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Average Salary of Major League Baseball Players:

*Source: MLBPA

As for the players, well, they did okay. Ueberroth would have done a fine job as commissioner from the owners’ point of view—if they hadn’t gotten caught in the conspiracy. Look at how the average salary stayed roughly the same from 1985-1990 and then skyrocketed shortly after. In a legal, free enterprise system, those things can happen in a booming business like baseball.

CONCLUSION:

#4

Did Sonny Liston throw his fights against Muhammad Ali?

There were just too many crazy things going on the world at the time the young, brash Muhammad Ali fought Sonny Liston—twice—in the mid-1960s (the first time fighting under his birth name, Cassius Clay). And all sorts of conspiracy theories have been bandied about over the pair of fights throughout the years. Some have involved mobsters making millions from betting against Liston. Others involved Black Muslims threatening Liston’s life. Some have the organized crime figures of Liston’s entourage conspiring with the Black Muslims from Ali’s camp. But before we can examine these various conspiracy theories, it’s important to go back and recognize the time and place that the fights took place.

The first fight was held on February 25, 1964. Sonny Liston was the world heavyweight champion at the time, and had been so since defeating Floyd Patterson in September of 1962. Cassius Clay had won an Olympic gold medal as a light heavyweight for the United States in 1960 and became known as a brash young boxer with a penchant for predicting the outcome of his fights.

According to Jose Torres’ 1971 book Sting like a Bee: The Muhammad Ali Story, Clay began his string of predictions after watching Gorgeous George, the great wrestler, in a fight. Clay said, “I hear this white fellow say, ‘I am the world’s greatest wrestler. I cannot be defeated. I am the Greatest. I am the King.... When he was in the ring, everybody booed, booed. And I was mad. And I looked around and I saw everybody was mad. I saw 15,000 people coming to see this man get beat. And his talking did it. And, I said, this is a g-o-o-o-o-o-o-d idea!”

Before all of his first fights, Clay would come up with a poetic prediction, a boastful Hallmark-like rhyme like “Jones like to mix, so I’ll let it go six. If he talks jive, I’ll cut it to five. And if he talks more, I’ll cut it to four.”

According to Torres, by 1963 Clay had been right twelve times in predicting which round his opponent would fall. When his prediction failed in his fight against Doug Jones, the public screamed that their fight was fixed. The odds had Clay favored 4:1 just a few weeks before the fight with Jones, but the odds dropped to 2:1 by fight time. Clay won the fight, but had to go the distance.

In his next fight, Clay traveled to England and knocked out European Champion Henry Cooper, but not before Cooper floored Clay at the end of the fourth round. A win is a win is a win, however, and Clay was undefeated in his first nineteen fights.

Sonny Liston, on the other hand, was not just the heavyweight champ but by most accounts also a very intimidating person. He had served two different prison sentences and had a string of convictions. Sportswriter Jimmy Cannon wrote in 1962 that “Liston has been a mugger, a cop-slugger, a stickup man, a strongarm guy, and a bodyguard for the mandarins of the St. Louis mobs.... Time spent in penitentiaries helped to form Liston’s attitude. He is generally hostile, suspicious, rudely curt, surly, and menacingly indifferent. During the years when he was a fierce muscle guy for the syndicate bosses, his signature on police documents was an X. Since then, Liston has learned to sign his name.” According to ESPN′s “SportsCentury” biography written by Mike Puma, “Liston had ties to organized crime. In 1952, after serving two years in prison, he was paroled to a team of boxing handlers with ties to John Vitale, a St. Louis underworld figure. Six years later, Frankie