Is Sonny Liston the most well rounded heavyweight ever on film?

Actually, there is a very logical reason - Holy bulked up as he faced increasingly larger opponents, as did Usyk. In fact, they both ended up becoming even larger than Liston & would've made him look small-ish by comparison in the same way Ali did.

He lacked Holmes' hand & foot speed, his combinations, & his punch variety. That's a heckuva lot of deficits to still characterize as "close."

A general lack of speed & understanding in cutting off the ring are weaknesses that plenty of hws thru out history would've been capable of capitalizing on.

& when Ali wobbled Liston for the 1st time, he did it by coming down off his toes & loading up on a single right hand, not w/ "foot speed combined with the 5-6 punch lightning fast combinations."

 

Liston and Holyfield are not the same size… one guy could drop 10lbs of fat easy, other had about 10 total to spare lol. Holyfield was a roided out looking freak of nature, Liston just looked like a generic big guy. Visually staggering difference, Holyfield also wasn’t a “blown up CW” he admits to liking being so big at 190lbs he was coming down from 200lbs peeled he’s Joe Louis sized before his chemical rebirth lol.

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Er....before we go any further where on earth did I mention the word suicide ? Yet again,you really do
have problems with comprehension.

 

When Sonny KO'd Floyd Patterson in 1962 to win the HW title he flew back to Philadelphia with a sportswriter named Jack McKinney. Liston actually prepared a speech that he recited to McKinney about how he wanted to be a positive role model and an example for young people that they can change course and achieve great things regardless of their background. Sonny thought that there would be a crowd to greet him at the Philadelphia airport once he landed and he was anxious to deliver his prepared speech to them.

There was no one to greet him when he arrived-and McKinney said Sonny was absolutely crushed by this snub. McKinney said he knew that they would always regard Sonny as the black-hat villain, and the public would never see him any other way.

Regardless of your opinions about Sonny Liston I think this story is tragic! And in so many ways it illustrates perfectly Harold Conrad's poignant quote about Sonny when he wrote: "Sonny Liston died the day he was born."

Was Sonny a thug? Well, I would suggest in a lot of ways he was "trapped" in that role, as the above story shows.

 

I didn’t read your essay because I don’t have the time or interest to wade through a presidential-length letter full of emotional nonsense. I also don’t have the time to derail threads about Liston, Tyson, Pep/Sadler, Monzon, or Hagler — unlike you, who seems to live for that sort of fixation.

I work full-time, attend college full-time, am seeing someone, and helping raise three kids — plus stepping in as a father figure for the children of the woman I’m with. So forgive me if I don’t drop everything to indulge another one of your rants.

As for the "Next time link some recipes for cookies. That way you’d provide something of value to the discussion." comment? That’s rich. None of what you’ve posted adds any real value to the discussion — it’s just you dragging the thread off-topic to indulge your obsession. Which you do in literally every thread regarding the aforementioned names.

You’ve made it clear you’re not impartial. You harp endlessly on the impersonating-officer charge even though Liston was found not guilty — yet you demand impossible levels of proof when it comes to the racism and brutality he faced from police. Why does one story require no evidence, while the other somehow needs to meet a higher burden of proof?

Let’s be real: police in those days were notorious for cruelty toward minorities, and the media wasn’t any better. Reporters called Liston slurs like “******” in print and treated him with open contempt. That context matters — and it’s exactly why pointing out who those officers really were is relevant.

Highlighting officers like James “Buster” Snider isn’t a deflection — it’s part of the historical record. He bragged about targeting Liston, was later fired over sexual-assault allegations, and was arrested for kidnapping a woman at gunpoint. Those facts call into question the credibility of the people you insist were beyond reproach.

 

Come on, @Saintpat wrote a very long and thought out post for ya and you have buttons and lint in your pocket lol.

 

I believe in the concept of being ' cruel to be kind ' . I just want to help the lad.

