Part 11 (1/2)

When Clay beat Liston, he bounced up on his stool and shouted that he was King of the World. Corn king, summer king, America's most beautiful young man. An angel in the boxing ring. A new and powerful image of black manhood.

He stepped up on that stool in 1964 and he put a noose around his neck.

The thing about magic is that it happens in spite of everything you can do to stop it.

And the wild old G.o.ds will have their sacrifice.

No excuses.

If they can't have Charismatic, they'll take the man that saved him.

So it goes.

8.

Sometimes it's easier to tell yourself you quit than to admit that they beat you. Sometimes it's easier to look down.

The civil rights movement in the early 1960s found Liston a thug and an embarra.s.sment. He was a jailbird, an illiterate, a dark unstoppable monster. The rumor was that he had a second career as a standover man-a mob enforcer. The NAACP protested when Floyd Patterson agreed to fight him in 1962.

9.

Sonny didn't know his own birthday or maybe he lied about his age. Forty's old for a fighter, and Sonny said he was born in '32 when he was might have been born as early as '27. There's a big d.a.m.ned difference between thirty-two and thirty-seven in the boxing ring.

And there's another thing, something about prize fighters you might not know. In Liston's day, they shot the fighters' hands full of anesthetic before they wrapped them for the fight. So a guy who was a hitter-a puncher rather than a boxer, in the parlance-he could pound away on his opponent and never notice he'd broken all the G.o.dd.a.m.ned bones in his G.o.dd.a.m.ned hands.

Sonny Liston was a puncher. Muhammad Ali was a boxer.

Neither one of them, as it happens, could abide the needles. So when they went swinging into the ring, they earned every punch they threw.

Smack a sheetrock wall a couple of dozen times with your shoulder behind it if you want to build up a concept of what that means, in terms of endurance and of pain. Me? I would have taken the needle over feeling the bones I was breaking. Taken it in a heartbeat.

But Charismatic finished his race on a shattered leg, and so did Black Gold.

What the h.e.l.l were a few broken bones to Sonny Liston?

10.

You know when I said Sonny was not a handsome man? Well, I also said Muhammad Ali was an angel. He was a black man's angel, an avenging angel, a messenger from a better future. He was the way and the path, man, and they marked him for sacrifice, because he was a warrior G.o.d, a Black Muslim Moses come to lead his people out of Egypt land.

And the people in power like to stay that way, and they have their ways of making it happen. Of making sure the sacrifice gets chosen.

Go ahead and curl your lip. White man born in the nineteenth century, reborn in 1905 as the Genius of the Mississippi of the West. What do I know about the black experience?

I am my city, and I contain mult.i.tudes. I'm the African-American airmen at Nellis Air Force Base, and I'm the black neighborhoods near D Street that can't keep a supermarket, and I'm Cartier Street and I'm Northtown and I'm Las Vegas, baby, and it doesn't matter a bit what you see when you look at my face.

Because Sonny Liston died here, and he's buried here in the palm of my hand. And I'm Sonny Liston too, wronged and wronging; he's in here, boiling and bubbling away.

11.

I filled his gla.s.s one more time and splashed what was left into my own, and that was the end of the bottle. I twisted it to make the last drop fall. Sonny watched my hands instead of my eyes, and folded his own enormous fists around his gla.s.s so it vanished. ”You're here on business, Jackie,” he said, and dropped his eyes to his knuckles. ”n.o.body wants to listen to me talk.”

”I want to listen, Sonny.” The scotch didn't taste so good, but I rolled it over my tongue anyway. I'd drunk enough that the roof of my mouth was getting dry, and the liquor helped a little. ”I'm here to listen as long as you want to talk.”

His shoulders always had a hunch. He didn't stand up tall. They hunched a bit more as he turned the gla.s.s in his hands. ”I guess I run out of things to say. So you might as well tell me what you came for.”

At Christmas time in 1970, Muhammad Ali-recently allowed back in the ring, pending his appeal of a draft evasion conviction-was preparing for a t.i.tle bout against Joe Frazier in March. He was also preparing for a more wide-reaching conflict; in April of that year, his appeal, his demand to be granted status as a conscientious objector, was to go before the United States Supreme Court.

He faced a five year prison sentence.

In jail, he'd come up against everything Sonny Liston had. And maybe Ali was the stronger man. And maybe the young king wouldn't break where the old one fell. Or maybe he wouldn't make it out of prison alive, or free.

”Ali needs your help,” I said.

”f.u.c.k Ca.s.sius Clay,” he said.

Sonny finished his drink and spent a while staring at the bottom of his gla.s.s. I waited until he turned his head, skimming his eyes along the floor, and tried to sip again from the empty gla.s.s. Then I cleared my throat and said ”It isn't just for him.”

Sonny flinched. See, the thing about Sonny-that he never learned to read, that doesn't mean he was dumb. ”The NAACP don't want me. The Nation of Islam don't want me. They didn't even want Clay to box me. I'm an embarra.s.sment to the black man.”

He dropped his gla.s.s on the table and held his breath for a moment before he shrugged and said, ”Well, they got their n.i.g.g.e.r now.”

Some of them know up front; they listen to the whispers, and they know the price they might have to pay if it's their number that comes up. Some just kind of know in the back of their heads. About the corn king, and the laurel wreath, and the price that sometimes has to be paid.

Sonny Liston, like I said, he wasn't dumb.

”Ali can do something you can't, Sonny.” Ali can be a symbol.