by Josh Gross
“I really almost begged him to go to Korea,” Rhee said.
The government offered free trips for up to fifteen people if Ali said yes, which he did. Ninety-nine percent of the time if Ali agreed to something he followed through. “He did things that normal champions wouldn’t even consider doing,” said Bobby Goodman, who worked alongside Ali for many fights starting with the decision over Doug Jones in 1963.
In this instance that meant traveling against the advice of his doctor and closest advisors a day after suffering significant damage to an area of his body that had not been targeted before. “I don’t think anyone thought it was a good idea, but he had made a commitment,” said Goodman, who never saw Ali banged up like he was following fifteen rounds with Inoki—not even the previous October’s grueling third fight with Frazier in Manila. “His legs were so swollen he couldn’t put pants on. It was awful. It was just grotesque. I think Inoki broke every vessel in Ali’s legs. He was in such pain. Ali tried to minimize everything. ‘I’ll be OK. I’ll be fine.’ But it was definitely not fine. It was ugly. I saw him just for a little while before I had to go back to the U.S. the next day. It was hard to look at. All the different colors. Black and blue wasn’t a fair description.”
Dundee was extremely concerned—the Norton fight was closing in fast. Kilroy, who claimed he wrapped Ali’s legs in ice, said to hell with Korea, let’s head home. Pacheco made an impassioned plea and suggested Ali’s legs were “filled with hand grenades.” He advised the man he treasured to remain in bed for three days before even considering stepping foot on a plane. Then he made Ali aware of the dangers: “If any of those clots get loose and go up into your head you’re dead. You can die from this. Those knots that are in your leg can get infected and can travel. And when they travel they’ll go right to the lungs, right to the heart, right to the brain.”
Addressing members of the team including Herbert Muhammad, who seemed fine with the pugilist continuing his Asian adventure, Pacheco said, “You guys are brutal. You’re absolutely dumb. You can’t do that with this guy.”
It didn’t matter. Ali’s mind was already made up, and whatever he said went.
Later that night in Ali’s palatial hotel room Rhee massaged the champ’s legs with ice. “He was taking it pretty well,” Rhee said. “I know it was painful.” Among the concerned and disappointed fight watchers in Tokyo the diminutive forty-five-year-old Korean felt the match was shameful, a disappointment for himself, the crowd, the whole world. “I think Antonio Inoki was scared,” said Rhee, who, like Ali, expected a standup fight.
The pall cast over the bout was short-lived, and Rhee shifted from a fight advisor to the man who would bring the great Muhammad Ali to Korea. Many Koreans saw Ali fight Inoki, and, like Rhee, they weren’t pleased. But they were happy to have a chance to see the man himself in person during a three-day visit.
On Sunday, they departed Tokyo. Following a planeside ceremony three hours later, hundreds of thousands of people waving American and Korean flags lined the streets as Ali enjoyed a motorcade from Kimpo Airport to downtown Seoul’s City Hall plaza. Rhee put the number at a million, though most news reports at the time had it about half of that.
“It was also the biggest day of my life,” Rhee said. “I had many expectations for the trip. To many people who didn’t know me I became known as the man who brought Muhammad Ali to Korea.”
At a news conference, Ali credited his “deadly” taekwondo punches, an obvious nod to Rhee and the Korean people, for scaring Inoki into fighting off his back. Behind the scenes, both men remained worried about those damaged legs but Ali’s pain subsided during the trip. He made twelve personal appearances and attended several special events, including boxing exhibitions with American troops a half marathon away from the demilitarized zone. Ali bragged to 2,500 soldiers assigned to the U.S. 2nd Infantry Division that he earned “one million dollars a punch. And you are going to see hundreds of punches for nothing.” Ali’s swollen leg didn’t keep him from dancing and peppering soft shots into two would-be contenders during a pair of five-minute exhibitions, according to an Associated Press report.
Ali was able-bodied for more than boxing. During one car ride with Rhee, Ali shared that he thought all Korean women were beautiful. “Can you fix me up with one tonight?” he asked. The man who brought Ali to Korea didn’t respond; he pretended not to hear the question. A few beats later Ali tapped Rhee and asked if he heard him.
