Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [54]
Cries of fix were loud. Sonny and the mob had gone for the price. Was it so? Why was Liston tearing up, as seen by a good reporter like Shrake? Had he received the word? We are asked to believe that Sonny got old in a snap, was not the fighter George Foreman saw when he worked as a sparring mate at the end of Sonny’s career: “He was the only fighter who ever, ever, stopped me consistently in my tracks with one punch, backed me up like a sports car.” Sonny always refused to talk about the Miami fight. He would talk about Liston 2, saying: “Yeah, I sit down for that one. It weren’t Clay. It was them. The Moooslems. I got word, inside stuff, they were going to kill me.” Ali would never be sure if he had met the real Liston. “The Liston fights,” he said once, “were beeeeg, and he made them little, and me along with them.” Was Sonny trying to win? “If he wasn’t,” Ali said, “he’s a better actor than me.” Sonny Liston went out on a suspicious drug overdose. The theory was that he went into the drug trade, and the sophistication of that calling had been too much for him; one can almost see him trying to discern the higher calculus of crime. On a rainy morning in January 1971 with Geraldine riding point, her unruly Charles was rolled down the Strip in front of the Vegas casinos, and there wasn’t a wet eye in all of Christendom.
Ali surveyed the field and picked Floyd Patterson to be next, once the youngest heavyweight champ in history before Clay, a two-time king of the ranks. Sonny’s attitude had lure, Floyd’s totally enveloped. In today’s TV currency, a couple of funny lines, a passing shtick, a new hairdo, an esoteric hobby turns an athlete into a priceless wit of prized individuality. But Floyd, like Sonny, was the real thing. No stranger or more interesting figure ever worked the landscape of sports; it followed that he had been discovered by the mystic Cus D’Amato, who said he often floated out-of-body on the ceiling. There was something vulpine about Floyd, and it might be said that he had the only careerist approach in boxing annals along with Archie Moore. He was dead set on lasting. While the fans and critics would kick him like a sad-eyed mutt one month and then join him the next in his personal salvation (boxing was spiritual to him), there was always the sense of Floyd sitting in an armchair and squinting through pince-nez at ring fluctuations.
To sit and talk with him was a delight, though at times there were colliding emotions; you either wanted to put your arm around him or give him a therapeutic slap in the face. In a moment, you were adrift in the middle of a Russian novel, in a Chekhovian dacha, oppressive heat, the taste of bitter tea, in the middle of souls looking for clarity in a suffusion of grayness. Let’s pass on his childhood, it could make you cry. Leave it with adolescent Floyd slashing an X through his picture and telling his mother: “I don’t like him.” Big names, including Frank Sinatra, were drawn to him. Liberals adored him, crowned him a man of brains and race vision. His pluck was inspiring, a fighter, like a skilled repairman trying to build a skyscraper. His instant shame baffled. After a title match, he always had two cars waiting, the victory car pointed to his hotel, the defeat car pointed out of town; he was partial to disguises.
Physically, Floyd, lithe and small, didn’t look like a heavyweight at all. There was no promise of consequence. He fought out of D’Amato’s “peekaboo” style, gloves nearly shielding his eyes, had superb hand speed and cheap crockery for a jaw. He had the eyes of a safecracker with no nerve; quite the contrary, though. He had a stiff billow of kinky hair that seemed pasted down on his forehead.