Ali vs. Inoki

by Josh Gross

  John Hall, a sports columnist with the LA Times after the paper absorbed the Mirror in May 1962, visited the Main Street Gym two or three afternoons a week just to talk with people. Hall and Steindler became good pals, and they shared a few drinks most afternoons.

  “He had a great sense of humor that people didn’t know,” Hall said of the loud manager and gym owner. “He hustled all the time. He was a hustler but I thought he was terrific. He was not perfect.”

  Hall took several opportunities to speak with Ali at the Alexandria Hotel, which opened in 1906, and spent several hours chatting with the curious boxer. If Ali wasn’t training he was usually standing on the hotel’s busy street corner with his brother checking out women, or engaged in some sort of press.

  “When Ali came in town the first time I ended up sitting next to him during lunch,” Hall recalled. “He asked all kinds of questions about Gorgeous George and Art Aragon—how they perfected the villain routine, got all the publicity and drew so well. There’s a lot of Gorgeous George that rubbed off on Ali early on.

  “He was really naive and trying to learn about everything. He asked a million questions.

  “I didn’t think he was a genius. He was street smart. Smart enough. He kept developing that act of his. It took him about three years to really get into it. He was smart enough to recite a poem, that’s for sure.”

  Sitting in on a session at the Main Street Gym is how Bill Caplan met Cassius Clay.

  Five years after moving with his new wife to L.A. from Des Moines, Iowa, Caplan paid the bills as a frozen food broker for Birds Eye and Ore-Ida Potatoes. Boxing was where he wanted to be, though, and like everyone else Caplan had begun to hear about this heavyweight kid who had won gold at the Olympics. He took the chance to see the boxer in person at the Main Street Gym ahead of Ali’s fight with Logan.

  “I walk in and Ali is sparring,” Caplan said. “He’s going backwards around that little ring as fast as most athletes can run forward. I never saw anything like it, his legs, and his speed. I was in awe. I guess he was about twenty years old; he was already famous and already made a mark and getting huge publicity.

  “I am carrying a little red Zenith transistor radio. Because I always have been, to this day, a Dodger fanatic. I would always have the radio with me, even when I went to a movie with my wife. I’d be listening to the Dodger game while watching the movie. And transistor radios were new then. And these little red Zeniths were the best transistor radio you could buy. It was my pride and joy.

  “And I’m watching Ali spar and the Dodgers had a game on the road. And he sees me listening to that radio. And when sparring was over, he was wiping the sweat off and he said, ‘What do you got there?’ I said, ‘That’s a radio.’ And he said, ‘That little thing’s a radio?’ Portable radios then were much larger. They had these heavy batteries and probably weighed about 12 pounds, but they felt like they weighed 50 pounds. And this was about half the size of a pack of cigarettes. Yet it had great tone and everything. And he says, ‘That’s a radio?’

  “He comes out of the ring and says, ‘Can I see that thing?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ He said, ‘Can you get music on this?’ I said, ‘Sure you can.’ We dialed it around and got a music station. He said, ‘Man, that’s really something. That thing plays nice music.’ He said, ‘You know what? I’ve got music at my hotel. It’s a recorder.’ It was a wire recorder. This was before tape. There were spools of wire and it worked the same way. He said, ‘I want to see if I can record music off your radio.’ So we walk over to the Alexandria Hotel on 5th and Spring Street. That’s where the fighters stayed, and I’m sure the wrestlers, too.

  “So we go up to his room, and it’s a two-room suite. He said, ‘Sit down and make yourself comfortable.’ And he brings out this wire recorder. And it’s about the size of the cable box on your TV. And said, ‘Let’s get some music on the radio.’ And we recorded it and played it back and he was thrilled to pieces. He said, ‘I’m gonna get me one of those so I can record and blah blah blah.’ And he asked what I do. I said, ‘Well, I represent frozen foods.’ And he didn’t understand what that was about. I said, ‘But what I really want to do is I want to be a boxing publicist. That’s what I wanna be.’

  “‘Ohhhh,’ he says. ‘Publicity, huh? Let me show you something about publicity.’

