Sonny Liston or Wladimir Klitschko who rates higher as a all time heavyweight?

You made me burst out laughing at work, *******.

 

Well, Wlad certainny had a better time "bursting" with experienced men like Rahman and Mercer than he did with a girl in her 20's like Penettiere

 

Too right mate !

 

Liston's feat of his removing 7 of the unfortunate Bethea's has been so accepted for a long time.I'm
not saying this is cast-iron evidence that it happened but it would be surprising ,that under the circumstances,
it was a myth.

 

I hear you, but there are other examples of old traditions that have been debunked on this very subforum. Unfortunately, boxing is a sport that likes yarns and folklore. Which is part of the fun, and kept Burt Sugar in business, but sometimes gets history wrong.

 

Bethea fought 22 times after that. Against Cleveland Williams, Karl Mildenberger, Eddie Machen, Henry Cooper, Ernie Terrell, Alex Miteff ... you'd think there would be one photo of him with missing teeth.

Losing seven teeth is like ALL the teeth in the front of your mouth. Where are all the TOOTHLESS Wayne Bethea photos?

You can certainly find picture of Leon Spinks with his front teeth missing.

Multiple reports don't confirm he had seven teeth knocked out. They just repeated the claim.

HUNDREDS (maybe thousands) of reports repeated the claim that there was a long time delay between rounds of the first Clay-Cooper fight while they found and replaced the split glove.

Dundee claimed it. Ali never denied it, even though the claim made him look like he needed saved.

The New York Times was still claiming that happened 10 years ago.

That didn't happen, either. The film confirmed it.

And, like the Clay-Cooper 1 fight, there's nothing in the film of Liston-Bethea showing a guy who lost SEVEN TEETH. Or any for that matter.

Tim Witherspoon got a tooth knocked out against Bonecrusher Smith and he kept spitting because of the blood in his mouth.

You lose seven teeth, your mouth is full of gore, you're spitting, your corner is concerned.

YOU and your corner aren't standing there yelling at the ref asking why he stopped it, right?

 

Um, yes.

A photo of Wayne Bethea with all the teeth in the front of his mouth missing would suffice.

He fought for many years and against a lot of big names after that.

A simple photo of a toothless Bethea would change my mind.

 

Side note: The Illinois State Athletic Commission wasn't the most above-board outfit in the 1950s during the Jim Norris/Frankie Carbo era.

Neither were fights at Chicago Stadium. Jim Norris owned Chicago Stadium. It was the site of many fixed and "rumored to have been fixed" fights. (Including Marciano-Walcott 2). Lots of articles were written about the Chicago Stadium and the questionable outcomes at that venue. It was home base for the mob-controlled fighters in that era.

The fact that Bethea's enraged managed claimed the ref was "in the bag" on a fight televised nationally, and fans watching it complained about the stoppage, the fighter complained about the stoppage, only for the manager to totally change his tune days later was par for the course.

Liston was being maneuvered to a title shot. He was a Carbo fighter. The stoppage looked questionable (for that era, where fights tended to go on longer). I'm not saying Liston didn't win the fight. He's much better than Bethea. Clearly.

But the claim that Bethea lost seven teeth seems way over the top in an attempt to silence detractors afterward.

The Kefauver Commission was about to gear up in a year or so and would soon run them all out of the sport.

Carmen Basilio hated fighting at Chicago Stadium, because so many fights weren't on the level there.

 

It's a little peculiar that some people will claim that one or both of the Ali bouts were fixed, while talking about Sonny's mob connections, but then look at the rest of Sonny's record and go, "Nah...that must've all been totally legit."

 

Actually, the burden of proof would be on those disputing Bethea's manager's claim.

 

Source?

No offense, but I'll take Bethea's manager, and the boxing commission, over a guy who thought Joshua was the best H2H fighter in history.

The poster you're replying to wasn't citing Liston's performance against Bethea as evidence he hit harder than Tyson or Foreman so I have no idea why you brought it up to him. He had SFA to do with that discussion. I've explained this to you countless times. Hopefully this time it'll get through to you but I doubt it.

 

Dundee lied and told the story about the glove delay In Clay-Cooper 1 until the day he died. And it wasn't true.

And the Illinois State Athletic Commission let one fixed fight after another go unchecked at Chicago Stadium that decade.

I've never seen a fighter get one tooth knocked out in a fight and whine about the stoppage, let alone seven.

Have you ever had seven teeth pulled let alone punched out of your skull on camera?

Are you standing there arguing with someone seconds later with no discernable injury on film?

The fight available. It doesn't corelate with what we can easily see.

And I've never seen a photo of Wayne Bethea with missing teeth. Let alone missing seven in the front of his face.

 

To be fair, on the last part, there's always the possibility of some sort of dental prosthetics or dentures if we're talking long after the fight.

 

Bethea had a solid post-Liston career as a trialhorse and even returned to the top 10 for a while in 1963, but he was never a celebrity so it's not surprising that the media weren't constantly printing pictures of him grinning for the cameras.

The fundamental difference between this and the Ali/Cooper issue - apart from the mountain of evidence which positively disproves that claim - is that no one started saying Ali received significant extra time to recover until years later.

This was what you originally stated about Liston - Bethea. As you put it: "It went from his gums were bleeding to … 60+ years later … he got seven teeth knocked out with one punch." I've shown you that's not true, and that multiple contemporary reports mention Bethea's lost teeth. You're just so determined not to acknowledge this fairly trivial error that you've concocted this conspiracy theory where Bethea's manager and the Illinois commission both lied about it as part of a plot to make Liston look good.