Baddies #5 | Sonny Liston

Consensus has Charles L ‘Sonny’ Liston born in the May of 1932, as the twenty-fourth of 25 children sired by father, Tobe.

 He grew up tall-and-strong as part of a sharecropping family, picking cotton in the fields of Sand Slough, Arkansas. His ‘intimidating demeanour’ and size was said to be born of his father administering regular ‘whoopings’ as well as substituting him for the mule to pull a plough.  

 He ran away to join his mother in St Louis when aged 13. Where his inability to read and write further marked him out. The streets proved his outlet, seeing the young Liston arrested over a hundred times as a teen. Described as ‘not afraid to fight the cops’, his photograph served as a warning, and was a fixture in every squad car in the city.