Sonny Liston won’t ever be forgotten but the 50th anniversary of his death came and went with very little fanfare.

Some will contend that’s because he hadn’t endeared himself in his fighting heyday, he wasn’t owed any more than a cursory mention. Maybe it’s the fact that we still don’t know how he died which means there’s a reluctance to revisit a story that has never had a definitive ending.

When Liston died, with heroin found in his system, there was speculation that he’d committed suicide while some thought he’d been murdered. He’d often told people that he’d feared for his life.

His wife, Geraldine, was away as Liston’s body lay in their home alone. He’d died at some point between mid-December and January 5. She discovered his body on her return from holiday seeing family in the Midwest. No one knew exactly when he drew his final breath.

Around the time of his passing, former foe Muhammad Ali was just being greenlit to fight Joe Frazier for the first time. The US Supreme Court had cleared the way for The Fight of the Century having agreed to hear Ali’s appeal against his 1967 conviction for draft evasion.

The trajectories of Ali and Liston had been so different after their two controversial meetings.

In their first fight, Liston bailed out citing a shoulder injury and in their second bout he was floored by a phantom finish.

For many, Liston became defined by both fights while arguably becoming just a footnote in the storied Ali tale.

While Ali forged ahead, Liston’s story ended abruptly. He might have been old before his time, but he was dead before his time was due, too. Sonny was only 38, or 40 depending on your source. Even that was unknown. For years people tried to work out when he was born but for many his first day on earth was as much a mystery as his last.

The week he died, boxing historian Ron Olver wrote how Liston’s lore and legend might grow in future years.

“Now that he’s dead,” wrote Olver, “some writers have come into the open and stated for a fact that he threw the Clay [Ali] fights, something they had only dared hint at while he was alive.”

Ron had met Liston in 1963 and described him as “quiet” and “sullen”, adding “Liston blotted his copy-book by taking off for America without telling anyone and without completing his contracts for exhibitions in Britain. This was unforgivable, and led to his being banned in this country.”

Then, speaking on behalf of many, Ron wrote, “He was an enigma. No one could really tell what was in his mind… I suppose once a man becomes a world champion it is impossible to disassociate his private life from his boxing career. In that respect, he was always a marked man.”

Liston’s reputation had always preceded him.

He was an ex-convict who was known to be an intimidating brute. He’d been an enforcer for the Mob and wasn’t to be messed with.

But friends like George Foreman and Ernie Terrell would recall a friendly, shy man years down the line.

Whatever, when Sonny beat Floyd Patterson for the title he thought it would be the making of him and he returned home to Philadelphia, armed with a speech declaring his worthy intentions of carrying the crown with dignity and pride. But the ticker-tape parade he expected failed to materialise. The heavyweight champion of the world was all but anonymous. Nobody liked him enough to support him and nobody cared about him enough to be there. That’s what he thought.

There would never be any fresh starts for Liston. The baggage of history travelled with him everywhere.

In Liston’s Boxing News obituary, Graham Houston wrote, “Just what happened to Liston in these two extraordinary encounters [with Ali] will probably never be known. He takes the secret to the grave and leaves us to theorise.”

“At his best,” Houston continued, “Liston probably had been an equal match for any heavyweight in history. But because of the Clay fiascos, Liston is unlikely to be elected in any boxing hall of fame.”

Sonny’s rap sheet in life had grown beyond his prison sentence, with motoring and weapons offences, and he’d been banned form fighting in New York because of his links to gangsters.

As Houston would write of the former champion, “He was the universal tough guy, the sort of man no one wanted to meet in a back alley on a dark night. The most dangerous unarmed man in the world.”

Then he was gone. And he took the secrets of how he went with him as well as those of the Ali fights.

Liston’s funeral procession went right down the Las Vegas Strip.

Geraldine explained after the service that Sonny had always said that if anything happened he’d like one last drive down Las Vegas Boulevard.

There were more than 700 mourners at the funeral and the likes of Ali, Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Sammy Davis Jr, Willie Mays and Doris Day all showed up.

Through the service, his mother Helen lamented his final days. “Why’d you die, Sonny – dead ten days with all the friends you had in Las Vegas.”

A motorcycle escort took him to his final resting place, at the Paradise Gardens Cemetery where anyone can go and pay their respects now, beneath the busy Vegas flightpath at nearby McCarran airport.

Years later, it was said a tormented Mike Tyson cracked a bottle of champagne on the headstone that simply declares Sonny ‘A Man.’

The date of death on his certificate was December 30, 1970, but no one really knew how long he’d been lying there before Geraldine found him and 50 years on few people seemed to care. For some he was a cult hero but for Sonny and too many others he was the champion no one cared about.

The headline of Boxing News when they reported his death was, “Liston is dead – but his legend is just beginning.”

That was true. Perhaps because we still don’t have firm answers to the questions being asked 50 years ago.