by Josh Gross
“That’s when I decided I’d never been shy about talking,” the boxer said to historian Thomas Hauser in the biography Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times. “But if I talked even more, there was no telling how much money people would pay to see me.”
Ali was simply playing off his strengths. He was already a poet, creating and reciting lines about his favorite boxers and moments, so it wasn’t as if George inspired him to make rhymes. More to the point, this was brashness recognizing itself in an unadulterated, propped-up form. Ali loved the show business side of pro wrestling, and George woke him up to what was possible.
It was a full house for George and Blassie, about double what Ali and Sabedong managed to produce the following night. Angelo Dundee’s charge watched the man that captivated him go through his usual shtick. George stepped into the ring on a cutout of a red carpet. “Pomp and Circumstance” played over loudspeakers. He tossed out gold-colored bobby pins that were removed from his hair to a hissing, snarling crowd. “Georgie pins,” the 14-karat version, were reserved for friends and well-wishers willing to swear an oath never to confuse regular bobby pins for these. The wrestler’s personal valet, whether lady or gentleman, used a super-sized sterling silver atomizer to douse his corner, the referee, the crowd, and, sometimes, his opponent in the sweet-smelling “Chanel No. 10,” a concoction that existed only in the fanciful world of “Gorgeous” George. His marcelled platinum locks, courtesy of Hollywood’s famous Frank & Joseph Hair Salon, were perfectly suited for the lacy, frilly gowns and sequined satin robes he wore into the ring.
“I don’t really think I’m gorgeous,” the wrestler, a natural brunette, was known to say. “But what’s my opinion against millions?” Once he stepped between the ropes and prepared to put on a show, he delighted in slowly folding his robes, reportedly valued at as much as $2,000 apiece. The slower the fold, he discovered, the more the crowd despised him. Against Blassie, George wore a form-fitting red velvet one. He was absurd, but that was the point. More than a third of his fans were women, and on plenty of occasions George dealt with the threat of having a purse hurled at him. Men were known to stick lit cigars into his calves. They hated him but they watched, especially in Los Angeles, where the Olympic Auditorium was home for “G.G.”
“When he got to the ring, everyone booed,” Muhammad Ali would later tell Dundee, according to John Capouya in his book Gorgeous George: The Outrageous Bad-Boy Wrestler Who Created American Pop Culture. “I looked around and I saw everybody was mad. I was mad! I saw 15,000 people coming to see this man get beat, and his talking did it. And I said, ‘This is a gooood idea.’”
Ali needed no gimmicks to attract or repel people. He was a magnet, always; it just depended on the other side’s polarity. The public’s feelings about the boxer throughout his career were based on tangible things: cockiness born from self-belief and success in real competition; a conversion to Islam; unconventional political views; changing his identity from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali; challenging the U.S. government as a conscientious objector during the war in Vietnam; civil rights activism; and dozens of other important stances he took throughout his career. Ali changed the way fighters approached publicity. Unafraid to consider consequences in the ring and out, Ali spoke like no boxer before him, offering statements on serious topics or clownish things as he wished. The man was much more than a lug, but when he incorporated an over-the-top feel to his language, when he harangued opponents for being ugly or looking like a bear or, in Inoki’s case, a pelican, or when he began bragging about himself, which he hadn’t done much until pro wrestlers changed his perspective, people simply ate it up.
When George Wagner bumped into Ali in Las Vegas, the bright lights had long dimmed on the wrestler’s career. Following promotional wars and match-fixing scandals that emerged out of pro wrestling’s turbulent 1930s, George’s buffoonery was the sort of thing no one watching could be confused about, and the total lack of a sporting attitude actually helped propel him to prominence and rekindled a new kind of interest in pro wrestling in America. Pro wrestling needed to be fake and not many of the boys were less real than “Gorgeous” George.
In a Las Vegas locker room following the “no contest” with Blassie, Greb brought Ali to see George, whose advice served the boxer well. “You got your good looks, a great body, and a lot of people will pay to see somebody shut your big mouth,” George is quoted as saying in Capouya’s book. “So keep on bragging, keep on sassing, and always be outrageous.”
