Ali vs. Inoki (26 page)

Five months after American Willie Williams, a six-footseven Kyokushin karate competitor, placed third out of 187 competitors from 162 countries in the second world open karate championships in November 1979, he faced Inoki in the most heated contest of the wrestler's mixed martial arts series.

Kyokushin—a form of karate created by Mas Oyama, a Korean-born Japanese national regarded as one of the most fearsome fighters in history—is the art Gerard Gordeau, the long lanky striker who slammed a foot into Teila Tuli's face, represented at UFC 1. Years later Gordeau told sherdog.com that based on his experience, there wasn't one best martial art, but Kyokushin, contested in open-weight elimination tournaments, was where the “real motherfuckers” proved how tough they are. That was Williams, who clawed and scraped his way through the Inoki match.

If it was worked it was a hell of a work that featured hard strikes to the head and body. At the very least it was wild; Inoki and Williams tumbled out of the ring several times. The contest, ruled a draw, ended when Inoki apparently broke Williams' elbow with an armbar on the floor—not the canvas, the floor. Inoki's ribs were also said to be fractured.

A decade after Ali, Inoki took to the ring with Leon Spinks, who split a pair of boxing bouts with The Greatest. The Japanese hero won by pin to close another panned boxer versus wrestler affair. Inoki “fought” five times in the 1980s. His closing two contests in 1989 were especially memorable.

Chota Chochoshvili, a two-time Olympian from the Soviet republic of Georgia in the Russian Caucasus who won the gold medal at ninety-three kilos in the Munich Games, threw Inoki hard onto the canvas on April 24, 1989. It was an odd open setup inside the Tokyo Dome, basically four pillars without ropes for the New Japan Pro Wrestling–promoted event. To the shock of Japan, Inoki was counted out at 1:30 of Round 5 and relinquished the WWF martial arts title. Chochoshvili coughed up the belt back to Inoki a month later by submission, a tried-and-true Kimura, and
Inoki retired from mixed martial arts “competition” the same way he started: claiming victory over an Olympicgold-medal-winning judoka.

Almost three decades years later, Japanese wrestler Shinsuke Nakamura, using his “Bomaye knee” named in honor of Inoki, who took the phrase from Ali, is the king of strong style seeking to expand his reach to America after signing a deal with the WWE.

Fueled by an embrace of shoot-style pro wrestling, the Universal Wrestling Federation formed in 1984 after New Japan–trained grapplers branched off to focus on matches that were essentially choreographed fights made to look legitimate. No jumping off the ropes. Punches and kicks and takedowns came at near full power. The wrestlers knew they were going to suffer in a match, and much of the time working came in the form of letting an opponent slip out of a submission hold.

UWF was very popular with fans, but behind the scenes it was plagued with problems and fell apart from the inside. In its place sprang up Shooto, UWF-International, RINGS, and Fujiwara Gumi, among other splinter groups, that brought a shoot style of wrestling back into the spotlight.

Structurally speaking, Fujiwara Gumi wasn't much better than UWF despite Yoshiaki Fujiwara, a top Gotch disciple, running the ship. Worked-shoot matches were
puroresu
, but some of the wrestlers were less than satisfied. Masakatsu Funaki and Minoru Suzuki, who idolized Inoki during their experience as young boys in NJPW, left Fujiwara to show what legitimate combat looked like under pro wrestling rules. With Gotch's blessing, Pancrase—a variant of pankration—began hosting real fights in a pro wrestling space,
bridging old-time shooting to modern-day pro wrestling and MMA. Starting in 1993, a couple months before UFC, Pancrase represents an incredibly influential organization in the growth of organized mixed fighting.

“I had done my homework on Pancrase and was convinced it was 80 percent work and 20 percent shoot,” said Art Davie. “It was a more sophisticated version of American pro wrestling, but there were shooters in Japan. Funaki, as an example. There were people who had some skills. The question with that early on was separating the wheat from the chaff, and I was pretty good at that. Who was bullshit? Who was real? That was one of the genres I investigated. Above and beyond Vale Tudo in Brazil, I began to look at the whole wrestling situation and shooting and working in Japan.

