Most controversial fight, phantom punch or ear bite?

Was the timekeeper's name Drew Brown?

 

Well Fergy the first thing that Ali did when Liston went down was stand over him gesturing and shouting for him to get up!
That's how confident he was that it had been a legitimate punch!

 

The Phantom "Punch"....without a doubt. After it happened up in Maine in May 1965...there were cries of "fix...fix!!
They had a thing on Wide World Of Sports with Howard Cosell...Bill Heinz....Jimmy Cannon....Jack Dempsey....and Rocky Marciano.Cannon said that the punch couldn't have squashed a grape.....he didn't like the people that were involved with the fight...Rocky said that Ali was moving back...and was in no position to throw a hard punch...they all thought that it "stunk". Tyson and the ear thing was just a bully's way to get DQ'd...because he knew he was going to get his ass kicked by Holyfield. That was the easy way out!! The 2nd Liston/Clay fight by far! We're still talking about it...aren't we???

 

No fix.

Liston isn't the first person to get KO'd by a sharp power overhand right clean on the chin over a jab.
And he wasn't the last.

Watch Liston when he tries getting up. He sees Ali running towards him from the corner of his eye, so he goes down so that he can look at Ali and see what he is doing, presumably to defend himself. Liston might have thought that Ali was going to uppercut him on the way up, because in his mind why else is he charging at him? As soon as Ali goes away, Liston gets up.

Ali, privately, was confident it was a genuine KO victory.

 

Both were a shock. But in retrospect I am satisfied about both results. So for me, no controversy in either case.

The ear bite was the most shocking by far. Totally unexpected. It was a petulant act in order to gain a notoriety from the jaws of defeat. Tyson deliberately wanted to horrify his audience as much as retaliate to Evander cutting him up with his head. He was sending out a message. Tyson wasn't going out with his tail between his legs in getting stopped (in his mind, unfairly) on cuts without taking Holyfield with him.

The Liston debacle, no doubt shocking at the time, was simply a debacle. Ali, Walcott and old Nat screwed up the result between them. Horrible officiating. The fight was not thrown or a fix any more than Witherspoon or Douglas or Walcott or any number of champions blown out whilst offering lacklustre efforts.

 

I don't think Ali knew at all what was going on, he seemed as perplexed as anybody.

 

That fight was a total farce. Horrible officiating. Like a key stone cops movie. Liston never got a count. Time keeper didn't know what he was doing. Ref didn't know what he was doing. Ali made an absolute fool of himself in preventing a count. Liston did get up but was stopped before he got hurt all because Walcott was ordered to stop the fight by someone who's official capacity that night was mere ringsider.

The shame of it was Ali really looked on fire. He was surly going to dominate Sonny and beat him worse than the last time but we never got to see that. In my opinion the whole debacle prevented a special performance. It was the natural order of things.

Liston was in store for a horrible shellacking and he knew it.

 

I guess it's too late to have that fight null and void and be declared a no-contest?