Ali vs. Inoki (3 page)

Seven minutes before Ali and Inoki stood in the ring together, the first images from the Nippon Budokan were
beamed by satellite to the rest of the world. Closed-circuit sites—predominantly movie houses with stadiums and arenas sprinkled in—filled with people hoping for a great show on a Friday night.

In San Jose, Calif., Meltzer and some high school friends put the finishing touches on a debate that had raged for weeks. “Beforehand we didn't know if it would be real or not,” said Meltzer, who, forty years later, is a highly respected pro wrestling and combat sports journalist. “The prevailing view in the media was that it was going to be a fake pro wrestling match.”

Was this thing on the up-and-up? Could a boxer, even someone as great as Ali, really beat a wrestler? Oh my God, what if Inoki takes Ali to the ground and hurts him?
These discussions played out wherever people congregated to take in the action.

Jeff Wagenheim spent fifteen dollars on a ticket to watch at the Liberty Theater in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Having graduated high school a week before the match, Wagenheim, who went on to cover mixed martial arts as a reporter for
Sports Illustrated
, had mostly matured past the wrestling fandom of his childhood. Yet after hearing of the Ali–Inoki pairing, he and a friend decided to see what the noise was about.

“I remember the air-conditioning wasn't working,” Wagenheim said. “As soon as we got in the theater I started feeling a little feverish, a little clammy and sweating, and you're not quite yourself. The place was packed.”

Unlike Wagenheim, Kevin Iole continued to love wrestling into his high school days, especially the McMahonowned WWWF (World Wide Wrestling Federation). And for Ali to insert himself in that world made the closed-circuit
event a must-see. Iole took a seat in the small ballroom at Monzo's Howard Johnson's in Monroeville, Pa., as the summer prior to his senior year was getting started. “I didn't think for one second it would be a real thing,” recalled the prolific boxing writer who, while working for the
Las Vegas Review-Journal
in 2004, was among the first American newspaper reporters to give the fledgling sport of mixed martial arts his attention. “I thought it'd be a work and we'd get a kick out of it, and who knew what Ali would do or say.”

Noted handicapper Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder explained that he was unwilling to post a line on the fight, highlighting the difficulty in guaranteeing the bona fides of such a spectacle. “How do I know it's anything but an exhibition?” he wrote in his newspaper column on June 3. “I've been bombarded by karate lovers who insist Ali doesn't have a chance, that no fighter can beat a wrestler.” At the fabled Olympic Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles, bookies ignored history and installed the boxer as a 3-to-1 favorite.

The Olympic, like Shea, hosted a live wrestling undercard the night of the Ali–Inoki dustup. It was one of several venues scattered amongst pro wrestling territories from the Northeast to the Southwest, under the auspices of the National Wrestling Alliance, that held talent-rich cards in support of the closed-circuit broadcast from Tokyo.

By comparison, Saturday's afternoon action at the Budokan offered little attraction outside the main event. Demonstrations of a traditional Iranian martial art as well as Goju Ryu karate preceded a pro wrestling tag-team match for Japanese fans, whose reputation as intelligent, mindful watchers of combat is well earned. If a sense of uncertainty circulated among American audiences, the Japanese
were utterly fixated on the enormous event that, courtesy of Inoki, had arrived on their shores.

Hideki Yamamoto, a fourteen-year-old junior high student fond of Coca-Cola packed in 350-milliliter steel cans, was in his second year at Wakasa Junior High School. On Saturday afternoon the left fielder was supposed to be practicing with his baseball club, but he and some of his teammates slipped out of training and found their way to a teachers' lounge.

“There was a TV set, and some teachers, including our baseball coach, surrounded it,” recalled Yamamoto, who years later served as an executive for Japan's seminal mixed martial arts promotion, the Pride Fighting Championship, with which Inoki was also affiliated. “I found out it was the live TV broadcast of the fight. The coaches said something but I could not hear what it was. They did not blame my friends and allowed them to keep watching.”

