BoxRec

Page 81 of the Devil and Sonny Liston:

"The biggest of them was the dive Archie Moore took in his 1955 New York title bout with Rocky Marciano. it was Marciano's last fight. and the fix ensured that Marciano would retire undefeated."


Yep. its right there.

AHA! Proof......keep lookin....can you find the page that talks about the Patterson and Ali fixes as well?


We Archie fans can only hope.


Sadly though Archie wouldn't take a dive for anyone or anything....part of being a true champion....never be part of a fixed game.

Now Jack Sharkey....whole different story.

Author Nick Tosches is far too hung up in conspiracy theories.
That's why he made a mess of the Liston book.
He is a crime novelist, not a boxing historian. That much becomes very obvious after reading "The Devil & Sonny Liston".
I don't give his research or credibility when it comes to boxing much weight.


-KOKid-

I heard Moore went into the tank with Floyd Patterson...but in ways I think that rumor only happened because Moore was beating Patterson rather easily and then was caught with a punch and was KO'd.

Course Moore did lose to some mediocre opposition in the past, and does make you wonder if it was true---but mind you, Moore in his early years fought alot, every week or every two weeks he was fighting someone and that could have caused him to be drained.

Moore didn't take no dive against Marciano---if that is true, then why the hell did Moore demand to face Marciano in the first place and say he would knock Marciano out? And why did Moore in years to come always say that Marciano was his hardest hitting opponent and that nobody had more stamina than Marciano in those days?

An awful lot of praise on Moore's part if it was a dive he taken. Truth is, Moore just couldn't stand up to Marciano's power---if it had been a dive why didn't Moore stay down, rather than be knocked down five times in his match with Marciano?

It's a false rumor and a blasphemous one at that.

..the marciano nonsene has been disposed of many many times...with at least one of the manys by me. so foolish that it's not worth commenting on all the holes in this foolishness again.


as for moore and patterson.....floyd had a good night and archie a bad one.....at a point in his career when speed was a big problem. look at the tape.....archie did nbot get knocked out by a lucky punch and he was nnot leading at any time. it was a case of a fast fresh mediocre young guy beating an all-time great old guy.

jeez...the tapes aren't hard to find...and if finding them is too much much trouble for some of you then write about something you've seen or has been written with some credibilty.

archie did nbot get knocked out by a lucky punch and he was nnot leading at any time. it was a case of a fast fresh mediocre young guy beating an all-time great old guy.

jaclem........two of the 3 judges had moore winning the 4 first rounds. so moore was well ahead. archie did have an off night though. he had a gruelling schedule fighting 11 times in the past 11 months entering the patterson fight as well as fluctuting his weight back and forth....perhaps he was a bit drained. moore claimed in his book he was mentally not there in the patterson fight.

I think moore made a mistake of fighting a gruelling schedule right after suffering a horrible physical beating to marciano in 1955. he should have paced himself more in 1956.

Tosches book is a piece of crap.

enrique wrote:Tosches book is a piece of crap.

straight, to the point, economic phrasing, and....100% accurate!

..brockton buster...thanks for the information about the judging. i haven't looked at the tape in a very long time. i probably was going with my memory of when i saw the fight live. not sure how i was scoring it..i just know that as i watched i was sure it was just a matter of time when floyd would take charge....he was just too fast for archie at that period in each of their careers.

i agree. archie didnt match up well with floyd stylistically. i still think archie was the best heavyweight in the world in 1956 outside of patterson.

..patterson/moore was the cause of one of my great embarrassments. i was known then as a good source for boxing info and a good predictor of fights. that wasn't so hard then if you really followed the game because fighters fought so often and they had a track record....showing their punch power, bnoxiong skills, chin...etc. so.. right before this fight took place i was telling a group of guys who were impressed with my boxing expertise just how archie would beat patterson...how his huge edge in experience and his talent would make him take patterson to camp. i even acted out each of their styles.....and so on. so comes fight night...and we all know what happened. as i've written i saw at once that archie wasn't going to make it. next day....hoots and hollers about my bad predictiion....imitations of how i had acted it out....and it took me a long time to live that one down.

as for archie being the second best heavyweight at the time...sure...that's how he got the match....as i those days you had to qualify by some kind of elimination bout wins...and he and floyd qualified....not like today when the alphabet boys just arbitrarily select someone to wear the belt.

