Rocky Marciano vs. Sonny Liston.

He didn't stop him though, Liston flat out quit!

 

I was referring to the Martin fight.F*ck me!

 

You quoted Liston as saying that Marshall almost had him out in the 7th rd of their 3rd fight.Yet this report says Marshall did not win a round?

Sonny Liston, 203, St. Louis, parlayed a harder punch, a devastating body attack and a 24-pound weight advantage into an easy decision over Marty Marshall, 179, Detroit, in the 10-round main event of a fight card at the Gardens tonight. Both judges and referee Buck McTiernan scored the bout the same—the first round even and the next nine for Liston. Marshall spent most of his time retreating." - Associated Press

Good job you're not a boxing writer, we would be in a worse position than we currently are trying to reconstruct fights!

 

Liston was dropped, why would the story be made up from nothing?

 

I was referring to Ali on your post.

 

Here's a source for you:

Page 32 Sonny Liston Rob Steen.

"By night he trained religiously, either at the Masonic temple on olive street or at the ringside gym, accompanied by Tony Anderson, who would draw ten per cent of the purses when Sonny turned pro and remained in his corner for seven years. A trainer, in essence is taxed only when required to convince a hurt employer to carry on, which presumably explains why Sonny would go through so few"

 

Where does it say he was, on CBZ? On Box Rec? No ,why is that do you think? Sam Langford's manager said that Langford dropped Jack Johnson, he didn't, he took two 9counts and was lucky to finish on his feet.
Motive? Blatantly obvious.

Marshall says he dropped Liston. Motive? Do you really need to be put in the picture?lol
Lets be honest ,you're Liston hater and very happy to believe anything negative that is said about him,it doesn' t make it true though.

 

That's the same book ! That isn't a primary source!lol

Here are some reviews of your "source"lol.

I purchased this book to kill time while waiting for the bio's of Joe Gans and Harry Greb to be released, and didn't expect very much from it since no one had bothered to write up a review for it and because it's only 233 pages and was written by a sportswriter with whom I am unfamiliar. Well, I was right not to expect a whole lot. As author Rob Steen admits in the book's first chapter, "The Sour Science", scienche holds antipathy for the sweet e and this is evident throughout the book. I would have been willing to put up with this bias ('tho I am a big fight fan, I am not blind to its problems) if Steen were a master storyteller and a good writer, but he is not. This left me only to hope that he would reveal enough information with which I was not already familiar to justify the $20 that I had shelled out. Again, this was not the case. The only thing that Steen revealed that had not been mentioned in most of the articles and TV programs about Liston was that he had insisted that a clause be inserted into the contract between the company that held the rights to the closed-circuit broadcast of his first bout with Clay/Ali and the individual venues that would screen it that stipulated that those venues could not segregate their patrons by race (which demonstrates that the 'Bear' did, in fact, take a stand on civil rights) and Steen also provides the reader with the long-forgotten opinions of Marty Marshall, Liston's first conqueror, on his bouts with him.

One is also left feeling disappointed by the brevity of Steen's accounts of each of Liston's 54 pro bouts (save the ones with Marshall), particularly since he spends so much time writing about Liston's mob connections, the mob's control of boxing, and Clay/Ali's ties to the Black Muslims (given that these aspects of Liston's and Ali's respective careers/lives had been so well documented by others, I would have thought that they would have been given short shrift by the author to allow for a greater discussion of other aspects of Liston's life)."

"The author gives us some very good insight on Liston's background and his connections with the worst elements that have infiltrated the boxing business since it became a money making business. The problem I had while reading the book was, as a person who has followed boxing for some forty-five years, it's apparent that the author is really not one that follows the sport. I'll list just a few examples. Steen (the author), states that when speaking about Nevada world title fights, that "Jim Corbett had reduced Bob Fitzsimmons to a state of near-paralysis in the fourteenth. Jim, the Cornishman remarked after rescrambling his senses, you gave me a bloody good licking, I will never fight you again." Problem is, it was Fizsimmons that knocked-out Corbett in that classic encounter!
Another example; The author states that Leotis Martin, the last fighter to defeat Liston, had "kept Joe Frazier at bay for almost nine rounds in the 1st section of the WBA heavyweight tournament" Martin never met Frazier in the ring and Frazier never was even in the tournament. Another example; Speaking about a $10,000 bet that Liston laid on heavyweight Mac Foster to defeat contender Jerry Quarry, Steen describes the fighter Quarry as "ageing and cumbersome". Quarry, at that time was in his early 20's, actually at his near peak, and was hardly "cumbersome", with two of the fastest counter-punching fist ever seen in the heavyweight ranks. With I would not be so sure tnumerous, even very obvious errors in the book, one has to wonder about the authors many other facts and revelations ?That a good deal of what the author states is completely true fact. But, much of the Liston story is well known anyway and the author's telling gives us some good food for thought. His literary style is good and his personal analogy of boxing in its violent form is spot-on. Despite Steen's apparent lack of historical boxing knowledge the book is still worth reading. "

