Night Train

Nick Tosches

I'm not a great boxing fan, but I'm old enough to remember the days of the early 60s when Sonny Liston was heavyweight champion of the world. Even in the rough-house world of pro boxing, Liston was bigger and badder than the rest. An illiterate street punk who had done time for armed robbery, a leg-breaker for the Mob with a string of arrests for drunk driving and at least one charge of alleged rape against his name, Liston was not the sort of icon which Black America wanted in the early days of the Civil Rights movement. Nor were matters helped by the coterie of people with whom Sonny was knowingly or unknowingly associated; guys with names like Red, Lem, Moose, Vince, Blinky, Irv and Doc. Hell, those names alone would scare the sh*t out of you.

It is no surprise the learn that Liston, descendant of a slave family, was little more than a slave himself in a world where shady deal followed shady deal, a man who never knew what it was to be truly free. As Tosches puts it: "He who is by nature not his own but another's man is by nature a slave."

And yet there was more to this complex man than could be imagined from his fearsome reputation as a brawler: a man without a trace of racism in his body, a man of gentle, ironic humour; a man of innate generosity and a man who enjoyed a genuine and mutual rapport with children. (Strangely enough, his own marriage was childless.)

This is where the main strength of the book lies - when Tosches is painting his picture of Liston the man and Liston the boxer. His sympathy for his subject is clear. His book is less strong in two areas. [1] The minutiae of hearings and committees investigating Mob connections and fixing in the fight game is OK, but the frustration felt by the judges comes through in the text. (In one amusing vignette, one denizen of the boxing fraternity declines to answer a question about declining to answer questions!) [2] A rather strange passage where Tosches digresses into what is almost a character assassination of Clay/Ali, whom he seems to see as some sort of childish buffoon.

NIGHT TRAIN (you'll have to read it to see why it's called that; it was called THE DEVIL AND SONNY LISTON in the States) is an interesting if uneven read - gripping in places, yet failing to match up in others. I'll remember it best for the way in which it recreates what is almost a lost era, yet an era that's not even forty years ago.