 

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This is the same Denver police force that @Saintpat insists could do no wrong — the same one that, according to contemporary accounts, was riddled with corruption and even ran burglary rings under “tight police leadership.” But sure, they couldn’t possibly have fabricated or embellished anything to target a man they didn’t like.

Noel: The corruption that tarnished Denver Police Department badges in the 1950s and early 60s was hard to wipe clean.

Maria: Nationally televised beatings of civil rights activists and anti-war protestors across the country in the 1960s only made things worse.

Noel: In Denver at that time, a notorious traffic cop with a scowling John Wayne face joined the DPD. His nickname alone still conjures some of the worst kinds of police abuses: Buster.

Maria: Soon after he joined, Patrolman James “Buster” Snider quickly became infamous as Noel quote's “Hottest Pen in the West” for the dizzying number of traffic tickets he could write in a single day.

Maria: He’s still infamous around Denver for harassing young people, especially in the Latino community. And if you search online for his name, you’ll see stories pop up on blogs, Facebook, and in news articles. Maria: But when we asked people to talk about him on tape? We got a lot of “no’s.”

Noel: Decades after the tickets, decades after his time on the force, many people are still reluctant to talk about him on the record.

Maria: But we did find a few. Michael Rappe: Okay. Well, I'm Michael Rappe. I'm a retired Denver police officer. I was appointed on January 1, 1986, and I retired... May 16, 2016. So I served 30 years. Maria: Like so many teenagers, Rappe spent time cruising downtown Denver with friends.

Michael Rappe: Back then, Denver was much different than it is now. It was, it was smaller, it was more Midwestern. And it was still a large city but for example, 15th and 16th streets were streets. There wasn't a 16th Street Mall, so you would cruise downtown.

Noel: Over the years, Buster fine-tuned his methodology.

Michael Rappe: Buster would, would stay in the loop, and he would be writing these equipment violations or just any kind of ticket you can imagine. I mean, he could write 150 tickets in a night. He would stop 15 cars at, at a time and pull them all over, and he'd start at the first car and get the drivers' licenses and he'd just go all the way down. And Buster had all of his tickets in a file folder. He would pre-sign them all, like, like the books came in 25, so he'd pre-sign six books.

Maria: The tickets were for minor things. And Rappe had his own run-ins with Buster as a youth.

Michael Rappe: I got one for failure to signal and one for honking the horn. So I knew that was two of his violations, because I got those. And I remember when I was going through the background process in 1985, one of the detectives was snickering. She said "These has to be Buster tickets," because the only thing I had on my record was the two tickets. And she said, "This has to be Buster tickets." I said they were Buster tickets, and we just shared a laugh.

Noel: After Rappe joined the force, he ended up working a shift with Buster.

Michael Rappe: I don't even know what his motivation was. But his thing was would just go out and basically…. I mean, today it would be harassment, you know, of traffic stops. And I don't think, you couldn’t do it today. People wouldn't wait. They'd drive off. Maria: But while the number of tickets Buster wrote was memorable, there was sometimes more to his stops than keeping unruly teenagers in line. [Music]

Maria: There were hints about Buster’s behavior in the articles that came out about him over the years. Noel: According to the Denver Post, he resigned suddenly in 1968 after he, quote, “took 17 minutes to talk to a citizen about an unofficial matter.” After that, he moved around a lot, working in Denver, then Thornton, and Grand Lake.

Maria: And then, he was back in Denver in 1975, writing tickets again until he got moved to North Denver after more complaints. Noel: A few years later, in 1979, the Post said, the Chicano community around Sloan’s lake complained that Snider was harassing them. He was back at it—writing tickets for minor offenses. Maria: He was still writing tickets into the 1980s. The Denver Post reported in February, 1981 that while most officers wrote nine tickets an hour, Buster wrote more than 100.

Noel: He told the paper at the time: “I have reasons I write tickets—and it ain’t to be a champ… I just wanna give them 10 hours for an eight hour check.”

Maria: Wherever he landed, he seemed to draw attention and stir controversy, whether for his ticket writing or his behavior on duty.

