing to eat. I’d been eating a day here and a day there, but eating’s a hard habit to get out of. Anyway, these kids come along and they had the bright idea of knocking over this store. All I could see at the end of it was a great plate of food, and if we had to take a gun along to get it that was okay, too.” Sonny was a lousy criminal. He wore the same yellow-and-black-checked shirt so often that he became known to the police as the Yellow Shirt Bandit.

  His first appearance on the St. Louis police docket came just after Christmas in 1949. Liston and two of his buddies held up a clerk near the Mississippi waterfront. On the wanted list, Liston became known as “#1 Negro.” His arrest records show a mugging for six dollars; his gang beat a man in an alley for nine dollars in ones; there were petty robberies at gas stations, robberies at luncheonettes. One of Liston’s criminal exploits netted him exactly five cents. He was finally arrested on January 14, 1950, after sticking up a place on Market Street called the Unique Cafe. The haul was thirty-seven dollars.

  Twenty-five minutes after the robbery, a young patrolman named David Herleth arrested Liston when he saw him at one o’clock in the morning running from a barbecue place to his house. The only weapon Liston carried was a roll of nickels. He was, of course, wearing his yellow shirt.

  Liston was convicted of two counts of robbery in the first degree and two counts of larceny. He was sentenced to five years in the Missouri State Penitentiary, a huge brick prison on the banks of the Missouri River in Jefferson City. He began his sentence in June 1950. According to Liston’s accounting, he was twenty years old. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat said he was twenty-two.

  EVEN AT HIS MOST SELF-DRAMATIZING, LISTON NEVER COMPLAINED about prison. He always said that the food in the pen was the best he had ever eaten—a statement made all the more vivid when one is reminded that the prisoner riots at Missouri State in 1954 were over the quality of the food. Liston had not had the opportunity to cultivate much experience or expertise at table. When he was eventually paroled, a friend of his bought him a chicken dinner as a treat, but Liston stared down at the plate as if he were eyeing the impenetrable mysteries of the universe.

  “Why don’t you eat it?” his friend said.

  “I don’t know how,” Liston said.

  Except for a few fights in the yard, Liston was a fairly well-behaved prisoner. He worked in the laundry and as a messenger. His singular stroke of fortune was to win the notice of the prison’s chaplains, first the Rev. Edward Schlattmann and then Father Alois Stevens. At Missouri State Penitentiary the chaplain also carried the title of athletic director. Schlattmann brought Liston to the gym and introduced him to the sport of boxing, and then after he was transferred a few weeks later the job fell to Father Stevens. Stevens was immediately impressed by Liston’s strength—Liston was knocking out men with his left jab alone—but he was worried that he would never be able to win him an early parole. Liston could hardly express himself, except with a baleful stare. He used an X to sign his name. “Sonny was just a big, ignorant, pretty nice kid,” Stevens said. “I tried to teach him the alphabet, but it was hard to impress on him the importance of it. ‘Surely you’ll want to read the papers about yourself,’ I’d tell him, but he wasn’t too faithful. He was very penurious with his words.”

  Liston soon became the prison champion, heavyweight division. He got his training from Sam Eveland, a car thief and a Golden Gloves champion from St. Louis. “He was the real thing right away,” Eveland told me. “You’d show him a punch or a technique and by the end of the day he had it down. But poor, poor Sonny. He could fight and that was it. He had the mind of an eleven-year-old, an overgrown kid. He could be the sweetest guy in the world, and then he’d just snap, go off. But there’s no denying it—he could hit like a mule. Pretty soon there was no one left inside who would get in the ring with him.”

  Father Stevens saw potential in Liston, at least as an athlete, and he called the sports editor at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Bob Burnes, to get some advice on how to help train Liston as a fighter. Father Stevens was so naive about the greater world of prizefighting that he asked Burnes how he could arrange for Liston to fight the top heavyweight contender, Rocky Marciano. Burnes laughed and sent Stevens to two of his friends: Monroe Harrison, a former sparring partner for Joe Louis who was now working as a school janitor, and Frank Mitchell, the publisher of a black-oriented weekly called the St. Louis Argus. Harrison and Mitchell were interested enough to arrange a jailhouse sparring session, and they hired a well-regarded local heavyweight named Thurman Wilson and headed out to the penitentiary.

