Deadspin Article: This Was Ali

http://deadspin.com/this-was-ali-1782042552

This is pretty great - an antidote to much of the writing on Ali over the past few weeks. This on the Liston fights:

"The unbeatable Sonny Liston was dead weight in the marketplace, 35 years ahead of a time where there would have been a culture to elevate him. It was crucial that he go.

People become discomfited when I talk about the Liston fights being fixed. They think that it somehow tarnishes Ali’s legend. Even people close to the sport will tell me that, although they know the second fight was fixed, they’re not sure the first one was.

“If it was fixed,” they’ll say, “why didn’t Sonny just take a quick dive, the way he did in the rematch?”

Here’s some Boxing 101. You wouldn’t be able to have a rematch if the first fight looked the way the second did. In order to make a second betting score, opinions as to the outcome of the rematch had to remain divided. That Liston was the betting favorite for the fight (at anywhere from a 6-5 to 8-5) shows that he did his job the first time around.

Liston’s people got around 8-1 odds wagering Ali in the first fight. Liston made sure not to knock Ali out and quit under ambiguous circumstances, and everyone collected their betting money. The score was incalculably more than any purse that Liston would have been able to generate from successfully defending his title.

Why flop onto the canvas so blatantly after one minute of fighting in the rematch? Because the money was already made at that point: the second bet was won when the fight ended. There’d never be a third fight, so why waste even a moment of surplus time masking the fix?

The first fix—the one people are so unwilling to see as even a possibility—was the real fix, the serious fix. The second was just scooping up the remaining money from the table, saying “F&%k you,” and going home.

It’s worth asking what would have happened if Ali’s fights with Liston hadn’t been fixed. Could Ali have only become Ali by being undefeated? He may well have possessed the talent and resolve needed to become the heavyweight champion down the road, but would he have, at 19-2, become an icon? It’s likely that, in terms of history, Ali could not have withstood being merely a great fighter.

What took place in Miami Beach, and, to a lesser extent, in Lewiston, is the shaky foundation on which a hegemonic narrative was built.

I’m not sure that’s even important, except insofar as, had those events not occurred, what followed probably would not have either. But Ali’s career was bona fide from that point on. His accomplishments were substantial and legitimate. And as a fighter, he was with us for a long, long time."

What a load of bollox....

This guy probably thinks Bush was behind 9/11..

Whether the fights were fixed or not... The author appears to assume that Liston would definitely have won the fights? He (paraphrasing) states that no sane boxing man would have Ali even close to being the greatest fighter of all time, but concedes he might have been one of the top heavies.

Reading the full article there's some decent stuff in there, but with the points made above he just puts himself in the flat earth society, in an attempt for being a bit 'in the know' controversial.