Phil Ochs wrote a song about it, and so did Mark Knopfler: that legendary fight in 1965, the one where, in the very first minute of the very first round, Sonny Liston took a fall.
Popular poets, Ochs and Knopfler, and what do you think the bards were? That kind of magic, the old dark magic that soaks down the roots of the world and keeps it rich, it’s a transformative magic. It never goes away.
However you spill it, it’s blood that makes the cactus grow. Ochs, just to interject a little more irony here, paid for his power in his own blood as well.
5.
Twenty-fifth child of twenty-six, Sonny Liston. A tenant farmer’s son, whose father beat him bloody. He never would meet my eye, even there in his room, this close to Christmas, near the cold bent stub end of 1970.
He never would meet a white man’s eyes. Even the eye of the One-Eyed Jack, patron saint of Las Vegas, when Jackie was pouring him J&B. Not a grown man’s eye, anyway, though he loved kids—and kids loved him. The bear was a teddy bear when you got him around children.
But he told me all about that fight. How the Mob told him to throw it or they’d kill him and his Momma and a selection of his brothers and sisters too. How he did what they told him in the most defiant manner possible. So the whole fucking world would know he took that fall.
The thing is, I didn’t believe him.
I sat there and nodded and listened, and I thought, Sonny Liston didn’t throw that fight. That famous “Phantom Punch”? Mohammed Ali got lucky. Hit a nerve cluster or something. Sonny Liston, the unstoppable Sonny Liston, the man with a heart of piston steel and a hand like John Henry’s hammer—Sonny Liston, he went down. It was a fluke, a freak thing, some kind of an accident.
I thought going down like that shamed him, so he told his wife he gave up because he knew Ali was better and he didn’t feel like fighting just to get beat. But he told me that other story, about the mob, and he drank another scotch and he toasted Muhammad Ali, though Sonny’d kind of hated him. Ali had been barred from fighting from 1967 until just that last year, who was facing a jail term because he wouldn’t go and die in Vietnam.
Sensible man, if you happen to ask me.
But I knew Sonny didn’t throw that fight for the Mob. I knew because I also knew this other thing about that fight, because I am the soul of Las Vegas, and in 1965, the Mob was Las Vegas.
And I knew they’d had a few words with Sonny before he went into the ring.
Sonny Liston was supposed to win. And Muhammad Ali was supposed to die.
6.
The one thing in his life that Sonny Liston could never hit back against was his daddy. Sonny, whose given name was Charles, but who called himself Sonny all his adult life.
Sonny had learned the hard way that you never look a white man in the eye. That you never look any man in the eye unless you mean to beat him down. That you never look the Man in the eye, because if you do he’s gonna beat you down.
He did his time in jail, Sonny Liston. He went in a boy and he came out a prize fighter, and when he came out he was owned by the Mob.
You can see it in the photos and you could see it in his face, when you met him, when you reached out to touch his hand; he almost never smiled, and his eyes always held this kind of deep sonorous seriousness over his black, flat, damaged nose.
Sonny Liston was a jailbird. Sonny Liston belonged to the Mob the same way his daddy belonged to the land.
Cassius Clay, God bless him, changed his slave name two days after that first bout with Sonny, as if winning it freed up something in him. Muhammad Ali, God bless him, never learned that lesson about looking down.
7.
Boxing is called the sweet science. And horse racing is the sport of kings.
When Clay beat Liston, he bounced up on his stool and shouted that he was King of the World. Corn king, summer king, America’s most beautiful young man. An angel in the boxing ring. A new and powerful image of black manhood.
He stepped up on that stool in 1964 and he put a noose around his neck.
The thing about magic is that it happens in spite of everything you can do to stop it.
And the wild old Gods will have their sacrifice.
No excuses.
If they can’t have Charismatic, they’ll take the man that saved him.
So it goes.
8.
Sometimes it’s easier to tell yourself you quit than to admit that they beat you. Sometimes it’s easier to look down.
The civil rights movement in the early 1960s found Liston a thug and an embarrassment. He was a jailbird, an illiterate, a dark unstoppable monster. The rumor was that he had a second career as a standover man—a mob enforcer. The NAACP protested when Floyd Patterson agreed to fight him in 1962.
9
.