Ali's presence in the match made people across Japan stop whatever it was they were doing to watch. This was precisely what Inoki wanted. While the businessmen who put up the money saw fortune, the ambitious wrestler envisioned his name being exposed to the wider world. Up to that point, he had been largely anonymous outside of Japan. Inoki touched fame in Asia, and some diehard stateside pro wrestling fans knew of him, but his ego demanded a larger audience. So he set out to find one.

During final preparations before his ring walk, Ali preened in front of a mirror in his locker room. Padded with white gauze and bandages, Ali's prized hands expertly tied off his white Everlast satin shorts accentuated by a black waistband and black stripes down each side—the same color
scheme he wore for so many indelible moments in the ring. Surrounded by members of his boxing entourage—Angelo Dundee, Drew “Bundini” Brown, Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, and Wali Muhammad—and people there just for this night— Freddie Blassie and Korea's Jhoon Rhee, who popularized taekwondo in America—Ali primped before shooing away a Japanese cameraman.

As a rookie reporter for United Press, Andrew Malcolm worked the occasional boxing event from ringside. He had learned the risk of being so close to the action that snot and spit might fly in his direction, so years later as the Tokyo bureau chief of the
New York Times
, Malcolm chose to settle in fifteen rows back from the apron. Ali and Inoki were expected to enter the ring around 11:30 a.m. local time and as the middle of the day approached, Budokan Hall was stifling. The mugginess made Malcolm squirm in his seat, which was set up with a full-service telephone line connected to a recording room in New York that collected reporters' phoned-in stories or notes. As an event unfolded, staff could take those accounts and begin working them into stories. Narrating the blow-by-blow back to New York was Malcolm's first task, though he felt silly talking on a trans-Pacific phone without someone listening on the other side. Next would be arranging time to speak with Ali after the bout for a feature on how smitten Japan was with him and the match.

From his vantage, Malcolm saw the trio of officials chatting as best they could in a neutral corner. Two Japanese judges, hefty grappler Kokichi Endo and boxing official Kou Toyama, joined American referee “Judo” Gene LeBell, who sported red pants to match his ginger hair, a blue shirt, and black bow tie. He had nearly donned a red tie, but opted for
a more formal look. LeBell, an influential martial artist and prolific stuntman out of Los Angeles, was set to play a crucial part. He would control the action in the ring and assign a score after each round, based on a five-point must scoring system and heavily negotiated rules.

Concerns about corruption and fighter safety made this judge-referee combination rare after the early 1980s. Each job is difficult enough without having to worry about doing both at the same time. Still, the use of LeBell's services in both areas made good sense. An accomplished grappler who could box? LeBell was literally one of the few people at the time who had intimate knowledge of mixed matches, though he had not refereed one before.

“Ali knew me as a good wrestler, at least he thought so,” said LeBell, who for all this expertise was paid $5,000 in crisp new hundred-dollar bills to officiate the contest. “He wanted me to be a referee. Ali saw me working out at Main Street Gym and that was his world. It was very casual. Ali and Inoki said we want you as the referee because all the guys that were up for it, they're either wrestling referees or boxing. And I did both.”

Before cameras picked up LeBell communicating with his fellow officials, he was backstage watching the closed-circuit feed out of Flushing, New York. In Ali's locker room LeBell stood with Blassie, a trusted friend, while the sevenfoot-four, roughly 500-pound André René Roussimoff (aka Andre the Giant) dumped Chuck Wepner over the top rope to take the WWWF co-feature at Shea Stadium by count out. Of course, the action in Queens was show business.

Watching alongside Blassie and LeBell, Ali was engrossed. He said he pictured Inoki going after him with
“a pro wrestling style” and sounded confident that if he was in there with Andre the Giant, he could have won. LeBell's wisdom compelled him to conjure a much different outcome. The first televised bout of this type in the United States ended when LeBell strangled a boxer unconscious on a wild night in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1963, which is why the referee figured Ali would be forced to the canvas and, if things went really bad, would get something broken or be strangled out cold.

“Inoki was a scary guy. He was always calm and spoke in a casual way, about breaking Ali's arm, or pulling out a bone, or a muscle. Ali would always banter with him, but I think he too was concerned, because of the unknown pieces,” said publicist Bobby Goodman, who worked with Ali in Tokyo on behalf of Top Rank. “Bob Arum put this together with Vince McMahon Sr. and it came not too long after the Richard Dunn fight in Munich. So the length of time Ali usually had to prepare for fights didn't really exist, especially for something he hadn't experienced before.”

