When bad Sonny Liston

laid down for a young Ali

"Excuse me for speaking with my eyes closed, but it helps me see better!"
—Rod Steiger, "The Big Knife" (1955)

by Richard G. Carter
This week 40 years ago, one of the greatest frauds in the history of boxing was perpetrated. The date was May 25, 1965, the place was tiny Lewiston, Maine. And every knowledgeable, objective fight fan knows that Charles "Sonny" Liston took a dive in a scandalous heavyweight championship bout with a young Muhammad Ali.

This was the infamous fix in which the fearsome Liston was "hit" by the light-punching Ali’s "phantom punch" enabling him to throw the fight.

Neil Leifer’s famous photo of Ali standing over his fallen foe was out of all proportion to the context of the event, which I witnessed at the old Warner Theater in downtown Milwaukee.

Among memorable highlights that night were the words of the legendary "Brown Bomber," Joe Louis. In his role as ringside commentator for the closed circuit telecast—the pay-per-view of its day—Louis had this to say, when asked about Ali’s KO of Liston: "That punch was like throwing corn flakes at a battle ship."

Of course, Ali would never own-up to the abject phoniness of this, his second controversial bout with Liston. Indeed, when I interviewed Ali for the Milwaukee Sentinel outside Muhammad’s Mosque No. 3 two weeks later and asked him point-blank about the so-called "phantom punch," he deadpanned: "I hit that chump hard." Uh-huh.

Please understand that I have not just arrived at this conclusion. I have always felt Liston went in the tank for Ali. No doubt about it. Liston-Ali II was as phony as a three-dollar bill, which I will expand on later. But first a little personal history.

One of the nice things about being an aggressive journalist is the opportunity afforded to meet interesting, important, high-profile people—rich, famous and infamous.

Thus, in addition to my in-depth interview with a 23-year-old Ali, I did the same with Liston three years earlier. And the difference between the two men was palpable.

To begin with, Sonny—an ex-street thug and cop-beater—was at least 40-years-old when he fought Ali, who had just changed his name from Cassius Clay after converting to Islam.

Nicknamed the "Big Ugly Bear" by Ali, Sonny and I met in 1962 during his Christmas visit with sick kids at Milwaukee Children’s Hospital. Although soft-spoken, he was the most physically intimidating man I’d ever encountered. And still is.
At 6’-1" and 215 lbs., Liston was shorter but heavier than Ali, with the widest shoulders imaginable. Possessed of a thunderous left jab and dynamite KO punch with both hands, Sonny seemed indestructible. Although he smiled easily during our talk, his scowl in the ring—described by Howard Cosell as "a baleful stare"—was one for the books

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As we conversed, I recalled how the late Sgt. Tommie Johnson—famous coach of the all-time best U.S. Olympic boxing team of 1976—talked about Liston during our Army service together in 1959. "If he ever gets the chance in a title fight, he’ll win by a knockout. I don’t care who he fights," the friendly, all-knowing "Sarge" told me.

Now back to Ali, whom I’ve always loved outside the ring. He is one of my heroes—with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and journalist Carl T. Rowan. I applauded his pro-Black activism and supported his anti-Vietnam War stance, which unjustly cost him three years at the peak of his boxing powers.

Yet, while fast and clever inside the ring, Ali was no match for Liston in an up-and-up fight. Indeed, many boxing experts feel strongly that in Ali’s defining moment, Liston laid down for him. This includes New York’s celebrated Art Rust Jr.—writer, broadcaster, radio talk show host and author of a number of sports books on figures such as Joe Louis.

In a December 6, 1987, New York Daily News column, "Did Liston fall for Clay?" Rust wrote: "In their first bout in Miami (February 25, 1964), Liston was allegedly supposed to throw the fight. But that scenario was nearly ruined when Ali wanted to quit in his corner because of his burning eyes and limited vision. So in the next bout in Lewiston, Liston was supposedly instructed that he was to go fast.

Joe Louis once told me Liston had admitted to him that both fights were fixed, but that Ali had no knowledge of this. Two days before the Lewiston fight, Liston told Louis, "I got my money. I ain’t gonna put up a fight."

On May 25, 1992, the great writer-cartoonist Bill Gallo, in a Daily News column headlined "It’s still a mystery," wrote: "Guys who saw the fight said that if, indeed, there was a punch, it wasn’t as hard as if your sister had hit you—even if she was mad as hell. When Sonny hit the deck, I thought he had tripped, or something. I was not alone. Everybody who saw the fight swore he or she had heard the splash from the water tank."

Then there was Wallace Matthews‚ May 25, 2001 column in the New York Post headlined "The punch missed ’round the world." He wrote: "Muhammad Ali flicked a right hand punch in the direction of Sonny Liston and ended a heavyweight title fight barely one minute after it began. That was 36 years ago today and there are people who will swear to you the punch hasn’t landed yet…"

In his definitive biography "The Devil and Sonny Liston," published in 2000, Nick Tosches suggests, with input from Liston’s associates that he pulled punches in the first fight and fell from a "phantom punch" in the second. Tosches further suggests that the mob or the Black Muslims or someone besides Ali knocked out Liston.

After further investigation and reflection, I buy the Rust and Tosches explanations of Liston’s embarrassing performance in the fiasco with Ali in Maine. Sonny reverted to his gangster ways and sold the fight for money. At the time, Ali was totally unaware of what was happening. The problem is Sonny was such a bad actor, his pathetic swoon from a laughable love-tap gave big-time boxing a black eye from which it has yet to fully recover.

Richard G. Carter, a freelance writer, is a former columnist with The Milwaukee Journal and the New York Daily News.