“I think that the Japanese were very sophisticated in understanding the nuances of these things and how to combine elements that would be something new.”

Pancrase took off and brought legitimacy back into pro wrestling. It was a different experience for
puroresu
fans used to drawn-out drama. Matches in Pancrase often ended early. For the most part it was shoot fights, stiff style, with an emphasis on submission wrestling. This was high-level hooking. Hearkening back to the good old days of catch, wrestlers had to know what they were doing in order to survive. Foreign stars were brought in to build up the talent. Frank Shamrock, Ken Shamrock, Bas Rutten, and Maurice Smith—all future UFC champions—made Pancrase cosmopolitan and exciting to watch. Passed down through Suzuki and Funaki, Gotch's techniques helped groom a new generation of fighters who soon enough would have a chance to participate in the UFC, which lifted the veil off of everything.

Funny enough, it was a man in a mask who may have pulled pro wrestling as close to real fighting as it could get. New Japan's famous “Tiger Mask,” Satoru Sayama, wanted to create a sport that focused on realistic and effective combat. That became Shooto, a seminal organization and sanctioning body known for developing some of the best welterweight-and-under Japanese talent of all time. In 1994, Sayama, notorious for his brutal training sessions, including whispers of canings, added closed-fist punches to the face of a grounded opponent for the first Japan Vale Tudo tournament. For five years the JVT produced excellent cards with legitimate contests under real fight conditions.

Rickson Gracie won the JVT tournaments in '94 and '95, and became the man everyone challenged. Gracie never even considered competing in the UWF because, as he saw it, they fix fights and he had no need to risk his reputation as a killer on an organization that went against what he was about. So UWF's Yoji Anjo, a pretty good fighter compared to his peers, tracked Gracie to the doorstep of the Brazilian's Los Angeles gym. After getting a call that there was a crew of Japanese folks looking for him, Gracie hopped in his car and wrapped his hands on the way. According to Gracie's telling of events on
The Joe Rogan Podcast
, when he arrived, a van full of photographers and reporters were waiting to document what happened.

The first thing Rickson did was bar them from the gym. Anjo wanted a fight and Gracie was willing, but he wasn't going to let the media get a glimpse. A few minutes later, Anjo walked outside after being beaten up and choked unconscious. His broken nose leaked blood onto his T-shirt, and the photos and story were reported all over Japan. A few
days later, Anjo returned to Gracie's gym with a package. He apologized as he handed Gracie a samurai helmet. When Anjo returned to Japan, however, he claimed he had been jumped. Gracie smartly filmed the fight, and he was the only one with a copy. When he sent tape of the demolition to Japanese media it was obvious his version was accurate and his reputation exploded.

About a year before Anjo came knocking on Gracie's door, Hideki Yamamoto visited Rickson's gym in Los Angeles and began training there as a white belt. Yamamoto's wife, Yukino Kanda, worked in events and her company shared business ties with Nobuyuki Sakakibara. Sakakibara represented Tokai TV and was in charge of promoting UWF and K-1 in Nagoya. Takada, a UWF star who was backed by gangster Hiromichi Momose, confided in Sakakibara that he wanted to fight either Mike Tyson or Rickson Gracie before his retirement. Takada had already followed the Inoki playbook by taking on mixed-style challenges. In 1991, for instance, he expelled boxer Trevor Berbick from the ring with leg kicks—not the sliding Ali kick, but a heavier more traditional Dutch- or Thai-style hammer. Berbick, incidentally, was the last man to fight Muhammad Ali, scoring a unanimous decision after ten dreary rounds in Nassau, Bahamas, in 1981.

Sakakibara and Kanda flew to Los Angeles to begin negotiations with Rickson in 1996.

