Mondays with Murray

There isn’t a sport out there that has more characters and greater stories in it than boxing — well, perhaps horse racing, which was the favourite territory of the legendary Jim Coleman. . . . Anyway, with Manny Pacquiao preparing to scrap with Joshua Clottery at Cowboys Stadium on Saturday night, here’s a piece about Sonny Liston that was written by the late, great Jim Murray in 1962 . . . Enjoy!

SEPTEMBER 23, 1962, SPORTS
Copyright 1962/THE TIMES MIRROR COMPANY
 
JIM MURRAY
 
Stop, Look 'n' Liston

CHICAGO — This first look you get a Sonny Liston you only hope it don't bite.
   You get the idea Floyd Patterson shouldn't fight him, Clyde Beatty should. Patterson should bring a whip, a chair and a gun that shoots blanks in the ring. Or one that shoots bullets.
   Liston would be an 8-5 favorite over the Marines. He already has beaten more cops than Perry Mason.
   You go out to his training camp at an abandoned racetrack in Aurora, and when he comes in, you panic — because you think someone has forgotten to hold a rope around his neck. I never thought I would see anything like it when I was awake. And if I was asleep I would wake up screaming. You half expect it to roar. Two people saw him doing roadwork one morning and called the circus to see if any of their cages had been vacated.
   If I were Patterson, I would make bloody sure Sonny had eaten before he went in the ring. If Liston gets hungry in the middle of the fight he may not even throw the bones away.
   Someone has dug up an old part of the archives to find out that if a man is knocked out of the ring, he gets 20 seconds to get back. But from the look of Liston's hands, Floyd may need a cab to get back. Instead of knocking him for a loop, he may knock him in The Loop. If Liston knocked me out of the ring, I would be inclined to let it go at that. I wouldn't get back in the ring if they gave me a week. I would take a fast inventory, and if I had all my vital parts I would go take in a show. The man has such a fantastically long reach he could jab Patterson from the second row of ringside. He may score a few jabs from his stool.
   The prevailing opinion in Chicago is Liston may knock out Patterson within two minutes and nine seconds of the introduction. They brought a hypnotist into the camps, presumably to hypnotize the champion against pain. But when the hypnotist got a look at Liston, they had to revive him.
   The late Arthur Brisbane, a journalist, used to always boast that a gorilla could lick any fighter but up to now I never thought we'd live to see it done. But Sonny Liston is such an awesome specimen that even though you know he can't read or write, the big shock is that he talks.
   His fist is so huge his boxing gloves look like saddles. Patterson's manager is holding out for a brand of gloves he knows won't even keep Sonny's hands warm. He should throw in a pair of handcuffs.
   The betting around town among people who saw Liston is not whether Patterson will win or lose but whether he will show up. There are those who think Sonny can knock him out even if he doesn't.
   Liston's camp is a lighthearted place — for everybody but the sparing partners. When they go home in single file they look like the retreat at Dunkirk. Sonny broke Big Jim Robinson's ribs. If he ever hit him on the head he'd henceforth be known as "Little Jim Robinson." Lou Bailey tried a couple of rounds and left the ring, the camp and ultimately the state. He complained his head still hurt two weeks later — but those who saw the workout say he was lucky he had one left to hurt.
   They're allowed to take pain pills, but morphine would be more humane. In fact, the best guess is that the hypnotist was really going to work on the sparring partners. Sonny ran out of them so fast he would have had to take his workouts to the Chicago Zoo to find opponents. But the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would have stalled that.
   His chest, neck, fist, thighs, wrists and calf are all one to four inches bigger than Patterson's. If you saw his footprint in the snow in the Himalayas, four expeditions would be launched to capture him. As long as he lives, man can believe in the Abominable Snowman.
   He has been celebrated in print as one of the few guys who ever could think of anything to do in Philadelphia after dark. He chased a woman off the highway with a red light and a fast car and was surprised she didn't know he was joking.
   He is the best argument I know for schooling. He never had any, and if he wins he's going to be stuck with all those millions of dollars and not even know which salad fork to use. Tunney read Shakespeare, but Sonny has a tough time with a "No Smoking" sign.
   He is so sure he is going to be champion that his only fear is Patterson will get hit by a streetcar before the fight. He got his jaw broken by a fighter named Marty Marshall one night because he was laughing at Marshall. "I never laughed in the ring since," he explains. He might add he seldom does out of it, either. "They say I look evil and mean. If you got your jaw broke you'd look the way I look," he told me.
   Patterson's speed bores him. "We ain't gonna race," he explains. He is of the opinion the only way Patterson can survive the fifth round is by hiding under the ring until the sixth.
 
Reprinted with permission by the Los Angeles Times

Jim Murray Memorial Foundation | P.O. Box 995 | La Quinta | CA | 92247