Sonny Liston's age?

Absolutely. Its an impossible question really.

 

Liston had to wait a while to start his career.

He was smart enough to know that white America wouldn't have been able to handle the idea of having him as a promising contender while Jack Johnson held the title.

 

Everybody knew that Sonny Liston was 850 years old!!! If you don't believe me,walk into a certain barber shop in NewYork and the old guy who runs it will confirm this,just like he knew Joe Louis' real age.

 

Very true,Fergy. I'm surprised that there has n't been a biopic about Sonny.

 

Would love to see that, Stevie.

 

I don't know honestly, anything would be pure speculation. Sonny Liston took that fact to his grave. In one interview that Liston gave to Howard Cosell he was asked, Sonny's response was I am 39 Just Like Jack Benny Always Says.

 

I have it on Great Authority that Sonny Charles Liston was 327,463 years old when *

This content is protected

* was found.
That is a tale for another time.

But as for his age, I heard it from & in an old Philly curios, magic, tea & blacksmith shop where there were pictures of Sonny as a visiting Master Craftsman.
They had a massive dusty volume that showed photos of his life back to the mid 19th century.
Before that there were numerous documents, uncannily consistent looking portraits, etchings, finally the pages became papyrus, then there were thin sliced stone slabs with engravings...
Material written in innumerable languages, all describing & picturing him the same way.

I was initially skeptical that Liston was over 300K years, old, because even though the stories & history flowed into each other so consistently, at that time the earliest Homo Sapiens had only been dated back to 100 something K years old.
But the archaeological evidence continued to verify this most ancient of historical records.
But since then we know through novel fossil discoveries, gene sequencing, & developments in dating techniques that modern humans date back 260-350K years.
Thanks to the earliest documentation from the oral tradition that the Sacred Tomb reveals, we can pinpoint the source of Sonny's origins, alienation & even name!

You see, he looked so different from his immediate ancestors & even his parents more archaic physical characteristics that he was initially shunned by his tribe.
In protest, his Mom & Dad along with some sympathetic relatives made the connection between him & his more brutish looking progenitors-smaller braincase, more prominent brow ridge, heavier projecting jawline, less flexible hip structure etc...
More overst by naming him "Sonny".

He retained the disproportionately long arms & robust physique.
But was really the earliest specimen, descended from Homo Heidelbergensus, we can call Fully Human.

If it was not for his way with the ladieieies in propagating the more advanced genes & larger cranium, we never would have reached a critical mass of modern DNA to get our population infused with adequate potential for more advanced technologies-that flowered first in terms of tools & weapons ~ 300K, & then there was an explosion of all sorts of scientific & artistic technologies about 40 millennia past.

So ironically in the ring or reviewing his fisticuffs dominance, many might be inspired to gaze upon the scowling challenger & champion & readily confess the answer to his question "Whose your Daddy?"-that he also invented.

He savored the fact of his secret-that ironically it applied literally to us all.

 

Okay, wait a minute. I just saw your link to the 1950 census records listing Sonny's age as 27. This is news to me. Why hasn't anyone uncovered this before? I remember on another site the writer Springs Toledo did a census search and didn't find this listing. Is this conclusive? Hmmm. Maybe, maybe not. I seem to recall someone in the Liston family claiming there was another child among the 24 or 25 of them
whose name also was Charles.

 

The reason this wasn't uncovered before is because in the US, census records are only released after 72 years to protect the identities of those listed in the census.

 

I have long believed he's a bad reporter who embellishes.

 

Lol I talked to the guy. He paid me to research some facts for him (I've informed him, I'm an excellent historian, and genealogist) that I don't think he even bothered to use in any of his books. Nor did he credit me with those finds (though that was likely for the better, as I don't want to be associated with the guy in any way ).

 

SD, this is an amazing find. You may have uncovered the Rosetta Stone! Now I can die.

 

Did he pay you or did you work pro bono?

 

The actor Ving Rhames supposedly worked on one but I don't think it came to fruition.

 

No he paid me to do some research for him. Off the top of my head, he wanted to find Liston's birth mother's date of death, as well as her son, Liston's half brother EB Ward. I was able to locate both, with Helen's being unexpectedly very tough. He also wanted a specific newspaper clipping he lost that I had in my notes.