- 2 days ago
The Big Bear, the most intimidating and tragic heavyweight of all time, Charles L. "Sonny" Liston
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00:00Hello, I'm Chris Fowler for SportsCentury.
00:25His was the face of menace.
00:28He wore a malevolent scowl that paralyzed opponents with fear.
00:32He had sledgehammer fists and a left jab like the pistons in a locomotive.
00:37He also had an assassin's instinct for finishing off a man.
00:41Yet in the end, Charles Sonny Liston was revealed as nothing more than a bully,
00:46done in, apparently, by his insatiable appetite for things destructive and dangerous.
00:52Sonny Liston, the former heavyweight boxing champion,
00:54was found dead last night in his Las Vegas home by his wife.
00:57He was 38.
00:59He had been dead for at least a week.
01:01An autopsy failed to show the cause of death, and further studies will be made.
01:05It's the 5th of January, 1971, and she goes home and sees the papers hadn't been picked
01:13up, sees the lights on all over the house.
01:16The door is open.
01:17And I goes up to step, and the house had a terrible smell.
01:22And I went in the kitchen, and I didn't see anything.
01:25She...
01:26...and sees Liston lying at the end of the bed.
01:30His head cantered to one side.
01:32She could see immediately that he's dead.
01:34Liston's death is surrounded in mystery.
01:38No one knows to this day what happened.
01:39He was such a shady guy, and had so many shady kinds of associations and relationships.
01:49That suspicion literally pursues him beyond the grave.
01:53It's possible that he was murdered because he was muscling in on somebody's drug business.
02:00It's possible that in a fit of manic depression, he killed himself.
02:09It's probably most likely that he screwed up with a speedball and inadvertently overdosed.
02:15He supposedly...
02:17He did not overdose.
02:19He hated needles.
02:22Made threats that he was going to blow the whistle on a lot of things that happened to him in the past.
02:27He found him dead.
02:29So ended one of the most tragic downfalls in boxing history.
02:34Less than a decade earlier, Sonny Liston, known respectfully as The Bear,
02:38dominated boxing's heavyweight division as if it were his own private forest.
02:42With no serious challengers, he agreed to defend his crown in 1964
02:47against a 22-year-old upstart believed to have more mouth than fight.
02:53I'm tired of Wichert's fight. I'm nervous.
02:55He's got my job. I'm the champion.
02:57When he's getting ready to fight, Liston, he drives his bus onto the front lawn at Liston's house in Denver.
03:04Come on out here and fight. I'll fight you now, you big ugly bear.
03:07Kevin, what are we going to do?
03:08You're going to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.
03:12Sonny Liston was a bully.
03:16The one group of people who were not afraid of Liston,
03:19and who Liston was actually a little afraid of, were the crazy people.
03:22If Sonny Liston even dreamed he'd beat me, he'd apologize.
03:26He's too ugly to be a world champ.
03:28The world champ should be pretty like me.
03:31He didn't make him doubt himself so much as he thought,
03:35I'm going to get in the ring with a crazy guy.
03:36Who the hell knows what he's going to do?
03:41Clay comes out to meet Liston, and Liston starts to retreat.
03:45If Liston goes back in his father, he'll end up in the ring fast season.
03:49Ha.
03:49Clay went at him hammering Tom.
03:51But Sonny bought it.
03:54Don't you have any respect for him at all?
03:56As a fighter?
03:57Ali, well Clay, Clay later known as Ali, admitted in his autobiography, he was scared of Liston.
04:10As a fighter, I think you should be locked up for impersonating a fighter.
04:16For all his pre-fight mayhem, Clay, undefeated in 19 bouts, was no impersonator.
04:21But Liston didn't just win, he devastated, knocking out 25 of his 36 opponents.
04:28The contrast between them couldn't have been sharper.
04:31Clay was the exuberant exhibitionist, Liston the silent enforcer.
04:36Not too many guys you watch jump and roll that make you nervous.
04:40This is a bad man.
04:43When you got hit by Sonny Liston's jab, it felt like you were getting hit with a telephone pole.
04:48Possibly the greatest left jab in the history of the heavyweight division.
04:53That left jab could go through brick walls.
04:56It was like learning that another country had the atom bomb and they were coming at you.
05:01He seemed invincible.
05:02He was this devastating, hulking figure who was just beating opponents, knocking them out.
05:09This wasn't going to be any fight at all.
05:11He was going to spank this baby.
05:12He trained for maybe a four years, which is about how he didn't train, he drank a lot.
05:21And when they said, they asked him how many rounds it would take him to knock out Clay.
05:27He said this.
05:30Two rounds.