That ability put George in the main event of the first pro wrestling show at Madison Square Garden since a twelveyear ban in New York that was inspired by a historic double cross. The Gold Dust Trio fell apart in 1929 after Mondt walked away following a dispute over control with Billy Sandow’s brother. Mondt learned much about the business and carried on as a major player through the rest of his days. Wrestling, meanwhile, became fragmented, and the lack of a true national champion against an emerging reality of various regional championships confused the public and elicited criticism from the press. One of these champions was Danno O’Mahoney, a showman with little shooting gravitas who operated at the mercy of bookers and hookers. He just couldn’t protect himself, so it seemed everyone tried to snatch the belt from him no matter what any script said.
A wrestler named Dick Shikat took his chance at O’Mahoney, and while some of the sport’s most powerful promoters were aware of what might happen, it was primarily the challenger’s call once they stepped in the ring. Shikat hooked the fish in less than twenty minutes, and all hell broke loose. Burned promoters played games, booking Shikat unbeknownst to him in numerous states until he was barred by many commissions for being a no-show. This prompted a trial in Columbus, Ohio, at which all the major promoters were forced to testify. The lid was blown off wrestling: whatever credibility the business had as a sports venture was gone so far as the public was concerned; the media covered it less and less until it didn’t at all, and a multimillion-dollar national spectacle devolved into a regional program that allowed basically everyone to claim they were a pro wrestling world champion.
Fifteen of these so-called champions existed when George appeared at Madison Square Garden in 1949. He was not among them at the time, though even he held a title once. Two days after George appeared at the Garden on February 22 of that year, the New York Times’ Arthur Daley led his column, “Sports of the Times,” with this: “If Gorgeous George has not killed wrestling in New York for good and for all, the sport (if you pardon the expression) is hardy enough to survive a direct hit by an atomic bomb.” Less than five years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that was quite a statement. Daley was wrong both ways. George wouldn’t kill pro wrestling in New York or anywhere else, and the business wasn’t impenetrable, though, like the proverbial cockroach in a nuclear explosion, it’s a reputed survivor. Despite the weeping of newspaper writers, George’s peak through the mid-1950s brought him much fame and money. As gimmicks go, yes, George’s panache went stale, yet it was captivating enough even at the tawdry end to rope in someone like Ali.
ROUND FOUR
Two hundred forty pounds. Barrel-chested. Serious. No hint of fragrance to be found. In most ways Rikidōzan couldn’t have been more different from George Wagner. Yet, as the “Human Orchid” bloomed over American pop culture during the 1950s, retired sumo wrestler Rikidōzan grew to an even greater stature in Japan. An honest-to-goodness icon. How? By capitalizing on anti-Western sentiment and mollifying the depressed spirit of a people decimated by war.
Television, timing, theater, and good ol’ jingoism proved more potent for Rikidōzan than “Gorgeous” George’s “Chanel No. 10.” Then, after he had acted as savior to a people that loved him only because they did not truly know him, the blade of a yakuza gangster’s six-inch hunting knife plunged into Rikidōzan’s battle-hardened abdomen. His untimely demise in 1963 unveiled a face long shrouded in secrecy.
Kim Sin-rak arrived in Japan in 1939 at the age of fifteen after a touring scout sig
ned him to one of the several licensed sumo houses in that country. At Tokyo’s Nishinoseki stable, Sin-rak, strapping young man that he was, received the shikona (ring name) “Rikidōzan,” which fittingly translates to “Rugged Mountain Road.” It was decided that this new identity also required an elaborate fiction. The public wasn’t considered capable of accepting a nonnative Japanese rikishi, let alone a Korean, beating their own in sumo. That’s how Kim Sin-rak from the South Hamgyong Province in northeast Korea, a citizen of the Japanese empire, became Mitsuhiro Momota, pure-blooded Japanese son of Minokichi Momota, the Nagasaki-based scout who discovered him. Years later, well into his incredible pro wrestling stardom, Rikidōzan felt his background, if revealed as false, would have cost him much of his fan base—basically halving the country of Japan—such was the breadth of his popularity and the pervasiveness of anti-Korean sentiment among the population following the annexation of Korea in 1910. It wouldn’t be officially revealed until 1978, and even then many hagiographies glossed over or ignored the truth of Rikidōzan’s heritage and rise to fame.
