Sonny Liston
American heavyweight boxer; world heavyweight champion 25 September 1962 to 25 February 1964. Mailer's running antagonist at the 25 September 1962 Patterson–Liston I press conferences in Chicago — and the subject of Mailer's first sustained boxing essay, "Ten Thousand Words a Minute" (Esquire, February 1963).
Charles “Sonny” Liston won the world heavyweight title on 25 September 1962 in Chicago, knocking out Floyd Patterson in the first round of the first of their two championship fights. Mailer covered the fight for Esquire and made himself a part of the story at Liston’s press conference the next day: at one point Mailer told Liston, “I pick Floyd Patterson to knock you out in the sixth”; Liston replied, “He’s still drunk” (62.17b). Mailer’s account, “Ten Thousand Words a Minute” (63.3), is his first sustained boxing essay and a key piece of the New Journalism the Esquire columns of the period helped to define. Mailer’s contemporary letter-to-the-editor to New York Herald Tribune columnist Red Smith (62.17a) complains of inaccuracies in Smith’s 27 September column: “I was neither drunk nor offensive.”
Stub; to be expanded as the 1963 boxing coverage is ingested.
Related pages
- 1962 | Floyd Patterson | The Literate at the Fight
- U.S. Perils Return Bout (62.17b) | Ten Thousand Words a Minute (63.3) | Letter to the Editor (62.17a)