1949 article claiming Lowry took a dive against Marciano

Official Marcianista State Approved Propoganda

 

Oh that's okay then!

 

What is the"official version," care to share it with us?

 

49-0?

Marciano didn't always win!

Oh **** he actually did!

 

Anybody, at any time disputed this?

 

I don't know why it's so hard for some to believe that a seasoned old journeyman like Ted Lowry threw the fight with an up-and-coming Marciano.
Stuff like that happens all the time. These guys make a living testing young prospects and often they are told not to test them too hard, ie. "you can't win".

 

Whatever the consensus here, I don't see all that much credible evidence of a fix. Al Weill or Carbo pays Lowry to make Marciano look bad and then go the distance to lose a decision which this reporter is saying was undeserved? Taking this at face value, Weill not only had to get Lowry to tank it, but also the officials. All this to make his own fighter look bad? Why not pay Lowry to actually take a dive and make Marciano look good?

Parker escalates the fix talk, but off what he writes, he didn't see the fight. He seems to be going on what a correspondent told him. Who is this correspondent? It very possibly is Thomas, as Parker just seems to be regurgitating Thomas' take on the fight.

Lowry himself says he tried and won, but scored this fight the same as Thomas, 6-4, so fairly competitive. But perhaps a couple of those rounds Lowry gave to himself could have been scored for Marciano, and were by the officials.

What has to be explained? Really nothing. Lowry hit Marciano with his best shots in the early rounds and stunned him but couldn't finish him. Marciano came on in the late rounds. This is off Lowry's version. Well, Marciano taking a licking and keeping on ticking is what he did throughout his career. Thomas saw Lowry hit Marciano with punches which would have finished or at least slowed down an ordinary fighter. Thomas drew conclusions off what he would expect from an ordinary fighter. Marciano would never have gotten to the top if he didn't have a chin, durability, resilience, and stamina well above that of the ordinary heavyweight of his era.

I haven't seen a film, so like everyone else, I have to go off this one ringside report, but how can I judge how accurate it really is? Marciano in fact won a UD, so the bottom line is that the officials would have had to have been corrupt. Was Marciano's unbeaten record that important in 1949 to bribe officials?

A more likely explanation to me is that Thomas' take on the fight was just an outlier opinion.

But, as I said, w/o film who knows for certain. But I wouldn't draw sweeping conclusions about a fix or even a bad decision just off one reporter's opinion.

 

The young prospects always tend to get the benefit of the decision. Just a "hometown decision".
It doesn't mean the referee or judges are bribed. They just favour the fighter who the big promoters want to succeed. That tends to keep them employed.

The same with Lowry "throwing" the fight. He doesn't have to be bribed either, necessarily. At this stage of his career he probably knows his best way of making a living is not to upset the applecart by finishing off a young prospect.
It's okay now and then, but he knows to be a reliable loser against certain fighters. Whether they admit it or not.
Marciano's career was picking up at this point and Al Weill had hopes for him by this point and had already put him in a semi-final at "The Garden".

This stuff happens all the time in professional boxing.
It's just business.

 

There's a big difference between Lowry knowing a win, especially by KO, would make it harder to get fights, or judging bias towards the up and comer, and it being an out and out fix by the mafia.

I think the former is reasonable, but would need a hell of a lot more evidence to believe the latter.

 

Anyone who thinks Marciano wasnt owned and influenced by the mob obviously doesnt know jack **** about Al Weill. Thats not to say that the Lowry fight was fixed and maybe they didnt need to fix his fights for him and selectively match him but it takes a special kind of ignorance to say Marciano had no ties to the mob. And saying he hated the mob is a lot like that bull**** documentary a while back about Carmen Basilio "Fighting the Mob" pretending that Basilio was this righteous crusader going it alone against the mob controlled sport. Ha. Joe Netro and the DeJohn's were in the pocket of Carbo and the IBC just like Al Weill was. They knew which side their bread was buttered on. You couldnt get big fights, title shots, bigger money, or TV dates without giving a piece of yourself to the mob. When the IBC took over boxing and ran a monopoly with the help of Carbo Marciano wouldnt have gotten a whiff of a title shot without being in bed with them and it didnt hurt that his manager was bought and paid for by both the IBC and the mob.

