I've been thinking about degrees of separation. Basically, wondering whether they're measured in Celcius or Fahrenheit. Which led me to wondering about Fahrenheit himself and whether he ever got a degree and if he did, did anyone look at it and ask "What's that in Celcius?" Because I would have. And then he would probably have punched me.
Which got me to thinking about Sonny Liston (punching always makes me think of Liston, to the point where I'm surprised to discover that some people hear the word "punch" and don't think of Liston; they think of a British humor magazine, or one half of a two-puppet team, or a fruity beverage mix named for the 5oth state, it's nuts, really, the way people's brains work). I've been thinking about Liston - pictured here on the cover of the December 1963 Esquire ("The last man on earth America wanted to see coming down its chimney," as Sports Illustrated later put it) - since reading about him in a Vanity Fair article about the heyday of Esquire magazine. (It's okay for a magazine to write about another magazine's heyday if it's made quite clear that not only is that heyday over, it's been over for some time). Coincidentally, it turned out that my sister, who lives in Quebec City, had read the same article. It reminded her of her love of, and ambition to write for, magazines. It reminded me of my once cherished desire to be the world heavyweight boxing champion. Ah, the dreams of youth.
I first learned about Liston at the age of eight when I read my father's "Boxing Champions of the World" book cover-to-cover. I also learned about the great John L. Sullivan, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tuney, and Archie "The Old Mongoose" Moore. My father was (and still is) a big boxing fan, and he did his best to turn all of us (three girls and a boy) into boxers, with varying degrees of success (degrees of success, by the way, are always measured in Celcius). I can't say I really like watching boxing, but I love reading about it. More to the point, I love reading about boxers. Their stories are always grittier than those of hockey players, or golfers, or rhythmic gymnasts. And I like gritty. I used to drink the afore-mentioned fruity beverage mix without water.
Liston stuck in my memory because he was a true badass, complete with a police record and mob connections. He came as a shock to the American system, becoming champion by creaming the gentlemanly Floyd Patterson(prior to Mike Tyson, the youngest man ever to hold the world heavyweight title). Both were black, but they represented opposite ends of the spectrum of public black personas. Think Michael Jackson (back when he still had a nose) vs. Prince. Think Condoleeza vs. L'il Kim (a boxing match I'd pay to see anyday). Think Punch vs. Judy. No, wait, don't think that.
These meditations on Liston and black persona came from a book on Mohammad Ali by David Remnick, by the way, not from my eight-year-old brain. At eight, a lot of that boxing book went over my head. For instance, I remember reading about the world middleweight champion Stanley Ketchel, the "Michigan Assassin." He was of particular interest because my grandfather, also a boxing fan, had named one of his sons after him (my uncle, Michigan Assassin Campbell). Ketchel was murdered on a ranch where he was training for a fight by "a jealous farmhand." I thought the farmhand was jealous of his boxing title, which made sense to me. A boxing title seemed like a pretty awesome thing to have - and I imagined Ketchel wearing his championship belt around the ranch, just to rub it in. I had no idea there was a woman in the mix until years later, when I'd learned to cherchez la femme, as they say in French boxing circles.
I'm ready to end this now, but I'm not really sure how to do it. I could follow my own advice on writing and "end abruptly," but that seems particularly lame in a posting that started with a discussion of degrees of separation. So let's see if I can bring this back to where I started: Farhenheit to Liston to Ketchel to my uncle who is now in Florida where the temperature, when he last checked in, was in the '70s. FARHENHEIT.
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