Sonny didn’t know his own birthday or maybe he lied about his age. Forty’s old for a fighter, and Sonny said he was born in ’32 when he was might have been born as early as ’27. There’s a big damned difference between thirty-two and thirty-seven in the boxing ring.
And there’s another thing, something about prize fighters you might not know. In Liston’s day, they shot the fighters’ hands full of anesthetic before they wrapped them for the fight. So a guy who was a hitter—a puncher rather than a boxer, in the parlance—he could pound away on his opponent and never notice he’d broken all the goddamned bones in his goddamned hands.
Sonny Liston was a puncher. Muhammad Ali was a boxer.
Neither one of them, as it happens, could abide the needles. So when they went swinging into the ring, they earned every punch they threw.
Smack a sheetrock wall a couple of dozen times with your shoulder behind it if you want to build up a concept of what that means, in terms of endurance and of pain. Me? I would have taken the needle over feeling the bones I was breaking. Taken it in a heartbeat.
But Charismatic finished his race on a shattered leg, and so did Black Gold.
What the hell were a few broken bones to Sonny Liston?
10.
You know when I said Sonny was not a handsome man? Well, I also said Muhammad Ali was an angel. He was a black man’s angel, an avenging angel, a messenger from a better future. He was the way and the path, man, and they marked him for sacrifice, because he was a warrior god, a Black Muslim Moses come to lead his people out of Egypt land.
And the people in power like to stay that way, and they have their ways of making it happen. Of making sure the sacrifice gets chosen.
Go ahead and curl your lip. White man born in the nineteenth century, reborn in 1905 as the Genius of the Mississippi of the West. What do I know about the black experience?
I am my city, and I contain multitudes. I’m the African-American airmen at Nellis Air Force Base, and I’m the black neighborhoods near D Street that can’t keep a supermarket, and I’m Cartier Street and I’m Northtown and I’m Las Vegas, baby, and it doesn’t matter a bit what you see when you look at my face.
Because Sonny Liston died here, and he’s buried here in the palm of my hand. And I’m Sonny Liston too, wronged and wronging; he’s in here, boiling and bubbling away.
11.
I filled his glass one more time and splashed what was left into my own, and that was the end of the bottle. I twisted it to make the last drop fall. Sonny watched my hands instead of my eyes, and folded his own enormous fists around his glass so it vanished. “You’re here on business, Jackie,” he said, and dropped his eyes to his knuckles. “Nobody wants to listen to me talk.”
“I want to listen, Sonny.” The scotch didn’t taste so good, but I rolled it over my tongue anyway. I’d drunk enough that the roof of my mouth was getting dry, and the liquor helped a little. “I’m here to listen as long as you want to talk.”
His shoulders always had a hunch. He didn’t stand up tall. They hunched a bit more as he turned the glass in his hands. “I guess I run out of things to say. So you might as well tell me what you came for.”
At Christmas time in 1970, Muhammad Ali—recently allowed back in the ring, pending his appeal of a draft evasion conviction—was preparing for a title bout against Joe Frazier in March. He was also preparing for a more wide-reaching conflict; in April of that year, his appeal, his demand to be granted status as a conscientious objector, was to go before the United States Supreme Court.
He faced a five year prison sentence.
In jail, he’d come up against everything Sonny Liston had. And maybe Ali was the stronger man. And maybe the young king wouldn’t break where the old one fell. Or maybe he wouldn’t make it out of prison alive, or free.
“Ali needs your help,” I said.
“Fuck Cassius Clay,” he said.
Sonny finished his drink and spent a while staring at the bottom of his glass. I waited until he turned his head, skimming his eyes along the floor, and tried to sip again from the empty glass. Then I cleared my throat and said “It isn’t just for him.”
Sonny flinched. See, the thing about Sonny—that he never learned to read, that doesn’t mean he was dumb. “The NAACP don’t want me. The Nation of Islam don’t want me. They didn’t even want Clay to box me. I’m an embarrassment to the black man.”
He dropped his glass on the table and held his breath for a moment before he shrugged and said, “Well, they got their nigger now.”
Some of them know up front; they listen to the whispers, and they know the price they might have to pay if it’s their number that comes up. Some just kind of know in the back of their heads. About the corn king, and the laurel wreath, and the price that sometimes has to be paid.
