My discovery yesterday of the publication of this article which examines Nick Tosches' biographical treatment of Charles "Sonny" Liston has just inspired me to fish out my copy of the Tosches book.
Sandwiched between biographies on Joe Frazier and Louis Armstrong, I have not opened it for a good number of years and can hardly believe how many years ago I acquired it. Accompanying the inscription of my name is the date of purchase: "27 April 2000".
The publication of Tosches' book was looked forward to by many boxing afficionados. The last treatment of Sonny's life had been that of Rob Steen which was titled Sonny Boy: The Life and Strife of Sonny Liston. It is another boxing biography among my collections and again cannot help but marvel at the passage of time. My inscription finishes with "20th of March 1993".
I recall that many aficionados were not enthralled by Steen's book and even fewer were thrilled by Tosches' effort.
It took some time for me to appreciate that many readers of the sport of boxing prefer what I would describe as a "meat and potatoes" stylizing of a biography. In other words, one that is linearly arranged, devoid of the penmanship of the hyper-intellectual overly devoted to thematic interludes on issues of culture and philosophy.
While the hard-boiled journalistic style of Budd Schulberg and the participatory journalism of Norman Mailer and was largely appreciated by the average boxing book reader, the efforts of writers such as Steen and Tosches were angrily dismissed.
Why?
I think Tosches was seen by many as fundamentally an interloper. In other words, he was cynically a non-aficionado using the rich history of sport, its litany of characters and the drama that intrinsically attaches to a contest between two gloved combatants in a squared ring for the selfish purpose of enhancing their credentials as a writer.
Also, Tosches' emphasis on the Mafia underworld at the expense of giving a more structured account of Liston's boxing career did not go down well. Neither did his unflattering evaluation of Muhammad Ali as the apotheosis of "mediocrity". Moreover, his penchant for "macho writing", described by the New York Times's reviewer as "his complex, heavy-breathing metaphors", struck boxing readers as akin to the exhibition of a show-off circus juggler.
I personally have no such qualms and seek to extract whatever knowledge and enjoyment that I can from each biography I read regardless of the author's stylization. If the biographer's aim is to present the "truth" and the essence of a person, there are a variety of ways of achieving this, including Tosches' strategy of framing Liston and his existence in America via Aristotelian ideology.
And I of course look forward to absorbing Narjisse Moumna's deconstructions of Nick Tosches' method of attempting to uncover the truth and the essence of Charles "Sonny" Liston.
The Architecture of Absence | ALMA Magazine
© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).
Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.
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