Charles Liston

A 2005 article by Richard Carter begins, "every knowledgeable, objective fight fan knows that Charles Liston took a dive," and concludes: "The problem is that 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." (74) Ali, of course, needs the fight to be legitimate to build his reputation as "The Greatest." For Carter, as well as for biographers Steen and Tosches, the fight needs to be fixed to support their primary theses: that boxing is irredeemably corrupt, that it is irreparably damaging, physically as well as morally, to the men who fight, and that Sonny lived his whole life as a slave, respectively.