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Vicious in the ring, vicious on the page | page 1, 2
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. The Devil and Sonny Liston By Nick Tosches 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.
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