As Ali readied himself to engage in a form of combat that presented challenges he wasn't equipped to handle, the unflappable boxer, the most famous face on earth, grew anxious in a way earthquakes or flying on a plane that had run out of gas could not make him.

ROUND TWO

M
uhammad Ali met Ichiro Hatta, a fellow Olympian and president of the Japanese Amateur Wrestling Association, at a reception in the United States in April 1975. The story goes that Ali nudged Hatta, an instrumental figure in Japan's Olympic movement, with a dare: “Isn't there an Oriental fighter who will challenge me? I'll give him one million dollars if he wins.” Respected for, among other things, introducing Western-style wrestling to Japan in 1931, Hatta devoted himself to grappling, in the way that Japanese strive to find and repeat perfection over the long course of their professional lives. Therefore, unbeknownst to Ali, Hatta was quite simply the best person to relay his message to the Japanese press, which predictably played up the remark. As it happened, a professional wrestler responded.

There are numerous examples of great wrestlers chasing fights with great boxers. There are far fewer examples of great
boxers chasing great wrestlers, but that's what Ali seemed to have in mind. Ali's interest in Inoki's offer hinged, of course, on a massive payday. But his love of professional wrestling, and the notion that the boxer-versus-wrestler debate had not been settled, were quite compelling to Ali. That was particularly true, he explained, because a boxer of his caliber, in his prime, taking on a top-form “rassler” was rare. The possibility of what might happen wasn't much of a mystery, though. Documented mixed-style fights date as far back as the days of antiquity, when Athens and Rome cradled civilizations, and the results suggested grapplers held a significant edge when allowed to ply their trade.

The influential sport of
pankration
, a Greek term that translates to “all powers,” is the ancient version of mixed fighting. Mythologized as the martial art Theseus used to slay the Minotaur in the labyrinth and Hercules employed to subdue the Nemean lion, pankration in the real world during the seventh century
B.C.
blended a mix of unbridled striking and grappling that left all attacks on the table. The wide-ranging barbarism of pankration, save eye gouging and biting, was only too restrictive for Spartan fighters, who, true to their reputation, boycotted competitions unless no holds were barred. The Greeks, however, were on board—it was said Zeus grappled with his father, the titan Kronos, for control over Mount Olympus. Mere mortals became godlike if they found success among the three wrestling forms that rounded out the combat sports lineup at the ancient Olympiad. A quite vicious form of boxing, known for disfiguring faces with fists wrapped in hard leather straps, was also featured as sport.

Until 393
A.D
., when Theodosius I, the last man to rule the entirety of the Roman Empire, abolished gladiatorial
combat and pagan festivals including the Olympics, pankration created many star athletes celebrated by the Greeks. Mixed fighting held a prominent place in that part of the world for more than a thousand years, yet at the return of the Olympic games to Greece in 1896, bareknuckle brawlers capable of punching and grappling weren't welcome. Not that it mattered much. These types of fights persisted as humans across a multitude of generations, regardless of the social mores of the day, were compelled to participate in or watch sanctioned violence.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Martin “Farmer” Burns, whose headstone at the St. James Cemetery in Toronto, Iowa, reads “World's Champion Wrestler,” was the man to challenge. Shy of 175 pounds yet incredibly strong, Burns was the obligatory bear on the mat during his heyday, boasting a twenty-inch neck that allowed him to perform carnival circuit stunts like dropping six feet off a platform wearing a noose, as if he'd been convicted of a capital crime, while whistling “Yankee Doodle.” Burns' power and skill made him an effective enough grappler into his fifties, handling almost anyone with the “catch-as-catch-can” wrestling style—an influential 1870s British creation that made full use of pinning positions and, absorbing what worked from other parts of the world, a menagerie of painful submissions holds.