05:33That's not what happened.
05:34How long he thought it would take him to dispose of this young upstart.
05:41I thought Sonny Liston was going to be champion for 147 years.
05:47This guy could knock out with a jam.
05:50My assignment was to get in my rental car and go back and forth between the arena and the nearest hospital emergency room.
05:59So I would not waste a moment of deadline time following Cassius Clay into intensive care.
06:07Of the 46 writers covering the fight, only three picked Clay to win.
06:13Fight fans across all social strata agreed.
06:17A lot of people in the black community who at this point kind of would think Clay's a clown, so I'd rather see Liston win.
06:24The press wanted Sonny to eat the loudmouth from Louisville.
06:28Liston was an 8-to-1 player.
06:29They didn't like Clay at all.
06:32Dislike turned into distrust when news reports revealed Clay's association with Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam.
06:39Although the fight's promoters prevailed upon the high-profile leader to leave Clay's camp,
06:44the pre-fight atmosphere was negatively charged with skepticism and fear.
06:48Meanwhile, Liston's underrule connections were leading some fans to suspect he might throw the bow.
06:54On February 25th, the fighters squared off before an undersold crowd in Miami Beach.
07:01Liston wants to pump that jab to set up his other punches to get this kid to stand still.
07:07The speed was so predominant over Liston.
07:10He made Liston look like he was standing still, and Liston wasn't that slow.
07:14Liston is beginning to question what's going on.
07:17Nobody told me this guy was this fast.
07:21He should have watched my film.
07:24Now Clay realizes, faster than this guy, Liston's corner decides to put ointment on his gloves and his shoulder.
07:33It is possible, with the intention of getting it in Clay's eyes.
07:38Ladies and gentlemen, we don't know exactly what happened.
07:41They're yelling from Cassius Clay's corner.
07:44Clay couldn't see, and then Liston beat him up for a round or two.
07:51And he was going to quit.
07:53When he came back, and he says, cut the gloves off, I said, sit down.
07:56Put my pinky in his eye, and put it in my eye.
07:59It did burn.
08:00I put the water in his eyes, I'm wiping him clean.
08:04That's Angelo Dundee that he was arguing with, Joe.
08:06Angelo now is telling him off a little bit while he gets him ready.
08:10Dundee says, this is for the championship, kid.
08:13You are going out there.
08:14He's clinking, and he's bouncing away continually.
08:18Liston is trying to knock him out.
08:19He's trying to get to a blind Cassius Clay, and he can't do it.
08:24And Liston, by that round, is already exhausted.
08:28And Clay pulled the greatest escape act since Houdini.
08:32He survived that fifth round, and then in round six, his vision cleared.
08:38And Liston found him.
08:40Clay and Ali had one of the greatest chins of all time.
08:48That's why he survived Liston.
08:50Himself on the defensive.
08:52The champion has slowed down a bit.
08:54His face was just knots all up and down and cut.
08:59One eye was nearly closed.
09:01I mean, he was the picture of defeat.
09:03Sonny Liston is not running out!
09:05Sonny Liston is not running out!
09:08The winner of the four-heavy-week champion in the world has got this fight!
09:12Sonny Liston is sitting on his stool.
09:14Has not pulled, nobody has said a word!
09:16After the fight, everyone who had picked Sonny all had to have a reason why Sonny lost.
09:23And the first reason they gave was fix.
09:26It had to be a fix.
09:27They just didn't want to admit Clay had won the fight.
09:30From the depths of his humiliation, Liston could not accept responsibility for his loss,
09:36blaming it on a shoulder injury.
09:38And I went back to my corner.
09:41The whole floor felt like it was full of water.
09:44His arm was just aching, and I was the one that was rubbing with wintergreen and alcohol.
09:51They took him to the hospital, and there never was a valid report on what had happened to that particular shoulder.
09:56Don't give up the heavyweight championship of the world,
10:00the single most valuable prize in all of sports, because your shoulder hurts.
10:06His one weakness...
10:07What?
10:09...as a fighter was his lack of heart.
10:11Once you take his gun away, he turned into a sissy.
10:18Years, it said, but Liston, he died the day he...
10:21Neither of these guys would have said that to him, personally, when he was alive and they had their chance.
10:29Two, if you can't move your shoulder and your job is to throw punches, how are you supposed to compete?
10:43Very simple.
10:44Harold Conrad had been his publicist for years, it said, about Liston.
10:48He died the day he was born, and it's a little harsh, but in a way, it's true.
10:53It's true.
10:54There was a time when he proudly brandished a birth certificate, proving that he was born in January 1932.
11:02His mother has named two...
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