“I will do anything but that,” Rhee told the champ. “I will not introduce a woman to you. That’s one thing I will never do for anybody.”
Many people over the years had answered yes to Ali’s request. Though Ali claimed he was a “single man,” Rhee explained he doesn’t “believe in sex before marriage, so I wouldn’t cooperate.” A minute later Ali tapped Rhee again and, according to the taekwondo man, said, “Master Rhee, I really respect you.”
Ali still found a woman to pal around with.
Indeed, Ali enjoyed the Korean people. Wherever he and Rhee went their meals were paid for. Kimchi was a bit too spicy, but the kegogi—dog meat—suited Ali fine.
The day Ali departed Korea, the country’s authoritarian president, Park Chung Hee, asked to meet with him. Due to a conflict with the boxer’s flight time it never happened. Park assumed control of South Korea following a military coup in 1961, and three years after Ali’s visit was assassinated. The great boxer had bumped into his share of military strongmen over the course of his well-travelled career. Unsavory characters and sordid affairs were just part of the boxing business. And as Ali returned to the U.S., bad financial dealings around the Inoki bout began to surface. The $6 million Ali was guaranteed turned out to be $1.8 million, insofar as that is what he received in the aftermath of the bout.
“It confirms my principle,” Ali’s manager Herbert Muhammad told Dave Anderson of the New York Times, “of getting all the money in the bank ahead of time. I didn’t do it this time.”
The financial details were prickly. “The $3 million from Japan,” Muhammad told Anderson, “was split up—$1.8 million in a letter of credit that’s in the bank and $1.2 million in a dollar-for-dollar tax credit” that was held up pending an accounting by Top Rank of Ali’s share. (Top Rank boss Bob Arum ignored several requests to participate in this book.) Anderson cited closed-circuit TV sources that projected Top Rank’s gross at $2.5 million, less than a $1 million net. “So far Ali hasn’t got a quarter,” Muhammad told the Times. “Nobody’s got paid.”
Even more concerning, Ali’s left leg started killing him as soon as he departed Korea. After dedicating the Ali Mall in Manila—the first major shopping center in the Philippines—Ali returned to Los Angeles on the first of July and Gene Kilroy took him posthaste to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, where X-rays revealed blood clots. He was admitted for a three-day stay.
Tests showed superficial clotting near the surface of both knees, according to a report by United Press International, which noted, “Ali also suffered from severe muscle damage in his left leg; anemia produced by bleeding into the leg from the injury to blood vessels in the muscle of the leg; vein damage; and an accumulation of both fluid and blood in the entire leg.” Doctors administered blood thinners to Ali, Kilroy said, and within a couple days it was reported that he had made “substantial progress.”
Once again, Ali seemed to have dodged a bullet, though Pacheco remained angered over how things had played out in Japan. “You’re fucking lucky those lumps didn’t travel,” Pacheco told him.
Six weeks after the match with Inoki, Ali was back to running three miles a day as he began preparing for the third fight with Ken Norton.
ROUND THIRTEEN
In all athletic endeavors, energy is best transferred from the ground to the feet to the legs to the hips and so on; power loads before it can be unleashed. The more efficient the transition, the more force is created. This process helped refine martial arts to a feat of literal human engineering. The body is designed to do
certain things in certain ways, and special martial artists, like other talented athletes, can appear smooth and rhythmic generating tremendous acceleration and damage.
Antonio Inoki didn’t make it look smooth and rhythmic against a man who was the smoothest and most rhythmic of all time. That fight—that’s the correct word for what happened—was ugly, and that’s another reason fans and media sneered at it at the time. Watching Inoki launch himself to the floor while swinging a boot wasn’t the best, but it served him well by keeping that “pelican” chin clear of Ali’s punches.
Aesthetics aside, Inoki’s lack of connection to the ground while kicking reduced the attack’s venom. So it was that an accumulation of kicks did in Muhammad Ali. Had Inoki consistently thrown kicks with proper technique—it was against the rules, plus he tried but didn’t trust himself—it’s highly unlikely Ali would have survived the full fifteen rounds.