By 1910, Burns' prestige put him in position to work alongside “Gentleman Jim” Corbett—who famously took the heavyweight boxing title from John L. Sullivan eighteen years earlier. The pair served as conditioning coaches for Jim Jeffries, the “Great White Hope” to the generally reviled blackness that was then boxing heavyweight champion Jack
Johnson. Say this about Jeffries, the 220-pound banger knew how to assemble a training camp. Burns and Corbett, who in his final fight in 1903 failed to regain the title against Jeffries, are regarded as major influences on the increasingly scientific way people trained their bodies.

During Jeffries' camp in Reno, Nevada, middleweight contender Billy Papke, a very capable fighter at the time, mouthed off at Burns that a boxer could handle a wrestler, no sweat. Burns quickly offered stakes and a classic wrestlerversus-boxer confrontation ensued.

Eighteen seconds after they met in the ring, Papke's shoulders were square to the canvas. That wasn't enough for Burns, who, intent on sending a message, dragged a squealing Papke to the ropes, tied the boxer's arms behind him, and jumped out of the ring to collect $2,300. As it turned out, Burns was considerably more successful with Papke than he was at preparing Jeffries for Johnson.

With America consumed by the first sporting event to truly dominate public discourse—much more than a boxing title was on the line—Johnson scored three knockdowns en route to a 15th-round stoppage. Race riots ensued and Congress made the transportation of prizefight films across state lines a criminal offense.

Johnson entertained his share of grapplers who wanted a piece, but they never got one, even if he fancied himself a fairly decent wrestler.

Four years after the fight in Reno, Burns published a widely read mail-order newsletter entitled
The Lessons in Wrestling and Physical Culture
. Ninety-six pages in total, each set of instructions included lessons on body-weight and resistance exercises, as well as wrestling and submission techniques. The
pamphlet inspired a new generation of grapplers such as Ed “Strangler” Lewis, who carried on ancient and modern grappling traditions while captivating the public enough to bank at least $4 million over the course of his career.

Such was the strength of the “Strangler” Lewis name that, with a straight face, he attempted during his championship reign to arrange a fight with heavyweight boxing king Jack Dempsey. The public certainly wanted to see it. Lewis' main challenge came March 16, 1922, in Nashville, Tenn., following another successful defense of the heavyweight wrestling title. “I realize that Jack Dempsey is one of the greatest boxers that ever stepped into a ring, and there is no desire whatsoever on my part to minimize his ability,” the five-foot-ten, barrel-chested grappler told reporters in Nashville, “but I am fully confident that I can handle him, else I would not agree to the match. It is my contention that the world's heavyweight champion wrestler is superior to the champion boxer at all times, and that wrestling is a more powerful method of self-defense than the boxing art.”

Through the media, Dempsey's manager, Jack Kearns, accepted the match, and claimed the “Manassa Mauler” was a “first-rate wrestler himself.”

Four days after the challenge was issued, Colonel Joe C. Miller, a rancher near Ponca City, Okla., wired an offer to Dempsey and Lewis for a $200,000 guarantee and split of the receipts if the boxer-wrestler clash was brought to his property, the 101 Ranch, located on the main line of the Santa Fe Railroad. By the end of the year, however, the Oklahoma offer had been cast aside for a $300,000 payday from Wichita, Kans., where wrestling promoter Tom Law, backed by five oilmen, put up money for a bout to take place
no later than July 4, 1923. Soon Lewis spoke in the press as if the match had been signed. Dempsey claimed to know nothing of an official contest, even if yet again he suggested he was ready to take on Lewis.

Speaking to the
Rochester American-Journal
on December 10, 1922, Dempsey noted that “if the match ever went through, I think I'd be mighty tempted to try to beat that wrestler at his own game. I've done a lot of wrestling as part of my preliminary training and I think I've got the old toehold and headlock down close to perfection. If I can win the first fall from him, I'll begin to use my fists. But I've got a funny little hunch that maybe I can dump him without rapping him on the chin.”

A bold claim considering the competition.

As the first week of January 1923 came to a close, a set of ten rules was released to the public. Two of the ten pertained to Dempsey, who was obligated to wrap his hands in soft bandages, wear five-ounce gloves, and refrain from hitting Lewis when he was down.

