Why did Marciano Choose to defend against Charles than Valdez ?

DUBBLECHIN

"Whoever I argued with on this board, I didn't take anything personally. I hope you didn't either."

I didn't. Just hope we can have good debates, and happy Fourth to you.

*That said, drunken fans tossing things around and bellyaching about a decision in a fight in which they were probably betting heavily isn't much of a surprise to me and I wouldn't draw big conclusions from it.

The Moore-Valdes fight seems to have been close. I don't think you provide any real evidence the fight or the decision was not on the level.

Many fights were not televised. Marciano-LaStarza II for example. As for filming, do you in fact know it wasn't filmed? I have never seen any film of Valdes-Charles, but that doesn't prove a film doesn't exist, or at least didn't at one time. It would be all but impossible, I think, to stop someone from filming if they wanted to, and how could one be certain that one of the many movie studio newsreel organizations like Movietone News wouldn't film it to show highlights in theatres. That is where many old fight films come from.

I do think you edited out the key line in the post you partially quoted--

"I'm not criticizing the 'Valdes won' point of view as much as the one implying a conspiracy."

 

I didn't purposefully leave out any of your previous quote, I just keep clicking quote to reply and it grabs what it grabs.

Actually, the Rocky Marciano-Roland La Starza fight was broadcast live on Closed Circuit. I just checked the New York Times on the day of the fight, and it said the fight wasn't on network television but was being televised via closed circuit in thirty four cities.

Some collector somewhere probably has the kinescope of it - like we've seen with the Marciano-Walcott bouts and the Marciano-Moore fight.

Regarding Moore-Valdes, I don't think Las Vegas even had the infrastructure to televise an event live around the country at that time. None of the television networks were there. I could be wrong, but I think the first local television station was launched the following year.

Moore-Valdes was the first significant fight of any kind Vegas hosted. By the sounds of it, the fight was great but the promotion was terrible. They didn't have an official scale. It was being held in the desert when Las Vegas was not much more than a strip of road with seven or eight hotels owned by the mob. The fight was held in a minor-league ballpark before Major League Baseball had even gotten that far west. I don't think the Dodgers and the Giants moved out west until three years later.

I've seen photos of the fight. They all look really sharp. The descriptions of the fight were that it was a war. I've never heard of any moving pictures of it.

But why in the hell weren't there three judges? And why was it staged in a place where literally only the people there could see it?iIt doesn't make any sense at all. Boxing was on national television three or four times a week back then.

The first meeting between Moore and Valdes, which wasn't considered significant at all at the time, was really high profile by comparison and was nationally televised.

I checked the television listings the day of Valdes-Moore in 1955, and the card broadcast nationally that night was Virgil Akins vs. Ron Delaney from St. Nicholas Arena at 8:30 eastern. Compared to Moore-Valdes, the Akins fight meant nothing.

When you consider how truly corrupt the sport was in 1955, and how the Feds came down hard on all the big players the following year, nothing about that Moore-Valdes fight makes sense. It was a major, very significant fight in boxing - when Boxing was right up there with baseball as the top sport in the country - and by staging it where they did the powers-that-be made sure nobody saw the fight nationally.

Basically, what I'm saying is if you had to stage an important fight, and you wanted to make sure one guy won, but you didn't want too many people to see it, at the time they couldn't have staged it in a better place. Unfortunately for them, people who did show up and watched it started throwing crap in the ring because they didn't agree with the verdict.

 

Wasn't the mob just trying to draw high rollers into Vegas? Not being televised would make the fight more select. Peter Wilson wrote of what a startlingly intresting location it was with the rows of seats showing a kind of history of a town emerging. He said frontiers type old timers with check shirts and cowboy hats sat at the back on the dusty Stone steps of the bleachers and the middle rows were filled by the New comers that perhaps worked in hotels or entertainment and the front rows were all the high rolling gamblers and show business types. He wrote of a desert sky and mountains like crumpled brown paper. There was nothing there then. This was a growing town then. It must have been like Shelby was when Dempsey came to fight Gibbons only the place was backed and supported by a growing industry. Gambling.

 

One more thing before I have to go ... a couple months before Marciano won the title, Al Weill (the IBC and MSG matchmaker) made a fight between Rocky Castellani and Ernie Durando. Castellani’s manager was a mobster. Castellani was supposed to win, but Durando flipped the script and knocked out Castellani.

Castellani’s manager was so enraged at the double-cross he attacked the ref and Durando’s cornermen in the ring in front of the whole arena. When the ring was cleared, Al Weill went back to Castellani’s dressing room to apologize and the mobsters in the dressing room beat the hell out of Weill – who had to be hospitalized.

Prosecutors in New York forced Weill to testify against Castellani’s manager, but he wouldn’t say anything. They ended up taking Castellani’s manager’s license away from him anyway.

Point is, the Feds were gathering a mountain of stuff to charge Carbo, Gibson, Norris, etc. with, because some of the crap they’d done was so high profile – like the Castellani fight – that everyone saw it so they had to report it.

So, if you know the investigators are watching, it makes sense why Valdes-Moore was sent packing to Las Vegas, where there were no big newspapers, no national television coverage, and everyone running the casinos were mobbed up.

Why else was it sent there to fall off the radar?

 

Well, Dempsey-Gibbons was one of the biggest busts in boxing history. The town folded and went bankrupt because of the fight. So if the idea was to stage another Dempsey-Gibbons, that wasn't a good example to go after.

I think Moore-Valdes was held in Vegas because they could control whatever happened with the fewest eyes on it as possible.

Even today, if you question what happened, people tell you to shut up. So it must've worked to some degree.

But admittedly that's just my opinion.

That's all from me.

You guys have a great weekend.

Thanks for the conversation. It's nice to find fellow boxing geeks. :good

 

Marciano-LaStarza was filmed and the full film is on you tube. I was just going by the film announcer who said more than once that the fight was neither broadcast nor televised. He must have been wrong.

As for Las Vegas, I would advise watching the MGM film MEET ME IN LAS VEGAS filmed by MGM in 1956 to get a pretty good idea what Las Vegas was like at that time and who was there. It was a fast growing town.

The attendance was over 10,000. Just a question. How many times had Valdes fought before a bigger crowd?

If you want to think this fight was fixed, so be it. I don't think there is any evidence at all.

 

I don't know how many times he fought in front of that many people. There were 165 million people living in the U.S. in 1955. How many would've seen it if was shown on national television?

Let's just say more than 10,000.

 

I am a police officer. The last thing I do is let my emotions get the best of me. Nice try. :good

 

"that's just my opinion."

And I disagree with it. No problem.

I think another poster hit it on the head. They wanted to attract high-rollers to Las Vegas where the real money would be made at the gambling tables. TV money from 1955 would probably have been chicken feed compared to that.

There is no need for a conspiracy theory to explain what needs no explanation. Moore was simply the better fighter as his overall record proves. Valdes went 13-10 during his peak run.

 

Yes it was a growing town, a booming industry. Brining in high rollers for entertainment and an important fight has become a tradition so worth while it continues to this very day. Ten thousand fans being drawn into a desert to gamble was huge. The gambling industry was relocating from Cuba. that fight, with its "exclusive" appeal was helping to put Vegas on the map. They wanted to attract free spending big shots. It worked.

And that 13-10 run would not look so "consistent" if valdes rematched Baker and Moore earlier or rematched Johnson and Charles.

 

by the way HeGrant are you hegrant or Double-chin