The Devil and Sonny Liston (10 page)

Despite the fact that Liston pounded Welch at will and the Toledo boxer's only defense was to wrap his arms around his head, Liston was unable to floor the visitor, let alone knock him out.

And on occasion, Welch managed to land a punch which momentarily stopped Liston, too, although Sonny wasn't hurt at any time while Welch appeared to be on his way out several times. He always managed to evade the kayo punch or Liston didn't find the right way to land it.

No one knew Sonny Liston better as a man or as a fighter than the St. Louis light heavyweight Foneda Cox. On the June night in
1953 when Liston's amateur boxing career ended with his defeat of Herman Schreibauer, the twenty
three
year
old Cox shared the evening's glory, defeating a West German opponent in the match preceding the Liston
Schreibauer contest. On the night in Detroit when Liston beat Summerlin for the second time, Cox was again also a victor, winning a five
round decision in a preliminary match against Bill Hunter.

Tall
,
rangy Foneda Cox was a protege of Frank Mitchell
,
and Tony Anderson was his trainer. After Liston's parole from prison the previous year
,
"they put Sonny in the same gymnasium with me
,
and I started boxing with Sonny. That's how we got together." The two men became more than sparring partners and fellow boxers: they became fast friends.

"Let me give it to you this way,
"
Foneda said. "There was no fighter living that could put on a boxing glove and stand up against Sonny Liston." That
,
to Foneda
,
was the plain and simple truth. "Nobo
dy,
"
he said
,
"could whip Sonny Liston."

Foneda's words should be borne in mind when regarding the loss to Marshall
,
or the lackluster Welch fight. They should be borne in mind always.

As should money. Those seven dollars and seventy cents taken from a man beaten down and dragged into an alley. One roll of pennies
,
one roll of nickels
,
twenty
four loose nickels
,
ten dimes
,
and twelve quarters. That two
yard price
,
that taste of undreamt fortune, on the night of that first professional fight. In yellow shirt and bib overalls
,
in white trunks and leather gloves
,
the same blow
,
the same motive.

With that first two
hundred
dollar payday
,
Sonny had entered
a world in which money was the kind and loving god of the ruling few and the predestining subjugator of the many. At best
,
it was a matter of "workin' on halves
,
" as E.B. Ward said of sharecropping. "If you had ten bales of cotton
,
the white man got five." It was not right. It was not wrong. It was simply and supremely the way it was.

The first rematch with Marty Marshall was held in St. Louis on April 21, 1955. Liston sent Marshall reeling to the canvas four times
,
and the fight ended as a six
round technical knockout for
Liston. Marshall remained forever in awe of Sonny's power. "He
h
it me like no man should be hit.
"
he told the reporter George Puscas of the
Detroit Free Press
. "He's tough. That's one thing nobody can deny about that man. He hurts when he breathes on you." Liston's only loss
,
to Marshall
,
may have been a grievous error that Liston was able to wave away. But in the fourth round of the second Liston
Marshall fight. Marshall did something to Liston that was so unthinkable
,
so impossible
,
that Liston
,
doing his best to erase it from history
,
denied that it ever happened: Marshall
knocked him down.

"
I’
m sorry to this day about that," said Marshall. "Man
,
am I sorry. He hit me after that like -
nobody
should be hit like that. I think about it now and I hurt. He came out after me in the fifth round.
He hit me with a right hand on my ear.
It didn't knock me out and it didn't knock me down
,
but it hurt so much I just had to go down anyway. The next round, he knocked me down three times." Marshall recalled. "He hit me in the stomach with a left hand in the sixth. That wasn't a knockdown
,
either.
It couldn't be: I was paralyzed. I just couldn't move. I couldn't move enough to fall down.
"
Later that round
,
said Marshall. Liston "knocked me down three times
,
and that was it."

For all of that
,
Sonny would never admit to his having been momentarily felled while off guard.
"I just don't know why he wouldn't remember that," Marshall would say. "Everybody remembers. It was in the papers."

But Sonny didn't read the papers.
Later, in 1956
,
when the time came for their third and final match
,
Marshall knew that he never again in his life wanted a beating such as Liston had given him: and if
losing was inevitable
,
he wanted at least to avoid the new dimensions in pain to which Liston had delivered him:
"I just knew I couldn't let him touch me.
"

The Marshall TKO of April 1955 was the first of five consecutive knockouts in an ever widening territory. Sonny knocked out Emil Brtko in Brtko's hometown of Pittsburgh on May 5
. H
e knocked out Calvin Butler in St. Louis on May 25. It was the Cleveland fighter's third defeat
,
the others having been delivered by Marty Marshall and Emil Brtko. Sonny knocked out the Chicago fighter Johnny Gray in Indianapolis on September 13. Two months later, on December 13, in the first professional fight held in East St. Louis in a quarter of a century
,
he knocked out Larry Watson, an Omaha fighter who had beaten Wes Bascom, the only conqueror of John Summerlin prior to Liston.

Frank Mitchell, the publisher of the black weekly
Argus
, used
the newspaper to champion his prodigy. The first publicity photo of Liston -
poised in the corner of the ring, gloved fists raised to the breast, white T shirt, white trunks -appeared in the Argus of December 9
,
1955
,
in a story announcing the upcoming Watson fight. The next week's issue, under the headline "Liston Wins Number 13," celebrated the "flashing left and right combination" witnessed by "a crowd of 780." The publicity picture ran again in the
Argus
two weeks later
,
above an item noting Liston's "climb toward the heavyweight title row." In concluding, Mitchell's
Argus
declared that Liston
"
may be a champ in a very short time.
"

By the time Liston was fighting out of town. Frank Mitchell was his sole manager of record.

