The Bad Guy

There was frank animal hatred in the obsidian eyes. The harried champion felt it. He shuddered involuntarily and looked away. On his chest, rivulets of sweat sparkled in the harsh glare of naked lights. Patiently, coldly, the massive-shouldered challenger stalked his prey, drawing his circles tighter and tighter, until the champion was trapped against the ropes. A thudding left to the belly doubled up the champion. Another left to the head made him drop his gloves. The challenger swung his right . . .

This is the dream of Charles ("Sonny"') Liston, 29. It is a tortured dream, peopled with shadows: hoodlums, lawyers, judges, cops, commissioners, pugs, promoters, priests, Senators and sportswriters. It is a fragile dream. But there is a chance of its coming true. Last week the terms of the contract were agreed on (55% for the champion, 12 1/2% for the challenger) and the promotional drums were booming for what promised to be the richest bout in boxing history. This summer, probably in June at New York's Yankee Stadium, Sonny Liston will fight Floyd Patterson for the heavyweight championship of the world, and the total gate receipts are estimated at something like $4,000,000 (largely because of TV rights).

A Grunt & a Click. Challenger Liston is the most controversial figure to fight for the heavyweight championship since Jack ("Li'l Arthur") Johnson, the first of the great Negro champions and a man whose full-blown arrogance inspired fans to cry for "a great white hope." Semiliterate, surly and suspicious, Liston starts telephone conversations with "It's your dime, start talking," ends them without warning, on a grunt and a click. Brazen and tough, he has been arrested 19 times since 1950, convicted twice (armed robbery, assaulting a police officer), spent a total of three years in prison. His underworld connections are notorious: he worked as a head-knocking labor goon for St. Louis Hoodlum John Vitale, and his boxing career was supervised by stooges of Ganglord Frankie Carbo.

To police in St. Louis, Liston is an incorrigible troublemaker. "He's a bad man," says Detective Sergeant James Reddick. "He hangs out with a bunch of dogs." To his onetime comanager, Monroe Harrison, he is "vicious all the way." To some sportswriters, he is too mean to be permitted in the ring. Wrote Gene Ward in the New York Daily News: "The world has too many hoodlums in high places as it is." Yet to the Rev. Edward P. Murphy, a Denver Catholic priest who befriended him, Liston is "a man of tremendous potential."

The fashionable explanation for criminal acts is a troubled childhood. Liston's was all of that. One of 25 children born to an Arkansas cotton farmer and his two wives, Sonny has hated authority as long as he can remember. "I caught a whupping from my father every day. If he missed a day, I'd have to go to him and ask, 'Why didn't you whup me?' " His mother walked out and went to St. Louis. At twelve, Sonny ran away to join her. "She put me in school," says Liston, "but I was much bigger than the other kids and I didn't stay long. I started fighting, and I started playing hooky, and one thing led to another. I wound up in the house of detention." The original charge was breaking and entering, but Liston soon graduated to grander crime, served two years in the state prison at Jefferson City, Mo., for a series of restaurant robberies. There Liston met a chaplain who interested him in boxing. He memorized helpful hints from Joe Louis' My Life Story (sample: "Never jab at your target; always try to jab through it"), soon was prison champion, emerged to win the intercity Golden Gloves heavyweight championship in 1953.

What Counts. "A boxing match is like a cowboy movie,'' says Liston. "There's got to be good guys, and there's got to be bad guys. That's what people pay for." Liston is a certified bad guy, but when he squares off against Patterson in June, only one thing will count: How well can he fight?

Judging from his record--33 wins, one loss, 23 knockouts--Sonny Liston can take care of himself in the ring. But he is unlikely to terrify Patterson. With only two exceptions (Tommy Jackson in 1956, Ingemar Johansson in 1959) Patterson has knocked out every man he has faced in the past seven years.

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