Ali vs. Inoki

by Josh Gross

  Born Frederick Kenneth Blassman to German parents in St. Louis, February 8, 1918, Blassie wrestled during World War II under the name “Sailor” Fred Blassie while stationed with the Navy at Port Hueneme, Calif. After the war he ditched the “Sailor” routine and toured the Midwest, but it wasn’t until returning to the West Coast’s sandy beaches in Venice and Santa Monica that Blassie struck a chord with wrestling fans by playing the antagonist.

  On April 23, 1962, the day Ali made his L.A. debut against George Logan, Blassie rematched Rikidōzan in a bout that captivated the Japanese. Even more startling than the nation’s hysterical reaction to the contest was its response to Blassie, whose tactics stunned audiences. They simply hadn’t seen anyone like him before. Plenty of American wrestlers made similar trips to Japan, gave Rikidōzan a go, then did the job and lost. For having the audacity to challenge Rikidōzan, they were generally well behaved and contrite. Not Blassie. He may as well have been a vampire, so scared were some Japanese.

  Combined with a mastery of the televised interview, Blassie’s profile as the heel (pro wrestling for “bad guy”) grew immensely in the early ’60s by doing the kinds of things he did upon landing in Japan for the rematch. Pulling out a file, Blassie appeared to sharpen his teeth in front of cameras. The gimmick worked wonders. Flashes popped, the Japanese ate it up, yet like almost everything else about his profession it was a con. The wrestler had befriended an L.A. dentist who crafted false dentures for Blassie so he could do crazy things like rasp his “teeth” into fangs then bite into stuff.

  Rikidōzan’s second clash against Blassie in Tokyo made headlines for more than huge television ratings or a win for the local favorite. Several elderly Japanese reportedly died from heart attacks after Blassie appeared to bite Rikidōzan, draw blood, and spit it in the former sumo wrestler’s face. This was absurd theater, an example of pro wrestling’s proverbial “crimson mask,” and, of course, Rikidōzan sawed his head with a razor blade to make it happen. Blassie, true to form, showed no remorse. The dead, he said, had it coming.

  Blassie returned to L.A. for the final contest in his three-match series with Rikidōzan. Since the July 25 bout was held off television at the Olympic Auditorium, Rich Marotta, a wrestling-crazed kid from Burbank, Calif., pleaded with his father to take him. Marotta got his wish and the young fan’s first sensory memories of the Olympic were born on a mild summer day.

  Seated with his father in the top row of the 10,400-seat-capacity arena, Marotta was as far from ringside as he could have been, but he was there and being in the building watching from the nosebleeds was a far better proposition than sitting at home in the dark.

  “It didn’t smell good in the place,” remembered the L.A. native who made his way in life via boxing as a media personality. “It certainly wasn’t a modern arena. I remember going into the bathroom and they had about two stalls and three urinals. And guys would just be peeing in the sinks. I had never seen anything like that. Guys just peeing in the sinks. It was dirty in there.”

  The Olympic Auditorium, unlike today’s arenas, was a fairly intimate setup. People in the building focused on the action in the ring, not big screens, so for twenty minutes Marotta excitedly watched through binoculars as the Japanese hero beat up the blond, tan American.

  Because Marotta despised Blassie he screamed for Rikidōzan. After slamming Blassie hard into a turnbuckle, Rikidōzan charged, missed, and tumbled through the ropes into the steel ringpost. Blassie snapped off a necktwister and mauled Rikidōzan until “there was blood everywhere,” said Marotta. “Johnny ‘Red Shoes’ Dugan was the referee again. And finally ‘Red Shoes’ Dugan stopped the match and awarded it to Blassie. So my first trip to the Olympic Auditorium turned out to be a terrible disappointment that way.”

  Blassie’s matches were less a choreographed wrestling match than a straight brawl, yet his series of matches with Rikidōzan proved important because they signified that Blassie’s belt, the WWA title, was prestigious enough to attract challengers from faraway locales and was also worth hunting after. Therefore the Southern California wrestling territory run by Aileen Eaton and her son Mike LeBell was an entity to be reckoned with.

  The Olympic Auditorium opened on August 5, 1925.

  Los Angeles was in the midst of establishing entertainment as its industry and silver-screen legends Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D.W. Griffith created United Artists to push back against the entrenched studio caste system.

  A mile from the location of the United Artists Building and its ornate Spanish Gothic theater that depicts studio executives as demons, the “Auditorium blazed with glory on its opening night, the light of many electric lights surpassed only by the sparkling jewels that adorned the persons of several of our well-known citizens and citizenesses,” the Los Angeles Times published the following day. “Hollywood and the moving picture colony slipped into their tuxedos and formal apparel and blessed the ringside by their presence.”

  During the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic Games, the venue hosted boxing, wrestling, and weightlifting events. This was its intended purpose, and even from its least desired seats, the views of the action were good. With a capacity of 15,300, the Olympic—the so-called Madison Square Garden of the West Coast—registered as the largest indoor venue in the U.S. at the time.

  Lou Daro, a carnival strongman who left home when he was ten to join a flying trapeze act with the Barnum & Bailey circus, took the money he earned from almost being ripped apart in a game of tug-and-war with eight Clydesdales and secured the rights to promote pro wrestling and boxing at the Olympic Auditorium from its opening through the end of ’30s. The shift in pro wrestling from legitimate to show business was swift under the direction of “Carnation Lou,” who spoke eight languages by the time he moved to L.A. from New York. Daro was known for managing Ed “Strangler” Lewis and pinning a white carnation to the lapel of his dapper suits.

  While wrestling across the U.S. in the ’30s suffered under the weight of controversies, entrenched battles between the industry’s power brokers, and the public’s shifting tastes, Los Angeles remained a hotbed. Daro was far more successful at selling wrestling than boxing, and with the help of Joe “Toots” Mondt, one third of the Gold Dust Trio, a bridge was built between the wrestling business on both coasts. Then misdeeds caught up to Mondt, Daro, and his brother Jack after a special investigation by the California State Assembly found financial irregularities, including more than $200,000 paid over a four-year period to politicians, media, and public relations firms in an attempt to maintain their alleged wrestling monopoly.

  Crowds soon dwindled at the Olympic, and pressure from the California State Athletic Commission prompted the arena’s owner, one of the city’s richest men, Frank A. Garbutt, to briefly pass the Olympic business off to George Zaharias, a former wrestler and bodybuilder who married perhaps the best female athlete of all time, Babe Didrikson, in 1939.

  Three years later, the irrepressible Aileen Eaton began her thirty-eight-year run at the helm of the Olympic. The fight business revealed itself to Eaton, a widowed mother of two. In 1941, Eaton worked as the private secretary for Garbutt, the president of the Los Angeles Athletic Club, whose net worth was $91 million (nearly $1.5 billion in 2016). Garbutt instructed Eaton to report back why the arena was operating in the red. Within days, she found bookkeeping irregularities, cleaned house, and recommended hiring boxing inspector Alvah “Cal” Eaton as the venue’s promoter. Garbutt empowered Eaton to run the building, and on the business of fight promotion, she was hooked. Ten years later, she and Cal married.

  Left to her own devices, the first female fight promoter in the country transformed a block of downtown real estate into a combat sports cathedral. Four decades after discovering the fight business, Eaton received a written tribute from famed Los Angeles Times sports columnist Jim Murray while she recovered from successful quadruple bypass heart surgery. “Red-haired, blue-eyed, pound for pound, she was as tough as any welterweight who e
ver came down the aisle,” Murray wrote. The diminutive Eaton was liable to chew out a handful of managers one hour, and fit in fine at a fancy tea party the next.

  Before passing away on a Saturday night in the fall of 1987, Eaton claimed to have seen more than 10,000 professional fights, including 100 world championship bouts she promoted; a few of them had needed more seats than the Olympic could offer so she had booked dates at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum or Dodger Stadium.

  Wrestling crowds were wild and noticeably different from the more affluent boxing set. For untelevised wrestling on Friday nights, lines assembled around the block before lunch. Wrestling matches at the Olympic housed more of the crazies, the purse-swinging grandmas. Popular boxing nights felt subdued by comparison, even if the arena still buzzed. If regular boxing patrons missed two weeks of action without notifying the box office, they lost their seats. Folks located in the row behind moved up, which made everyone else happy because they bumped forward too.

  Gamblers on boxing nights flashed signs at each other regarding who or what they wanted to wager on. There was a whole section of them near Aisle 10 employing a well-established system that included odds on much more than the outcome of a fight. One regular bet centered on which unsuspecting patron might slip down a slick metal ramp that should have been cordoned off with caution tape. Another famous Olympic wager centered on the fighters’ corners, which were determined when legendary ring announcer Jimmy Lennon flipped a large disk. Black or white, blue or red, it was one more game to play for the bettors.

  “I just remember through my life my dad flipping the disk and claiming he could make it come up any color,” said Jimmy Lennon Jr., the youngest of five kids who followed in his father’s footsteps and became a beloved ring announcer.

  On both boxing and wrestling nights, Lennon handled the PA. Because of the acoustics inside an enclosed concrete box, sound echoed and reverberated everywhere inside the Olympic Auditorium.

  “When the crowd was on, it would be the loudest place,” said Lennon Jr., who as a kid enjoyed the run of the building and the closest views in the house. Boxing and pro wrestling in Los Angeles remained solid business and though competition existed between promoters, especially for Latino boxers, Eaton and her sons, Gene and Mike LeBell, loomed large.

  While Eaton worked for Garbutt at the L.A.A.C., Gene stumbled into mat-covered rooms full of tough guys. Even as a kid, he fit right in amongst a crew of war-torn men wearing scarred faces and cauliflower ears. LeBell had a chance to learn grappling, a combination of everything from pins to joint locks and strangle holds. He was eager to participate, and the famous Ed “Strangler” Lewis provided LeBell his first lesson: the double wristlock (i.e., downward arm crank or Kimura).

  Literally and figuratively, “Judo” LeBell bumped up against the best in the combat sports world for the rest of his days, in part because he is so colorfully classified as one of these folks himself. So it was no surprise that LeBell got near the Olympic champion when he visited Los Angeles for several months in 1962.

  During his initial interaction with Ali, LeBell said his mother handed the boxer a button. “I’m the greatest,” it prophesied. According to Gene, Ali balked: “Excuse me Mrs. Eaton, I couldn’t wear that. What would people say?” The hard woman looked into Ali’s soul and set him straight. “I don’t care what they say. If it sells boletos (tickets) that’s all that counts.” Eaton’s logic won the day.

  A run from the Grand Olympic Auditorium to Main Street Gym lasted a good two miles. Newspapermen infatuated with the fighter hung from convertibles and snapped photos while the young, handsome man from Louisville pounded the pavement. That button didn’t go unnoticed.

  This is one of several moments during Ali’s Southern California excursion that stuck with him.

  Ali’s third straight round-four technical knockout in 1962 came when George Logan went down unremarkably at the Sports Arena in the spring. Less than a month later Ali returned to New York to earn his fourth stoppage in as many months by putting away tricky Billy Daniels in seven rounds. Ali returned to L.A., and spent much of his time training all across the boxing-rich city.

  Ali mainly concentrated his efforts at the Main Street Gym, a boxing institution on skid row within jogging distance of the Alexandria Hotel and Olympic Auditorium. Along with Stillman’s and Gleason’s in New York, Main Street Gym, located on the second floor of the old vaudeville venue the Adolphus Theater, a dance hall circa 1911, was, by the 1960s, as classic a boxing dive as America ever produced.

  Rudy Hernández first trained there in 1974 when he was twelve years old. A decade later, he was the last boxer to walk out of the doors before the gym was leveled and paved into a parking lot.

  “You saw all these fighters and you knew they were good and they were popular, but I didn’t realize how great they were until I got older,” Hernández said. “Then I understood what it was like to see these guys and how great they were in their time.”

  The Main Street Gym supplied many fighters to Aileen Eaton, who promoted weekly fights at the Olympic Auditorium. The Hollywood Legion stadium also put on shows every Saturday night. Boxing clubs in Santa Monica, Southgate, and in the valley, near Burbank airport, would go periodically. There was plenty of boxing in Southern California through the 1970s, and many of the top fighters trained out of the Main Street Gym.

  Ray Robinson put in enough sweat equity at the Main Street Gym that, when pickings got slim, he sparred the likes of Gene LeBell. Well on his journey to mixing standing and grappling martial arts into its own seamless style, LeBell trained in boxing for free at Main Street Gym. By the time LeBell was old enough to drive he shared the same ring with Robinson—that’s to say being punched in the face many times by the best welterweight boxer of all time. This was regular stuff for LeBell, who also had a chance to wrestle and teach moves to “Sugar” Ray and Archie Moore.

  Paramount Studios was where LeBell first saw Ali sparring with a stuntman. “When he went to Main Street Gym to work out, there was no fooling around,” LeBell said. “He was there to do a job. I would have wet my pants if Ali wanted to wrestle with me. I would have jumped off a building. But I know they wouldn’t let me wrestle with him.”

  Main Street Gym was unique for several reasons, but perhaps none as unique as its racial diversity. Boxers of all backgrounds regularly shared what would have otherwise been cloistered techniques. “That was probably one of the only gyms that had everything,” said Hernández, who trained his younger brother Genaro Hernández to a super featherweight championship run in the 1990s.

  When Hernández was a sophomore in high school he was picked to spar three rounds with Alexis Argüello, the rangy 130-pound world champion Nicaraguan. Argüello, the first fighter since Henry Armstrong to win belts in three divisions, was impressed with Hernández’s effort and offered another $15 to spar a fourth period. They had a deal. Afterwards Argüello produced a good laugh when he learned Hernández was as old as his fee per round. A few close watchers around the gym inquired about the availability of Hernández’s contract that day.

  “I left the Main Street Gym knowing this is what I wanted to do with my life,” Hernández said.

  Argüello, Bobby Chacon, Danny “Little Red” Lopez, Albert Dávila, Roberto Durán, Art Aragon, and fighters of various backgrounds had similar epiphanies at the Main Street Gym. All the while other boxing cauldrons turned out quality fighters, too. There was a spot on 108th and Broadway out in Watts. And a gym near the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on 78th and Hoover that “takes the absolute, uncontested award as the dirtiest, filthiest gym I’ve ever seen,” said Boxing Hall of Fame publicist Bill Caplan. “It made Main Street look like it was sterilized. The Main Street Gym didn’t smell that noxious. They had a lot of windows. They could get fresh air. It smelled like a gym, the sweat. But that locker room was so nasty that I wouldn’t even go in there to take a leak.”

  Showering without a hazmat suit was a risky proposition. It speaks to LeBell�
�s stuntman leanings that he dared to stand under the running water in slippers.

  “You could always tell when you got to the second floor,” the grappler said. “It smelled like a urinal.”

  Used as the interior location for “Mighty Mick’s Boxing” in the first three Rocky films, the gym at 318½ Main Street was filled with characters pulled from central casting. The space offered two fifteen-foot rings, side by side, and always showcased a wide variety of fighters going through their routines. Life-size cutouts of famed champions helped cover the peeling walls.

  The pros sparred during the day, and anyone could get upstairs to watch. All they had to do was pay Arthur “Duke” Holloway, the large black man wearing a bowler and smoking a cigar at the top of the staircase, whatever he charged that day. Rarely was it more than a dollar to step inside the gym. From 1960 to 1977, Holloway worked for Howie Steindler, a New York expat, perhaps the Main Street Gym’s greatest eccentric, who was killed in an unsolved murder in front of his home in the San Fernando Valley. Steindler’s body was found in his Cadillac on the Ventura Freeway.

  Steindler didn’t take any bullshit, was as profane as anyone, and made boxing his life while laying down the law at a hothouse nestled between burlesque theaters. There are reasons Burgess Meredith’s Mickey was modeled after Steindler, who fought as an amateur featherweight before heading west in 1942.

  “You’d pass right by where Howie Steindler would have his office,” Rich Marotta said. “And you’d see him in there. He was eventually the manager of Danny ‘Little Red’ Lopez. And when those guys would be training down there, I’d go down and watch. Just as a kid boxing fan. They had a little set of bleachers you could sit in and watch the fighters. It was amazing because you could end up talking to the fighters a little bit. You were right there among them. That was another new experience.”