Blood Brothers (13 page)

On April 3, ten days after the fight, Paret died without ever regaining consciousness. His death introduced a new vocabulary into the sport. Phrases like “traumatic brain injury” and “subdural hemorrhage” and “edema” sounded like a foreign language to boxing fans but reflected the sweet science's new reality.
¹⁵

The horrible end of the Griffith-Paret fight had both immediate and longer-range consequences. While Paret was still in a coma, journalists and politicians began debating the future of a sport “where the object is to knock an opponent loose from his senses.” In the days after the match, politicians demanded that New York governor Nelson Rockefeller do something—form a commission, ban the sport, or at least speak out against it. Ultimately, the state legislature formed a committee to investigate whether prizefighting should be abolished altogether.
¹⁶

Paret died two years before
The Fight of the Week
did, but only because of existing contracts between the network and the sponsors. His death prompted industry executives to reexamine its relationship with the sport. In fact, boxing's television ratings had been declining for years, down from about a third of the available audience to a tenth. One by one, the national weekly shows that had appeared in the 1940s and 1950s went off the air by 1962. All that remained was
The Fight of the Week,
which ABC aired from 1960 to 1964.
¹⁷

The combination of ring deaths, criminal influence, public opposition, and declining ratings made ABC reconsider the renewal of their contract with the Gillette Safety Razor Company, which began sponsoring the show after NBC canceled
The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports
in
1960. The fact that the demographics of boxing were all wrong—that is, its audience was not only dwindling but also generally poorer and older—was as devastating as Griffith's punches. Increasingly, TV executives demanded shows that appealed to the youth market—ranging from
The Addams Family
and
Bewitched
to
Shindig
and
Hullabaloo
to
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
and
Peyton Place—
not programs where men were battered bloody and killed. Boxing's core audience of World War II and Korean War veterans, from ethnic, working-class backgrounds, with limited education and disposable incomes, were proving a poor fit for the age of John Kennedy, John Glenn, and the Beach Boys.
¹⁸

Two days before Christmas in 1963, ABC announced that it planned to cancel
The Fight of the Week
when its new season began. The program, which had begun less than four months after the D-Day invasion, ended on September 11, 1964. Harry Markson, director of boxing for Madison Square Garden, predicted that the end of the long-running show would not be fatal to boxing—in fact, he foresaw the very opposite. But his tone sounded off-key. Most critics thought that the cancellation of
The Fight of the Week
was another portent of the slow death of the sport.
¹⁹

W
ITH BOXING ON
its deathbed, Cassius Clay sensed an opportunity. He understood that there was truth in the old axiom: the health of boxing follows the popularity of the heavyweight champion. What the sport needed, he calculated, was a dynamic, entertaining titleholder. In his view, Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston, the top two heavyweights, were incapable of saving the sport. Only he could remedy boxing's ills.

At the beginning of 1962, Patterson held the title, which he had won in 1956 after Marciano retired, lost in 1959 when he was knocked out by Swedish Ingemar Johansson, and regained in 1960 when he in turn knocked out Johansson. Floyd was a good, compassionate, complex man in a profession normally dominated by men with other attributes, and the crown of Dempsey, Louis, and Marciano was an uncomfortable fit for him, a fact not lost on Clay. Cassius thought that boxing needed a champion who was great, not one who ran from challengers and lost to Scandinavians.

Patterson grew up in poverty in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. As an adult, he was so timid, shy, and withdrawn that even when he became a
successful professional prizefighter, he could not look his opponents in the eyes before a fight. After one match he gently kissed the man he had just knocked out.

Sportswriters accused him of gross pugilistic malfeasance—that is, as a champion he had not defended his title against the best contenders. Most of his defenses were against mid-ranked, smaller heavyweights with overblown records, who, perhaps not coincidentally, were white. He consistently avoided top-rated heavyweights. And he steered widely clear of Sonny Liston, generally recognized between 1960 and 1962 as the top contender in the division. Unlike Patterson, Liston
had
fought and defeated virtually every other major contender.