  In the car, Wilson asked Mitchell, “How many rounds?”

  “As many as you want,” Mitchell said, “but we don’t want to show the boy up.”

  At that point, Liston was not nearly the fighter he would be. He was all left hand. In the language of the game, he couldn’t wipe his ass with his right. But the left was more than sufficient for Thurman Wilson; the jab was a bludgeon and the hook a deathblow. When Liston worked the heavy bag in the prison gym, he left behind a dent the size of a medicine ball. In the ring, he dented Wilson, landing the jab and the hook over and over again. After four rounds of battery, Wilson plodded back to his corner in terrible pain and told Mitchell, “You better get me out of this ring. He’s going to kill me.”

  Harrison went to Burnes’s office to thank him.

  “You finally found me a live one,” he said.

  There was still the nagging problem of Liston’s incarceration. After about a year of campaigning with the parole board, in October 1952 Father Stevens managed to arrange Liston’s release from prison, with the proviso that he would look after him, along with Frank Mitchell and Monroe Harrison. This would eventually prove a dubious arrangement. Mitchell, it was well known in St. Louis, had a close relationship with the biggest mobster in town, John Vitale—and the more Liston attracted attention, the more he interested John Vitale and the mob.

  Initially, Liston’s closest working relationship was with Harrison, who was known as an honest and hardworking man. Harrison was eager to see Sonny on a righteous path. He set him up with a room at the Pine Street YMCA and a job at a local steel company. For a while, at least, this arrangement provided stability. At night, after work, Liston trained either at the local Masonic Temple or at the Ringside Gym on Olive Street. Right away he started working out to the sound of “Night Train,” a sinuous favorite of strippers written and made popular by the St. Louis sax player Jimmy Forrest. (Later, Liston would convert to James Brown’s “Night Train,” a darker, more raucous version of the same tune.) With Harrison in his corner, Liston started to win fights—first in Golden Gloves competitions around the country and then, beginning in September 1953, against professional heavyweights. Eventually the papers started coming around. Liston was a prospect.

  “Sonny’s the type of person who needs understanding,” Harrison told a reporter who visited him in his basement office at the Can-Lane Branch School in St. Louis. “He’s vicious all the way. Youth, all his youth! He needs someone to help him control his emotions. He must be kept busy until all that youth and strength leaves him, like it leaves all of us. Right now he’s like the leopard, that animal out there in the jungle.… He needs training. He needs love. The right people have to take an interest in the boy and treat him like a member of the family. You got to talk to him about what he talks about. Otherwise, he’s got no conversation.”

  Harrison tried to keep Liston occupied and off the streets when he wasn’t working or in the gym. They’d listen to the radio, play checkers. And every once in a while, Harrison would bring Liston down to the Globe-Democrat for an interview with
Burnes.

  “Tell Mr. Bob you been a good boy,” Harrison would prompt Liston.

  “You been a good boy?” Burnes would ask.

  “Yes, Mr. Bob.”

  MONROE HARRISON HELPED MANAGE LISTON THROUGH EIGHT professional fights. Then Sonny met a clever boxer named Marty Marshall, a tough journeyman who broke Liston’s jaw and beat him in a close eight-round decision. Liston would claim that Marshall had caught him with his mouth open—“I was laughing!” But for at least that moment, Liston’s prospects dimmed. Harrison, for his part, had to take stock. His wife was extremely ill. He was broke. Liston was now no longer a sure thing—far from it. Harrison had no choice, really, but to sell his share in the future of Sonny Liston. Frank Mitchell bought him out for six hundred dollars.

  A few years later, Mitchell would also appear before the Kefauver hearings, but he would not be quite as open about his past as Liston. For good reason. His record showed twenty-six arrests. He had a reputation as a gambler and, far worse, as a front for Vitale. Vitale, for his part, had been arrested fifty-eight times and convicted three times. When Mitchell was asked about his acquaintance with Vitale, he said it was all a matter of golf etiquette, a chance meeting on a public course, a fervent desire to be polite: “You see, there were twosomes. They started Vitale’s twosome and then they added my twosome in. I couldn’t afford to discriminate on a public golf course, me of all people.” Certainly not.