Nobody in the fight racket gave a fuck about the suckers in the seats

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Before the first drumbeat comes down, the voice of James Brown: All aboard! Night Train!

He just was what he fucking was: Charles L. Liston, mightiest of men, sharpest of dressers. He had more pasts than most people had socks. Go on, pick a past. They were all the same to him: sand slough and alleys, bar-rooms and prison cells, fancy ass big bad gangster men and bent-down cotton pickers. All the same. Working for halves here, Boss, working for halves ... With his dangerous ways and his dangerous airs and his love of that rhythm and blues that the white man held to be dangerous, too, Sonny was to become the new hero of a different, younger minority, that minority of black street punks, and white street punks, who could not afford the ticket price to have their own voices heard at the fights when Sonny was booed and execrated. If Sonny is to be regarded as the first rock 'n' roll champ, Clay should be regarded as the first made for TV boxing idol. As he danced and cavorted in acceptable and inoffensive outrageousness before the masses and the cameras and the microphones of mediocrity, so mediocrity embraced him.