“WHAT IF” Liston had been trained as a child...

Thanks my friend.

 

Could have ended up in any number of ways.. he could have been the greatest fighter of all time. Or he could have been injured or beaten at a young age and never gone anywhere. Too many variables to draw an accurate conclusion. Sometimes champions are products of their specific circumstances.. in Sonny’s case he was shaped by his violent life on the streets at an early age.

 

In the streets of St. Louis where he was arrested for robbing a Gas Station as his first crime as a teen.

 

A child...as in, during the first crusade? I think all the good fighters were too busy with the conquest of Jerusalem to be training some whelp.

 

No no no!
Don't you recall how I definitively proved that Liston is (still alive at) 337,642 years old?
Well he had a Birthday since then (2/29, thus technically only on leap years, so you can flatter his vanity by dividing by 4 & pretending he is not that much over 84.5K...)

Trouble is, as the first Homo Sapien Sapien, his intelligence was far more evolved that his parents or brethren.
So the best potential mentors (likely "Og Son of Gog") did not have the braiaiain firepower to teach much more than frantic punching & then to just shell up...

But Liston slowly learned from experiences around the world.
Including tribal warfare & hand to hand combat of all types.
Basically the Full Extent of his even prehistoric experience is unknown, but he could have dominated in any & every type of fighting style, street to martial to MMA.

So he more of a Self-Made man than anyone.
Besides being Orders of Magnitude older than anyone ever.

 

I guess it is possible that getting trained to box as a kid might have prevented him getting into criminal activity, so without the criminal label he might have got his shot at the title a lot earlier

 

Liston would never beat Bermane Stiverne with you as his life coach

 

Liston actually didn’t have it in him young, by his own mouth he got hit with a good one and decided not to come back, he came back when he was 200lbs and things were different.

 

He tried boxing young, he didn’t like being hit by his admission and it sounds like he was thrown into sparring too early and left.

 

News papers

Newspapers make champions and even bums are called champions.

 

Exactly , his harsh upbringing led to his success, great boxers have to have adversity to suceed.

 

You can have a bunch of kids out in a play ground or something developing more athletic ability than when they are in a more structured type of training with drills. You really don’t have to start that young imo but be developing your reflexes, mind and other things with activity. Listons upbringing seemed to create a great boxer.

 

Potty trained?

 

Father Murphy was a Denver priest.

 

As a few have mentioned due to his physical attributes he would have a success at any time. If he started younger maybe his mindset would have been different and actually held him back. His brutal upbringing, if it can evened called an upbringing, made him one mean individual. Like one poster said if Duran had been brought up in a nice middle class home how mean and angry would he have fought.