Jaclem wrote:..patterson/moore was the cause of one of my great embarrassments. i was known then as a good source for boxing info and a good predictor of fights. that wasn't so hard then if you really followed the game because fighters fought so often and they had a track record....showing their punch power, bnoxiong skills, chin...etc. so.. right before this fight took place i was telling a group of guys who were impressed with my boxing expertise just how archie would beat patterson...how his huge edge in experience and his talent would make him take patterson to camp. i even acted out each of their styles.....and so on. so comes fight night...and we all know what happened. as i've written i saw at once that archie wasn't going to make it. next day....hoots and hollers about my bad predictiion....imitations of how i had acted it out....and it took me a long time to live that one down.

as for archie being the second best heavyweight at the time...sure...that's how he got the match....as i those days you had to qualify by some kind of elimination bout wins...and he and floyd qualified....not like today when the alphabet boys just arbitrarily select someone to wear the belt.

jaclem....thanx! do u know if a marciano title bout almost happened in 1956 before marcianos retirement? was marciano close to taking on a valdez or patterson in 1956 before he retired?


i would have liked to see floyd patterson vs bob baker in 1956 instead of hurricane jackson vs baker. baker was robbed in the rematch vs jackson. the 3 man heavyweight tourney should have been baker, moore, patterson with patterson fighting baker and moore getting the bye.


its too bad archie fought patterson cause if he had fought anyone else for the title........he would have been heavyweight champion.

>>>Tosches book is a piece of crap<<<

So true! The book is one of the weakest boxing books that I have ever read and I have read quite a few!

I'd like to see Toches say that to Moores face... I think even a very elderly Moore would make Tosches regret it... seriously though a sure sign of a crap book is ludicrous statements like this... if Marciano vs MOORE was fixed then noone told either of the fighters... I doubt Tosches has even bothered to watch the fight...

silkov wrote:I'd like to see Toches say that to Moores face... I think even a very elderly Moore would make Tosches regret it... seriously though a sure sign of a crap book is ludicrous statements like this... if Marciano vs MOORE was fixed then noone told either of the fighters... I doubt Tosches has even bothered to watch the fight...

moore would break him in half

---Page 81 of the Devil and Sonny Liston:----


As has already been stated...author, Nick Tosches is very much full of shit a lot of the time...this instance being a prime example!!!

Just because it is written in a book it most certainly does not mean it is true...especially in this instance!!!

You can find many, many similar kinds of inaccurate statements in most books that Nat Fleischer has written as well.

BrocktonBlockbuster49 wrote:

Jaclem wrote:..patterson/moore was the cause of one of my great embarrassments. i was known then as a good source for boxing info and a good predictor of fights. that wasn't so hard then if you really followed the game because fighters fought so often and they had a track record....showing their punch power, bnoxiong skills, chin...etc. so.. right before this fight took place i was telling a group of guys who were impressed with my boxing expertise just how archie would beat patterson...how his huge edge in experience and his talent would make him take patterson to camp. i even acted out each of their styles.....and so on. so comes fight night...and we all know what happened. as i've written i saw at once that archie wasn't going to make it. next day....hoots and hollers about my bad predictiion....imitations of how i had acted it out....and it took me a long time to live that one down.

as for archie being the second best heavyweight at the time...sure...that's how he got the match....as i those days you had to qualify by some kind of elimination bout wins...and he and floyd qualified....not like today when the alphabet boys just arbitrarily select someone to wear the belt.

jaclem....thanx! do u know if a marciano title bout almost happened in 1956 before marcianos retirement? was marciano close to taking on a valdez or patterson in 1956 before he retired?


i would have liked to see floyd patterson vs bob baker in 1956 instead of hurricane jackson vs baker. baker was robbed in the rematch vs jackson. the 3 man heavyweight tourney should have been baker, moore, patterson with patterson fighting baker and moore getting the bye.


its too bad archie fought patterson cause if he had fought anyone else for the title........he would have been heavyweight champion.

There was talk of a fight between Marciano and Canada's Earl Walls. When negotiations broke down it contributed to Earl's decision to retire.