 

A fighter having to play ball with the mob in those days is like a fish having to play ball with water. There wasn't any choice.

But there is a difference between informed cynicism and what I would call crackpot cynicism in which everything is always a fix and nothing is on the level. I have heard this kind of thinking about almost everything, including even the NFL and NBA.

For me, a fix is simply not needed to explain what appears to have happened in this fight and seems unlikely from a balanced perspective. And the fall back position that Lowry could have won or even stopped Marciano but didn't because he knew where his bread was buttered also strikes me as an over the top stretch given the two men's entire careers.

 

I would agree with this. Its one thing to say that it was a bad decision, which it may well have been, its entirely another to claim Lowery purposely threw the fight. Particularly if the idea was that his motivation was that he would be frozen out of bigger fights etc. Lowery was what he was. He was a journeyman who lost about half of his fights. His career trajectory was never title bound and it didnt demonstrably change after the Marciano fight. He continued being an opponent for bigger names and reliably losing as often as he won. None of the fights appear to be "big money" fights and considering his career was winding down I dont see much opportunity for him to cash out. In fact, at the time, Marciano was a largely unknown New England clubfighter. His handlers may have had hopes of him developing into something but at this point the idea that they were scared that a Ted Lowery level fighter was going to derail this freight train on track to becoming the HW champion is an argument born out of hindsight and nothing that was actually happening on the ground at the time. Remember the context of the article that started this thread: Its late November 1949. Marciano is booked to fight a bum named Pat Richardson in his first Garden showcase on the undercard of Brion-LaStarza. Parker, who wasnt shy about his dislike of Weill and regularly wrote about Weill being the secret matchmaker for the Garden (It was a position Weill had held official previously and Parker was correct that he was still acting in that capacity unofficially which was a conflict of interest). Parker didnt like the idea that Weill could exert so much control and maneuver his fighters into the spotlight like what was obviously happening with Marciano. So its easy to see that he could have taken a bit of gossip or an unsubstantiated assumption and ran with it.

 

[url]http://boxrec.com/media/index.php/Rocky_Marciano_vs._Ted_Lowry_(1st_meeting)[/url]

Clearly Ted Lowry a 160 to 170 pound guy with a 70-68 record took a dive. The Mafia probably told him to carry Marciano and not knock him out. Which is why when he had Marciano hurt badly in the second, third, and forth rounds he didn't try to finish him. Yet these delusional Marciano fans still think this 5'10 180 pound glorified club fighter could beat the likes of Mike Tyson, Lennox Lewis, George Foreman, Riddick Bowe, Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko, Anthony Joshua, Ron Lyle, Razor Ruddocks, David Tua and the likes. All of these guys would of smashed Marciano out in less than 1 minute.

 

Without seeing a fight with my own eyes I don’t think it’s fair to call it a fix. That said up and coming fighters with the right management behind them almost always get the decision even to this day.

I can only go off of the opinion of my football coach’s son Matthew, who was at both Marciano-Lowry fights and said Lowry deserved the decision in the first fight and Jimmy Carter, who was very good friends with Lowry and Kid Gavilan and said Lowry and Gavilan were both extremely talented fighters that with better backing wouldn’t have been robbed as frequently as they were on the cards.

 

What were all of the times Gavilan was supposedly robbed? I can think of three with a fourth being possible: Felton, Waterman and Saxton were considered robberies. Villemain may have been a robbery but given Villemains size, strength, durability, and style I could see that being an issue for Gavilan and causing a close fight in French Canada no less. The Waterman fight was in England so you cant really blame that on the mob and the Saxton fight was so dull that it could have gone either way whether it was fixed or not. A lot of people thought Gavilan was throwing fights but I dont buy it. You can see that later in his career he was losing a step which allowed younger fighters to beat him on activity. He also got lucky in his fights with Basilio and Graham and Ike Williams was approached about throwing a fight to Gavilan (which he refused to do and lost anyway) so Gavilan may have benefited as much as he was hurt by the corruption.