The guy's a part-time journalist whose subject is f*cking cricket!
It says he has written in the Times, well he sure as f*ck doesn't cover boxing in it because I read it! Oh My!

 

We should fnd the 'primary sources' then.

I tend to think the 1964 Sports Illustrated is closer to the events than what's currently shown on Boxrec or CBZ in 2016.
Is the Mort Sharnik article proven to be full of other inaccuracies ?

I'm as sceptical as anyone when it comes to anything written or said about any fight I can't see for myself. But there's really no reason to go one way or the other on this yet.

 

Very much so!

 

I'm a Liston hater? Give your head a shake will you.

You talk of Liston's courage, I want proof he suffered a broken jaw. Have you got the medical report?

 

Strangely enough no I haven't.Neither have I got the medical report of Ali's broken jaw V Norton or Shavers v Quarry! Abrahams v Miranda !Quigg's v Frampton! Finnegan v Reiche! So they didn't happen either! Do you actually know how ridiculous you're coming across here?

 

The pr

The problem for you here is it was Tex Maule would said Marshall dropped Liston, though he wasn't actually there. So okay you believe it,[no surprise there lol ].

"Clay was not, however, the first man to knock Liston down. In a fight on April 21, 1955 in St. Louis, Marty Marshall dropped Liston with a punch remarkably similar to the one Clay used (SI, Feb. 10, 1964). "In the fifth round," the account goes, "Marshall slipped a Liston jab to the outside and crossed a right to Sonny's jaw, à la Max Schmeling when he knocked Joe Louis down in 1936. The result was the same. Liston went down." He got up, too, with no more intention of quitting than he had against Clay, and he knocked Marshall out a round later."

Key words,"the account goes"lol
Unfortunately ,[ for you ,] Maule also said this.
A Quick, Hard Right and a Needless Storm of Protest
Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay) is a fighter bedeviled by his own excellence. He knocked out big Sonny Liston with a punch so marvelously fast that almost no one believed in it—but it was hard and true

By Tex Maule
So do you accept the former and discount the latter?lol


It's a conundrum for you ,do you cherry pick and lose any credibility you have ,or are you honest and throw out both accounts? I'm genuinely interested in your choice.lol

 

I've seen pictures of Ali's broken jaw from the X-ray , of course it could all be made up along with the pic of Ali laid in a hospital bed being visited by Norton.....

Any pics of Liston in hospital or any of a X-ray?

 

I think this is a well researched article. Lots of technical points described in great detail.

Where else can you find such good interviews with Jimmy McCarter, Bert whitehurst, Marty Marshall or a press account of marshals first fight with Liston? At the very least it answers the often repeated idea that Sonny "only got his jaw broken because he was laughing". This has been doing the rounds so long and it can not be proved ONE WAY OR THE OTHER.

Sonny improved. This was a learning fight. And a lot of this criticism is admittedly whilst Sonny was developing.

In the days before every fight was filmed or tapes were sent to News centres to build a fighter the general Public might have only glimpsed a champion in his title winning effort.

As the article states "A large part of the Liston Legend is built upon his last three fights, fights that were spread over a three year period and lasted exactly six minutes and four seconds". The job it seems here is to go about addressing what else there is to know about him.

This article was in a mainstream sports magazine and the article goes to some length to educate general sports fans into understanding what boxing people already knew about this new monster of a champion BEFORE he fights clay.

Here is the proof that ,even at the time, it had not gone unnoticed that much of Sonny's reputation was based on the Westphal and Patterson fights that had given Sonny exposure to the wider sports public.
I did not sense that this is as a personal attack on Listons profile. To me, this is an honest look at a champions boxing career (whilst he is still champion) under a microscope to see if it all adds up.

what stood out was the recognition already that Sonny appeared such a great fighter with no real flaws even though so much of it was built on the "six minutes of fighting spread over three years".

The article simply addressed this factor by digging up earlier fights and interviewing key opponents.

It's actually a tribute to his stature.