In Popular Culture
- Acting
Liston made a cameo appearance in the 1968 Head, which starred The Monkees. Liston played the part of a farmer in the 1970 film Moonfire with Richard Egan and Charles Napier. In the same year, Liston appeared in a television commercial for Braniff Airlines with Andy Warhol.
- Portrayal in film
In the 2001 film Ali, Liston was portrayed by former WBO Heavyweight Champion Michael Bentt.
Liston was the subject of a 2008 feature film based upon his life titled Phantom Punch. The film starred Ving Rhames as Liston and was produced by Rhames, Hassain Zaidi and Marek Posival.
- Portrayal in fiction
Liston appears as a character in James Ellroy's novel The Cold Six Thousand. In the novel, Liston not only drinks, but also pops pills, and works as a sometime enforcer for a heroin ring in Las Vegas. Liston also appears in the sequel, Blood's a Rover.
Thom Jones titled his 2000 collection of short stories Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine.
- Music
Liston has been referenced in many songs by artists such as Sun Kil Moon, The Animals, Tom Petty, Mark Knopfler, Phil Ochs, Morrissey, The Mountain Goats, Freddy Blohm, Chuck E. Weiss, This Bike is a Pipe Bomb, KK Downing, The Roots, Wu-Tang Clan, Gone Jackals, Billy Joel, The Mountain Goats, Roll Deep, UCL, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Mark Knopfler's tribute to Liston, "Song for Sonny Liston," appeared on his 2004 album Shangri-La.
"Sonny Liston" is also the name of an indie folk band from Oxford, England.
Liston appeared on the December 1963 cover of Esquire magazine (cover photograph by Carl Fischer) "the last man on earth America wanted to see coming down its chimney".
Elizabeth Bear wrote the short story "Sonny Liston Takes the Fall", published in The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy in 2008. The story speculates that Liston threw the Ali match for the social good.
Read more about this topic: Sonny Liston
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