Paul Gallender lays Ali-Liston II at the doors of the Nation of Islam

Yeah, in a way they complement each other.

 

I agree. Steens book is better but neither book is for the boxing aficionado. Intresting for people not too much into the wider history of boxing. I think the best work will be when apollack or somebody like him gets round to it.

 

Thing is .....

... Paul Gallender has a lady friend medium called Josie Roase who talks with Sonny Liston "on the other side".

Apparently, Sonny Liston is "collaborating" with this Josie in writing two books, one about "healing in the afterlife" and another book which is a 'posthoumous autobiography' which is similar to Paul Gallender's book but in Sonny's own voice and vernacular.


I don't want to be judgmental, but ........

 

... he's a f*cking crack pot.

 

... or just gullible.

 

Two days before the fight, two Muslims visited Sonny and threatened to kill him if he didn’t lose the bout. Things were getting worse for the ex-champ, but the worst was yet to come.

The fight’s security force of 300 represented one lawman for approximately every eight paying customers. “I don’t want Lewiston to go down in history as the place where the heavyweight champion was killed,” said the city’s Chief of Police


Has anyone actually pointed out exactly " who " these two muslims were? Only I find it hard to believe that someone as naturally violent ( out of the ring ) as Sonny would be intimidated. Rather I'd have thought that the two mugs would have been brutalised.

 

Yeah, from what I've heard about Sonny Liston he wouldn't have taken kindly to that kind of ****. He was known to smack people. He did some time for beating up an armed cop, broke his leg, threw him in a trash can.
And only two muslims?

 

The timekeeper counted Liston out , Walcott said he did not see him signalling to him.The blame that is heaped on Nat Fleischer for supposedly stopping the fight whlie unauthorised to do so is bull**** he merely caught Walcott's attention and told him that the time keeper ,whom he was sitting next to had counted Sonny out. The Maine rules allowed for the timekeeper to stop the count in the event that the standing fighter did not go to a neutral corner. They were not applied.

"The atmosphere surrounding the fight was tense and sometimes ugly, largely due to the repercussions of Ali's public embrace of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. Malcolm X, who had a public and bitter falling out with Elijah Muhammad, had been assassinated several months before the fight, and the men arrested for the slaying were members of the Nation of Islam. Rumors circulated that Ali, who had publicly snubbed Malcolm after his break with Elijah Muhammad, might be killed by Malcolm's supporters in retaliation. The FBI took the threats seriously enough to post a 12-man, 24-hour guard around Ali. Liston's camp, in turn, claimed he had received a death threat from the Nation of Islam. The Fruit of Islam—the omnipresent, bow-tied paramilitary wing of the Nation of Islam—surrounding Ali only added to the sense of foreboding and hostility. Security for the fight was, for that time, unprecedented.
Due to the remote location and the fear of violence, only 2,434 fans were present in the 4,900-seat arena, setting the all-time record for the lowest attendance for a heavyweight championship fight. "
The Fight

"The ending of the second Ali-Liston fight remains one of the most controversial in boxing history. Midway through the first round, Liston threw a left jab and Ali went over it with a fast right, knocking the former champion down. Liston went down on his back. He rolled over, got to his right knee and then fell on his back again. Many in attendance did not see Ali deliver the punch. The fight quickly descended into chaos. Referee Jersey Joe Walcott, a former World Heavyweight Champion himself, had a hard time getting Ali to go to a neutral corner. Ali initially stood over his fallen opponent, gesturing and yelling at him, "Get up and fight, sucker!"
When Walcott got back to Liston and looked at the knockdown timekeeper, Francis McDonough, to pick up the count, Liston had fallen back on the canvas. Walcott never did pick up the count. He said he could not hear McDonough, who did not have a microphone. Also, McDonough did not bang on the canvas or motion a number count with his fingers. McDonough, however, claimed Walcott was looking at the crowd and never at him. After Liston arose, Walcott wiped off his gloves. He then left the fighters to go over to the McDonough. "The timekeeper was waving both hands and saying, 'I counted him out—the fight is over,'" Walcott said after the fight. "Nat Fleischer (editor of The Ring) was seating beside McDonough and he was waving his hands, too, saying it was over." Walcott then rushed back to the fighters, who had resumed boxing, and stopped the fight—awarding Ali a first-round knockout victory. The official time of the stoppage was announced as 1:00 into the first round, which was wrong. Liston went down at 1:44, got up at 1:56, and Walcott stopped the fight at 2:12.
McDonough and Fleischer were also wrong in their interpretation of how the rules applied. Under the rules, the timekeeper is supposed to start the count at the time of a knockdown. The referee's duty is to get the boxer scoring the knockdown to a neutral corner, pick up the count from the timekeeper and continue it aloud for the knocked down boxer. Under the rules of the Maine Commission, the referee was authorized to stop his count if a boxer refused to go to the proper corner. "It might have been better if Walcott had stopped the count (by the knockdown timekeeper) until Clay went to the neutral corner and then started again," said Duncan MacDonald, a commission member.
"I did my job," Walcott said. "He (Ali) looked like a man in a different world. I didn't know what he might do. I thought he might stomp him or pick him up and belt him again."
"If that bum Clay had gone to a neutral corner instead of running around like a maniac, all the trouble would have been avoided," McDonough said. He acknowledged that Walcott could have asked him to start the count again "after he got that wild man—Clay—back to a neutral corner, but he didn't, so that was that."
Post-Fight Reactions

