I wish Liston lived longer

Including greats -- Carlos Monzon. If there's a hell, he's there.

Fantastic fighter though.

 

Be careful,, do you think you'd have been any better if you'd had the upbringing Sonny Liston had? Faced his obstacles?
He grew up in ABJECT poverty ,suffered serious beatings as a child from his father, went to prison and became heavyweight champion of the world. He faced serious racism and opposition from all sides.....Sonny did all right under the circumstances.

 

The guy had a hard life .

 

Right on.
It is the "nature versus nurture" debate.
I don't condone POS behaviour, but now I try to better understand circunstances that made Liston the boxer and the man. Was he truly a mean person at the core? or it was the factors surrounding him? could his life had been different? who knows.

Same with Monzon. Guy was a fantastic boxer, but also a thug and abuser, and ultimately a killer. He also had a very hard upbringing and was dirty poor. That does'nt justify his action. He doesn't get a free pass. But you still can wonder if things could have worked out in a different way.

However in the case of McClellam ... screw him. If what has been told is true, then he was a sadistic POS.

 

Now this much is true. Would have been easy to give up an accomplish nothing given his back story.

 

He could have made an interesting commentator further down the line.

 

Sonny never killed anyone.

 

I don’t think we can hold that against him …

 

So how bad was Liston?

He had a brutal upbringing, and here can be no doubt about that.

Liston is what authors call an antivillain.

That is a villain who has some redeeming characteristics.

 

Didn’t someone once say that Liston for all intents and purposes died the day he was born?

 

All of society is too careful with this approach & I refuse to be a part of it. The excuses laid before the courts for the conduct of sentient Human Beings who actively choose to do wrong is vomitous. I despise excuses for willing behaviour. Liston chose to be a piece of ****. No one disputes he was. The only thing left to do is weakly half-claim it wasn’t his fault, that he wasn’t responsible.

Rubbish.

 

Kid Bacon, I'll point out to you that pigs are forced to live in horrific conditions and are routinely slaughtered despite being smarter than dogs.

 

What society deems wrong is constantly changing so that's a silly argument. The vast majority of people prior to the 2000s in western democracies were extremely homophobic. By your logic most Americans pre 2000 were scumbags due to their homophobia.

And prior to the 1950s most white Americans were very racist. I guess they were all scumbags as well by current morals.

 

What is deemed ‘homophobia’ isn’t even an agreed upon term, so I don’t know about the quality of that example.

But more to the point, since when is holding up liquor stores or heroin usage morally acceptable? I guess standards are high where I live.