by Josh Gross
As the studio laughter subsided, Ali said, indeed, it was “a stupid question.”
“I’ve been asked that so much,” he replied. “I thought you were going to ask me how I got started rasslin’. Boxing is old news. We’re in a new field now. We’re going to Japan to take on this Antonio Inoki, the world’s heavyweight karate wrestling champion. This is a whole new thing. People have always wondered how would a boxer do with a wrestler. I’ve always wanted to fight a wrestler. I’ve seen them grabbing each other. Throwing each other down and twisting each other’s arm. And I said, ‘Boy I could whoop him. All you gotta do is hit him, hit him really fast and hard and move off of him.’ And now I’m going to get a chance to do it. This will be something. I predict this will outsell all of my fights, and I’m the biggest draw in the world. Everybody should watch this fight.
“Listen, I’m going to play the ropes. We’re going fifteen rounds, three-minute rounds. He’s allowed to use his bare fists. He’s allowed to use karate. No punching in the eyes and no hitting below the belt. If I can grab the ropes when I’m down he’s going to have to turn me loose, and you saw a sample on Wide World of Sports a few days ago when I beat these rasslers to bloody messes. That’s right. And that’s what I’m gonna get. Plus he’s starting to talk. He’s talking about, I better bring a sling and crutches with me, and I don’t like fighters or wrestlers who talk too much.”
The Carson stand-in and the audience howled with laughter. Stevenson noted that Inoki, whom he called “Hokey Finoki,” causing Ali to turn and poorly conceal his snickering from the crowd, was willingly taking kicks to the face in preparation for the impending onslaught.
“He got two or three teeth knocked out, I understand, accidentally,” Ali said. “People jumping on his face because he don’t do this for rasslin’. He’s trying to get ready for shock, but the shock he’s taking isn’t like my punches.” Ali then showed a little bit of humility, considering what he was facing. “I’m a little nervous, I must admit. If this man grabs my arm, or gets in behind me and gets one of those body-snatchers or those backbreakers on me, I’m in trouble. But I’m counting on my speed and my reflexes, because if I hit him right and he don’t fall, then he can do what he wanna do.”
Charged with protecting Ali from body-snatchers, backbreakers, and everything else he wasn’t used to was a man the champ had long admired: beguiling retired pro wrestler “Classy” Freddie Blassie, who, at fifty-eight, still cut an imposing figure. Blassie emerged from behind the multicolored The Tonight Show curtain without his cane, a staple of his pro wrestling gimmick after becoming a “manager” in the sunset years of his fondly remembered career. The cane, he liked to say, wasn’t a tool to lean on. A man of his distinction simply required a walking stick—not to mention a respectable weapon should the need arise. The blond Blassie strode towards Carson’s occupied desk draped in his usual getup—a Hawaiian shirt and khaki slacks—and Ali gladly made space for his “new trainer” by sliding over next to Ed McMahon on the couch. Using catchphrases cultivated over four decades of working every pro wrestling territory worth knowing, Blassie plowed over that “pencil-neck geek” Stevenson. As it was, Ali was attempting to sell a legitimate fight, not a pro wrestling bonanza, and he sensed Blassie’s over-the-top shtick would confuse the audience. So the boxer cut him off.
Ali leaned forward.
“There’s $10 million involved,” he said, which was an exaggeration since he had agreed to a purse of $6.1 million while Inoki was set to take home in the neighborhood of $2 million. “I wouldn’t take the sport of boxing and disgrace it. I wouldn’t pull a fraud on the public. This is real. There’s no plan. The blood. The holds. The pain. Everything is going to be real. I’m not here in this time of my life to come out with some phony action.”
The next night Charlton Heston and comedian Kelly Monteith had the pleasure of welcoming Johnny Carson back to Burbank, Calif. After hearing Ed McMahon describe a wacky time at a bicentennial gathering in the West Chicago suburb of Wheaton, Ill.—“You told me never to play a fairgrounds, and I made a mistake,” McMahon admitted to Carson. “I didn’t listen to you.”—the late-night king lamented his days touring the Midwest.
Professional wrestlers knew as well as anyone what it was like to play in front of fairgrounds fans. The tradition of wrestling tours, like America, is long and vast, and in significant ways linked to the man Ali signed to fight in Tokyo.
Inoki, a famous disciple of the father of Japanese professional wrestling, better known as Rikidōzan, was the B-side of a contest poised to produce the largest purse and audience for a bout of this type. Ticket prices at the Nippon Budokan arena were exorbitant, yet, with Ali involved, the fight was a sellout. Ringside seats for regular wrestling shows at the Budokan were 5,000 yen (roughly $17 at the time). For the Ali–Inoki rumble, that price put fans in the nosebleeds of a 14,000-seat building. The face value of the most expensive ticket available to the public was $1,000 ($4,100 today). Sponsors could access “royal ringside” seats for three times that price.
“My memory was, ‘Oh my God, you’re charging how much?’” recalled Dave Meltzer, a sixteen-year-old fanatic with a pro wrestling newsletter who watched the match at the Santa Clara Fairgrounds, one of four Bay Area venues carrying the closed-circuit feed from Tokyo.
“It was announced in Japan long before it was announced in the United States,” he said. “And even though it was announced in Japan, I thought the Japanese wrestling people were just making noise because there was no way in hell this was ever going to happen. And they actually announced it and I was stunned. There was always in wrestling historically this idea of a boxer versus a wrestler going back to ‘Strangler’ Lewis and Jack Dempsey—it never happened, probably because when the boxer started training with real wrestlers it was like, wow, this is a really dumb idea.”
At Shea Stadium in Flushing, New York, 32,897 spectators gathered to watch Ali meet Inoki after a World Wide Wrestling Federation extravaganza, “Showdown at Shea,” a precursor to modern-day WrestleMania events. For the sake of business that night, a gimpy Bruno Sammartino returned to the squared circle two months after fracturing his neck in a match at Madison Square Garden against Stan Hansen. Anchoring the event before Shea Stadium went dark for the Ali–Inoki contest, Andre the Giant faced Chuck Wepner— Sylvester Stallone’s inspiration for Rocky Balboa. (Decades later, most people believe the action at Shea and Tokyo also prompted Stallone to include a boxer-versus-wrestler scene in Rocky III. Through his publicist, Stallone denied any truth to that.) Cards like these took place across North America that night, and at the behest of Vince McMahon Sr., were billed as a sort of “Martial Arts Olympics” to support the so-called World Martial Arts Championship.
Whatever trepidation Ali felt ahead of the Inoki bout, it was at least rooted in combat sports reality. Unlike earlier generations of American audiences, fight watchers in the mid-1970s weren’t clued into matches that allowed for more than trading punches. Boxing was the combat sport, in large part because of Ali, who ably served as its king and jester. Martial arts in the age of Bruce Lee were repurposed as flash for film and television, further eroding the prominence of American grappling arts that had been influenced by Japanese martial arts missionaries and European immigrants during the Industrial Revolution. By the summer of America’s 200th birthday, when fans gathered in arenas across the globe to watch Ali fight Inoki, a sense of excitement brewed on all sides. Ali was the best boxer on the planet, The Greatest of All Time, and anything he did received huge attention. But this? This was unique. Something mysterious. And that made it potentially something bigger.
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 finis
hing 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
Muhammad 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.