Japan's K-1 was the dominant martial arts promoter on the planet, hosting opulent, exciting events that brought strikers of any style into the ring for single-night elimination tournaments. Kazuyoshi Ishii, a Kyokushin black belt, was the powerful owner of K-1, and Sakakibara approached him
because of their television ties to say that Tokai TV, which is a part of the Fuji TV network, was interested in promoting Rickson Gracie's match with Takada. According to Hideki Yamamoto, Master Ishii, as he was known, insisted on investing money in the event. As the project moved forward, Ishii had second thoughts about promoting mixed fighting, which could potentially threaten K-1's market share in Japan. He was never a fan of grappling-inclusive events anyhow.

Prior to UFC 1, Ishii sat down for an expensive breakfast with Art Davie and Rorion Gracie at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills on a fact-finding mission of sorts. Ishii told them he wasn't interested in events with grappling, and eventually that same feeling caused him to withdraw his money and support for the Gracie-Takada fight. By 1998, Davie had left the struggling UFC to work with K-1.

Sakakibara then went to a man who had apparently been betrayed by Ishii, a shadowy
yakuza
figure named Mr. Ishizaka (aka Korean-born Kim Dok Soo). The underworld in Japan involved itself with events. If something big was happening, they felt entitled to a piece. Whether Rikidōzan or Antonio Inoki brought the crowds, fight game politics and organized crime were easily intertwined.

Inoki was certainly a player in front of and behind the curtain for Pride. The alliance was practical in the beginning, said Yamamoto. Sakakibara needed talent from New Japan Pro Wrestling to fight for his promotional company, Dream Stage Entertainment, which usurped control of Pride when KRS vanished upon Naoto Morishita's apparent suicide on January 9, 2003. DSE hired Inoki as a contractor and ended up booking some fights that hurt the pro wrestling business in Japan. Inoki, however, seemed to be just fine.

Since Sakakibara had not dealt with NJPW before, “to have control over Inoki, DSE hired Mr. Momose,” Yamamoto said. “So payment was made through Momose to Inoki. It was always cash so that Inoki did not have to file income.”

In his 2002 autobiography,
The Phantom of Pride
, Momose described himself as a strategic planner for many companies, including DSE. Considering he was the person who came up with the first 50 million yen to start DSE, it's easy to understand how Momose, who always sat alongside Inoki at Pride events wearing a baseball cap with “Young at Heart” stitched into it, earned his ghostly sobriquet.

I saw them together many times while covering Pride in Japan as a reporter until the end of 2003, when Momose was pushed out by Ishizaka as
yakuza
gangsters faced down at the Tokyo Dome.

“That had started with Morishita's death and it continued for the whole year and it culminated at that November event and what happened was that Ishizaka and his group basically had the numbers to take control or take full control of Pride,” Miro Mijatovic, a former fight manager credited with exposing Pride's
yakuza
ties following a lawsuit, told Spike TV in 2012.

Several years after Pride made its mark on the mixedfighting world, Ishizaka (the Korean Kim Dok Soo) reportedly fled to South Korea as Japanese authorities sought him for questioning when his ties to Pride were elaborated upon in a series of articles by the weekly magazine
Shukan Gendai
. The blowback cost Pride support from Fuji TV in 2006, and without television backing, the promotion rapidly unraveled. Sakakibara, the public face of Pride, endured
a tear-filled press conference in Las Vegas before officially selling the show to Zuffa in 2007, solidifying the Octagon as the center of the MMA universe.

ROUND FIFTEEN

O
n 310, located in the second-to-last paragraph of the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography
King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero
, journalist David Remnick dedicates the work to his brother. Such was the depth of the Remnick boys' fascination with Ali, the author noted, that they
even
ventured to the Beacon Theater on Manhattan's Upper West Side, Friday, June 25, 1976, to watch Ali battle a professional wrestler live on closed circuit.

