Cross, Tha Ali-Liston II fix was great because it allowed Leotis Martin the chance to prove that HE was the GREATEST heavyweight that ever lived-even better than Chuck Wepner!
Not sure if it was a fix, but Foreman losing against Briggs was a breath of fresh air. Briggs is bad but at least it opened the way to have a REAL heavyweight champion, not someone stripping the championship of all its dignity and true value. Foreman had been taking the title hostage for 3 goddamn years facing bums and jokes and struggling with them too. Paying the organisations to be allowed to fight those jokes.
If their first match was indeed fixed, then I wholly concur. If Liston had repelled Clay the way he did Patterson and Cleveland Williams, then the heavyweight division might have been moribund for years, and many of us may not have become boxing fans to begin with. (I don't remember even being aware of boxing before Ali.) Carnera/Sharkey II, if it was a fix (which I do not believe) resulted in the heavyweight championship finally coming out of mothballs for the first time in ten years, as Primo defended it three times in less than a year's span, the first HW titlist to do that in 20 years. Assuming Foreman was actually drugged in Kinshasa (and whether he was or wasn't, George simply was not going to win against that challenger in that venue), Ali's reacquisition of the title set the stage for the boxing renaissance which carried the sport for the next dozen years. (I consider this revival to have concluded with SRL/Hagler, and the end of the 15 round era.)
Wait, now. You concur. That Liston being forced to lose, and Ali being a patsy for that loss is a good thing? What a crock that is. There is no better way to dehumanise fighters than to fix.
I guess Escalera/Everett indirectly led to the brutal Arguello/Escalera battle... Maxie Rosenbloom and a few others helped out down on their luck fighters with their fixes, in a very tough economical era.
It was good that it made boxing bigger, but as a fan, come on...... Manilla was good but after that he kept ducking his mandatory all the time and fought jokes like Dunn, Evangelista etc instead... Foreman retired out of frustration, Ail kept the title away from mandatories for a long time and the fights were complete borefests. Not to mention his undeserved decision in the Norton and Young fights.
And both Ali and Liston were certainly dehumanised, weren't they? (Vilification and deification are dehumanizing sides of the same coin.) The sad fact of the matter is that many sports stars are indeed products, moneymaking commodities and symbols who get discarded when their lucrative usefulness has expired. What's good for boxing, or any business? Whatever generates attention or income for the enterprise. Boxing used to headline the front page of the New York Times, and champions appeared on the cover of Time and Life Magazines. Time issued reports of boxing outcomes on a weekly basis. Go to Yahoo News today, click Sports, and then click Boxing News, then you'll find a blank page more often than not, unless some sordid story of a scandalous nature is available to report. People used to watch boxers they felt strongly about, hoping to either see them win or lose. Now, the general public is indifferent to boxers and boxing, except for gadfly reformers who would either like to see it abolished, or subjected to federal oversight (which is stupidly ignorant when considering the internationality of the sport).