  “Do you know about Seinfeld reruns and Kramer’s coffee table book that had legs and became a coffee table? So Ali comes out with a scrapbook that looks like Kramer’s coffee-table book. The thing is about ten inches thick. Many pages, and absolutely full. And he puts it down on the coffee table and he starts going through the pages with me. Sports Illustrated, Sport Magazine, New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune. This book is full of clippings and cover stories—and this was 1962. He was just a young buck getting started. And he said, ‘Now this is publicity.’ To say I was impressed, I can see the picture in my mind right now of all the clippings. It was unbelievable for a guy that young who wasn’t a champion. It was Muhammad Ali.”

  Later that year, Bill Caplan was hired as a part-time publicist for his boyhood hero, the long-retired heavyweight champion Joe Louis. Caplan went on to do publicity for virtually every major promoter in the game, including the feared and respected Aileen Eaton.

  “In her time, it was so unusual for a woman to be in charge,” Caplan said. “Nowadays we’d call it a CEO. It was so unusual for her to be such a factor in a man’s business. She had no background in it. She had no training. She just went in there after a very short time of watching those guys and going through the books in a day and a half confirmed that they were cheating the Los Angeles Athletic Club. She suddenly was running the show.”

  Caplan went to work for George Parnassus, a former matchmaker at the Olympic who moved on to promote boxing once a week for Jack Kent Cooke at the Great Western Forum. In 1970, after two years on the job, Caplan had an altercation with Don Fraser, another publicity man at the Forum, over the truth. Caplan said he slugged Fraser in the chin. Fraser claimed they both got in good licks. Either way, Parnassus, a Greek immigrant, fired Caplan, who immediately dialed Don Chargin’s office at the Olympic Auditorium.

  “Bill was a heck of a PR guy, so I went to Aileen and said I have a heck of an idea of who we can get,” said Chargin, who served as matchmaker for the Olympic from 1963 through 1984. “She always knew what you were thinking and said, ‘Don’t mention that name.’ I said, ‘How do you know what I’m talking about?’ She said, ‘You’re talking about Bill Caplan.’ I said, ‘Aileen, he’s got five kids. He can do it.’ They ended up being real good friends.”

  Aileen Eaton is not without her critics. Don Fraser, who survived Caplan’s haymaker to promote Ali’s rematch with Ken Norton at the Forum in 1973, suggested the Boxing Hall of Famer receives more credit than she deserves for driving the sport in L.A. That’s the minority opinion.

  Eaton was regarded for selling stories, for finding a “hook” that interested people and got them in the building. As a result of Eaton’s lost influence, attendance dwindled at the Olympic. The LeBell boys, Gene the fighter and Mike the pro wrestling promoter, eventually ended Friday night pro wrestling showcases in 1982, and Los Angeles no longer ranked near the nation’s best wrestling or boxing town like it used to.

  “If I needed a mother, she was there, and if I needed a business adviser, she was there,” Gene LeBell said around the time Eaton passed at the age of seventy-eight. “What can you say? She’s my mother.”

  Ferdie Pacheco, Ali’s longtime physician, recoiled at the mere mention of Eaton’s name. “An awful woman,” he moaned. “We called her the ‘Dragon Queen.’” Eaton, Pacheco said, attempted to dangle Ali around Los Angeles like a jewel among Hollywood’s constellation of stars. “As a boxing promoter and a woman: evil,” said Ali’s doctor. “She controlled a lot of the boxing that went on because she had her tentacles in the mafia in Los Angeles. She ran boxing pretty strong. Some people lost fights they shouldn’t have lost. Some people won ’em t
hat shouldn’t have won ’em. She wasn’t a good person. She wasn’t a bad person. She was a boxing person.”

  The underworld and fight world were well intertwined throughout the U.S., and in L.A. they often intersected at the Olympic Auditorium. The influence of famed gangster Mickey Cohen, who himself participated in underground prizefights in L.A. in the late 1920s, was well known.

  Cohen managed several boxers from the shadows, and would often treat LeBell to candy, Cokes, and hotdogs with not one but two dogs per bun. After one gangland altercation the five-foot-five media darling, dubbed “Public Nuisance No. 1,” was sent to recover at Cedars Hospital. LeBell happened to be there battling anemia, and, as the story goes, the teenager wandered over to Cohen’s guarded room and startled police officers. One of Cohen’s bodyguards vouched for the kid, who was allowed inside. LeBell, barely old enough to drive, chatted with the famous Jewish gangster as buckshot wounds soaked through his bandages.