The same year Rikidōzan began his journey up the difficult sumo ranks, Isamu Takeshita became the third president of the Japan Sumo Association. Fluent in English, Takeshita enjoyed quite a life. A half century before passing away at the age of eighty, Takeshita set up President Theodore Roosevelt with a judo and jiu-jitsu partner, Yamashita Yoshiaki, who at the president’s request taught technique at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he interacted with an assortment of styles including catch-as-catch-can wrestlers. In fact, the pinning of Yoshiaki led the Naval Academy to hire a wrestler rather than a jiu-jitsu man to teach young midshipmen. Still, Takeshita’s diplomatic transaction blazed a trail for four Kanō Jigorō students, including the supremely influential Mitsuyo Maeda, throughout the Americas in the early 1900s. Their efforts created the conditions for the proliferation of Japanese submission arts that are essential to the way the world understands and applies martial arts today.
Takeshita made five trips to the United States between the Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt administrations. During a summer radio broadcast from San Francisco in 1935, six years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, he proclaimed, “No Japanese warship has ever crossed the Pacific except on a mission of peace. No Japanese soldier has ever come to these shores except on a similar mission.” Yet the retired admiral, who received a Distinguished Service Medal from the United States for his actions in the Japanese Imperial Navy during World War I, played a significant role in militarizing Japanese youth and sports in the ramp-up to war in the Pacific.
Joseph Svinth, for the Journal of Combative Sport, noted, “The fascistization of Japanese sport was among [Takeshita’s] duties in these positions, and during the late 1930s Takeshita was responsible for organizing regular foreign exchanges with Germany’s Hitler Youth.”
Takeshita’s considerable influence and fondness for sumo helped it grow into a national sport, but even he fell short in shielding the country’s indigenous wrestling style from the impact of war. As the empire churned in the years leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese life was essentially co-opted by the military. School-aged children were prescribed a physical education curriculum that translated directly to war fighting. Sporting arts were derided as unnecessary, and budō—the martial ways, specifically the Japanese martial arts spirit—was consigned to hand-to-hand fighting. The central authority for Japanese martial arts, the Dai Nippon Butoku Kai, was controlled by the Imperial Army, which promoted boxing because of the belief it engendered the right kind of spirit, while downplaying Kanō Jigorō’s Kodokan judo, which was thought to be too sporting. Kendo and sumo were simply impractical. Boxers such as Tsuneo “Piston” Horiguchi remained busy competing, and, like some sumotori, participated in war bond drives. Athletes in the East and West were useful for this sort of thing, as manipulating sports into effective propagandist tools was hardly new.
Dwindling resources, intensifying attacks from American B-29 Superfortress bombers around Tokyo, and a closely guarded military project halted sumo competition ahead of the summer tournament of 1944. Young battering ram Rikidōzan was close to touching its upper echelon before he and his stable were pulled into the war effort, apparently assigned to factory work during this time. Stories exist that he punched American prisoners of war whose output in forced labor camps wasn’t sufficient, though the veracity of the reports is unclear. Other rikishi, such as members of the Tatsunami stable, provided labor services like digging up pine roots that produced oil used for fighter plane fuel.
As responsible as anything for the abbreviated sumo season was a secret Japanese initiative with the goal of producing 10,000 bomb-dropping balloons, the Fu-Go Weapon, capable of hitting the continental United States directly from Japan or from warships in the Pacific. According to a 1973 report for the Smithsonian Institution by Robert C. Mikesh, Tokyo’s main sumo stadium, the Ryōgoku Kokugikan, was among several sports arenas, music halls, and theaters the military used to inflate and test thirty-three-foot-diameter balloons designed to deliver a payload of four incendiary bombs and one thirty-two-pound antipersonnel bomb. The Japanese hoped after catching strong winds from the west, America’s wooded areas would explode in raging forest fires, tying up critical resources and causing a panic among the civilian population.
For logistical, morale, and propaganda reasons, the American military worked with the media to keep information of potential balloon damage from reaching Japan, all the while stunting a potential hysteria on the West Coast. On May 5, 1945, Elsie Mitchell, age twenty-six, and five children from her husband’s church—Edward Engen, Jay Gifford, and Joan Patzke, all thirteen years old; Dick Patzke, age fourteen; and Sherman Shoemaker, eleven years old— were killed during a fishing and picnic excursion near Bly, Oreg., when a balloon did as intended. These casualties, the only ones in the United States that were a direct result of foreign enemy action, prompted the U.S. government to cease its censorship on the topic.