When the fight ended, numerous fans booed and started yelling, "Fix!" Skeptics called the knockout blow "the phantom punch." Ali called it "the anchor punch." He said it was taught to him by comedian and film actor Stepin Fetchit, who learned it from Jack Johnson. In the ring after the fight, Ali told closed circuit commentator Steve Ellis: "Didn't I tell the world that I had a surprise and if I told you the surprise, you would not come to the fight." However, Ali was unsure immediately after the fight as to whether or not the punch connected, as footage from the event shows Ali in the ring asking his entourage, "Did I hit him?" Ali told Nation of Islam minister Abdul Rahman that Liston "laid down" and Rahman replied, "No, you hit him." Rahman later said, "Ali hit him so fast, Ali didn't really know he hit him....and It took a long time before even he saw the punch he hit Sonny with."
Years later, Ali told biographer Thomas Hauser: "The punch jarred him. It was a good punch, but I didn't think I hit him so hard he couldn't get up."
"It was a good right-hand punch," Liston said after the fight. "It made me groggy. I got to my knees but fell the second time because I was off balance....I could have got up, but I didn't hear the count."
After the fight, George Chuvalo climbed through the ropes and shoved Ali, yelling, "Fix!" He was restrained, but later he said that he had seen Liston's eyes while the challenger was on the floor, and he knew that he was not in bad shape. "His eyes were darting from side to side like this," he said, darting his eyes from side to side. "When a fighter is hurt his eyes roll up." However, Dr. Carroll L. Witten, former Kentucky State Boxing Commissioner, who had studied the reactions of knocked out fighters, said, "Chuvalo is wrong. The side-to-side movement of eyes is commonly associated with temporary unconsciousness and is one of the first things you look for. It is called nystagmus."
There were some at ringside who believed the fight was legitimate. World Light Heavyweight Champion Jose Torres said, "It was a perfect punch." Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times wrote that it was "no phantom punch." And Tex Maule of Sports Illustrated wrote, "The blow had so much force it lifted Liston's left foot, upon which most of his weight was resting, well off the canvas."
Hall of Fame announcer Don Dunphy was one of many who didn't believe the fight was on the level. "If that was a punch, I'll eat it," he said. "Here was a guy who was in prison and the guards use to beat him over the head with clubs and couldn't knock him down." But others contend that he wasn't the same Liston. Dave Anderson of the New York Times said Liston "looked awful" in his last workout before the fight. Liston's handlers secretly paid sparring partner Amos Lincoln an extra $100 to take it easy on him. Arthur Daley of the New York Times wrote that Liston's handlers knew he "didn't have it anymore."
One ringside observer, former World Heavyweight Champion James J. Braddock, said the suspect Ali right hand merely finished up what an earlier punch had begun. "I have a feeling that this guy (Ali) is a lot better than any of us gave him credit for," Braddock said. "It isn't the knockout punch that sticks in my mind as much as a punch he let go (earlier)....It was a right to Liston's jaw and it shook him to his shoetops. For all we know, it could have been the one that set up the knockout."
Another former champion, Rocky Marciano, changed his view about the knockout punch after seeing videotape the next day. "I didn't think it was a powerful punch when I saw the fight from ringside," Marciano said. "Now (after seeing video) I think Clay, seeing the opening, snapped the punch the last six inches."
Dave Anderson said he saw Liston in Las Vegas in 1967 and asked him what happened. "It wasn't that hard a punch, but it partially caught me off balance and when I got knocked down, I got mixed up because the referee never gave me a count," Liston said. "I was listening for a count. That's the first thing you do, but I never heard a count because Clay never went to a neutral corner."
Jerry Izenberg of the Newark Star-Ledger said Liston told him that he lost simply because "the timekeeper couldn't count."
Mark Kram of Sports Illustrated said Liston told him: "That guy (Ali) was crazy. I didn't want anything to do with him. And the Muslims were coming up. Who needed that? So I went down. I wasn't hit."

 

During a 1995 HBO documentary about Liston, trainer Johnny Tocco, who owned a boxing gym in Las Vegas, said he spoke with mobster John Vitale before the rematch and was told not to pay any attention to what he heard about the fight. He also told Tocco that he should be glad that he wasn't going to Lewiston. When Tocco asked why, Vitale told him that the fight was going to end in the first round.

During the same documentary, former FBI agent William F. Roemer Jr. said, "We learned that there very definitely had been a fix in that fight." He said Bernie Glickman, a boxing manager from Chicago with mob ties, claimed that while he was conversing with Liston and his wife before the fight, Liston's wife told the ex-champion that as long as he had to loss the fight, he should go down early to avoid any chance of getting hurt.

In the wake of the controversial fight, there was an outcry by press and politicians for the abolition of boxing. Bills to ban the sport were planned in several state legislatures.

A promoter in San Antonio apologized to his theater TV customers and, on the basis that they had been defrauded by a "shameful spectacle," donated his take to boys' clubs. The California legislature, in session, received a resolution calling for an investigation by the state attorney general to determine if its closed-circuit viewers had been fraudulently duped out of their money.

For those who believe that Liston took a dive, there are a number of theories as to why, including: (1) The Mafia forced Liston to throw the fight as part of a betting coup. (2) Liston bet against himself and took a dive because he owed money to the Mafia. (3) A couple of members of the Nation of Islam visited Liston's training camp and told Liston they would kill him if he won the rematch. (4) Author Paul Gallender claims that members of the Nation of Islam kidnapped Liston's wife, Geraldine, and his son, Bobby. Liston was told to lose the fight to Ali or he would never see his family again. (5) Liston was afraid that he would be accidentally shot by followers of Malcolm X as they tried to kill Ali in the ring.

What really happened that day in Lewiston, Maine, is still debated to this day.

 

Truly.
I feel a bit sorry for Gallender now, having listen to this.

[yt]RwMZZl_AWFU[/yt]

Go to 20:40

 

Whatever the reason, it's painfully obvious it was a dive. We've all seen hundreds of KO's here, and fighter's reactions to being hit hard. That's not how it goes. He tanked it for sure.

 

:rofl