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

It is feeling eerily cold for a summer's night. :?

I'm already being haunted by that photo of Benny Lynch ...... and now this .....

:yikes

 

.... now look who's throwing Phantom punches.

 

Yep, that's where I am.

Gallender. He has an article up on Boxing.com now saying that the mystery is solved. I read through it quickly and saw a lot of theory passed off as fact and no evidence. That's irresponsible.

Is he chirping about Liston's being born before 1930? I hope not. That would suggest incompetence as a researcher -the US Census reports for 1930 and 1940 are now available and guess what: Sonny was not listed in the Liston household in 1930. He is in the 1940 though. That ought to be common knowledge by now.

 

As flash knock downs go, there was nothing wrong with the knockdown itself. Sonny went down from a punch that landed, even if he was off balance, the punch put him over and that would be a knockdown.


Taken from mcveys post:

"The time keeper and Fleischer were 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. "


Because Sonny NEVER GOT A COUNT we will never know if Liston intended to stay down. He was obliged to wait for a count while Walcott got Ali away from him and over to a neutral corner.

Bottom line?

Bad officiating prevented us ever knowing what that fight was.

 

I don't know when Liston was born, but the US Census is not that reliable. It's full of gaps.
I've done some work with the 1930 and 1940 Census and several members of my family are not in it, even though I know how old they were and where they lived at the times.

 

Liston was born between 1930 and 1932. Officially he looked "about" 10 years old in 1940 because that's how it went into the census. He was proberbly big for his age and could have been younger. There is no set height for ten year old children. His poor mother had so many kids nobody knew for sure. When you are on a farm between the wars where nobody goes to school, nobody follows the news I imagine one year is like the next. You were old enough to work or you wasn't. That was all that counted then.

 

On the US Census.

Being totally missed seems very possible, but if Liston is listed as ten or so in the 1940 census it makes it very hard to believe he was actually in his twenties, especially when the "evidence" offered for him being that old is so weak.

*Just my own reaction off the boxing films from the late fifties, and other you tube videos like his commercial with Warhol--a 1930-1932 date seems about right given his appearance on these films.

 

Some of the early boxing photos of Sonny he looks quite young, at least a lot younger than he looked in the mid 1960s. I think what ever his name the man who became Sonny Liston aged quite a lot over the years he was photographed as a boxer. If he was born in 1917 he would not have looked so young in the beginning. He would have started out looking as old as George Foreman did at the start if his second career. That was not the case in my view

http://i8.tinypic.com/25ss7qb.jpg

 

Does that make sense?
If Charles "Sonny" (the boxer) stole the identity of a younger brother called Charles, the motive cannot be to appear older.

 

A lot of what I've heard him say about these fights fits in to that category. He has some hearsay stories which he puts out as proof, and dismisses the alternative versions - some of which are based on better evidence, imo.

Some of his alleged witnesses (eg. Ash Resnick) are suspects in other versions and theories of the two fights. Rightly of wrongly, but it should be something to consider.

He's yet to explain how his theory is any better.

But now this guy has gone and proved himself an idiot .... or a joker who likes creating fictions ..... or at the very least an individual with no concept of scientific skepticism or faculty for critical thinking.

He's gone so far off the deep end now that I actually feel bad about pointing it out like that.

 

So, which one was the boxer ?

 

OK. That guy was born in 1925 but pretended to be his younger brother?