Sonny, whose nickname seemed singularly inappropriate, had a past, and much of it was bad. The first murky fact about his life was his exact age. When he needed a date of birth on an application to fight in the 1953 Golden Gloves tournament, he gave May 8, 1932. His mother told one reporter that she thought it was January 8, 1932, and another, January 18, 1932. But those dates only set the upper range for the speculations that included 1931, 1930, and back into the 1920s.

Over time, Sonny developed an effective tactic for shutting down questions about his birthdate. When a scribe probed the subject, Liston would throw him a glance as cold as a gravestone at midnight and say, “Anyone who says [I wasn't born in 1932] is callin' my momma a liar.”
²⁰

By his own reckoning, he was one of twenty-five children sired by Toby Liston, a brutal, abusive father who sharecropped a small patch of ground near Forest City, Arkansas. He beat his son so often that if a day passed without a hard whupping, Sonny would wake his dad at night and ask, “How come you didn't whup me today?” Lines of bird-track scars down his back testified to the frequency and severity of the beatings, and by the time he was twelve Sonny had endured enough. As he told sports columnist Jerry Izenberg, one day the family's mule died, prompting Toby to say to Sonny, “Boy, you're the mule now.” Not relishing the promotion, he ran away from home early the next morning.
²¹

He caught a train to St. Louis, where his mother lived with several of his brothers and sisters. But the reunion did not solve his problems. Instead of attending school—he remained functionally illiterate all his life—he took to the streets and alleys of St. Louis, running with the wrong sorts of people and embracing a life of crime like it was his
calling. As he once said, “I had a tendency to find things before they got lost.” “He's a bad man,” commented Detective Sergeant James Reddick. He was a bad man who brutally mugged innocent people, held up small businesses at gunpoint, and did not get away with it. In 1950, he was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to five years in the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City.
²²

In the pen he learned valuable skills that saved his life. Father Alois Stevens, the Catholic chaplain and athletic director at “Jeff City,” saw in Liston “a big, ignorant, pretty nice kid” who seemed perfectly suited for the boxing ring. “He was,” Stevens remembered, “the most perfect specimen of manhood I had ever seen.” At six foot one and a half inches tall and over two hundred pounds, with thick legs, broad shoulders, long, heavily muscled arms, and enormous hands, he had a heavy-weight's build. He was also graceful on his feet and had remarkably quick hands. Frank Mitchell, one of Liston's early managers, witnessed the same quickness when Sonny suddenly reached down and scooped a live pigeon off the sidewalk. If ever there was a case of biology being destiny, Liston was it.
²³

After serving just over two years of his sentence, Sonny was paroled in October 1952 to the custody of Father Stevens as well as Monroe Harrison and Frank Mitchell, two men with ties to the St. Louis boxing scene. Under their direction, Liston strung together a few amateur titles and then in 1953 turned professional. An immediate success, by early 1956 he had won fifteen of sixteen fights.

Once again, his problems came from outside the ring, among the “unwholesome influences” in the dark streets and back alleys of St. Louis. Harrison sold his management share of Liston's contract in 1955, but even before then John Vitale had become Sonny's undercover manager. Reputed to be the leader of the St. Louis crime family, Vitale undoubtedly received a piece of Liston's ring earnings and employed him when Sonny was not engaged in his primary profession. Liston did odd jobs for Vitale's construction business. Sometimes he served as his chauffeur, other times he broke legs and cracked heads for his boss.
²⁴

Although Sonny's face was impassive, it conveyed the pain of his life. But his face also suggested something even more sinister, something buried just beneath the surface of white American culture, struggling to crack the crust. Poet Leroi Jones (after 1968, Amiri Baraka) described
the implicit threat of the boxer: “Sonny Liston was the big black Negro in every white man's hallway, waiting to do him in, deal him under, for all the hurts white men have been able to inflict on his world.”
²⁵

