In Nick Tosches great book, The Devil and Sonny Liston, the author identifies his subject’s main problem: “In the Saturday night cigarette smokehouse neon dark of that dive, Charles Liston, who neither knew his age nor felt any ties of blood upon this earth nor saw any future beyond the drink in front of him and the smoky dark spare refuge of this barroom from the bone-cutting, river-heavy dank and freezing chill, knew only that he was nobody and that he had come from nowhere and that he was nowhere. He did not see that one could be nobody with a capital ‘N.’” Smokin’ Joe Frazier, who just passed away, and his two greatest opponents, Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, became not just important nobodies but cultural kings.
Frazier, who could barely get a word in, with Ali and Dick Cavett:
