Ali vs Liston II 60 year anniversary

Very controversial.

Here is what i think happened.

In the first fight, Liston attacked Ali with everything. Liston threw HUGE lunging left hooks at Ali and Ali's remarkable footwork and reflexes allowed him to dodge those hooks. However, some of Liston's huge hooks in the first fight missed Ali by only a couple of inches. It was clear that Ali had enormous respect for Liston's power so the kind of hook that Cooper landed wasn't going to land vs Liston since Ali respected Liston a lot more than Cooper.

If the first fight was fixed, why was Liston lunging at Ali with such huge left hooks? How could Liston have known that one of those huge hooks wasn't going to connect on Ali and knock him down the way Cooper did? Liston would have to be the greatest actor of all time to miss those hooks by a couple of inches over and over again. Not to mention Liston landed some brutal body shots on Ali in the 3rd and 4th rounds and those body shots would have badly hurt or even knocked down a lot of heavies. Ali just had an unusual resistance to body shots that surely Liston could not have predicted.

Ali made Liston miss huge shots like no one else could. Additionally, Ali was a highly underrated puncher and had amazing combination punching ability. Ali's combinations had hurt Liston as early as round 1. Liston's energy was drained from getting hit by huge combinations plus missing big shots of his own. He realized he couldn't win and decided to call it a day. No fix for me. Its very clear what happened the first time around.

In this second fight, Ali appeared even more confident than the first time around. I believe Liston came to win but within the first 20 seconds, Liston realized that this guy is way too fast. Ali landed a very fast right hand that knocked Liston down. Liston realized that he was going to get another beating and he decided to stay down.

Just my two cents.

 

He might've quit that night because of the improbability that he has to beat Ali,or it might've been that his body was too rusty to move after that,thus he stayed down.

 

Well, tbf he did get up — I can’t say he beat the count by the supremely incompetent Jersey Joe Walcott, who then called off the fight after it resumed because a sports writer told him to, because I don’t think Joe ever started counting.

Joe seemed willing to let it go on before he was told not to.

The knockdown was real. Sonny made a business decision that he knew this was hopeless so he didn’t want to take a beating, so he rolled over as if more hurt than stunned, which is what he was. He paid a price for quitting a second time in a world title fight, but history seems to have forgiven him … if it happened today, same people who defend Sonny or stick up for him would want him banished for quitting like that.

Somehow, Joe ended up being a commissioner in one of the more powerful states in boxing, his home state of New Jersey, after this.

 

My question has always been: Who would pay off or bother to scare off Sonny Liston enough so he would take a dive in the second fight when it was obvious from the first fight that Sonny could not beat Muhammad Ali?

 

I don’t believe he took a dive, per se, but decided to bail early realizing he was probably going to take a beating and feeling he couldn’t deal with Ali’s speed.

But the answer to the question of who would pay/entice Sonny to take a dive, the answer would be gambling interests who wanted a sure thing and not just a ‘I really think Ali will win again’ gamble.

 

Imo Ali was solely to blame for the initial chaos and Walcott’s ineptitude was to blame thereafter.

From the time Ali did finally retreat to his corner up until Liston’s arising, less than 10 secs had passed, - and we know Jersey Joe didn’t apply a count at any stage anyway.

Aside from any speculation that Liston took a dive, Sonny was an absolutely innocent player during all the commotion.

 

I cannot visualize a way that Sonny Liston defeats Muhammad Ali in that fight aside from something similar to a falling object landing on Ali's head and knocking him unconscious at the same time that Sonny is landing some sort of punch and nobody notices the impact from above so they count Muhammad out and then raise Liston's hand in victory.

And that was some sentence I just typed out there. And no punctuation until the end, too. Top that!

 

60 years have passed since this fight.
Damn!
Time is a killer.

 

This.

 

For me Liston was underdone and overconfident in the first and Ali was too good at their career points anyway. He took a dive in the rematch for mine. All that rolling around the floor would be flat out convincing Stevie Wonder.

 

Even though some will say Ali hadn’t quite hit prime for the first Liston fight, I think the respect for Liston that you alluded to and the incredible adrenaline Ali took into the fight lent to one of his greatest performances ever.

Aside from his extraordinary natural gifts I saw Ali employ perhaps his greatest measure of conventional boxing and text book punching - again, that probably came back to the highest respect Ali had for the opponent at hand.

I read somewhere in which Dundee noted the visible, heavy welts on Ali’s body from the body punches Liston landed - one such punch that announcer Steve Ellis called a “heavy shot dug under the heart” was clearly audible.

Liston certainly tried in fight 1 but his complacency, advancing age and lack of preparedness for a wunderkind like Ali did him no favours - nor did the relatively few rounds Sonny had fought over the last few years.

As to power, it was after fight 1 I think when Liston said “They told me he couldn’t punch” so as to say that Liston def. felt the power in Ali’s shots and Sonny was visibly wobbled in round 3 or 4 by a sizzling Ali combo, forcing Liston back to the ropes.

 

I was very young but I remember looking at one of my older brothers boxing magazines, it was probably a few years old but not many at the time, and it was celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Johnson - Jeffries fight which seemed like eons ago. Now that’s scary.

 

GREAT synopsis! I think Sonny came into that 1st Ali fight WAYYY overconfident. He hardly trained for it--and he probably thought all he'd have to do was give Ali his trademark killer death stare and he'd faint before the opening bell! No way was he prepared for Ali's speed, reflexes, and razor sharp punches.

In the rematch-Ali lands a good, clean shot--but no way was that enough to KO Sonny. I think he knew he had no chance so why not tank it rather than risk getting a worse beating than what he absorbed in their 1st fight.

 

The rumors were circulating abundantly at the time that the fix was in so much so that Ali had heard them as well, when Liston went down Ali screamed for him to get up cause ain't nobody gonna believe this sh#t,,, he knew what was going on.