Ali-Liston Rematch Called a Farce

May 25, 1965 - In Great Britain, Chattanooga, and Lewiston, Me., seeing wasn’t believing.

“It looks as though he knocked Liston down with a wrist movement,” Tommy Farr of Wales said in London of Muhammad Ali’s one-round knockout victory tonight.

Farr, a former heavyweight who once lasted 15 rounds with Joe Louis, saw the fight at the BBC’s studio, where it was relayed via Early Bird satellite.

Farr said the fight was “a real shocker.”Henry Cooper, the British heavyweight titleholder, also saw the match. He said: “They talk over there about horizontal British heavyweights — but we can do a little better than that.”In Tennessee, the legal counsel for the World Boxing Association — which doesn’t recognized Ali — described Ali’s knockout as “a farce and a fraud.”Bob Summitt, the counsel, also said that the fight was “another good example of taking money from the public without giving them a real fight.”He said that if Ali fought Floyd Patterson, the WBA would withdraw recognition of Patterson, too.

And in Lewiston, where the fiasco unfolded, George Russo, the chairman of the Maine Boxing Commission said, “The fight was a terrible disappointment.”

Maine Governor John Reed, like Russo, did not see the knockout punch. The Governor said he had no plans to seek an investigation of the bout’s strange ending.

Reed said a member of his party saw the knockout punch through a pair of binoculars and thought it was a hard one.

Canadian heavyweight George Chuvalo, who was also there termed it “the biggest fix I ever saw.”

Support this project at patreon.com/realtime1960s