As a result of his various activities and his implicit threat, the police constantly harassed Liston, and he was arrested as often as he fought professionally. On May 5, 1956, he got into an argument with a cop over a parking ticket. The confrontation escalated, ending with patrolman Thomas Mellow lying on the ground with a broken knee and a gash over his left eye and Sonny trotting away with the officer's Colt .38 service revolver. Soon arrested and convicted, he was sentenced to nine months in the city workhouse.
²⁶

Liston walked out of prison in the fall of 1957, but he was far from rehabilitated. He continued to run afoul of the law, and it seems probable that St. Louis policemen targeted him for special harassment. Soon he was advised to leave the city. As Sonny recalled the episode, a police captain said, “If you don't, they're going to find you dead in an alley.” So Liston left, resettled in Philadelphia, and reappeared in the ring under new management.
²⁷

His career was to some degree always controlled by mobsters, but by 1958 he had become the special project of the leading gangsters in the boxing business. There were layers to his management, with each stratum more secretive and powerful than the one below. On paper, Joseph “Pep” Barone was his manager, but he was merely a front man for Philadelphia gangster Frank “Blinky” Palermo, who in turn took orders from Frankie Carbo. And with such influential friends behind him, Liston's career bounded forward. Suddenly he was able to get fights with leading contenders, and by spring 1960 he was the top-ranked fighter in the division.
²⁸

His problem, however, was that he had become a focal point for critics who assailed the sport. From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, two men from two organizations had control of prizefighting. The first was initially a legal corporation organized in 1949. Controlled by James Dougan Norris, a Chicago businessman, the International Boxing Club (IBC) soon acquired a stranglehold on the promotion of major fights in the United States. Within a few years, it was a monopolistic octopus of the first order, and in 1957, a federal court ruled it so and ordered it broken up. Two years later, it was disbanded.
²⁹

But like Liston's managers of record and undercover managers, James Norris was little more than a front man for Frankie Carbo, whose power was virtually absolute, his dictates tantamount to royal commands. Virtually every major boxing manager and promoter worked to some degree with Carbo—his henchmen gave them no choice—and many fighters owed their careers to him, as Sonny Liston did.

Carbo's influence began to wane in the late 1950s, when he was arrested for federal income tax violations and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. But Liston's career continued to flourish. Sportswriters debated whether Patterson should give him a title shot and whether he was a reformed man or still a back-alley thug, but none questioned that he was the most fearsome, most qualified contender in the division. Even President John F. Kennedy offered an opinion. In January 1962, at a White House meeting with Patterson, he suggested that Floyd not risk his crown against Liston.
³⁰

Patterson, however, was an honorable man who believed in redemption and second chances. Liston's life, he thought, was not so different from his. Both had bad beginnings and had moved into petty crime, only Floyd had received help and Sonny had not. A devout Catholic, Patterson believed, “There but for the grace of God, go I.” Liston had committed crimes, gone to prison, paid his debt, and was now a fellow professional. No matter what Patterson's manager, Cus D'Amato; sportswriters; the NAACP; or the president of the United States thought, Liston had earned a chance to fight for the heavyweight title.
³¹

Patterson fought Liston on September 25, 1962, under the lights at Comiskey Park in Chicago. It may have been the most talked- and written-about fight since the 1938 rematch between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling. It was covered by some two hundred sportswriters and a distinguished collection of novelists and essayists. Less than half a year after the death of Benny “the Kid” Paret, they seemed to have come to write boxing's obituary. Norman Mailer had been sent by
Esquire
, James Baldwin by
Nugget
, and A. J. Liebling by
The New Yorker
. They were joined by Gay Talese, Nelson Algren, Budd Schulberg, Gerald Kersh, and a busload of others. Surveying the array of talent, Liebling judged that it was like one of “those highly intellectual
pour-parlers
on a Mediterranean island” and suspected that “placed before typewriters, the
accumulated novelists could have produced a copy of the
Paris Review
in forty-two minutes.”
³²