What did Liston expect ? Ali to be slower than last time ? The few seconds the fight lasted was no different from the beginning of the first fight, and Ali didn't keep that footspeed up at quite that pace for more than a couple of rounds. I know Liston quit pathetically in the first fight but if the "quit-because-he-realized-he-couldn't-win theory" for the second fight is right then that's got to be the lamest and quickest quit job in history. I mean, that's quite a hasty assessment of his chances too. He might as well of quit at the weigh-in when he saw Ali still had two arms and two legs !
No one can take Sonny's throne. He's still sat in it complaining of a hurt shoulder. Gielgud, Olivier ......... Liston ?
Much like yourself, and most of the boxing world, I firmly believe that this was a quit job. Ali was no knockout artist, even when he nailed fighters with his very hardest of shots. In this particular case, he barely grazed Liston, and the man dropped suspiciously like a sack of potatoes. It was the worst attempt at faking a defeat that we've ever seen, except for perhaps Seldon vs Tyson. At least when Witherspoon threw his fight with Smith, he got up a few times before he was TKO'd. Withersoon is a much better shakespearian actor than Liston could ever hope to be.
As a matter of fact, yes. Seriously, ANYONE can end up having a lot of eye trouble later on in life. His vision was normal at the time of his reporting on this fight. :huh :nono
"that's got to be the lamest and quickest quit job in history." Who's disputing that? Liston either wouldn't or couldn't get up--either way he hit rock bottom.
Wasn't Liston in great shape for the second fight? Something seems to of happened last second that made him take the dive.
The story goes that he was but Ali got an injury and the fight was postponed. Liston was then unablr to get himself back into that top top shape.
I doubt it. I have read in several different places over the years that Sonny was so slow, that his manager had to pay his sparring partners to slow down just to give him confidence. His wife Nadine Liston, said that his shoulder was constantly sore, and that she was pressing heat on it nearly every single night. I think Liston was pretty much a shot fighter from 1965 onward.
Fogey.....yes, Jim Murray was a well known sportswriter and won many awards in his life. He was also known for looking on the brighter side of things and glorifying the spectacle, if you catch my drift. In the Lewiston farce, and it was a farce, it took a cynical, hard-boiled sportswriter to cut through all the french pastry and assorted other bull**** and sum up the affair with the "couldn't crush a grape comment." Besides, you haven't considered the fact that the "unsteady in his corner" stuff was just a continuation of the performance? I mean, if you have just tanked in front of many, would you hop, dance, and skip out of the ring, or would you want to appear a little unsteady? :hey
That was when he was playfighting, when he was serious he could punch through walls, that was how he first came to America in fact; took on some demolition contracts. Ali could punch reasonably hard, more often than not they were energy sapping hard straights than explosive power punches, but over a fight he could hurt you. But anyone who has seen that fight knows that it was a complete farce. From Liston picking the wrong punch to go down to, to his hammy acting, him getting up surveying the scene then going back down again and the fact that there was clearly nothing on the punch. That was a keep him honest punch, time him coming in then move out, not a knockout punch; that was not the intent and that was not the outcome.
Ali COULD punch. There's no doubt about there. He stunned iron chinned Foreman very early in their fight, had Frazier almost gone at times... He was a big guy and his power itself was decent... But coupled with his speed it was more than the sum of its parts.
Well, Cannon calling it a fix was, after all, swimming with the crowd. It did not take a very cynical or hard-boiled insight to come up with that interpretation. It was the interpretation of the majority and of the man in the street. Boxing was in a bad odour due to revelations of fixes in the past and being down on boxing was trendy. Banning boxing was one of the big liberal causes of the day. Many were looking for another scandal to lay at boxing's door. Murray was swimming against the tide in calling the fight legit. And we can not forget that the unpopularity of Ali's religious conversion might well have swayed the views of some old timers, such as Cannon, who were reluctant to give him any sort of credit. The idea that Ali was a "joke" as a fighter was held very dear by many WWII era reporters and took years to bury.