Word: liston
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Doing nothing to dispel that image, Patterson said shortly before the fight: "If Liston should be lucky enough to win, I hope you'll accept him the way you've accepted me. You know, there's a little bit of good in everybody." For his part, Liston snarled: "I'll kill him. I'd like to run over him with an automobile...
...visitors' dressing room deep beneath the stands at Chicago's Comiskey Park, Charles Sonny Liston, 28, sat swaddled in towels and a white terry-cloth bathrobe. He stared at the green cinder-block walls for a moment, then turned his baleful, red-flecked brown eyes on Jack Nilon, his "investment adviser." "It's cold outside," grunted Sonny. "I'm gonna make it quick...
Only two heavyweight championship fights in boxing history have ended quicker.* And none has seemed more of a mismatch. It took Liston just 2 min. 6 sec. of the first round to club Floyd Patterson into oblivion and install himself as the new king of a tarnished sport. He accomplished it without even trying. A series of deceptively mild left jabs pried Patterson out of his peekaboo crouch. Three times the ineffectual champion attempted to clinch; contemptuously Listen shoved him away. At last, Liston bounced a left hook off Patterson's head, followed it with a chopping right...
...Terrible Hoax." In the astonished silence, Sonny Liston stalked around the ring. Then came the angry, roaring boos from the 18,894 spectators. Many had not seen the knockout punch; those who had felt cheated. In 258 locations across the U.S., some 500,000 people, who had paid between $4 and $10 each to witness the fight on closed-circuit TV, started filing out in bitter disgust. "It was the stinkingest exhibition I ever saw in my life," said one. At Brooklyn's Fox Theater, 3,800 people did not even have that to say; their screen went blank...
...Dempsey in 1926, called the fight "a terrible hoax," adding that "it's shows like this that are killing boxing." They surely do it no good. In the prefight ballyhoo, everyone had been told to expect a classic which matched Patterson, the swift and stouthearted Good Guy, against Liston, the hulking, oft-arrested...