Used as an adverb, “even” stands out as dismissively revealing. For many reasons Ali was special, and one way or another he tended to leave an impression. There was a sense that whatever Ali did—be it box, protest, make movies, provide his voice and likeness for Saturday morning cartoons, or, yes,
even
engage in perceived carnival acts like mixedrules fights with pro wrestlers—some redeeming virtue would emerge. What that looked like after the Inoki bout greatly depended on a viewer's sense of the situation.

Like most Americans who watched Ali take on Inoki, for the seventeen-year-old Remnick it rendered down to a strange spectacle the value of which, if such a thing existed, resided mainly in Ali's vibrant presence. Forty years after the fact, Remnick, now editor-in-chief of the
New Yorker
, offered no recollection of the night he watched Ali–Inoki at the Beacon—other than suggesting it was something worth forgetting. Otherwise, it was as the boxing and wrestling media framed: a fifteen-round farce. A money grab. A footnote. A dangerous waste of time. A disaster. It was Inoki crawling around the floor like a crab. It was the crowd failing to understand what they were watching. It was the West being utterly disdainful of the East.

The existence of Ali–Inoki was partly a result of the attitude that produced George Foreman pummeling five no-name boxers in under an hour on
Wide World of Sports
; Billie Jean King besting Bobby Riggs in The Battle of the Sexes inside the Eighth Wonder of the World, Houston's Astrodome; Bob Arum and Vince McMahon Jr. promoting a closed-circuit event featuring Evil Knievel's aborted jump on a rocket-powered cycle across the Snake River Canyon;
Superstars
, which matched athletes from various sports in a multitude of competitions; and
Battle of the Network Stars
, which did the same with actors and actresses.

These were the reality shows of their day. The genre became common in American pop culture during the 1970s, yet some events stood the test of time. Riggs versus King, for instance, came to represent an important cultural moment for the cause of feminism in the U.S.

Bucking conventional wisdom, Ali versus Inoki has also come to signify more than a sad money grab. The history
associated with the world's greatest heavyweight boxer, perceived then as the world's greatest fighter, taking on a skilled opponent with divergent abilities, is reason enough for the match to be remembered. It took quite a lot of courage for Ali to do what he did. No one asked him to step outside his comfort zone to take on Inoki. Rather, most people with any sway wished he wouldn't. He did it for himself, at the zenith of his career and fame, months removed from perhaps his most impressive win in the most trying of circumstances.

This was, in spite of the rules, a legitimate contest. Nothing between the competitors was scripted or rehearsed, at least. Conceivably it would not have taken much for Ali to end up in a risky situation. He could have been made to look a fool. He could have, regardless of his public protestations in venues like
The Tonight Show
, brought disrepute to boxing.

“Ali was always willing to endure ridicule to enhance his name and create interest in him and his sport,” said boxing writer Kevin Iole. “But it could have hurt his reputation and it had the ability to do so. I don't think Inoki took any risk. It was all upside for Inoki.”

Discussion around the legacy of the Inoki match rarely centers on the true cost or benefit. Ali was, in fact, hurt in Tokyo.

Whether or not it was a result of the Frazier contest, the blows to his legs by Inoki, the normal physical price of a long boxing career, or simply how it worked out, Ali wouldn't put an opponent on the canvas again during his final seven fights over the next five years.

Following the third Frazier fight, Ali's reflexes were noticeably slower and his speech patterns had shifted. The
Inoki contest only exacerbated his decline because it sapped the heavyweight of whatever remaining mobility he could muster. Early in Ali's career his defense, offense, and everything else were predicated on the swiftness coming from his legs. Now the decline was obvious for everyone to see.

“This guy was dying with every fight he fights,” Pacheco said. “Blood was coming out in his urine and eventually it'll be the end of the road. They just kept on going until the last fight. He had to quit because he couldn't walk up to the ring. For them to put him up to the ring was criminal. The poor guy couldn't even walk to the ring. This model, wonderful athlete just run down. Like a Model T running the Indianapolis 500. It shouldn't have happened but it did. I said it on television so much they asked me to shut up.”

