Bullshit. Tosches allots a single sentence to the thrill that a proud young black man who wouldn't play humble gave African-Americans in the early '60s. His claims that Clay was a court jester to the white middle class are laughable to anyone who remembers the suspicion and hatred Clay aroused even before he converted to Islam and defied the draft. In a country undergoing a defining struggle with racism, how could the reaction to a boasting black loudmouth be any different?

Tosches writes about the fear that Liston's 1962 fight with then-champ Patterson aroused in black America. The soft-spoken, insecure Patterson (the subject of the most moving section of David Remnick's Ali book, "King of the World," was a role model, while Liston -- mean outside the ring, vicious inside it and mobbed up on top of that -- was someone most black Americans considered the opposite. Tosches doesn't address the dilemma that a Liston-Clay match posed for blacks, who, all too conscious of white opinion, felt they were being forced to choose between a thug and a braggart. Nor does he cite any of the racist ridicule that such established sportswriters as Jimmy Cannon and Red Smith directed at Clay. What accounts for Ali's appeal, in Tosches' view, was his ability to play, for white writers, "the dream cards of manliness, racial understanding, provocative sensibility and bond between writer and warrior."

The key to Tosches' attitude lies in his dismissal of Ali's fans in the press as people "who could write no better than they could fight." In much the same way that Albert Goldman's "Ladies and Gentlemen: Lenny Bruce!!" was a performance designed to show off the author's hip credentials, "The Devil and Sonny Liston" is designed to demonstrate that Tosches is fit to walk in the shadow of the King Motherfucker himself. While Liston demolishes opponents with the brutality of his blows, Tosches goes down the mean streets of professional boxing, ventures into the shadowy corners of mob dealings and dares to reveal the fixed fights. He wants to be on the page what Liston was in the ring: the man who will not be fucked with.

But a biographer who aims to be a mythmaker may wind up dealing in inflated pulp archetypes. Tosches turns Liston into a white writer's fantasy of black rage. Where his Jerry Lee Lewis biography, "Hellfire," was a mythic battle between sin and salvation for his subject's soul, this book is a story of the devil triumphant. To Tosches, Liston is the walking embodiment of bad voodoo, "the big bad nigger who looked at you like he didn't know whether to drink your blood or spit on you, or, worse, like he didn't even see you with those deep dark grave-dirt-colored dead man's eyes of his; the big bad nigger who come up here from way down there and took people round the neck from behind like a beast."

Granted, Tosches is a remarkable reporter. He digs up hangers-on and fixers and flunkies who you would have thought had gone the way of sharkskin suits. But I couldn't keep straight the promoters and the mobsters who populate these pages, or sort out their deals and their double-crosses. After a while, I wasn't sure if it mattered. Like Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas," "The Devil and Sonny Liston" is high on the big-balled braggadocio of hoods and mobsters. Scorsese got by with his adolescent fascination through sheer energy. Bogged down in the swamp of literary pulp, Tosches sinks.

And though he has a reporter's instincts, he doesn't have a reporter's discernment. In one section, Chicago attorney Truman K. Gibson (who helped Joe Louis out of the financial morass of his later years) tells Tosches that in his years in boxing he knew of three fixed fights. Tosches names two and then demurs: "As for the third fix, I doubt if history and the lawyers that stand between these words and my paycheck are ready for that one." That's a tabloid tease -- a shocker too hot to reveal. But what prevents him? Either he has the evidence to back up his claim or he doesn't.

It's in the allegation that Liston's two fights with Ali were fixed that Tosches' judgment is most in question, though. He's hardly the first person to make that claim. In the first fight, Liston simply refused to come out of his corner for the seventh round. In the second, Ali's right felled Liston in the first round. If these were fixes, they were spectacularly obvious ones. Tosches makes a good case that a man of Liston's temperament would make a fix obvious out of plain resentment. And he includes the assertions of Liston associates that Liston said he threw the first fight.

But whatever the truth is, the way he calls the fights themselves feels off the mark. Ever eager to diminish Ali, he insists the boxer was faking when he claimed temporary blindness in the fifth round. (Liniment applied to a cut under Liston's eyes had gotten onto Liston's gloves and into Ali's eyes.) But A.J. Liebling, whose writing on boxing is among the best, claimed that the best fighter he ever saw was Pete Herman, who had been nearly blind at the time Liebling saw him fight. (Among other things, Herman would move his head to draw punches and determine his opponent's position from where the blows passed him.)

Tosches claims that the "phantom punch" (as it's come to be known) of the second fight was "a blow so slight that few could see it." Really? A few years ago, at the Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, N.Y., my wife and I took in a documentary on Liston. When it got to the rematch with Ali and the "phantom punch" (recorded by one camera), I heard my wife gasp, and when the punch was rerun in slow motion, I could see Liston's neck snap back and his head crumple onto his right shoulder as the rest of him followed suit all the way to the canvas.

In fairness, Tosches is careful to point out that the victors of fixed fights are never in on the fix. (It has to look believable.) But even if Ali became champ through a fix, somehow he stayed champ -- and that's territory into which Tosches doesn't venture. Joyce Carol Oates has observed that after the government deprived Ali of his peak fighting years, he came back to discover that while his youthful speed was gone, he could take a punch. If the older Ali could withstand the blows of George Foreman -- a fighter who was probably the equal of Liston in the power of his punch -- couldn't a younger Ali have withstood the blows of Liston? Ali's triumphant strategy in Zaire in 1974 was to let Foreman punch himself out and then move in to finish him off. Couldn't he have worn down Liston in the same manner?

Tosches knows there's a great story here. And we may get it in the upcoming film in which Ving Rhames is slated to play Liston. But his tough-guy stance and his slumming infatuation with sleaze get in the way. He knows how to sort through rumor, making a convincing case that Liston's death in 1970 (apparently from a heroin overdose) wasn't the mob hit it's been claimed to be. But he's not above allowing rumor to advance his view.

The contradictions of Liston are worth exploring. But have we traveled much beyond the sentimentality of that old boxing weepie "The Champ" when Tosches tells us that Liston was kind to children or that one of the mourners at his funeral was his adopted son? Tosches comes across, finally, as one more stunned child mourning a fallen idol, his prose the embarrassing result of a childish fantasy that has been pumped up to convince us of its manly resistance to fantasy.