Cap

There was talk of a fight between Marciano and Canada's Earl Walls. When negotiations broke down it contributed to Earl's decision to retire.

Cap

I always wondered why Walls retired so soon, when he seemed to have reached the pinnacle of his success as a professional fighter. I never, though, heard that Marciano was to ever fight Walls. Do you have documentation to back this up, not to say its not true, but I think it would have been interesting to see.

From what I can recall, Marciano was supposed to have fought the winner of Valdes-Baker [which was Valdes] but there was such a tiff over the fight (due to it being lackluster) that the IBC froze out both Valdes and Baker from fighting Marciano. At the time, Marciano had just recently also discovered that Al Weil had taken a huge percentage out of his purse from the Don Cockell fight and he already had bad feelings towards Weil as he talked down the Rock's dad [the famous 'If we needed a cook, we'd hire one' incident].

The only negotiations that I was aware of, outside of Valdes or Baker, was a two bit exhibition bout that was to be against a former light heavyweight prospect named Floyd Patterson, which was to be held on Tuesday Night Fights(?) and only scheduled for two rounds. For many reasons, ranging from the fight being too short in length to nobody wanting to see a 'nobody' (Patterson) against the champ, especially if it wasn't to be a title bout. So negotiations fizzled out on that one.

Marciano was hoping to have got a fight sometime in the spring or summer of 1956, as many a newspaper written that Marciano was looking for the 'golden 50'. Then out of the blue he unexpectedly retired, and named Moore, Patterson, and Jackson as his top three contenders worthy of duking it out for the Heavyweight crown.

The reasons given at the time were because of a lack of opponents (which was somewhat true) and a bad back. The Marciano family these days say that Marciano retired because it started to become a job to Marciano and his heart was no longer in it, that he didn't want to embarass his family. A more logical answer that has been thrown around is that Marciano figured if he retired, his contract with Al Weil would be broken and then he could come back at another time and place.

Unfortunately for Marciano, Weil still held an iron fist over the IBC even when the Rock retired, and it wouldn't be until Patterson was made champ that D'Amato began to have the strong hold on the IBC. Rocky of course had respect for Patterson, that and the money for one reason or another wasn't there to quite generate enough interest for him to come back. But when Johansson became champion, the interest did indeed pick up, as Marciano said on television that he would greatly consider fighting the winner of Patterson-Johansson 2.

In between the rematch and the rubber match, Marciano began to train; while some reports say he only trained for a month and changed his mind, or that his uncle told him he was too soft to become a success again, or the fear that if he lost he would lose the novelty of being the only undefeated heavyweight champion and lose future endorsement deals...

Lou Duva on the other hand said that there was a contract, that if Johansson was able to regain the title from Patterson, that Marciano-Johansson would have happened; of course, Johansson in fact lost, and Marciano never did come out of retirement.

But, there was an altercation in later times, with the up and coming Sonny Liston. Reportedly at a training camp, a reporter asked Liston if he felt he hit harder than Marciano ever did, to which Liston said yes. Marciano was present at the camp, and over heard and supposedly challenged Liston right then and there to a match inside the camp. Liston backed down, either in embarassment or to defuse the situation altogether.

But anyways, if you have documentation on the Walls-Marciano proposed bout, I'd love to see it.

Jaclem wrote:..the marciano nonsene has been disposed of many many times...with at least one of the manys by me. so foolish that it's not worth commenting on all the holes in this foolishness again.


as for moore and patterson.....floyd had a good night and archie a bad one.....at a point in his career when speed was a big problem. look at the tape.....archie did nbot get knocked out by a lucky punch and he was nnot leading at any time. it was a case of a fast fresh mediocre young guy beating an all-time great old guy.

jeez...the tapes aren't hard to find...and if finding them is too much much trouble for some of you then write about something you've seen or has been written with some credibilty.

Agreed... except for the part about Patterson being mediocre.

As I and I'm sure others have said in the past, I think if Archie was going to take a dive against Rocky he'd go down in the early rounds (especially since Rocky was a known puncher so people would find it believable) rather than letting Rocky pound him for round after round, dropping him five times. And Archie was trying to land hard shots of his own for much of the fight, even dropping Rocky at one point.

In regards to Moore - Patterson which I shall re-watch tonight.


