Sonny Liston: The Champ Nobody Wanted BY A.S. (Doc) Young. 1963, first edition.

Sonny Liston: The Champ Nobody Wanted BY A.S. (Doc) Young.

Publisher: Johnson Publishing Co.; USA, 1963, first edition.

Good hardback in tatty torn jacket. Red boards are heavily rubbed at edges with some creasing and compression to spine. Binding firm, ffep has been removed, no inscriptions, foxing to paste-downs, end-papers and edges, pages lightly tanned with minor marks, deep creases to bottom corner of first two pages. Jacket is rubbed, chipped, marked, foxed, and torn with loss to spine ends. 224 pages, illustrated.

A sympathetic biography, by a prominent African-American sportswriter (A.S. "Doc" Young), of the heavyweight boxing champion who was famous for being infamous. Written in 1963 shortly after Sonny Liston took the title away from then-champ Floyd Patterson with a stunning first-round knockout on September 25, 1962, this biography takes a look at Liston's long ascent to the pinnacle of boxing. Liston had to overcome a hard and unguided childhood which led him into extensive criminal activity (he served a two-year prison sentence for armed robbery in the early 1950s), and his boxing career was clouded by persistent links to organized crime, as well as the perception (right or wrong), that he was an 'unsavory' character.

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