| |
What is fairly certain is that he
had a difficult upbringing. Lost among his dozens of
siblings, young Charles Liston worked beside them as soon
as he was old enough, rarely attending school and never
learning to read and write. Never close to his father, he
once said, in a rare commentary on his childhood, "The
only thing my old man ever gave me was a beating."
Eventually, he was sent to live with a stepbrother, and
after his father's death, in 1946, he followed his mother
to St. Louis.
Actually, young
Charles simply showed up in St. Louis one night, thinking it
was like the small towns he was used to, where anybody he met
would be able to point him to the home of Helen Liston. A
couple of policemen found him wandering around and took him to
an all-night café where a friend of Helen's told him where she
lived. The cops agreed to drive him there. It would be
Liston's last friendly contact with the police. With his huge
hands and menacing attitude, Charles Liston soon fell in with
St. Louis' youth gangs, beginning with petty crimes and moving
on to harder stuff. On January 15, 1950, he was sentenced to
the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City on two
counts of armed robbery and two counts of larceny. It was
there he found his calling.
The big man with
the bad attitude soon caught the attention of Father Edward
Schlattmann, the Catholic chaplain who doubled as the prison's
athletic director. As he did with other prison brawlers, Fr.
Schlattmann convinced Liston, who had somehow acquired the
nickname "Sonny," to work out his aggression in the prison's
boxing
ring.
After a few weeks, other inmates refused to get into the ring
with Liston. Father Schlattmann's successor, Father Alois
Stevens, told a Sport Illustrated reporter that Liston
"was the most perfect specimen of manhood I had ever seen.
Powerful arms, big shoulders. Pretty soon he was knocking out
everybody in the gym. His hands were so large! I couldn't
believe it. They always had trouble with his gloves, trouble
getting them on when his hands were wrapped." Sonny's fists
were some fifteen inches around, in sharp contrast to the foot
or less claimed by the vast majority of heavyweight boxers |
|
.jpg)
.jpg)
.JPG)