In 1976, hardly anyone in the mainstream grasped the true devastation of a well-timed, well-placed leg kick. That’s one of the reasons Inoki’s effort was widely panned. Some reporters wondered afterwards about the point of throwing kicks to a guy’s leg in a fight. Few people had any inkling that, done right, a leg kick could actually debilitate an adversary. There was hardly any kickboxing happening in the States at the time, and only a select few hardcore martial artists fully understood the implications of shins meeting thighs.
“If you think about it Inoki was smart,” said Maurice Smith, who watched the contest as a budding fourteen-yearold karate and taekwondo student in Seattle, Wash., the adopted city of Bruce Lee. “He did something Ali wasn’t unaccustomed to: those low kicks. We weren’t covering low kicks in my training, but I understood that getting kicked didn’t feel good. Not to the level that we know now, but definitely to a point. It had a big significance in diminishing Ali’s skill set, his abilities.”
Inoki may have peppered a great boxer’s legs, yet Smith is rightly considered mixed martial arts’ godfather of leg kicking.
Two decades after Ali was hospitalized for taking Louisville Sluggers, Smith neutralized UFC heavyweight champion Mark Coleman, a powerhouse grappler, partly because he could bludgeon the wrestler’s lead leg. The outcome served as a wakeup call to the wider martial arts world because four years after the debut of the UFC, grappling was the dominant combat style. An onslaught of big, strong Olympic-caliber wrestlers, many of whom freely used steroids to boost their training and physical advantages, dominated mixed-style contests—adding to the perception that fighters who had to stay on their feet to have a chance almost never did.
For all of Smith’s success in kickboxing (he retired with a 53–13–5 record) and foresight adapting striking to MMA, he closed out a decade of mixed-rules bouts having twenty-eight fights. Nowadays, thanks in no small part to Smith, the leg kick is a mandatory MMA tool. Fighters must know how to throw or defend one if they want a chance of winning at an elite level.
The sport’s most effective low kicker, it could be argued, is the first man to hold the UFC 145-pound belt, Brazilian Jose Aldo, whose dynamism made him among the game’s most devastating offensive fighters. His classically brutal victory over Urijah Faber in April 2010 is the gold standard of leg-kick effectiveness and devastation. Missing once in twenty-six attempts, Aldo debilitated Faber, a terrific fighter, en route to a lopsided win that went the distance due to the Californian’s conditioning, desire, and ability to endure pain.
Aldo kicked Faber much more effectively than Inoki kicked Ali, but the Japanese fighter connected four times as many kicks against an opponent who had never been hit in that spot before. Afterwards Faber’s left leg resembled a massive elephant trunk more than any part of the human body, and it took over a month for the purplish hue and swelling to subside.
Beyond his kicking ability, Smith is remembered as being one of the first true mixed martial artists because he melded unique styles to boost his strengths. He incorporated the groundwork of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which had been derived from judo. Known as the guard, or in catch wrestling lore “leg-and-hip control,” Smith essentially learned how to defend himself from the bottom in the likely case that a grappler secured top position over him. There’s a lot that can happen both ways from this spot, but it certainly wasn’t where a fighter like Smith wanted to be.
Alongside pioneering UFC champion and submission fighter Frank Shamrock, Smith embraced the full spectrum of martial arts. His important affiliation with Shamrock and Tsuyoshi Kohsaka in the late 1990s, during MMA’s mediastarved days in the U.S., subsequently changed the way fighters prepared and fought by highlighting the wisdom of training everything all the time. Smith learned a wrestler’s sprawl in hopes of shutting down lower body takedown attempts, and if that didn’t work he revolutionized control from the bottom with his grappling half-guard. The trio called themselves “The Alliance” and described their style as “cross training.”
This way of thinking would have been rare in the 1970s, a result of the mainstream drive at the time to represent pure martial arts styles. There were practitioners who sought to remove themselves from this dogma. Smith turned out to be one. Gene LeBell, a misfit of his day, was always willing to use whatever worked. Exposure in his earliest brushes with martial arts to the anything-goes grappling ideology of Ed “Strangler” Lewis played a large part in shaping his open thought process.