Noel: In a 1983 profile of Buster that ran in the Post, he called members of the LGBTQ community “heathens.” He rebuffed questions about prejudice in his ticket writing, and, a year later, he was involved in a lawsuit over the dispersal of activists at Columbus Park.

Maria: A heads up: this next part contains descriptions of sexual assault and other disturbing details.

Noel: In 1984, after more than 20 years as a traffic cop working on various Colorado police departments, Snider’s motives for relentlessly ticketing motorists, especially young people, were abruptly called into question. The Denver Post reported that he had allegedly forced a woman to have sex with him in his patrol car, and he’d been charged with assault.

Maria: The article says that Snider denied it, but the District Attorney at the time said that because there were no witnesses, it was her word against his, and it couldn’t be proved. Noel: But the FBI started looking into potential civil rights violations.

Dean Christopherson: And they basically fired him at that point. So he was stripped of his pension and anything else. And he had a couple more run-ins with the law, over the course of that time. Noel: Six months later, another victim came forward and said that Snider had raped her three times in 1980. According to a February 23, 1985 article in The Denver Post, Snider allegedly said to her, “Don’t you tell anybody, or I’ll find you.” His partner said that the woman was, quote, “Forward.” He was acquitted.

Maria: After that, he tried to get his job back, but was denied. Then in 1988, he made headlines again when he was charged with kidnapping a 20-year-old woman. Noel: Newspaper articles at the time reported that he’d offered her a ride while she was biking to a convenience store. When she declined, he forced her into his car at gunpoint. But she managed to get away after begging him to stop for cigarettes, and the store clerk called the police. Maria: This time, he was convicted, for menacing and assault. He was given 90 days house arrest and 4 years of probation. Noel: After 20 years, and who knows how many hundreds of thousands of tickets Buster Snider wrote, his pen went cold. But not before further eroding public confidence in the police. [Music]

Noel: Though the Denver Police Department had Black officers from its beginnings, it wasn’t until the late 1970s and early ’80s that a concerted effort was made to promote them to leadership positions

That's Snider, one of the officers who arrested Liston. He became infamous for harassing minorities — especially Latinos — and was later fired for ****, accused of multiple sexual assaults, and convicted of kidnapping a woman at gunpoint. That’s the same man Pat’s holding up as a paragon of virtue.

And the corruption didn’t stop with him. Even within the DPD, Black officers were discriminated against. In 1972, Carol C. Hogue, the department’s first Black female officer, had to sue for racial and sexual discrimination. The resulting Hogue Decree forced the DPD to hire women and minorities in meaningful numbers for the first time — nearly two decades after the era Pat keeps defending.

So if Black police officers weren’t even treated as equals inside the department, why would anyone think Black civilians — especially a controversial, outspoken figure like Sonny Liston — would have been treated fairly by those same cops?

The answer’s obvious.

 

Swag, you are absolutely hammering this guy !

 

While the rest of us are sick of your ceaseless,senseless obsession of disrespecting ATGs like
Sonny Liston and George Foreman.

 

Yep, I freely admit I missed a word in your word salad. I saw ‘took in his life’ as ‘took his life.’ I regret the error and am happy to set the record straight.

Now, explain to me again how being arrested a bunch of times is proof of innocence and proof of racism.

Charles Manson spent the majority of his life — even BEFORE his conviction for the Tate-LaBianca murders — incarcerated in adult or youth, state or federal, correctional institutions. He was arrested (much like Sonny, who I am not saying was a murderer btw) from his early teens up through adulthood. And repeatedly convicted.

He also grew up poor and terribly abused. There is even some speculation that his father (he was a ******* child so who sired him isn’t really known) was a black man.

So was Charlie Manson also a victim of racism just like Charlie Liston in your eyes? Does the fact that he kept getting arrested reflect that cops were ALL corrupt and ALL racist … or does it reflect that he was a career criminal.