Ali's kidneys were not only allowing blood to pass, there was evidence that the lining of his kidney's cellular walls were disintegrating, Pacheco said. The great boxer was literally falling apart from the inside, but he didn't care. In Ali's mind, a fighter's mind, The Greatest's mind, he remained invincible and untouchable.

Three months after the match in Tokyo, Ali received a victory many people felt he should not have over Ken Norton in their third fight at Yankee Stadium. He managed two more wins before dropping his title to seven-fight “veteran” Leon Spinks in 1978.

“It's like somebody with a paintbrush walking up to the
Mona Lisa
saying I can make that better,” said Pacheco, who had sounded the alarm bells and removed himself from the equation in September 1977 after Ali's unanimous decision over Earnie Shavers.

“It's the
Mona Lisa
, you can't touch it! Well, that's what Ali was. He was the
Mona Lisa
. He was a perfect specimen. He was a masterpiece. Don't touch him. Don't fool around with him. But everyone did and he let 'em. He let them all. I didn't want to be a part of that and I wasn't, and to this day I'm proud I wasn't. I stopped and stepped away from him when I wanted to.”

After regaining the belt versus Spinks at the Superdome in New Orleans, Ali announced his retirement in September 1979, which he promptly broke thirteen months later against Larry Holmes.

“The press conference that they had at the Forum for him when he decided he was going to retire was very memorable,” said newspaper columnist John Hall. “They had a circus going. Several bars on the floor. Chick Hearn was the MC and introduced a lot of people. Ali made a big speech that day and was the most charming I ever saw. He said, ‘I fooled you all. You believed I was a bad guy. I fooled you all. I've enjoyed it and thank you for everything.' He was totally charming. The next time I saw him he was already starting to mumble and lost the personality. I think it was from the punches. Larry Holmes really beat him up both to the body and head. He hurt him a lot too.”

Ali looked deceptively great ahead of that fight. He weighed under 218, and as far as his personal goals went this was good news. Ali hadn't been less than 220 pounds for a boxing bout since upending Foreman in 1974, but in 1980 this was smoke and mirrors as he suffered from the dehydrating effects of thyroid pills. Gene Kilroy said he took Ali to the Mayo Clinic for a checkup before meeting Holmes. The boxer passed, though Pacheco knocked those results.

Fourteen months later in a minor-league baseball park in Nassau, Bahamas, Ali, weighing 236.5 pounds, went down to Trevor Berbick in an ugly display. He seemed almost unable to make it into the ring on his own. This was undoubtedly the end. No more propping up an old master.

“One of the main differences between Ali and other fighters today, he never walked around thinking he was a god,” said Rudy Hernández, who remembered the great boxer shadowboxing at the Main Street Gym in Los Angeles in 1981 like the rest of the guys. “He walked around being humble. He spoke to us. There was no catch. No cameras. No one around. He spoke to us like another human being. To me guys today feel like they're owed, and they haven't earned it. They weren't as humble as he was.”

Up until Parkinson's disease overtook Ali's life, the man exuded a special sort of boundless energy. It was here that Ali and Antonio Inoki, whose famous “burning fighting spirit” mantra follows him wherever he goes, truly connected. An important piece of Inoki's persona focuses on transferring his energy to fans, fighters and other wrestlers. A believer in the supernatural, Inoki will literally slap people silly as a goodwill gesture, and most recipients accept the experience with reverence. More than saying hello, Inoki always asks how are their energy levels. Someone wondering that, then, needs to be spry most of the time.

Ali didn't need to slap someone cross the face to transfer energy. He only needed to walk in a room. I saw him once in person, in 1998 at a K-1 kickboxing event in Las Vegas. Pronounced physical ailments caused him to shake and slow his gait, but the room didn't care that Ali wasn't Ali. They loved him just the same. Everyone stood and looked before
offering an equal mix of cheering, clapping, and respect. The feel of the place bumped up a few notches—even then he had that sort of presence about him.

