Blues Song for a Fighter: A Three-Act Drama

By J.J. Parker

Sonny Liston"" -- these words pictured menace and boxing ring beatings in Americans' minds in the 1960s.

Was the ""Big Ugly Bear,"" as a youthful Muhammad Ali called him, as mean and antisocial as he seemed? Or was he a man -- hampered by illiteracy -- misunderstood?

""Blues Song for a Fighter"" reveals the real Sonny Liston: witty, hopeful, vengeful, loving children and his wife, determined, humorous, yet -- when drunk -- lascivious, crude, and violent.

J.J. Parker, author of the acclaimed ""Tink Wilson,"" has penned a stage play version of Liston's tempestuous, ill-fated existence ... a vital sunbeam whose starting and ending points no one ever knew.

Though a former thug paroled from prison ( he did time for armed robbery), Sonny never was paroled from his fate: to uneasily ride a personal Night Train to (and from) nowhere, to be divorced from, yet part of, the human race.

This book offers a three-act play depicting the drama of Sonny Liston's life, the ""blues song for a fighter"" that he correctly predicted some day would be written, read, and understood.

Settle into your ringside seat ... the bell for Round One is about to clang....

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 30, 2006
• ISBN: 9781462842223

J.J. Parker

N/A

Book preview

Copyright © 2006 by J. J. Parker.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

ALL ABOARD!

FOR THE NIGHT TRAIN . . . .

CAST OF CHARACTERS

SETTING

Time

Set List

CHARACTER BREAKDOWN

BEAT SHEET OF

BLUES SONG FOR A FIGHTER

PROLOGUE

Act I

Act II

Act III

EPILOGUE

BLUES SONG FOR A FIGHTER

PROLOGUE

ACT I

SCENE 1

ACT I

SCENE 2

ACT I

SCENE 3

ACT I

SCENE 4

ACT I

SCENE 5

ACT I

SCENE 6

ACT I

SCENE 7

ACT I

SCENE 8

ACT I

SCENE 9

ACT II

SCENE 1

ACT II

SCENE 2

ACT II

SCENE 3

ACT II

SCENE 4

ACT II

SCENE 5

ACT II

SCENE 6

ACT II

SCENE 7

ACT II

SCENE 8

ACT III

SCENE 1

ACT III

SCENE 2

ACT III

SCENE 3

ACT III

SCENE 4

ACT III

SCENE 5

EPILOGUE

This play is:

Dedicated to

fighters trying to

get off the canvas

one more time… .

Someday they’re gonna write a blues song just for fighters. It’ll be for slow guitar, soft trumpet and a bell.

—Charles Sonny Liston

ALL ABOARD!

FOR THE NIGHT TRAIN . . . .

Sonny Liston’s life had a yin and yang flavor. ‘Yang’ means ‘sunny,’ a pun on Sonny’s name reflected in the sunrise depicted on the back of Sonny’s white robe that he wore into the ring as champion. Yet ‘yin’ means ‘shady,’ an allusion to the shady mobsters Liston worked for and was controlled by… .

Likewise, Sonny was a mixture of strengths and weaknesses: a colossus who could effortlessly rip a door off its hinges, as he did while touring England as champ, yet be uneasy during an interview because of his limited command of English (he was illiterate). He was, during his boxing prime of 1958-1963, the baddest man on the planet, as Mike Tyson would later style himself, an intimidator whose prefight scowl and dead-man’s eyes frightened many shaken opponents. Yet the supposedly invincible Sonny was whipped by a 21-year-old Fancy Dan named Cassius Clay. And though Sonny feared no one (except perhaps a crazy man), he was scared, upon pain of death, by unknown malefactors into (probably) throwing his rematch with the by-then Muhammad Ali.

As for his relations with females, Liston was—when on the prowl, and inebriated—a womanizer. But when not possessed by John Barleycorn (or more specifically, J&B scotch), he was a devoted husband to his wife Geraldine—and by all accounts she wore the pants of the two-person Liston family.

Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Sonny had two personas: his sober one, which included being a big harmless teddy bear to kids—whom he loved—and his drunken one, which careened from one rough-and-tumble encounter with policemen to another.

Even Liston’s careers were bifurcated. From about 1950 onward, the Good Sonny boxed—in prison, and after parole, as an amateur belting out every other boxer to oppose him, and in the professional ring. But the Bad Sonny performed paid errands for the underworld, including beating mobbed-up union members who didn’t follow their Mafia family’s edicts. Mobsters also controlled Sonny’s professional boxing career, at least until he let—through lax training and overconfidence—an up-and-coming Ali derail it.

Liston’s ring prospects rose steadily from the time he turned pro, after winning the U.S. and European Gold Gloves in 1953, until he ascended the pinnacle in 1962 by steamrolling an undersized Floyd Patterson. Sonny rode the wave for a year and a half, fighting only Patterson again, and flattening him again. After Liston embraced the canvas in the 1965 sub-one-round farce with Ali, Sonny’s ring stock plummeted. Boxing fans and reporters considered him a has-been.

