Liston should get A lot more stick for being a cheat

If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying.

 

It's only fair to say that the evidence is quite weak.

 

You linked to an article from 2012. That's the very definition of decades later. It does come directly from Dundee's mouth, but Dundee's also the source for his story of tearing a hole in Ali's glove against Cooper. That's something that he wasn't just a first-hand source for but the actual person who committed the act, and his story has been proven false. Why is he any more believable in this instance?

That's the thing, though. If Dundee had accused Liston of cheating, the very same people who now cite him as support would instead bring up his tall tale about Ali's glove to dismiss him. And the other side would readily accept him as credible.

It was a brief going-over of Liston's gloves that couldn't have lasted more than minute. Doesn't mean there wasn't something elsewhere on Liston's person, or that Liston's handlers didn't manage to rinse it off, or anything. And good luck getting a referee to admit that he lost control of a fight.

How would Dundee or Ali have contested the ref's finding in the moment? Walk out of the ring? They were challengers in a world title fight. Good luck ever getting another shot if you do that. Ali himself still believed that Liston or his people had done something to blind him days after the fight, when he'd already won and it hardly mattered anyway.

If you're going to set the burden of proof to be "real time" and "on-the-spot," of course the evidence is going to favor that Liston's side didn't do anything. You're not going to find newspaper quotes from his corner saying, "Yeah, we cheated. Can't believe Liston managed to blow it anyway." I don't claim to know what actually happened that night, or to really have an opinion either way, but the idea that citing a line or two from different newspaper articles debunks or proves anything is dubious to me.

 

Was waiting for you to show up lol

 

No, no no. You are confusing The Ultimate Warrior with Liston. I think that happened at Wrestlemania 7. And then logan paul tried it when he fought some guy but I can't remember that guy's name.

 

Several fighters have complained this and I’ve seen a lot of talk about this over the years but was this actually ever proven?

Liston has become a more beloved fighter over the years but shouldn’t something like this affect his legacy?

 

The key issue isn’t merely that the “hot gloves” allegations surfaced decades later — it’s that they were attributed to a secondary source who had conveniently already passed away. Even if the timing would still be questionable coming from a primary source, that’s a far cry from “this dead guy supposedly confessed this to me years ago and I’m only mentioning it now.” As for Dundee's comments, being decades later, here's a press report after the fight. "Angelo Dundee acknowledged has asked the referee to check Liston's gloves but was inclined to regard the entire thing as an unfortunate accident. "I don't think there was any mish-mash," Dundee said. Unfortunate Thing "I honestly feel nothing was wrong. Just an unfortunate thing. I know those guys. They wouldn't pull such stuff It might have been sweat or it might have come from dirt on Liston's glove"

https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-beaumont-enterprise/198156718/

And what exactly would Dundee’s incentive have been to downplay cheating if he truly believed Liston intentionally blinded Ali? If anything, it would’ve enhanced Ali’s legend to say his fighter overcame dirty tactics from the heavyweight champion.

As for the glove inspection, this idea that liniment or Monsel’s solution could’ve been secretly applied and gone unnoticed doesn’t make much sense. Liniment has an overwhelmingly strong odor that would’ve been immediately obvious to the referee, the commission, and everyone ringside. Monsel’s solution would’ve left a visible stain on the gloves. These aren’t invisible substances.

The “the referee would cover for himself” argument is weak. If he had found something illegal, disqualifying Liston wouldn’t have embarrassed him — it would’ve reinforced his authority. He was known as a no-nonsense referee, not someone afraid to act.

Ali himself was conflicted afterward and admitted he didn’t know whether anything had actually been on Liston’s gloves. That uncertainty matters, because if substances like liniment or Monsel’s solution had really been involved, there likely wouldn’t have been much ambiguity about it at all. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-beaumont-enterprise/198224434/

At the end of the day, the reason the evidence favors “nothing happened” isn’t because the burden of proof is impossibly high. It’s because there’s no physical evidence, no contemporaneous confirmation, no referee finding, no commission finding, no visible residue, no detectable smell, and no account that survives more than mild scrutiny without collapsing into speculation or retrospective storytelling.

This isn’t really “impartial” analysis so much as selective skepticism dressed up as neutrality. You’re claiming to be “on the fence,” yet you’re constantly reaching for hypotheticals that keep the possibility of wrongdoing alive — even when there’s no physical evidence supporting it — while simultaneously minimizing the much more straightforward indicators that nothing improper was found.

Every time the evidence points toward nothing being found — referee inspection, lack of odor or staining, absence of immediate protest, and even Ali’s own uncertainty — it gets softened or reinterpreted to keep the door open for wrongdoing. Meanwhile, every hypothetical that preserves the cheating theory gets elevated as if it meaningfully balances things out.

That’s the contradiction: presenting yourself as neutral while systematically privileging one side of uncertainty. Real impartiality would mean giving proportionate weight to what is actually evidenced, not continually stretching for ways to keep a discredited possibility alive.

 

Viva La Raza!

 

The evidence is the man running around blind for a round.

Something extraordinary happened that night. I don't know what it was. I can think of no other fight in which a boxer's vision was impeded to that extent, so a benign explanation like tears or dirt getting in his eyes or something doesn't explain it, unless Ali was a hysterical hypochondriac. That doesn't mean that Liston's camp must have cheated, but that would sure help explain it if he did.

I never used the word "impartial" or the phrase "on the fence." That's not how quotation marks work. I said that I didn't know what happened. That's still true.

The newspaper tag game doesn't really work here, because, again, Liston's side is not going to offer quotes that they cheated either way. Writers claiming to have been told something by a dead cornerman isn't stone cold proof of anything, but if I were going to reveal a dark secret that someone told me once, I'd probably wait until they were dead, too, just to avoid getting them in any trouble. I fail to see how Dundee spitballing a possible answer is more convincing. After Liston's side, the most credible sources are Ali himself, because it happened to him, and the referee, because he inspected Liston's gloves. Ali thought they cheated. The referee didn't. That the referee didn't find anything IS solid evidence, more than these Dundee quotes that you keep dragging into the discussion. It's what makes this an enduring mystery, because it makes the easiest answer a lot less likely.

 

Dundee stated he rubbed Ali’s eyes and rubbed his own and his eyes began to burn.

 

Ok.
Why was Ali unable to see for that entire round? Clearly there was a substance in his eyes that was affecting him. That doesn't happen all that much.

 

I'm a Liston fan. I know some of the things he went through in his life. He probably deserves to be on a postage stamp for achieving what he did. His upbringing was so horrid it reads like the making of a serial killer.
He managed to win the heavyweight championship instead.

With that said I dont think Sonny was above bending the rules. I don't know that he was involved with it. He might have just been fighting and somebody in his corner did it.
Its good to see fans defending Sonny. I wish some of them would give the same energy to Aaron Pryor.
Sonny was as much sinned against as he was a sinner.

 

He didn't rub **** into Ali's eyes, stop talking crap.

 

Show me the source of that.

 

I've seen that somewhere. It doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't accidental as has been cited to Dundee as well.