"I was committed to paying thirty five dollars a week for Sonny's
support," Monroe Harrison would later say, "and my wife got sick and I just couldn't afford it. I had to turn my share of the contract over to Mitchell." Harrison spoke these words at a time when Liston was the heavyweight champion of the world and he himself still a school custodian. "Let's face it," he added
,
"a poor. colored trainer just don't ever wind up with fifty percent of a heavyweight champion's contract.
"

When Harrison died, Bob Burnes, in eulogizing him, would
tell a different tale. "There came a time," Burnes would write,
"
when Monroe Harrison came into the office on a Tuesday afternoon." Harrison's lugubrious demeanor "surprised me because I knew that Sonny had won the night before in Chicago, but that's all I knew."

"They took Sonny from me," Harrison said, according to
Burnes.

"Who did?"

"Two guys touched me on the shoulder during the sixth round," Burnes claimed Harrison told him. "They said, 'We're taking Sonny
,
'
and I said, 'When?' and they said, 'Right now."'

"That was the beginning," Burnes would write, "of the takeover of Sonny Liston by the mob.
"

But Liston never fought in Chicago on a Monday night, and he never fought in Chicago at all until 1958
,
four years after Harrison had sold out his interest in Liston. It was a good tale that Burnes told
,
and it would become a part of the Liston legend. But it was a lie. Liston's takeover by the Mob had begun long before, right under the unseeing eyes of Burnes and the rest of them, the moment that Liston drew the first breath of that dream of a golden new morning.

Frank Mitchell, pillar of the black community, was, in his management of Liston, a front man for the interests of another gentle man, named John J. Vitale.

In those days
,
professional boxing was largely the domain of the International Boxing Club, a corporation formed in 1949 by James Dougan Norris, a wealthy forty two year old Chicago sportsman who, with his father, James Norris, and his partner, Arthur Wirtz, already owned the Chicago Stadium, the Detroit Olympia, the St. Louis Arena, and considerable stock in Madison Square Garden.

Though Norris bankrolled it and was its president, the IBC was conceived, midwifed, and masterminded by Truman K. Gibson, Jr., a distinguished Chicago attorney whose involvement in boxing came through his relationship with the heavyweight champion Joe Louis.

Born on an Alabama cotton plantation and raised in the bad parts of Detroit, Louis was the first black champion since Jack Johnson lost to Jess Willard in 1915. Defending his title a record twenty five times in an unprecedented reign that spanned the years
1937 to 1949, Louis, described by one writer as a fighter "with murder in his heart and thunderbolts in his gloves," was perhaps the only hero that Sonny Liston ever had.

It was during World War II that Gibson and Louis met. Gibson, also a black Southerner, was two years older than Louis. Born in Atlanta in 1912, he attended the University of Chicago, was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1935, and to the bar of the Supreme Court in 1939. He met Louis when, serving as a civilian aide to Secretary of War Stimson, he arranged the fighter's exhibition tour of army bases in Europe and North Africa. Gibson subsequently received a Medal of Merit. Appointed to the Compton Commission for Universal Military Training and the President's Advisory Commission on Morals, Religion, and Education in the Armed Services, he became an instrumental agent in the desegregation of the military, a role he attributed to the Louis tour and his observation that the white soldiers always had the good seats.

Though Gibson had little interest in boxing, the two became
friends. After the war, when Louis - who had served four years of his championship in the armed forces and who had donated the entire purses of his 1942 title defenses to the Army and Navy Relief Funds -
was set upon by the government for back taxes, he turned to Gibson for help.

It was Gibson who set up Joe Louis Enterprises, Inc., to set
aright
the exploited champion's financial situation. It was Gibson freed Louis from the contractual clutch of Mike Jacobs's 2
0
th Century Sporting Club. It was Gibson who, in early 1949, cut the
deal through which Louis's resignation as champion brought the
I
BC officially into being: the deal through which Norris and W
ir
tz purchased from Joe Louis Enterprises contracts binding the four leading contenders to the title Louis abdicated, contracts that thus gave the IBC exclusive promotional rights to the heavyweight championship.

Once in control of the heavyweight title -
won by Ezzard
Charles over Jersey Joe Walcott in the IBC's inaugural presentation -
the organization set out to place under contract and deliver to its fold the leading contenders in every principal division. As it succeeded, the IBC of Illinois grew into a network of tentacle entities: the IBC of New York, the IBC of Missouri, the IBC of Michigan, and various other related companies. Norris and Wirtz gained control of the Madison Square Garden Corporation; Norris became its president, Wirtz its vice president and treasurer. Ex
c
lusive television contracts were negotiated with NBC for the weekly Friday
night fights, with CBS for the Wednesday
night fights.

Gibson, who became, with Norris and Wirtz, one of the triumvirate that was the IBC's board of directors, would later flatly tell the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly: "During the period 1950 to 1959, practically all of the championships in the major weight categories were staged by one or the other of our organizations or in conjunction with our television presentations." In 1949, after its auspicious beginning, the IBC faced a bleak future. Beset by the demands and resistance of suspicious and disgruntled managers, picketed and boycotted by the Boxing Guild that represented those managers, it seemed that the IBC's dream
of imperium, and the IBC itse
lf, might be short li
ved. It was then
that the board of its directors came to know what wise old timers already knew: in the world of boxing, there was only one true and sovereign power and he lived in New York. Some called him Mr. Gray.