Yet Sonny resurfaced, moving with his wife to Las Vegas, the only city to ever embrace him (he’d been raised in rural Arkansas, and cops had run him out of St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Denver). He fought stiffs and, appropriately, knocked them stiff in Europe in 1966-’67. In 1968, he returned to the United States to pound into the canvas seven ham-and-eggers. For once luck was with Sonny—Ali, for refusing Army induction, had had his title stripped, and boxing’s chief commission was to hold a heavyweight-contender elimination tournament to which the ex-champ was invited.

In 1969, Liston fought in that tourney. But at the end of the year, he was knocked out (legitimately) by a former sparring partner. How? Though he claimed he was 36, Sonny was probably 41 or 42, and his reflexes had slowed. Father Time had taken away Sonny’s last chance to debark from his personal Night Train.

Which brings up another Liston conundrum: how old was he? His mother once provided the best guess, insisting he had been born in 1927 or 1928. Sonny’s explanation—that in the Arkansas boondocks he’d been born into, his birth had been recorded by someone carving the date into the bark of a tree that was subsequently cut down and hauled off—is a legend. Truthfully, he had no birth certificate nor family Bible with his birth date inscribed. He never knew how old he actually was, and, as his boxing career progressed, he kept advancing his publicized birth year, from 1928 to 1930 to 1932 to 1933.

Nor had he a known time of demise on his death certificate. Sonny died in his stylish Vegas home, alone, as his wife Geraldine visited St. Louis relatives. His death date is easier to narrow down than his birth date. Sonny died of vague, probably drug-related causes at the end of 1970. (His death date is listed as Dec. 30, but that’s an estimate: Liston was one of the few celebrities in recent U.S. history whom no one knew when he was born or what day [or night] he died.)

And what did he die of? A drug overdose? Accidentally self-administered? Or was he given a hotshot by a mob enforcer for Sonny trying to muscle his way back into a Vegas mob? Or did Liston, despondent over the end of his ring career, and realizing he knew no other trade, commit suicide by injecting a heroin overdose? Or did he die of natural causes stemming from a traffic accident he’d been in around Thanksgiving 1970?

No one knows for sure how this giant of a man—the son of a tenant farmer who had 25 children in two families and forced Sonny to quit school and plant and pick cotton from age 8 onward, and whipped little Sonny’s back when he didn’t want to work in the fields—perished. But Sonny Liston sure did live. Countless fight fans, boxers, women, bartenders, prison guards, sports reporters, and mobsters could attest to that… .

Maybe somewhere, perhaps in a twilight zone, a funeral-suited Sonny Liston does sit in an unpiloted train, one fashioned like a subway, except carrying only one passenger. And possibly this speeding train to nowhere, hauling only its lone passive and resigned-to-his-fate passenger, travels only at night… forever.

-J.J.P.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Sonny Liston

Foneda Cox

Geraldine Liston

Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali

Jack McKinney

Moe Willis

Father Murphy

Sonya

Jim Simon

Teddy King

Bundini Brown

Angelo Dundee

TV Announcer

Ring Announcer

Nurse

Referee (Jersey Joe Walcott)

Reporter #1

Reporter #2

Young Girl

Cop #1

Gym Announcer

Stewardess

Nat Fleischer

Little Boy

Young Girl #2

Drunk

Willie Reddish

Howard Bingham

Floyd Patterson

Daniel

Nurse

Hospital Children

Extra #1

Extra #2

Fight Fan

Timid Man

Referee #2

Eddie Jenkins

Bald Boxer

Opponent

Barkeep

Waiter

Photographer

Extras

SETTING

Various locations in the United States; many scenes are set in Denver and Las Vegas, though sets could be considered to represent typical gyms, arenas, hotel rooms, bars, etc., in 1960s America.

Time

September 1962 to December 1970.

Set List

1.     Int.: airplane with exit hatch

2.     Int.: boxing gym without ring

3.     Int.: bar, nighttime

4.     Int.: physical therapy room inside hospital

5.     Ext.: land near training camp; trees and grass present

6.     Int.: boxing ring inside Las Vegas arena

7.     Ext.: Listons’ Denver home and yard; nighttime

8.     Int.: Miami Beach gym (same as set #6)

9.     Int.: weigh-in room (may be same as set #4)

10.    Int.: Miami Beach hotel room

11.    Int.: living room in Sonny’s Denver home

12.    Int.: lounge in country club (may be same as set #3)

13.    Int.: lobby of Mass. hotel

14.    Int.: boxing gym (same as set #2)

15.    Int.: hotel room (may be same as set #10)

16.    Int.: boxing gym (same as set #2)

17.    Int.: boxing ring (same as set #6)

18.    Int.: hotel room (same as set #10)

19.    Int.: boxing ring (same as set #6)

20.    Int.: Vegas restaurant with booths

21.    Int.: boxing arena locker room

22.    Int.: living room of Liston home (same as set #11)

23.    Int.: main bedroom of Liston home

24.    Int.: