by Josh Gross
Like the Imperial Japanese Army, Americans usurped the old sumo venue, which had been repaired after U.S. firebombing destroyed its huge iron roof. Rather than testing weapons, Occupation forces renamed the building from Ryōgoku Kokugikan to Ryōgoku Memorial Hall and staged events—the first bits of Americana introduced to the Japanese that hadn’t fallen from the sky. American-style pro wrestling, the kind “Toots” Mondt had established in the 1920s, was officially introduced to the Japanese on Sunday, September 30, 1951, the same month the country returned to the League of Nations after signing a peace treaty in San Francisco.
Rikidōzan debuted in late October, feeling his way through a ten-minute time-limit draw against Bruns. Sergeant Clarkson Crume, for Stars and Stripes, noted that Rikidōzan had lost six inches off his waist since meeting Sakata and the boys, and was “surprisingly good for someone who has been wrestling only three weeks.” The squat Japanese grappler hung around the tour through December 11, karate chopping and running over the opposition—a sampling of the hard style that became his trademark. Winter’s harshness cut the wrestling program short, but the expedition paid off because Bruns had found a twenty-year-old, 265-pound man who would spearhead the rapid expansion of the “sport” in Japan.
The following February, as a naturalized Japanese citizen—important since status as a North Korean would have made travel to the U.S. problematic—Rikidōzan departed in good shape, down thirty pounds, ready to learn the pro wrestling business. He landed in Hawaii, one of the nearly thirty territories encompassing the National Wrestling Association, and was coached by Bobby Bruns. The NWA-affiliated promotion in San Francisco also gave him plenty of opportunities to step into the ring. Rising from the ashes of the Gold Dust Trio, the NWA attempted to control and organize talent, produce strong champions the public would support (despite knowing that wrestling was more show than competition), and seize the larger space of wrestling. NWA representatives in Honolulu (Al Karasick) and San Francisco (Joe Malcewicz) arranged the historic “Shriners” tour of 1951, and envisioned Japan as a place well worth expanding to.
Rikidōzan made them look smart.
Intent on establishing a lasting pro wrestling promotion, Rikidōzan returned to his adopted country after a year and a half on the road. In short order, a pipeline of mostly large white men, presumably Americans but not always, journeyed overseas to lose—delighting Japanese audiences, most of whom remained ignorant that outcomes were predetermined. Rikidōzan’s affiliation with the NWA quickly lent credibility to him and his organization, the Japanese Pro Wrestling Alliance.
More important than NWA ties was the timing of his venture. As it had for wrestling and “Gorgeous” George in the States, television became an enormous driver for Rikidōzan and pro wrestling in Japan. Within a month of the JWA starting operations on July 30, 1953, commercial broadcast networks began distributing programming to Japanese households, which, no different than postwar Americans, purchased televisions in increasing numbers.
Rikidōzan’s first puroresu event hit airwaves on two networks, NHG and NTV, live from Tokyo, on February 19, 1954. Joining forces with Masahiko Kimura—a pioneering judo and mixed-style fighter three years removed from breaking Hélio Gracie’s left arm with a joint lock that was later named in his honor in front of 20,000 Brazilians—the pair competed in a tag-team match against the big-and-tall Sharpe brothers of Canada (to the Japanese, Ben and Mike Sharpe passed just fine for Americans). Three days of pro wrestling, all live on television, served as quite an introduction for Rikidōzan, the “ethnic hero” of Japan, whose ring formula evoked memories of the Second World War. With a twist.
“I get phone calls, letters telling me hit back when American wrestlers hit me,” he told the United Press during an interview in San Francisco in 1952. “Finally, when [they] hit dirty, I hit dirty, too.”
In the U.S., that was easy enough to understand because for years this had been wrestling at its core. The Gold Dust Trio played off stereotypes—religious, ethnic, or nationalist—and casting the likes of Rikidōzan as a villain was simply how it worked. But in Japan? He couldn’t accept such humiliation from gaijin. Surrender instead of victory meant reminding people of the Empire’s failure. Of the Americans’ bombs. The sun hadn’t set on the Japanese, Rikidōzan intended to say through his karate chops; that’s how he wanted to make people feel when he wrestled.
Pro wrestling and television produced prideful and harrowing moments for the Japanese. In the fall of 1955, a couple years after Rikidōzan captured the public’s imagination, an eleven-year-old schoolboy was reportedly killed when a fellow student landed a dropkick while imitating the American style of wrestling. Networks, which were saturated with wrestling at the time, created public service announcements essentially telling kids to cool it.
A growing fervor around Rikidōzan, and Kimura’s cemented reputation as one of Japan’s best fighters, prompted the media to speculate about what might happen if they were matched as opponents instead of teammates. The wrestlers paid attention and agreed it was a good idea to entertain this question. There was money to be made, and for the advancement of Japanese pro wrestling the match needed to happen. So on December 22, 1954, the first pro wrestling heavyweight championship of Japan was contested at the Kuramae Kokugikan, the home of sumo from 1950 until 1985. Without nationalist overtones, the contest between Rikidōzan and Kimura turned out to be a straight power play. Shifting from work to shoot, the former sumo man chopped the judoka to the floor, a double cross apparently justified by an errant kick from Kimura to Rikidōzan’s groin.
“The first bout was going to be a draw,” Kimura told Sports Graphic Number, Japan’s Sports Illustrated, in 1983. “The winner of the second will be determined by the winner of a rock-paper-scissors. After the second match, we will repeat this process. We came to an agreement on this condition. As for the content of the match, Rikidōzan will let me throw him, and I will let him strike me with a chop. We then rehearsed karate chop and throws. However, once the bout started, Rikidōzan became taken by greed for big money and fame. He lost his mind and became a mad man. When I saw him raise his hand, I opened my arms to invite the chop. He delivered the chop, not to my chest, but to my neck with full force. I fell to the mat. He then kicked me. Neck arteries are so vulnerable that it did not need to be Rikidōzan to cause a knockdown. A junior high school kid could inflict a knockdown this way. I could not forgive his treachery. That night, I received a phone call informing me that several, ten, yakuza are on their way to Tokyo to kill Rikidōzan.”
A strain of thought exists that suggests Rikidōzan’s stabbing death in 1963 was the yakuza catching up with him for the betrayal of Kimura, who, to the surprise of no one, never received a chance to wrestle or fight the former sumo stylist again. As with most things having to do with Rikidōzan, who he was and what he did relative to his public perception were very different.
Rikidōzan and American Lou Thesz wrestled to a sixty-minute draw in Tokyo’s first-ever “world title match” in 1957, scoring a record 87.0 rating on Japanese television—two of his matches rank in the top ten most-viewed programs in the country’s history and tens of thousands of people packed the streets to watch. His matches against Thesz, the only American wrestler Rikidōzan admitted to having respect for, represent the crowning achievements of his enormous ring success.
When Rikidōzan visited Los Angeles a year later to face Thesz—the best shooter in the world, a man chiseled from granite like Ed “Strangler” Lewis—the message was clear: If Rikidōzan could put up a fight against a man like Thesz, if he could beat Thesz and claim the NWA international heavyweight belt, which he did in L.A., well, he could do anything.
So too could the Japanese.
Not only had the face of Japanese strength adopted the American manner of wrestling, he adopted the American way of life and business. In L.A., Rikidōzan asked Gene LeBell, then twenty-six, to hold $15,000 cash in crisp $100 bills. “He said keep it until the match is over,” rec
alled LeBell. “I could’ve gone down to Mexico.” No matter what happened at the Olympic Auditorium that night, a top-of-the line Rolls-Royce was going to be purchased afterwards. Big money. Big cars. Big homes. Big deals. He operated in the legitimate and illegitimate consumerism that permeated Japan following the war. Rikidōzan put his name on nightclubs, hotels, condominiums, and bowling alleys. He also circulated among gangsters, and in some ways was one himself. When he drank too much he could become belligerent, a bully who ignored police summons.
Rikidōzan indulged in money, power, and influence. He was not who he was portrayed to be, and after his sudden death ten days before “Gorgeous” George Wagner passed away in Los Angeles, the pro wrestling business in Japan was left in shambles. It is testament to Rikidōzan’s massive influence that his death didn’t bring down pro wrestling altogether. Instead, his protégés rode the tidal wave and established important legacies of their own.
ROUND FIVE
More than a few Cassius Clay watchers suggested that because he moved around the ring so much, the sleek twenty-year-old might not trust his chin.
Due mostly to his locomotion, it’s true, the attention-grabbing fighter hadn’t been hurt during his first sixteen months as pro. The man’s legs, so long as they were strong underneath him, were his first line of defense in that they got him to where he wanted to be faster than he could get touched. And yet this is where some critics conjured questions regarding Ali’s potential.
Ali breezed to a 10–0 record and received more than enough press to justify a debut at the old Madison Square Garden to begin his 1962 campaign—but that wasn’t successful or quick enough. A hold-the-reins development plan buffered against the Olympic champion’s heavy competitive drive. On the subject of his tenth opponent, Munich-born Willi Besmanoff, Ali declared shame at having fought an “unrated duck.” While Ali talked up champions Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston he got in rounds with pugs like the squat Besmanoff, who finished his fifteen-year career with ninety-three bouts and a ledger of 51-34-8. The fight with Ali in Louisville was the German’s seventy-ninth, and it marked one of eleven times he was stopped.
No one besides the six-foot-three kid himself—“a golden-brown young man,” A.J. Liebling observed in the March 1962 edition of the New Yorker, “big-chested and long-legged, whose limbs have the smooth rounded look that Joe Louis’s used to have, and that frequently denotes fast muscles”—was eager to approach deep waters. Trainer Angelo Dundee knew superior talent could get a person by in some fields, but not boxing, not even for a specimen like Ali.
There was much to learn on the arduous road ahead.
The purpose of boxing is to inflict damage with your fists while avoiding strikes in return. During a career in prizefighting that’s nearly impossible. Boxers are expected to be stout because almost all of them get caught. The game ones respond to trouble and fight on. The great ones do that then win.
For Ali’s doubters it boiled down to, yeah, sure, the fancy-footed dancer’s talent was obvious, but what kind of fighter was he really?
New York matchmaker Teddy Brenner lived up to his reputation by testing Ali’s doggedness in the boxer’s Garden debut, and Sonny Banks, a twenty-one-year-old converted southpaw puncher from Detroit, got the nod. Midway through the opening round, Banks snapped off a left hook that put Ali on the canvas and turned the Miami-based Dundee from tan to pale. Ali, a 5-to-1 favorite, needed only the count of two to regroup, shake off the cobwebs, and get to his feet.
“That was my first time knocked down as a professional,” Ali told the press on a twelve-degree February night in Manhattan. “I had to get up to take care of things after that because it was rather embarrassing, me on the floor. As you know, I think that I’m the greatest and I’m not supposed to be on the floor, so I had to get up and put him on out, in four as I predicted.”
Suckered by the illusion of landing a second money punch, a fight finisher, Banks became a predictable headhunter with that left hook. As he crumbled under Ali’s angular fighting and incessant, buzzing jab, Banks, penned Liebling, “was like a man trying to fight off wasps with a shovel.”
Unsure of Ali’s recuperative powers until Banks touched his charge’s off button, Dundee was encouraged to see the type of pugilist he was dealing with. Critics, meanwhile, had new information to critique regarding the quality of Ali’s chin.
For all of the whirlwind dancing and speed that defined so much of Ali’s career, Banks showed that perhaps The Greatest’s best boxing trait was standing when he had to. Ali did so many things better than most, and determining his “best” is difficult to pin down. The man’s energy output in life was preternatural, yet he was as relaxed as any fighter—a fundamental reason for his legendary stamina and pace. A rare few boxers, never mind heavyweights, moved as Ali did. As Liebling noted in his New Yorker piece “Poet and Pedagogue,” which beautifully described the Banks fight, the “Louisville Lip” needed no help providing the press a quote, making news, or, as the story noted, coming up with rhymes. Less than two years removed from the Rome Olympics, Clay was a business, the full package, well on his way, with financial backers and a support system, to an unparalleled life.
Beating Banks set in motion a pivotal stretch for the rising contender. Eighteen days passed between Ali’s debut at MSG and the last night in February, a Wednesday, when he stopped another left-hooker, Don Warner, in four rounds in Miami. Ali predicted a finish in five, but because Warner wouldn’t shake hands before the fight he said he deducted a round for poor sportsmanship. Highlighted by three bouts in Tinseltown, Ali fought a half dozen times in 1962 and enjoyed the run of L.A. during a period that shaped him as a boxer, showman, and person.
Vice President Richard Nixon dedicated the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena on July 4, 1959, barely a year before Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts accepted, inside the same building, the Democratic party’s nomination for President of the United States of America. Kennedy bested Nixon in the fall of 1960 after a groundbreaking election that produced another sort of combat sport: televised presidential debates.
By the spring of ’62, as Ali checked in to the Alexandria Hotel on 5th and Spring Street in Downtown L.A., Kennedy was entangled in the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam festered, the Cold War frosted, and the Cuban Missile Crisis was mere months away.
On top of everything else, the young president faced the pleas of L.A.-based pro wrestler “Classy” Freddie Blassie, who stood as the dominant West Coast champion after taking the belt from Frenchman Édouard Carpentier at the Sports Arena in June 1961. The following month, Lou Thesz, who put over Japan’s Rikidōzan in ’58, did the same for Blassie while legendary boxer Jersey Joe Walcott served as the referee.
Blassie drove big television ratings in L.A. on Wednesday nights from 8:00 to 9:30 P.M. on KCOP channel 13. So far as live sports went, boxing (and, ahem, wrestling) were easier and less expensive to broadcast than, say, baseball because they required only a couple cameras to sufficiently cover the action. From the start, TV and pro wrestling went as well together as any two things could, a fact that was partly responsible for Rikidōzan’s success in Japan.
On March 28, 1962, within walking distance of Little Tokyo, L.A.’s strong Asian community filled the Olympic Auditorium hoping that the father of puroresu, Rikidōzan, would make history as the first Japanese to challenge for and subsequently win an American pro wrestling title.
Despite stomping Masahiko Kimura in Tokyo and possessing a wild-man reputation away from the ring, Rikidōzan wasn’t well known in the West. Still, the new hero—such was Rikidōzan’s stature at the time—received a far more honorable portrayal than most Japanese wrestlers after the Second World War. While Blassie’s old tag team partner, Mr. Moto, played the role as untrustworthy, maybe scheming another Pearl Harbor, Rikidōzan, proud and seemingly forthright, was talked about as the sort of man who wouldn’t stoop to hitting another when he was down.
Blassie the villain lost the belt to the pride of Japan
when referee Johnny “Red Shoes” Dugan counted out the tanned American. Though many fans reviled Blassie and wanted him to lose, most viewers at home or at the Olympic Auditorium couldn’t have imagined him without the World Wrestling Association world heavyweight title. Everyone went wild as Rikidōzan won the first and only fall during an hour of wrestling. The time limit elapsed and Blassie flipped when famed ring announcer Jimmy Lennon raised Rikidōzan’s hand, officially declaring him champion. Blassie hollered that the contest was supposed to be two of three falls, then he ripped the referee’s shirt in half down the front.
“I’ve never seen such injustice in all my life,” Blassie howled at KCOP-13’s Dick Lane. “I’m going to take this up with the World Wide Wrestling Association president and then I’m going to take it up with the athletic commission. If that isn’t far enough I’m going to see my great friend President Kennedy because this was the dirtiest trick that’s ever been pulled.”
Damaging investigations into pro wrestling during the 1930s forever altered the business on the West Coast, yet the California State Athletic Commission, mainly as a way of collecting fees, continued to treat the scripted stuff like a sport for many years. After going ballistic Blassie was summarily fined for manhandling Dugan, as if the rampage wasn’t part of the show. He paid and said not a word. Even on his deathbed Blassie wouldn’t break character, so there was no way he’d betray wrestling by stating on the record that the match and his reaction with the referee was an angle.
