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The Devil and Sonny Liston By Nick Tosches Little, Brown, 266 pages Nonfiction

That rush to the microphone -- and Clay's career was becoming one big rush to the microphone -- said much about the youthful Clay.

And, hell, man, fuck youthful: he was 21 years old, a grown man, and it was not so much youth he was full of but childishness.

A photograph taken before the fight that night shows Clay in a checkered sport jacket, eyes bulging, mouth open and as wide as the Holland Tunnel, screaming his praise for himself, while entertained white onlookers smile.

You have to hand it to Tosches: He may not be the first writer to turn himself into a goddamned fool by dismissing Ali, but at least he finds an original way to do it -- and it would take someone highly original to paint Ali as a cartoon darky making the white man smile.

It goes on:

He was, at this point in his career, seen as an audacious but enamouring child, a frivolity of the noble white man ... His sense of humor ... was not much developed beyond the playground realm ... His tiresome and trying wit, his harmless and drably colorful shows of playfulness, and his affected audacity were perfectly suited for the media of the day ... Clay should be regarded as the first made-for-TV boxing idol. As he danced and cavorted in acceptable and inoffensive outrageousness before the masses and the cameras and the microphones of mediocrity, so mediocrity embraced him.

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."

Next page | The truth about the "phantom punch"