  Cohen would disappear for stretches of time, including a fifteen-year prison sentence in 1962 following his second conviction for tax evasion. When Cohen reappeared after ten years, he walked like a man that had suffered a stroke. After a fellow inmate cracked him in the head several times with a lead pipe, the tough guy was never the same. Cohen passed away in Los Angeles at the age of sixty-two, a month after Ali fought Inoki in Tokyo.

  “I remember meeting some old man walking with a cane,” said Lennon Jr. “My dad would introduce me. Mickey rubbed the top of my head and called me ‘Lemon Head.’ I saw him periodically at the Olympic. My dad also told the story of having dinner with my mom and Bugsy Siegel, and saying whatever you do don’t calling him ‘Bugsy.’”

  Boxing was in the early stages of working through blowback from the organized crime-supported International Boxing Club of New York era of the 1950s when Ali moved to the pro ranks. Congress, reacting to Supreme Court decisions around the International Boxing Club antitrust suits, spent nearly four decades attempting to establish protections for boxers. The Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act of 1998, for instance, focused partly on solving fighters’ continued exploitation outside the ring, especially via coercive long-term contracts.

  During Eaton’s run at the helm of the Olympic, one of the things that made her promotional style unique was that she didn’t offer long-term deals to fighters. She believed that multi-fight agreements came with the temptation to protect boxers in easy bouts, thus cheating the fans.

  “We lost some good, good fighters by doing that,” Don Chargin said. “She would say, ‘Look, if they don’t want us, we don’t want them.’ You’ll never find that kind of approach again.”

  There were plenty of big fights, of course, like Ali’s return to L.A. in July of ’62 against ranked Argentine Alejandro Lavorante. Fighting for the last time at less than 200 pounds, Ali looked tremendous on his way to a fifth-round knockout that set up a graduation of sorts against Archie Moore. (Lavorante tragically died following injuries sustained in a bout at the Olympic Auditorium two months later.)

  Moore, like Ali, could talk. Not as poetic or poignant, but after 217 fights, he had figured out how to promote. He was also smart enough to know he really didn’t have a chance against Ali, and took the fight versus his former training partner with that in mind. Moore had previously attempted to mentor Ali, but the young stud had no interest in sweeping floors or doing gym chores like a typical pug. He left Moore in 1960 and signed up with Angelo Dundee.

  When they met in 1962, “The Old Mongoose” talked a big game, as he usually did, and came up with fun lines like a “lip buttoner” punch. But Moore really had no intention of fighting enough to risk getting hurt. A paid crowd of 16,200 at the Sports Arena watched the soon-to-be retired boxer try to score hooks to Ali’s body, but the aspiring heavyweight’s speed was simply too much. Moore’s cover-up defense cost him as he went dizzy under a stream of punches that dotted the top of his head. Moore fought once more before retiring, stopping a wrestler no less, Mike DiBiase, who made his only boxing appearance in Phoenix in 1963.

  By the time Ali stepped into the ring with Inoki, he had felt enough hard shots to be too familiar with the full-body jar that punctuates a clean hit.

  Throughout Ali’s career the ability to endure punishment proved to be both a blessing and curse, which is why absorbing punches isn’t high on his list of attributes. But it was nonetheless true and tested several times before, during, and after the peak of his fame.

  Sonny Banks’ fist elucidated answers about the great boxer’s recuperative powers, and sixteen months after being floored at the Garden, Ali scared his supporters again. England’s Henry Cooper dropped Ali with a vicious left hook at the end of the fourth round, nearly knocking him through the ropes. Ali was saved by the bell and Dundee’s guile—lore places the delay at closer to a few minutes, but the trainer actually bought Ali an extra six seconds with some commotion in the corner about his fighter’s gloves. Cooper, the British champion, was put away by Ali in the next round.

  Just in case critics were onto something and Ali’s chin really couldn’t hold up under the strain of heavyweight boxing, his handlers figured it was time to put him in front of “The Big Bear” Sonny Liston.

