I’m firmly in the camp that believes Muhammad Ali legitimately beat Sonny Liston twice. The second fight, in 1965, caused so much consternation because Ali scored his knockout on a so-called “phantom punch” (which was actually an anchor punch). Howard Cosell corralled Jack Dempsey, Rocky Marciano, and journalists Jimmy Cannon and W.C. Heinz to discuss the controversy.
Postscript: Marciano “fought” Ali four years later via computer, right before perishing in a plane crash. In 1968, Heinz co-wrote the novel M*A*S*H under the pseudonym “Richard Hooker.”
Jack Paar and Liberace welcome Cassius Clay, who was known to sometimes be gassy. The future heavyweight champion (and future Muhammad Ali) was three months from his first bout with Sonny Liston. From a PBS Paar doc.
The opening of The Devil and Sonny Liston, Nick Tosches beautiful, bruising biography of the boxer, who died young and mysteriously: “The corpse was rolled over and lay face down on the metal slab. It was then that the coroner saw them; the copper-colored whipping welts, old and faint, like one might imagine those of a driven slave.
To say that Charles Liston had been a slave would be to render cheap metaphor of the life of a man. And yet those scars on his back were as nothing to deeper scars, the kind that no coroner could ever see, scars of a darkness far less imaginable than those from any lash. Charles Liston, the most formidable of men, the most unconquerable of heavyweight boxers, had been enslaved by the forces of that darkness: enslaved, conquered, and killed by them.
Born with dead man’s eyes, he had passed from the darkness of those scars on his back to the darkness of the criminal underworld, to a darkness beyond, a darkness whose final form was the last thing he ever saw.”
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