The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [20]
Liston won the heavyweight championship by beating Floyd Patterson in 1962. Only one thing could prevent a Clay-Liston fight. Liston had to give Patterson a rematch. That fight took place on July 22, 1963, in Las Vegas, the very first time a heavyweight championship match took place there. This time, the fight lasted all of two minutes, ten seconds. It was little wonder that Clay wanted Liston, who had inflated his record to 35-1 at that point.
The public wanted the Clay-Liston fight, too, but the popular betting choice—and the man that most of America wanted to see win the fight—was Liston. (Of course, white America had rooted—hard—for Floyd Patterson to defeat Liston earlier.) Murray Kempton wrote in The New Republic in 1964 that “Liston used to be a hoodlum; now he was our cop; he was the big Negro we pay to keep sassy Negroes in line.”
The most popular conspiracy theory regarding the first fight between Liston and Clay goes like this: Liston at the time had a close relationship with a flamboyant underworld figure named Ashe Resnick. Resnick owned the Vegas casino where Liston trained. Did Resnick orchestrate a gambling bonanza by ordering Liston to lose in the middle rounds of the first fight (or the first round in the rematch)? Suspicions aside, to this day no hard evidence (no paper trail, testimony trail, or money trail) has ever surfaced that could prove a fix was in on either fight. Besides, it can be argued that Liston was more valuable to the mob as a champion.
Heading into the first fight, Clay began intentionally agitating Liston. He rented a bus and followed Liston. Written across the top of the bus was, “World’s Most Colorful Fighter” and under that “Liston must go in eight.”
The twenty-one-year-old Clay was a big underdog and few believed he could win, including the great former heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano, who said, “First, Clay is horribly short of experience to be going against a brute like Liston. Clay may have the basic tools, but he’s at least a year away from full maturity, both physically and as a strategist.”
It wasn’t just that Liston was favored to win the fight, it was that he was favored by so much. All of the experts predicted the champion would prevail. I’ve read that Liston was a 7-1 favorite. Some sources had it as much as 8-1. To add even more intrigue, the Clay camp was using all its influence to convince the Army not to induct Clay before the match with Liston. Liston was the champion, but Clay was the drawing card, the lightning rod. There were so many characters surrounding both fighters that it would have been surprising if the fight wasn’t tampered with in some way. In any case, whoever conspired to fix these fights needed to get to only one person: Sonny Liston.
Convention Hall in Miami held only 8,300 fans. In the first round, Clay ducked most of Liston’s punches. He moved backwards, and from side to side. Toward the end of the third round, Clay caught Liston with a flurry of punches, and a cut opened up under the champion’s eye.
The most memorable—and most suspicious—round of that fight was the fifth. Between the fourth and fifth rounds, something got into Clay’s eyes. Clay came out fighting anyway. With his corner pushing him out toward the champion, Clay began waving his arms at Liston. In a 1971 article for Life magazine, Norman Mailer wrote that Clay had a look of “abject horror on his face, as if to say, ‘Your younger brother is now an old blind beggar. Do not strike him.’ For Clay looked like a ghost with his eyes closed, tears streaming.... Liston drew back in doubt, in bewilderment, conceivably in concern for his new great reputation