By his own reckoning, he was one of twenty-five children sired by Toby Liston, a brutal, abusive father who sharecropped a small patch of ground near Forest City, Arkansas. He beat his son so often that if a day passed without a hard whupping, Sonny would wake his dad at night and ask, “How come you didn’t whup me today?” Lines of bird-track scars down his back testified to the frequency and severity of the beatings, and by the time he was twelve Sonny had endured enough. As he told sports columnist Jerry Izenberg, one day the family’s mule died, prompting Toby to say to Sonny, “Boy, you’re the mule now.” Not relishing the promotion, he ran away from home early the next morning.21
He caught a train to St. Louis, where his mother lived with several of his brothers and sisters. But the reunion did not solve his problems. Instead of attending school—he remained functionally illiterate all his life—he took to the streets and alleys of St. Louis, running with the wrong sorts of people and embracing a life of crime like it was his calling. As he once said, “I had a tendency to find things before they got lost.” “He’s a bad man,” commented Detective Sergeant James Reddick. He was a bad man who brutally mugged innocent people, held up small businesses at gunpoint, and did not get away with it. In 1950, he was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to five years in the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City.22
In the pen he learned valuable skills that saved his life. Father Alois Stevens, the Catholic chaplain and athletic director at “Jeff City,” saw in Liston “a big, ignorant, pretty nice kid” who seemed perfectly suited for the boxing ring. “He was,” Stevens remembered, “the most perfect specimen of manhood I had ever seen.” At six foot one and a half inches tall and over two hundred pounds, with thick legs, broad shoulders, long, heavily muscled arms, and enormous hands, he had a heavyweight’s build. He was also graceful on his feet and had remarkably quick hands. Frank Mitchell, one of Liston’s early managers, witnessed the same quickness when Sonny suddenly reached down and scooped a live pigeon off the sidewalk. If ever there was a case of biology being destiny, Liston was it.23
After serving just over two years of his sentence, Sonny was paroled in October 1952 to the custody of Father Stevens as well as Monroe Harrison and Frank Mitchell, two men with ties to the St. Louis boxing scene. Under their direction, Liston strung together a few amateur titles and then in 1953 turned professional. An immediate success, by early 1956 he had won fifteen of sixteen fights.
Once again, his problems came from outside the ring, among the “unwholesome influences” in the dark streets and back alleys of St. Louis. Harrison sold his management share of Liston’s contract in 1955, but even before then John Vitale had become Sonny’s undercover manager. Reputed to be the leader of the St. Louis crime family, Vitale undoubtedly received a piece of Liston’s ring earnings and employed him when Sonny was not engaged in his primary profession. Liston did odd jobs for Vitale’s construction business. Sometimes he served as his chauffeur, other times he broke legs and cracked heads for his boss.24
Although Sonny’s face was impassive, it conveyed the pain of his life. But his face also suggested something even more sinister, something buried just beneath the surface of white American culture, struggling to crack the crust. Poet Leroi Jones (after 1968, Amiri Baraka) described the implicit threat of the boxer: “Sonny Liston was the big black Negro in every white man’s hallway, waiting to do him in, deal him under, for all the hurts white men have been able to inflict on his world.”25
As a result of his various activities and his implicit threat, the police constantly harassed Liston, and he was arrested as often as he fought professionally. On May 5, 1956, he got into an argument with a cop over a parking ticket. The confrontation escalated, ending with patrolman Thomas Mellow lying on the ground with a broken knee and a gash over his left eye and Sonny trotting away with the officer’s Colt .38 service revolver. Soon arrested and convicted, he was sentenced to nine months in the city workhouse.26
Liston walked out of prison in the fall of 1957, but he was far from rehabilitated. He continued to run afoul of the law, and it seems probable that St. Louis policemen targeted him for special harassment. Soon he was advised to leave the city. As Sonny recalled the episode, a police captain said, “If you don’t, they’re going to find you dead in an alley.” So Liston left, resettled in Philadelphia, and reappeared in the ring under new management.27