The rest restricted the wrestler: a common theme as these matches were discussed.

Among the notable instructions, Lewis could not hit with a bare hand or fist, and strangleholds were barred, as were butting and heeling. To win, Lewis had to pin Dempsey for three seconds. If Lewis spent more than ten seconds at a time on the canvas while Dempsey stood, the wrestler would be disqualified.

While talk captured imaginations across America, the spilled newspaper ink failed to manifest into a real contest. Reports of a signed match were labeled “bunk” by the pugilist. Instead Dempsey turned a desire among fans
to see the best from boxing meet the best from wrestling into leverage, agreeing to fight for promoter Tex Rickard on the Fourth of July, 1923. But not against a wrestler. The promoters—oilmen from Montana who originally offered Dempsey $200,000 to fight an unknown opponent and put an unknown boomtown on the map—caved and upped their guarantee to $300,000, the same amount of oil money Dempsey ignored to face Lewis in Wichita.

Two days before the fight, reports indicated that the last of three $100,000 payments to Dempsey had not been made, so the event was publicly cancelled. Dempsey's money came through at the last minute, but not before newspaper stories were published and 200 ten-car trains riding the Great Northern Railway, totaling thirty-five miles if someone wanted to connect them all at once, stopped running. A disaster. The city of Shelby, population 400, had spent a reported $1 million (nearly $14 million in 2015's values) to prepare. They laid eleven miles of new track, erected a stadium with sixteen entrances and eighty-five rows of seats on a six-acre plot of land, created a 160-acre automobile tourist camp, issued four hundred building permits, and budgeted city improvements costing $250,000. Grocery merchants within one hundred miles of Shelby were on call to make shipments to a town that now featured more than thirty places to grab food. Drinking booze and beer was legal, and six dance halls were available in the evenings. If anything got out of hand, the governor of Montana, Republican Joseph M. Dixon, was prepared to send in two units of the National Guard.

Since rail was the prime way spectators would have arrived at a newly built octagon-shaped wooden arena scaled for 40,208 seats, ticket sales produced just a small fraction
of the expected gate. Dempsey went on to win an uninspired decision over Tommy Gibbons, and the host oil enclave of Shelby, Montana, was forced to endure a historic fiasco. The
New York Times
called the bout “the greatest financial failure of a single sporting event in history.” Only Dempsey, his manager Kearns, and Gibbons walked away with cash. Everyone else got wiped out. Three banks connected to the financing of the fight closed their doors within a week—bad mojo, perhaps, for Dempsey avoiding the “Strangler.”

Two decades later, Dempsey, then forty-five, stuck his toes in rasslin' waters. Long retired, he mixed it up as a referee and quickly found himself embroiled in a fracas with a wrestler named Cowboy Luttrell. They settled the matter a couple months later, July 1, 1940, in Atlanta. Wearing the lightest gloves that Georgia officials allowed, Dempsey waited for Luttrell on an overturned beer case in his corner between rounds—a sad sight that did not go unnoticed by newspaper columnists. In front of more than 10,000 spectators, the “Manassa Mauler” smashed the wrestler in a round and a half. Exhibitions in which boxers boxed wrestlers usually rendered down to no match at all. This sort of setup wasn't grounds for debate. Under similar circumstances, few people would have given Antonio Inoki a serious shot at lasting as long against Ali as Luttrell did with Dempsey. But that wasn't the paradigm Ali established for his boxer-wrestler foray in Tokyo, and that certainly wasn't what Inoki had in mind as he hustled to get the fight made.

Smart promoters played up these conflicts, which is why the August 1963 issue of
Rogue
magazine, an early competitor
to
Playboy
, is still spoken of today. Jim Beck's article “The Judo Bums” threw down a well-worn martial arts gauntlet by offering a $1,000 prize to any judoka who could beat a boxer. Kenpo karate legend Ed Parker recruited “Judo” Gene LeBell to answer the challenge. “You're the most sadistic bastard I know,” Parker told LeBell at the judo man's hardcore Hollywood dojo. The prospect of walking away with $1,000 was incentive enough for LeBell, who didn't need selling or history lessons to accept Ed Parker's request.