did liston dive for clay

I've seen better acting in the WWF/WWE...

 

He took a dive, YES.
No doubts.

 

Ali was pretty shrewd like that.
Notice also in that first post fight interview, - if you've seen the original TV coverage - while they are talking and replaying the fight, you can hear Ali at one point shouting at his entourage "Don't say nothing, don't say nothing!", like he didn't trust his brother and people to say the right things , or that they might get picked up on the microphone saying something.
He had it covered, with his humour and jokes about being so fast. But his INSTANT reaction tells the true story. He KNEW he didn't hit Sonny hard enough.

 

Certaintly looks like one. Bad acting from Liston, and the punch truly doesn't look like a KO punch whether Liston saw it or not. Why did Sonny get up to continue though? Was it the confusion Ali caused, did he feel like he was on ground so long people would become suspicious?

 

Probably. If you take a dive and don't get given a count, and there's booing and ****, maybe you think "get up, and try again."
On the other hand, he had to get up sometime.

Joe Gans is believed to have dived against Terry McGovern, but, if I remember right, the old film shows him getting up a lot too. I guess there's no "textbook" on how to dive.

 

Could be a couple of reasons Liston got up:

1. He thought he was counted out.
2. He thought it was looking like an obvious fix.

 

Liston was down way too long. He said he stayed down whilst he waited for Ali to go to a corner. It does not explain everything but it is a point. Stay down until you get a count.

Why did Ali take so long to go to a damn corner? Without Ali behaving himself and going to a corner we can never know if Sonny wanted to be counted out because he never got a count.

I am not sure it was a fix. I think it is more a case of one fighter wanting to do his best, the other fighter not so keen to fight and the referee totaly losing control of the fight. Very poor handling of the fight. Genuine flash knockdown.

 

How do you know Walcott was in on it? What have you heard?

Apart from being terrible as a referee what did Joe do that could be seen as a reason to collaborate with a fix? He did not count. If he was in on it he would be much keener on counting to ten even if Ali was running around. Instead he followed Ali around.

 

I don't know if anyone else was in on it, but there's a whole lot of crooked guys in there.

Walcott, as much as he's a beloved character in boxing history, had some very dubious connections, such as his manager Felix Bocchiccio, a hoodlum who turned Walcott's career around in the 1940s, and later on Walcott ended up as the corrupt boxing commissioner of New Jersey in the 1980s. The Liston-Ali debacle sits slap bang in the middle there.

 

Most champions had direct or indirect associations with hoodlums who had official or unofficial shares in them or their management. It was how it was. It won't make Walcott anymore crooked than any other champion.

 

1. Failure to disqualify Ali with more than sufficient grounds to do so.

2. Awarding the fight to Ali when he fully realized Liston had not been counted out.

Why he didn't count Liston out with Ali still hovering over him is anybody's guess. I believe he was taken by surprise by an earlier than scripted dive by Liston. Walcott's natural instinct was to get the opponent in a neutral corner. With a minute or so to think about it, he knew he has screwed up and stopped the fight.

 

I'm not saying it makes him more crooked at all.

Few champions have had such a drastic career turnaround and had it credited so much to them hooking up with a hoodlum manager though.

 

Oh, yes, I accept that. No doubt a lot of fighters owed a lot to their beneficiary. I just don't know how it proves Walcott was in on it.

Interestingly Walcott also had hisown one round loss as a rematch clause ex champion.

 

I can't remember a champion being disqualified for not going to a neutral corner.

I am not sure Awarding the fight to Ali in itself makes Walcott that guilty. He was very incompetent. He turned his back on the two of them when Ali went in to finish Liston. Fix or no fix that is an official no no. If he was going to award it to Ali anyway why did he leave the two of them unsupervised to talk to Fleischer?

To me the biggest mystery is not was it a fix but Why did Fleischer interfere? And Why didn't Ali go to a neutral corner?

Fleischer's interference and Walcotts incompetence were the biggest balls up in boxing history.

 

Let's focus on just one question about Walcott's behavior.

Why did he stop that fight knowing full well that Liston had not been counter out?
I believe the only possible answer was that Walcott was bought.
I don't buy the Fleischer excuse. Walcott knew more about the rules of boxing than Fleischer did.
Walcott knew he had never started a count on Liston. He knew it was not a knockout. Why did he stop the fight?