“If you don’t know something you usually don’t like it,” LeBell said. “That’s why a lot of us argue with our neighbors. In the martial arts, it was the mystic, the secrets of the martial arts. They come from the Orient.”
A two-time national and overall judo champion—the sporting equivalent of best in show—LeBell ran headfirst into the limiting principle associated with my-way-or-thehighway martial arts practice. Thrown out of more dojos than he cared to remember because he wouldn’t do things the way they wanted, LeBell recalled one time in particular when a stodgy Japanese Rokudan, or sixth-degree black belt, challenged his credentials.
“The guy comes up to me and says, ‘I’m Rokudan,’” said LeBell, who was asked to share his rank. That meant it was time to goof around. Now in his eighties, LeBell features an assortment of belts, accolades, and awards on the walls of his San Fernando Valley home office. He swears they don’t mean a thing. To the Rokudan, LeBell simply stated that he was a teacher. Systems vary, explained LeBell, so different degrees meant different standards. The Rokudan didn’t appreciate the answer and was more direct. “How good are you?” he asked. LeBell told him he won the nationals a couple of times, back when it took eighteen matches over two days to do so. The Rokudan did an about-face and walked away unconvinced the red-haired loudmouth who wore a pink gi was an actual champion. But, that he was. Not only did LeBell represent grappling, particularly judo, to great effect against Milo Savage in 1963, he challenged the linear thinking that permeated media and popular culture, which positioned flashy television and film-friendly styles like karate, taekwondo, and gung fu as worthwhile to watch and practice because, supposedly, they were the most dangerous.
The best-known martial artist of his day, of course, was the legendary Bruce Lee. He epitomized the karate flash audiences craved yet worked to outmode that paradigm by promoting concepts that updated and modernized martial arts. That is why, despite never fighting professionally, Lee is regarded as a forefather of mixed martial arts.
If LeBell is thought of in similar lines, and he should be—quite a bit more than Lee to be fair—it would be because he was a let-me-see-what-you-got kind of guy.
LeBell knew Lee very well. They met on the set of the classic television show The Green Hornet. Lee starred as Kato for twenty-six episodes, and from 1966 to 1967 LeBell worked as a stuntman under prolific stunt coordinator Bennie Dobbins.
Lee moved so fast that people didn’t know how to react, though the camera loved him. During their first interaction, LeBell, who outweighed Lee by fifty pounds, lifted the little guy over his head, eager to show off the kettlebell work he put in with
Karl Gotch. In strength, fitness, and flexibility exercises, the Belgian killer routinely tossed around the equivalent of ninety-pound cannonballs affixed with a handle. LeBell was good for half of that, and the judoka claims he ran around the set dangling Lee in the air before locking him in a reverse nelson.
The world-famous Chinese-American threatened LeBell.
“Put me down or I’ll kill you,” Lee said.
Typical LeBell mouthed off: “I can’t put you down. You’ll kill me.”
“I demand respect,” Lee shouted, and LeBell let him loose. “OK, you’re the boss.”
They chatted and Lee invited LeBell to train with him. “I’ll teach you gung fu,” he said.
“I don’t know if I’m allergic to it,” the stuntman replied, “but I’ll do it.”
Lee felt LeBell disrespected him and that was unacceptable, but as their communication improved LeBell said Lee realized that the son of Hollywood was “brain dead.” Soon Lee called LeBell, who knew how to fall and make Lee look good, to work on various shows.
“Bruce Lee was the man for what he did,” LeBell said. “I loved Bruce because a lot of the gung fu guys didn’t like him because he showed other things that were practical but weren’t traditional in his art. I weighed 180, he weighed 135. A guy like that, I don’t care how good he is, you’re going to have him for lunch. That doesn’t make me any better. If we were the same weight he might’ve done some gung fu to me. At that time he got very interested in wrestling.”
This was right before Enter the Dragon, which was released in 1973 and became one of the most famous martial arts movies of all time. Perhaps the most famous. Lee had offered LeBell a chance to work on the movie in Hong Kong for $200 a week. The American judoka was pocketing five times that doing stunt work on cowboy movies, and passed.
