I mean, look at the guy!
He reportedly had a 84″ reach with what might be the largest fists I have ever seen on a guy his height. His arms were literal sledgehammers, and his power certainly supports this. If my memory serves me right, he is considered the second hardest hitting heavyweight ever.
He crushed everyone that had the guts to get in the ring with him, few as they were (aside from Ali of course). Add to that, possible mafia connections, and you've got yourself a scary guy.
Sonny Liston was the original baddest man on the planet. He grew up in an unforgiving world and a abusive who would beat up Liston and since that, this is where Sonny Liston was that one side y'all should not be mess with, even cops made a mistake of messing with him and even inmates when he was in prison.
Sonny was a truly tough and brutal man who was the product of a harsh, unforgiving, life.
Sonny was as feared in the street as he was in the ring. Arrested 19 times, in prison twice, Sonny once took a gun away from a police officer who was harassing him, beat the officer and broke his knee. On another occasion when he was again being harassed, an enraged Sonny took the officer, slapped him around, and put him in a trash bin.
Mike Tyson studied Liston (and Jack Dempsey) for their ability to intimidate an opponent. Mike is a lot smarter than people credit him for, and said once, "if you can make your opponent afraid, he is beat before he ever gets in the ring. Sonny Liston was the best at that - look what he did to Patterson."
Mike’s talent for terrifying his opponents is legendary. With his muscular physique, malevolent glare and his black trunks and shoes with no socks, he looked the part of an executioner. For most of his career, he was incredibly intimidating.
Sonny Liston wins the contest as the best of the intimidators.
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Sonny Liston
Sonny was a truly tough and brutal man who was the product of a harsh, unforgiving, life. Charles "Sonny" Liston was born into a sharecropping family who farmed the rocky, poor quality land of Morledge Plantation near Johnson Township, St. Francis County, Arkansas. Sonny said, confirmed by other family members, that his father inflicted beatings and whippings so severe on Sonny that the scars were still visible decades later. "The only thing my old man ever gave me was a beating," Liston said.
When Sonny was about 9 - he didn't really know how old he was, because he didn't know when he was born - his father hooked him to a plow when their mule died, and made Sonny pull the plow as a beast of burden.
When Sonny was 13, his mother took the rest of the children, and left his father, moving to St. Louis. Sonny, she abandoned to his father. But Sonny managed to raise enough money to get to St. Louis cross country on his own, where being illiterate, he could not go to school, and fell in with a gang whose robberies and other activities landed Sonny in prison when he was just 20.
Because his father had literally hooked him to a plow when he was a child, and worked him on the farm from the time he could walk, he never went to school, and he never learned to read and write, Beaten and abused as a child, he grew up to stay in trouble, and even in prison, other cons were terrified of making Sonny mad. He grew up in a world with no kindness and no forgiveness, and he gave none to anyone.
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