The U.S. Army also responded to the balloon threat via the Firefly Project. Conscientious objectors (group CPS-103) and the first all-black battalion of paratroopers, the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, better known as the Triple Nickles, were dispatched to the Pacific Northwest in case these fire balloons lived up to their billing. Despite the precaution, the 555th wasn’t called to smoke jump into a balloon-produced fire. There was concern among military brass that the Japanese might float germ or chemical warfare to American shores, but from November 4, 1944, to August 8, 1945, two small brush fires and a momentary loss of power at a plant in Hanford, Wash., were the only recorded incidents of property damage, according to the Smithsonian Institution report.
The situation at Hanford Engineering Works, however, could have been catastrophic. Uranium slugs for the atomic bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, Rikidōzan’s adopted hometown, were produced there and the balloon bomb triggered the reactor’s safety mechanism. The fail-safe system had not been tested, and everyone was relieved when it worked as designed. The reactor remained cool enough not to collapse or explode—ensuring the Fu-Go Weapon would be remembered as no more than a missed Hail Mary attempt by Japan to turn the tide of the war.
The end of hostilities and subsequent allied occupation did not immediately return Japanese life, including the martial arts, to their premilitarized social order. The Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur, instituted numerous edicts, among them directives aimed at removing and excluding militaristic and ultranationalist persons from society. Schools that briefly resuscitated martial arts instruction after the end of the war stopped, and the Dai Nippon Butoku Kai was shuttered. The tangled mess resulted in a purge of people apparently sympathetic to the defeated Japanese Empire, many of whom were seemingly connected to the Butokukai that had been corrupted under the fascist regime. This was the crux of the General Headquarters budō ban that lasted until 1950—not the shelving of martial arts, per se, just their perversion.
Under Takeshita’s leadership, sumo was not targeted by the Allied Powers’ budō prohibition. Speaking on the seventieth anniversary of the end of the war, Sokichi Kumagai, seventeen years a top-ranking sumo referee, or gyōji, told the Mainichi, a major daily Japanese newspaper, that he received word to reconvene with his stable and get touring again soon after Japan’s surrender. “The biggest problem was securing enough food for the wrestlers, who were all voracious eaters,” Kumagai said. The tour was called komezumo, or “rice sumo,” and in lieu of money, spectators were required to offer a payment of rice. “At the time we toured in groups of related stables,” Kumagai told the paper, “and all the groups toured in areas where rice farming was common.”
Soon enough the sumo association issued a notice that a Grand Sumo Tournament would be held in Tokyo in November 1945. Though his reputation remained strong and positive, and he was unaffected by the Butoku Kai purge, Takeshita announced plans to step down as the head of sumo when the honbasho ended. Rikidōzan had earned a spot in sumo’s top division, the makuuchi, and reached the sport’s third highest rank, sekiwake, by the time Takeshita passed away in 1949. He competed until September 1950, and, citing financial reasons, retired.
Rikidōzan’s improbably important pro wrestling journey began in construction. According to Robert Whiting’s book, Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan, a sumo fan, tattooed yakuza gambler Shinsasku Nita, maintained “special connections inside the GHQ.” Those relationships led to projects at U.S. military camps, some of which Nita hired Rikidōzan to supervise. The wrestler’s English improved and he enjoyed the nightlife in Ginza. One evening, according to Whiting, Rikidōzan found himself on the wrong side of an altercation with a Japanese-American Olympic weightlifter, Hawaii’s Harold Sakata, who earned a silver medal at the 1948 Games in London, and, later, appeared opposite Sean Connery’s version of James Bond as Auric Goldfinger’s hat-throwing henchman Oddjob. Sakata and Rikidōzan quickly worked out their differences, and the former sumo wrestler was integrated into a touring group of American pro wrestlers who had been sponsored by the Torii Oasis Shriner’s Club of Tokyo. Before heading to the Korean Peninsula, where fighting was underway between U.S.- and Chinese-led forces, former heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis joined seven wrestlers, including Sakata and Iowan Bobby Bruns, in entertaining U.S. servicemen while seeking to raise $50,000 for crippled children during a three-month tour of Japan.
