Sonny Liston: A Smell Of Rain And Victory

At SPORTS ILLUSTRATED's request, Jack McKinney of the Philadelphia Daily News went to South Fallsburg, N.Y. to "train" with Sonny Liston. McKinney, an amateur boxer and longtime confidant of the heavyweight challenger, spent eight days in Liston's tracks. Here is his report:

Two-twenty on the nose; time to go home and slop up a little," Sonny Liston announced unexpectedly as he stepped off the scale. So The Bear came down from the mountain, cross and impatient with the slow tread of time.

After 12 weeks of hard exercise and clean living in the Catskills—relieved only by three short trips back to Philadelphia—Liston felt he was ready to beat Floyd Patterson tomorrow, and he chafes at the knowledge that tomorrow won't come until the evening of September 25 in Chicago, weather permitting.

Liston's sparring partners didn't try to hide their delight when the man they call The Bear made his sudden decision to conclude preliminary training at The Pines, a Borscht Circuit resort in South Fallsburg, N.Y., one week ahead of schedule. It meant a welcome break of three weeks and some odd days before mustering in again for the final ordeal at Sonny's formal camp in Aurora, Ill.

"Three whole weeks, just think of it," gushed Slim Jim Robinson, a lanky, slick-moving veteran who had found himself in the unenviable position of being Liston's preferred sparmate. "In three weeks I might even be well again." Although he grinned when he said it, Robinson really wasn't jesting. Only three days earlier, one of Liston's clubbing hooks had torn a muscle in the lower right side of Slim Jim's rib cage.

The temporary loss of Robinson's services might have had something to do with Sonny's abrupt defection from The Pines, but the prime motivation was the challenger's fear of becoming too sharp too soon.

"I don't like this business of training six months or even three months for one fight," Sonny told me one morning. "I can get my body ready for any fight in three weeks—four weeks at the most. I'll never start this early again."

During my days in South Fallsburg I saw clearly that Sonny is the absolute boss of his own training program. The chain of command includes Advisor Jack Nilon, Camp Manager Archie Pirolli, Trainer Willie Reddish and Assistant Trainer Joe Pollino, but it begins with Sonny himself. "Don't bother me with little details," he had instructed Pirolli, a nervous, owlish-looking little-detail man in his late 60s, "but make sure all the little details are taken care of."

Although it's customary for the trainer to call days off, Liston reserved this decision for himself, and he didn't abuse it. There was only one evening while I was in camp when he announced after dinner, "We won't run tomorrow," and only one bleak morning when he declared, "No workout today. I smell rain." (It started coming down an hour later.)

"Sonny knows what he's doing," Reddish assured me. "Some fighters have to be driven, but he's not one of them. He's got a remarkable sense of self-discipline and, like he says, he knows his own body better than anyone."