  In Miami, on February 25, 1964, Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., like his father named in honor of a white abolitionist from Kentucky, won the heavyweight championship of the world when Liston, a 7–1 favorite, quit on his stool after six rounds. The following morning in front of reporters and with Malcolm X at his side, Clay, twenty-two, a decendant of African slaves, revealed his conversion to Islam then renounced his surname as a “slave name.” The young champ would be known as Cassius X until the Nation of Islam founder, Elijah Muhammad, bestowed him a holy name. On March 6, he became Muhammad Ali.

  ROUND SIX

  In wrestling. In business. In politics. In religion. In life. Inoki, the wrestler with a landing strip of a chin who attached himself to Muhammad Ali, almost always broke the rules and found a way to prosper. There are many reasons for fans to celebrate Inoki, not the least of which is one of the most recognizable faces in Japan.

  From his days as an apprentice “young boy” under the direct guidance of Rikidōzan through his legendary retirement from puroresu thirty-eight years later, Inoki carved out a niche as a mercenary capable of creating and inserting himself into dynamic, sometimes prickly situations while emerging largely unscathed.

  Inoki’s ambition to face the boxer was born out of his plan to capitalize on the foundational relationship laid down by Rikidōzan that bonds wrestlers and the Japanese people. Meanwhile, Inoki’s machinations helped extricate himself from his deceased mentor’s murky shadow, even if he sometimes wandered similar paths. Inoki is a complicated man, as difficult to pin down in life as he was in the ring. Even when Inoki appeared to be finished he was not, and his subversive nature helped him become an important sporting and political figure throughout Asia.

  Like many Japanese boys of the 1950s, Inoki was infatuated with wrestling and the televised spectacle that Rikidōzan perpetrated before his death in 1963.

  Inoki was reportedly born to an affluent family in Yokohama in 1943, the second-youngest of seven boys and four girls. Some people have openly asked if segments of the story of Inoki’s life, including where he was born, are fact or fiction. Like Rikidōzan, skeptics wonder if Inoki was also brought into the world in Korea, perhaps even the North.

  The official account says Kanji Inoki was five years old when his father Sajiro, a businessman and politician, passed away. As Inoki matured he was a natural athlete and showed ability throughout grade school in various sports, including basketball and track and field.

  By 1957, Inoki’s family had fallen on hard times and the decision was made to depart Japan for Brazil. The first Japanese settlers had arrived in Brazil a half century earlier, escaping poverty and unemployment to serve as laborers on coffee plantations in the southern part of the country following the abolition of slavery. Conditions were difficult. The cultur
es were vastly different, and so were illnesses like malaria, which exacted a terrible toll on the immigrants. But in spite of the hardship, the contributions that Japanese immigrants made to Brazilian society are far-reaching. They introduced organized farming to the Amazon, replacing a hunter-gatherer system, and early settlers popularized martial arts, helping create Brazilian jiu-jitsu with the influence of judo men like Mitsuyo Maeda.

  Inoki, aged fourteen, joined his grandfather (who died during the trip), mother, and brothers in emigrating to the country with the largest ethnic Japanese population outside of Japan. This is where Inoki’s connection with pro wrestling and Rikidōzan took root. During a wrestling tour of Brazil in the spring of 1960, Rikidōzan heard stories of the Japanese boy winning championships in shot put, discus, and javelin. The superstar wrestler sought out Inoki and found a strong young man who had shaped his adolescent frame toiling on coffee bean plantations.

  “In those days, it was like living as a slave,” Inoki said in interviews. “Now it is good to think I worked on the plantation in 45-degree [Celsius] heat. I struggled to eat, but such a life gave me the spirit to fight.”

  In the same way that a sumo wrestling scout found Rikidōzan and delivered him to Japan for grooming, the star performer intended to mold a young Inoki, who learned as a “young boy” for six months before stepping into the ring. The mentorship of Rikidōzan instilled in Inoki the principle that a pro wrestler is supposed to be the strongest. The kid learned a great many things from his teacher, and on September 30, 1960, Inoki was part of a trio of debuting Japan Wrestling Association prospects who made it big, including Shohei “Giant” Baba, a six-foot-eight baseball player turned wrestler, and Korean star Kintaro Ohki. Only Inoki was asked to lose, which he did to Ohki in front of 6,000 fans in Tokyo.