No one thinks the “phantom punch” is real…right?

A person can be kind around family and children and a lot of other things — murderer even. That bit of biased information from his own wife doesn’t mean he wasn’t a bully; it doesn’t mean he wasn’t a guy who would quit … in fact, he quit in the first fight on his stool when it wasn’t going his way.

So to me in the second fight he got hit, he went down and he decided he didn’t want any more because he realized he wasn’t going to do anything but take a beating.

As for not being good in social situations, he ended up in prison and in legal trouble in front of judges many times. That wasn’t because he didn’t know how to greet someone or which fork to use at the dinner table — Sonny was a thug for a good bit of his life. There’s plenty of evidence to support that.

 

FYI the referee was Jersey Joe Walcott. Who was badly badly badly over his head.

 

You didn't merely ask for a source. The tone of your questioning suggested I made it up, " Do you have a source??? I never heard that before." And Ali didn't have to cheat to beat Liston.

 

He quit to save himself from getting embarrassed and lumped up. It foreshadowed the "No mas" fight. As long as Ali and Leonard were fighting their fights there wasn't much Liston and Duran could do

 

https://vault.si.com/vault/1965/06/07/muhammad-ali-sonny-liston-second-fight

 

Is this how toy simply ask for a source:

• Source??? Iv never heard ANYTHING of this.

And Ali would have beat any iteration of Sonny Liston. He proved it when he knocked out George Foreman when Foreman was young and in his prime and he was past it.

 

If you really believe that there is nothing I can do to disabuse you of that notion. In the real world they fought twice and Ali made him quit twice.

 

Let’s just say it wasn’t one of Sonny’s finer moments and let it go at that.

And I didn’t mean for my moral compass comments to seem insulting to the man. I’m aware that he could be kind to children. He was famously very kind on this very night in question to Floyd Patterson, who he had about killed twice, who tried to console him.

I do still think he never probably had a moral compass, given the stories … and they are just that … of stuff he might have been involved in right before his death.

But let me offer this from another sport. A book came out a few years ago called The Baseball 100, by a noted baseball analyst named Joe Posnaski. It’s a collection of essays on the people he thinks were the 100 best players of all time.

On the list of course is a guy named Tris Speaker, one of the greatest center fielders who ever put on a glove. Speaker also was a virulent racist and a member, it’s documented, of the Ku Klux Klan.

He was working for the Cleveland Indians … he spent his greatest years with them … in 1948 when Larry Doby became the first Black player in the American League. You would think Speaker would have shown his arse and caused trouble. He didn’t. He saw something in Doby that caught his eye, they connected and Speaker literally spent hours working individually with Doby, helping him polish his skills, and from all indications took great pride and satisfaction in doing so.

Doby wound up in the Hall of Fame, and until the day he died expressed gratitude for what this virulent racist and KKK member … who knows if his heart ever changed … did for him and meant to him.

I bring this up in the context of Sonny Liston because of a quote Posnaski related from Buck O’Neill regarding that situation. Baseball fans will know immediately who I’m talking about; the rest of you can look it up.

“People aren’t just one thing.”