'80s TV Action Hero
Aren't all the big fights fixed?
'All he needs is for somebody to throw handgrenades at him for the rest of his life...'
HGW XX/7
Interesting, although the FBI in 1964 also thought MLK was a filthy Communist and that black emancipation was a socialist plot to destroy Freedomville God's Own Country Eagleland 'MERICA! I'm not sure their reasoning for suspecting the fight was fixed went beyond: "what are those shifty Negroes up to now?" Some people always back a dark horse, that two people did in a boxing match watched by millions and heavily teased proves nothing.
Still interesting; match-fixing is perhaps the ultimate example of scumminess in sport, because it's a betrayal of the most important people in the game - the fans.
Schild und Schwert der Partei
The Mafia fixed just about everything else in the sporting world of American, well, sport, so why would the Liston-Ali fight be any different?
Never heard of the Black Sox?
Time to get my tin foil hat out of storage!
The Great One
I'm sorry but I just don't see what kicking up a fuss about it about 50 years after the fact does. What are we supposed to do about it? Demand they have a rematch or something? Liston has been dead for decades now and Muhammad Ali is in his 70s and chances are everybody else involved in the supposed fix is also either dead or too old to really bother going after. Let's worry about handling the problems in sports now.
"If everybody is thinking alike, somebody isn't thinking"- George S. Patton
I'm freezing! Send help!
Isn't everything in the US fixed?
Uniocular
Not my apartment building's sewage system.
"It's so hard to be humble, knowing how great I am."
Sinful Saint
Or my heater, for that matter.
Sports, in general, aren't fixed in this country. Reality TV is, Professional Wrestling is (to a certain extent; a match's final outcome is scripted, and some of the individual "big moves" are also, but it's up to the fighters to get from point A to point B), and political elections are (not conspiracy theory; empirically, whoever spends the most campaign money has high odds of winning, and Congressional districts are divided up to all but ensure a certain voter outcome), but boxing matches are most definitely not scripted or fixed once the fight gets to a big enough point; otherwise, I can't imagine that Evander Holyfield okay'd the whole "Mike Tyson bits off my ear" bit.
If you meet me have some courtesy, have some sympathy, have some taste. Use all your well-learned politesse or I'll lay your soul to waste.
There is no fix, the check is in the mail, of course I love you, your broadband speed will be at least twenty megabytes per second, our countries are run by people who know what they are doing. What do all those statements have in common? They are all blatant lies, of course.![[lol]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/lol2v12_4863.png "[lol]"){kind=small}
Holyfield and Tyson hated each others guts too much for any fix to work. Football matches (what some Americans call soccer) are routinely fixed by Far East based betting syndicates. Sure, some of the smaller and medium players in the industry get turned over from time to time and they go to jail, but that, as they say, is just for the tourists. The real high-end players stay in business and stay making money from the punters they fleece.
FBI suspected 1964 Muhammad Ali-Sonny Liston fight was a Mob fix
Resnick, who had connections to Liston and organized crime, first advised Magids that Liston would knock out Clay in the second round. Then on the day of the fight, documents show Resnick told Magids not to make any bets on the fight but to "just go watch the fight on pay TV and he would know why and that he could not talk further at that time."
"Magids did go see the fight on TV and immediately realized that Resnick knew that Liston was going to lose," a document stated. "A week later, there was an article in Sports Illustrated writing up Resnick as a big loser because of his backing of Liston. Later people 'in the know' in Las Vegas told Magids that Resnick and Liston both reportedly made over $1 million betting against Liston on the fight and that the magazine article was a cover for this."
It's not confirmed that Liston took a dive, but it was enough for the FBI to continue to assert the suspicion internally that Resnick had fixed the fight."
The article states that Ali wasn't aware of the fight being thrown, but it does raise questions as to whether or not Ali's past and future fights may have been partially fixed as well.
Any thoughts?