A year after their draw in Tokyo, Inoki traveled with his wife to California to witness Ali's wedding to Veronica Porche at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills. Ali's divorce from Belinda had just finalized when he and Porche became official. Ahead of the fortieth anniversary of The Rumble in the Jungle, Porche, who provided Ali two more daughters, including famed female boxer Laila Ali, claimed she and Ali had married in a secret service in Zaire in 1974. By 1986, however, they were apart for good, as he married a fourth and final time that November, taking vows with Lonnie Williams, whom thirty years later he still lives with in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Ali's influence on Inoki was massive—all one needs to see is how the wrestler patterned himself after the great boxer. Ali allowed “Ali Bomaye,” a catchy, upbeat track from the movie
The Greatest
, the 1977 biopic in which he played himself, to be used as the Japanese wrestler's theme song. Inoki treated it as his own from then on. And when Inoki moved into the fight promotion business, he named his traditional New Year's Eve events “Inoki Bom-Ba-Ye.” Inoki has always treated wrestling as a vehicle to bring people together, and in this sense the mixed match with Ali served its purpose, even if he never found the fame he hoped for in America. The closest he got to enjoying notoriety in the U.S. outside of hardcore pro wrestling circles, beyond being the Japanese guy that Ali fought in the non-boxing bout, was appearing as himself in
The Bad News Bears Go to Japan
.

Inoki continued to build his wrestling career, getting in and out of trouble, and playing off the mixed-match theme until 1989, when he made the move into politics—a new sort of public life—through the “Sports and Peace” party and the Japanese House of Councillors.

The next year both he and Ali visited Iraq as the U.S.-led coalition ramped up for the Gulf War following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Both men attempted to negotiate the release of hostages taken by Saddam Hussein as bargaining chips to stave off attack. Ali sought freedom for fifteen Americans, while Inoki hoped to secure safe passage for over one hundred Japanese families.

As he had in Pakistan during the peak of his wrestling days in the 1970s, Inoki embraced Islam while he was in its midst. Whether or not this was a nod to Ali it surely seemed so, though Inoki generally took on the defining characteristics of the environment he operated in at any particular moment. In 1990, he became the first Japanese politician to be admitted to the mosque at Karbala. Standing in view of news cameras with his hands raised and palms facing skyward in prayer, Inoki underwent the process of becoming a Muslim. He was given the name “Muhammad Hussain,” although that was not revealed publicly for twenty-two years.

Days later, an estimated 35,000 people attended a “peace festival” Inoki organized in Baghdad featuring Japanese professional wrestlers, traditional taiko drummers, a rock concert, soccer, basketball, karate, and judo exhibitions at Saddam Arena. Another area in which Inoki and Ali were similar: they had no problem operating in the backyards of despots.

As Inoki's return to Japan loomed, Saddam Hussein's son Uday, Iraq's minister of sport when he wasn't raping,
murdering, or torturing, announced that according to a special order from his father, all remaining Japanese hostages would be released. Uday went so far as to apologize for holding them.

Within days of one another, Ali and Inoki departed Iraq in the company of their respective countrymen, and a month later, on January 17, 1991, the bombing commenced.

Neither Ali nor Inoki were prone to following rules. They operated as they wished in a world that was malleable to their needs. This is how truly pioneering people operate, and there's no question that Ali and Inoki qualify. Ali's strain of rebellion is a well-understood American quality. For the Japanese, however, Inoki's subversion in wrestling, politics, and life has served mostly to push firm boundaries. At certain moments he paid a price, including scoldings from the Japanese government, yet, like Ali, Inoki functions best when the lights are brightest.

In 1998, Inoki retired from active wrestling. Ali flew to Japan and sat ringside at the Tokyo Dome, joining over 65,000 fans (another 5,000 were turned away at the door) to honor the Japanese wrestler, statesman, salesman, and chameleon. Inoki walked away from participating in “strong style” matches by working over American tough guy Don Frye—just as Rikidōzan might have done if he had had the luxury of wrestling to a conclusive career arc.