I dont recall Moore leading the entire fight leading up to the point
of the knock down.

Moore throwing the fight against Marciano is very unlikely. Rocky was
in his better years, was heavier and just beat the old Mongoose.

Its easy to make claims without evidence.

Kym

If you guys watch this fight Moore/Patterson on YouTube with the Marciano commentary,you'll never see Moore look so bad. Read my reply to Buzz on my post:Fights That Looked Wrong To You. I qoute from Archie's authorized bio.

..the moore-patterson-marciano etc discussion i'v e already posted on a number of times, so i don't have anything to add here.

i do have a question - does anyone know why earl walls retired when he did? i thought he was as good as the some of the other guys around, and probably better. i'm not sure any more if i recall correctly but i think he may have had to quit because of an injury...maybe to his eye or eyes. would appreciate any info about this.

now....marciano and retirement...okay...one exception to the first sentence here. i clearly recall an interview with marciano on tv....a few years....at least... after his retirement...in which he said after the moore fight he had a slight buzzing in his ears for a while that he never had before. it didn't stay around long and he wasn't even sure if it was caused by the fight itself, but he did say it was ONE OF THE REASONS he began contemplating retirement. note i did not say THE reason...he said ONE of the reasons he just started thinking about it. as far as i know he never said that again..i have never read that again and i'm not disputing the problems he had with al weill or anything else.

yeah.....i've read that marciano challenged liston to fight "right then and there." good thing liston walked away... it gave rocky a few more years before the tragic plane crash.

Claims of this nature have plagued boxing history. There are more fights than I can name which have been reputed to have been "fakes," but after researching such claims very, very few actually turn out to be actual "fixes."

Ever since boxing became a sport fans and other interested parties have claimed that their man had to have thrown a certain fight because there is no way that he could lose in such a manner...which this is the argument that has been claimed on the Terry McGovern--Joe Gans fight in which McGovern simply destroyed Gans.

Now for years I had just assumed that the bout was a "fix" because that was how the story was presented by later writers and it seemed that one writer would cover the subject yet all he would do is simply rehash the exact same story that others had without actually adding anything new, or enlightening about the fight.

As I said, I had assumed for years that it was a fix due to the later articles that I had read, but over the last three, or four years I have very, very thoroughly researched the career of Terry McGovern as well as most of the opponents that he faced and I have read just about every single article that has ever been written about the McGovern-Gans fight from George Siler's (the referee in the fight) accounts and write-ups about the fight in the Chicago newspapers to more recent articles such as the Ring Detective series that used to be in Ring magazine back in the early sixties and I have also watched the fight 100s of times and though all of the written research about the fight is enough to really present a strong debate that the fight was on the level it is the film of the fight which really changed my mind and it is what actually got me started seriously on McGovern's career.

McGovern-Gans is a prime example of fights that were claimed to be "fake," but upon thorough research, an argument that the bout was nothing but legit can be made and it is a very, very strong argument that can be presented.

But while an argument can be made for either side on the McGovern-Gans fight there is no argument which can be made that Moore threw his bout with Marciano. I mean, a person can certainly make the claim, but he simply cannot present any kind of strong data to support the claim and Tosches certainly does not present any kind of proof.

Tosches is scum in my opinion, to make such allegations against any fighter is bad enough but to do it against a guy like Moore who struggled throughout his career to get his breaks etc!... does Tosches even know that Moore conducted a letter writing campaign through the Ring mag for about two years before he got a shot at Marciano??.... then we're supposed to believe that he then threw the fight!. And this is aside from actually watching the fight itself, if that was a fixed fight then both Moore and Marcinao deserved Oscars....
Tosches is just a hack and a poor one at that, his 'book' on Liston was more or less unreadable...

Tosches is scum in my opinion, to make such allegations against any fighter is bad enough but to do it against a guy like Moore who struggled throughout his career to get his breaks etc!... does Tosches even know that Moore conducted a letter writing campaign through the Ring mag for about two years before he got a shot at Marciano??.... then we're supposed to believe that he then threw the fight!. And this is aside from actually watching the fight itself, if that was a fixed fight then both Moore and Marcinao deserved Oscars....
Tosches is just a hack and a poor one at that, his 'book' on Liston was more or less unreadable...