Sonny Liston Quotes

Sonny Liston is America’s curse. He is the black menace sprung from white racist stereotypes. And he likes it that way.

If he wins, we’ll feel its God’s will. If he loses, we’ll feel its God’s will. I’m praying he’ll win. Mostly, I’m just glad all this tension will be over.

WHEN IT’S ALL OVER, there’s one final talk I want to make—to the press. When they gather in front of me, it’s hard to forget that nearly all of them had considered me a hoax. They start to shoot questions at me, but I cut them off: “Hold it! Hold it!” I say. “You’ve all had a chance to say what you thought before the fight. Now it’s my turn. You all said Sonny Liston would kill me. You said he was better than Jack Johnson or Jack Dempsey, even Joe Louis, and you ranked them the best heavyweights of all time. You kept writing how Liston whipped Floyd Patterson twice, and when I told you I would get Liston in eight, you wouldn’t believe it. Now I want all of you to tell the whole world while all the cameras are on us, tell the world that I’m The Greatest.” There’s a silence. “Who’s The Greatest?” I ask them. Nobody answers. They look down at their pads and microphones. “Who’s The Greatest?” I say again. They look up with solemn faces, but the room is still silent. “For the LAST TIME!” I shout. “All the eyes of the world on us. You just a bunch of hypocrites. I told you I was gonna get Liston and I got him. All the gamblers had me booked eight-to-one underdog. I proved all of you wrong. I shook up the world! Tell me who’s The Greatest! WHO IS THE GREATEST?” They hesitate for a minute, and finally in a dull tone they all answer, “You are.” •

Yet it is reasonable to assume that boxers fight one another because the legitimate objects of their anger are not accessible to them. There is no political system in which the spectacle of two men fighting each other is not a striking, if unintended, image of the political impotence of most men (and women): You fight what’s nearest, what’s available, what’s ready to fight you. And, if you can, you do it for money. If boxers as a class are angry one would have to be willfully naive not to know why. For the most part they constitute the disenfranchised of our affluent society, they are the sons of impoverished ghetto neighborhoods in which anger, if not fury, is appropriate - rather more, perhaps, than Christian meekness and self-abnegation. (It was only in prison that Sonny Liston, one of twenty-five children born to a sharecropper’s family in rural Arkansas, had enough to eat.) Where there is peace, Nietzsche theorizes, the warlike man attacks himself, but what precisely is “peace”? and where, in ghetto neighborhoods of unspeakable squalor and malaise, is it to be located? Boxing may be a way of cruelly assaulting one’s self but it is most immediately a way of transcending one’s fate. Going to war, like Marvin Hagler, and making millions of dollars from it, is distinctly American.

Clay’s quick, light boxing style – ‘float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ – was deemed inadequate to beat Liston. The night before the fight, Harvey Jones, the sparring partner of the young man already known as the ‘Louisville Lip’, presented a poem by Clay. Clay comes out to meet Liston and Liston starts to retreat, If Liston goes back an inch farther he'll end up in a ringside seat. Clay swings with a left, Clay swings with a right, Just look at young Cassius carry the fight. Liston keeps backing but there's not enough room, It's a matter of time until Clay lowers the boom. Then Clay lands with a right, what a beautiful swing, And the punch raised the bear clear out of the ring. Liston still rising and the ref wears a frown, But he can't start counting until Sonny comes down. Now Liston disappears from view, the crowd is getting frantic But our radar stations have picked him up somewhere over the Atlantic. Who on Earth thought, when they came to the fight, That they would witness the launching of a human satellite. Hence the crowd did not dream, when they laid down their money, That they would see a total eclipse of Sonny.

He continued, voice rising, giving one the best—and most disturbing—quotes in sports history. “Lennox is the conqueror? No. I’m Alexander. He’s no Alexander. I’m the best ever! There’s never been anybody as ruthless. I’m Sonny Liston! I’m Jack Dempsey! There’s no one like me! I’m from their cloth. There’s no one that can match me! My style is impetuous! My defense is impregnable! And I’m just ferocious! I want your heart! I want to eat his children! Praise be to Allah!