In my publication titled "THE IMMENSE RELEASE," I meticulously recorded Sonny's statements using the designation B) to denote his direct quotes he told to me telepathically. Subsequently, Paul Gallender, the biographer, provided corroborative evidence for Sonny's accounts, which I denoted as P).
Sonny, in his heart of hearts, did not want to be a fighter, but that was what he was used to. I'm sharing these parts from the book because I'm sure he wouldn't want to live today, the way he did back then.
23) B: Sonny had been feeling down on himself; he didn't like himself or what he was doing. Sonny Liston, a giant of a man, buried his face in his hands with a desire to beat himself. He felt trapped in a hellish reality from which he could not escape. Sonny shared that Father Stevens, the prison chaplain, saw his pain when he was down on himself and tried to change his thinking.
P: "Sonny was just a big, ignorant, pretty nice kid," said Father Stevens. "He wasn't smart-alecky, but he got in little scrapes. Sonny was illiterate, and these kinds (of inmates) don't know cockiness or any other emotion. They tell you nothing. It makes it hard." Testifying before a Senate Committee in 1960, Sonny credited Father Stevens with turning his life around. Sonny said: "He was the one who got me started in fighting." Father Stevens: "You like fighting so much, why don't you get into the boxing team?" Sonny responded: "I told him all right. I started fighting, and then I beat all the guys there, and he (Father Stevens) say, 'I'll see what I can do for you on the outside.'"
24) B: I asked Sonny if boxing was his salvation. He responded it was both heaven and hell and, much of the time, sheer torment.
P: Liston revealed his torment to Mark Kram in Las Vegas a few months before he died. He told Kram that hours after he knocked out Roy Harris in one round in Houston in 1960, he was nodding off in his hotel lobby when someone said to him: "Don't turn aroun', nigger." Sonny heard a gun being cocked and felt its barrel against his head when the guy said, "Tell me you're a no-good yeller nigger." The man said he had one bullet in his gun, but Sonny thought he was bluffing until he twice pulled the trigger. Sonny said, "Wait! I'm a no-good nigger!" The man told him he had missed a word, and Sonny added the word 'yeller.' He was told not to turn around, and Sonny heard the floor creak as the man walked away. Sonny told Kram: "I've heard that creak ever since. I was on my way to bein' finished before I got to Clay in Miami. Folks're violent. It got to be a torture for me… bein' public. Like bein' the only chicken in a bag full of cats." To this day, his friend Marilyn Resnick feels very bad about what happened to Liston when he was forced to throw his second fight with Muhammad Ali. Quoting Marilyn: "Sonny had his pride, and for him to be swallowed up by people like that who took advantage of him and his wife and his children was horrible. He must have been burning inside and knew just how bad and rotten they could be. He must have had a lot of torment in him."
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