Sonny Liston, like I said, he wasn’t dumb.
“Ali can do something you can’t, Sonny.” Ali can be a symbol.
“I can’t have it,” he drawled. “But I can buy it? Is that what you’re telling me, Jack?”
I finished my glass too, already drunk enough that it didn’t make my sinuses sting. “Sonny,” I said, with that last bit of Dutch courage in me, “you’re gonna have to take another fall.”
12.
When his wife—returning from a holiday visit to her relatives—found his body on January fifth, eleven days after I poured him that drink, maybe a week or so after he died, Sonny had needle marks in the crook of his arm, though the coroner’s report said heart failure.
Can you think of a worse way to kill the man?
13.
On March 8, 1971, a publicly reviled Muhammad Ali was defeated by Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden in New York City in a boxing match billed at the “Fight of the Century.” Ali had been vilified in the press as a Black Muslim, a religious and political radical, a black man who wouldn’t look down.
Three months later, the United States Supreme Court overturned the conviction, allowing Muhammad Ali’s conscientious objector status to stand.
He was a free man.
Ali fought Frazier twice more. He won both times, and went on to become the most respected fighter in the history of the sport. A beautiful avenging outspoken angel.
Almost thirty-five years after Sonny Liston died, in November of 2005, President George W. Bush awarded America’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to the draft-dodging, politically activist lay preacher Muhammad Ali.
14.
Sonny Liston never looked a man in the eye unless he meant to beat him down. Until he looked upon Cassius Clay and hated him. And looked past that hate and saw a dawning angel, and he saw the future, and he wanted it that bad.
Wanted it bad, Sonny Liston, illiterate jailbird and fighter and standover man. Sonny Liston the drunk, the sex offender. Broken, brutal Sonny Liston with the scars on his face from St. Louis cops beating a confession from him, with the scars on his back from his daddy beating him down on the farm.
Sonny Liston, who loved children. He wanted that thing, and he knew it could never be his.
Wanted it and saw a way to make it happen for somebody else.
15.
And so he takes that fall, Sonny Liston. Again and again and again, like John Henry driving steel until his heart burst, like a jockey rolling over the shoulder of a running, broken horse. He takes the fall, and he saves the King.
And Muhammad Ali? He never once looks down.
Cully sees the fin whales as he’s leaving Nantucket Harbor. Mother and calf; seventy-foot whale, and a forty-foot boat. She’s gray as Wellington rubber, lined with long parallel lines. She rolls on her side to show him an eye big as his hand, dark and sweet. Dreaming.
Looking back at him. Her breath mists his face like a benediction. “Put in a word for us, would you?” Cully says. “I’ll pay you back somehow.” He watches her a minute before turning away. The sun’s half over the eastern horizon, gold ripples flat on green water, rolling along the rim of the world like a great golden wheel. The Brant Point light’s gone dark with morning.
It’s the quiet before the work. Morgan is drinking coffee in the galley. There’s nothing between them and the Atlantic but an arrow-straight line.
Cully doesn’t tell Morgan about the whales.
Pen owns the Sweet Katrina—most of the Sweet Katrina—and stays on shore. Minority business owner, fifty-one percent. The government gives them a little boost, because of that, as if Pen Cullen was somehow different from Allan Cullen. As if she were somehow separate, not the same, flesh of one flesh. More worthy, somehow, than her husband.
Allan thinks she is. Fifteen years, three children, hard times, and hurricanes. Pen keeps her own counsel about who the worthy one is. She works nights at Nantucket Cottage Hospital. That gives them another little boost. Just enough, maybe, to stay afloat. So far.
They’ll have to sell the house come winter, if the catch doesn’t improve. Sell the house, or sell the boat.
There’s really no option.
Pen shades her eyes with one hand, her gardening glove leaving a smudge over her eyebrows, and waves with her shears in the other. The children don’t notice; they’re pushing and giggling up the steps of a fat yellow schoolbus. The bus’s doors close; the bus’s wheels turn. She watches them out of sight, the way she never watches Allan anymore. She knows that if it’s in his power, he is always coming home. Besides, there’s no widow’s walk on a little Cape Cod style cottage, and it wouldn’t matter anyway.