Sonny Liston was the anti-Ali, a boxer whose strength needed no gloss. His rise to the world heavyweight championship was a march of unambiguous victories that left opponent after opponent crushed, but to many Americans in the early 1960s, he was their worst dream come to life - a thug, an illiterate, a criminal who was not, in the saying of the time, a credit to his race.
But he hit harder than any man alive. And in the pages of Nick Tosches's remarkable biography of Liston, hitting hard was the only recourse for this man who essentially lived his entire life as a slave.
Digging into the darkest corners of police files, fight tapes, Congressional investigations, and the memories of those who know, Tosches reveals the true course of Liston's story. Birth into a huge family on a modern plantation, criminal life and imprisonment, a fight career under the scarcely concealed control of the mobsters who ran boxing - every stage of Liston's life is revealed as a new subjugation. The truth of Liston's infamous losses to Cassius Clay in 1964 and to the newly named Muhammad Ali in 1965 is revealed here in the inescapable words of Liston himself and those who knew him best. And in these pages the mysteries of Liston's death in Las Vegas are unfolded at last.