Tell me how your logic works on this. And tell me why, given that crops in Sonny’s day were all racist and all out to get black people, the rest of Liston’s family wasn’t arrested constantly, and why other black celebrities weren’t constantly arrested.

Enlighten me as to why the coops who so badly wanted to get rid of Sonny didn’t gun him down (which would have been justified then, now or at any time in U.S. history) after he beat up a cop and took his gun … or at some other time (he was arrested with illegal weapons more than once, and that’s all part of the record). Why didn’t these corrupt, racist men who could have justified it and gotten away with it not just put him down?

 

I used to listen to Jack McKinney's late night radio show on WCAU in Philadelphia back in the early 1960s when I was a teenager. He liked to talk about Liston and he claimed to have sparred with Sonny.. Many years later I called McKinney and we talked at length. Mostly he talked. He said some interesting things. He said Cus D'Amato loved Liston as a fighter, which isn't hard to imagine. However, I don't consider him a reliable source. Some of his anecdotes sound like blarney. He was given to dramatizing and exaggerating. He was more of a storyteller than an accurate truth teller.

 

Pat, come on now, what is going on with bizarre comparison between Charles Manson and Sonny Liston ? What
strange,obscure point are you trying to make.This quite frankly,is a ridiculous line of argument that you are using.

Are you seriously suggesting that every episode of racism ends in the alleged miscreant getting shot.Have you considered that even the most bigoted,racist cops would have been reluctant to shoot Liston if there were witnesses around who could have testified that Liston had made no motion to threaten the cops.


Cops did tend to do their dirty deeds out of sight.For instance, when Martin Luther KIng was arrested his wife,Coretta Scott King genuinely feared for her husband's safety.She felt compelled to call the civil rights lawyer,Harris Wofford,to try and secure King's release.
Wofford then called President Kennedy who asked his brother,the then US attorney-general
Robert Kennedy to make sure of King's release.Yes,Coretta Scott King genuinely
feared that the cops would kill her husband.Such circumstances caused Liston to leave St Louis.

So why were other black celebrities not arrested ? How many of these black celebrities were as assertive as Liston when it came to standing up for themselves ?
Swag has already mentioned the case of Carol C Hogue, the first female Black officer
in the Denver Police Department,who suffered racial and sexual discrimination.Are you
deliberately being obtuse in ignoring all the evidence that cops were very,very racist . Are you seriously denying that a black man like Liston would not have been subjected to racial slurs ?
Are you that gullible ? Well,perhaps you are.

As for me typing ' word salads ' ---- well Pat you are guilty of word diarrhoea ( I know,not particularly funny but accurate ).

 

Liston never demonstrated greater power than the bulked up versions of Holy or Usyk.

On top of that, Holy bombing out iron-chinned Qawi while weighing w/in 190 was as impressive a display of power as many of Liston's KOs of similarly (under)sized opponents.

Hearsay & sparring stories are never a more reliable metric than what's actually seen & proven in front of our own eyes.

& whether Holy or Usyk hit harder than Lewis or Wilder is a moot point, since Liston never demonstrated power on the same level as either of those fighters either.

There's nothing "clear" & certainly not "considerable" about his power compared to a bulked up Holy or Usyk, & the actual results of his fights actually contradict those claims. He never demonstrated anything remotely like the kind of power that 1-shot starched Buster Douglas or Dubois. The largest opponents that he beat were Wepner & Zech, neither of whom even quite reached 230 lb & both of whom were gradually battered into submission over numerous rnds.

Holmes also had 1 of the best uppercuts in hw history. Conversely, Liston showed only very sporadic power in his right, especially @ close quarters where he had a tendency to club w/ it.

Nunn was well ahead of Toney before the latter pulled the fight out of the fire. Toney was also outboxed/outworked in his very next fight after RJ & many people thought he could've/should've lost @ least 1 of the McCallum fights &/or the Reggie Johnson fight as well. The RJ fight definitely exposed weaknesses that other, less gifted fighters could & did take advantage of.