Hero, Heroin or Murder? Lives and Deaths of Sonny Liston Showtime Documentary
By Robert Brizel, Head Real Combat Media Boxing Correspondent
* Photo Credit: boxinghalloffame.com
Pariah: The Lives and Deaths of Charles ‘Sonny’ Liston, an 89 minute documentary or shockumentary of the controversial life of the former world heavyweight champion (depending on how one interprets it) will air on Showtime, Friday night, November 15, 2019. The documentary is loosely based on the 2016 best-selling book ‘The Murder of Sonny Liston: Las Vegas, Heroin, and Heavyweights’ by Shaun Assael.
Liston, 50-4 with 39 knockouts, Las Vegas, Nevada, was found dead on New Year’s and was believed to have died in his Las Vegas home on December 30, 1970. His death was ruled to be from natural causes, the heroin found in his system. Liston is a historical Bruce Lee type character. Lee’s 1973 death due to cerebral edema was ruled in Hong Kong to be a ‘death by misadventure’.
Liston was the Mike Tyson of decades past, who remains a mafia connected shadowy like figure. The late President John F. Kennedy told the late former world heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson to his face not to fight Liston because of his mob ties, and Patterson went against the President of the United States, losing his title and to Liston twice in the first round in an embarrassing display of poor ability against a power hitter.
One of the controversies covered in the documentary is Liston’s date of birth, supposedly 1930 (now verified by Bureau of the Census records) but perhaps six or seven years older, Liston perhaps fought in the 1930s and 1940s under the name of Sailor Liston between his prison stints. The 24th of 25th children from an Arkansas family, Liston worked the farm fields as an illiterate, lived a life as a troubled youth constantly in conflict with the law, until the mafia gave him an amateur and professional boxing career. Liston returned to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, neither a black hero nor a role model of the NAACP as a world heavyweight champion. Liston was in his time far more popular with the general public than Cassius Clay (later Nation of Islam’s Muhammad Ali). Liston was cheered at the rematch in Lewiston, Maine (not Muhammad Ali, who was booed). The general public did not go for Ali’s bragging personality, Islamic religious beliefs, and dodging of the draft in the 1960s. Liston stopped Chuck Wepner in his final bout, a bout he was by rumor supposed to lose. Was it a life of mafia connections, crime, drug abuse and dealing which did Sonny in? Was it an overdose or a carefully staged murder? Who was Sonny Liston? Watch the documentary. Come to your own conclusions. Liston’s forgotten gravestone in Davis Memorial Park reads simply-Charles ‘Sonny’ Liston 1932-1970 ‘A Man’. So he was.
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