Read Online The Devil and Sonny Liston by Nick Tosches - Free Book Online Page B

there was no one there to let him in. Their compassion for him was such, and he so deserving of compassion, that they embraced him as their own.
    " The police liked the boy," Harrison would say. "He was handy around the station, washed cars, did everything. He was big for his age. Finally they found his aunt, and she came and claimed the b oy. But it was the same thing. There was Sonny: hungry, no money, no place to eat or sleep. He saw a boy with five dollars - money the mother had given him to buy groceries - and he took it, strong armed him for it when he was only fifteen years old."
    It was Harrison who said that Sonny had attended school for a few days and been driven to quit because the other children laughed at him. Again, however, there was never any record of his attending school , and it is unlikely that he would have fled the mockery of smaller children. As Bob Burnes later declared, " Sonny never went to school." Liston himself cottoned to Harrison's tale, but in delivering the new revised version as autobiography, he sometimes let slip morsels of revelation about an earlier and more youthful criminal career. Telling one time of how the other schoolchildren had ridiculed him, he ended the poignant performance with the point blank afterthought: " So I wound up in the wrong school."
    " What school did you wind up in?" his interrogator asked.
    " Well, the house of detention."
    " How old were you then?"
    " I was about fourteen. "
    Age, according to the endless flux of the Liston calendar is, of course, highly subjective, but according to the birth date he had finally settled on, he would have turned fourteen in 1946.
    " How long did you stay there?"
    " My mother, she got me out; and then, well, I figure - she got me out, and I went right back for the same things."
    " You did what?"
    " I went back to the same thing and wound up in a bigger school this time."
    In what seems to be his most straightforward account, published in 1961, Liston said:
    I got to running with the wrong crowd. We broke into this restaurant about two in the morning and got away. But after we had gone ten blocks we decided to get some barbecue, and then the police ca m e along and barbecued us. I got out on probation. I was sixteen then , weighing over two hundred pounds. I was in a lot of street fights. I used to punch first and ask questions later, that's the way those guys do. I guess I was the biggest, strongest guy on the corner. None of the other gangs would mess with me, and so I started to strut with this gang and wound up in a bigger house.
    Some sucker sold me a gun to be shot only on Saturday night, that's the only time you needed it. I never shot a gun before, so I held it up in the sky and pulled the trigger. The gun lit up and I , thinking it was on fire, threw it in the mud. After that I started running with this guy who had a car. We made a few stickups, got away with the first , tried a second and it didn't turn out. This time , they sent me away to Jefferson City for five years.
    As much as they tried to cultivate for him an image of innocence, he inspired in Mitchell and Harrison themselves images of the predatory, the beastly, and the savage, which they expressed years later. In telling a story to illustrate the speed and stealth of the fighter's hands, Mitchell recounted the day when Sonny reached down and scooped a moving pigeon from a St. Louis sidewalk. " Man," Mitchell told him, " turn that pigeon loose. Everybody looking, think you a cannibal."
    " He's like a leopard," said Harrison, " that animal out there in the jungle - leap at an animal , kill it, but he don't need it."
    Sonny had not yet achieved much refinement of boxing style. He did not finesse his opponents: he simply obliterated them, usually without ever even using his right fist. " He had absolutely no right hand at all at this time," recalled Jim Lubbock , a Globe Democrat reporter who was involved in that newspaper's sponsorship of the Golden Gloves. "He just