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the world heavyweight champion boxer. One time, a plane carrying Ali and his entourage ran out of gas. The pilots initiated an emergency landing, and as the plane shook during its descent, Ali, staring at Kilroy, said calmly, “Allah has too much work for me to do to die like this.” According to many of the people who occupied space around Ali for long stretches of his professional life, this was how it was. Very little bothered the man, which partly explains his great success as a prizefighter. Ali navigated scares on the earth and in the air just like he did in the ring: with a sense of invincibility.

      By the summer of 1976, eight months after the boxer’s heated rival Joe Frazier didn’t answer the bell for Round 15 of the “Thrilla in Manila,” Ali had hit the peak of his worldwide fame. The timing made sense for New Japan Pro Wrestling, Inoki’s promotional company, to find a way to lure Ali to Japan. That meant financing the match, which included spending nearly $24,000 (more than $100,000 in 2015 values) over eleven nights in lodging and food costs for the heavyweight champion and his sizable entourage.

      Less than a week before Ali arrived in Tokyo, Inoki gave the press a guided tour of the penthouse where The Greatest was booked to stay. Ali’s “imperial” suite, priced at a princely $400 a night, boasted seven rooms. “I don’t have to do this, but I will, as I consider Ali to be the greatest boxer in the world,” said Japan’s most famous grappler. The layout “befits a personality of his standing.” Then, with cameras clicking, Inoki punched the bed Ali would sleep in.

      Even after Ali’s arrival, and with the event mere days away, few people interested in watching knew whether the match would be a lighthearted pro wrestling exhibition or a true mixed-rules competition. Ali’s camp operated as if the match was a “shoot”—a legitimate contest—and late into fight week still attempted to negotiate as favorable a set of rules as possible for their guy. The general consensus was that it was crazy for Ali to step away from boxing to tangle up with a wrestler. Everyone from trainer Angelo Dundee to doctor Ferdie Pacheco to promoter Bob Arum thought it was stupid for the most famous boxer of all time to meet a grappler skilled enough to twist arms or slam heads—who, more to the point, was empowered to do so.

      “I didn’t want him to do it,” Kilroy said. “Ali was going into his sport, Inoki wasn’t going into Ali’s sport.”

      Still, Ali did what he wanted and agreed to compete against a grappler, thus fulfilling a long-held desire to know what it was to take on a “rassler.” Only notorious hypeman Drew “Bundini” Brown, convinced the boxer could easily finish Inoki, egged Ali on.

      As the June 26th bout neared (thanks to the international date line, it aired live Friday night, June 25th, in North America), hardcore pro wrestling and boxing fans, Ali supporters, and martial arts aficionados, in small passionate pockets, speculated about the matchup and its legitimacy. Even though the boxer held some hope that the whole thing would end up a “work”—in pro wrestling parlance, a match with a predetermined outcome—talk of that evaporated months earlier after Vince McMahon Sr., a patriarch of American pro wrestling, approached Ali’s camp with the idea.

      “McMahon wanted Ali to throw the fight,” Kilroy said. “Ali wouldn’t do it. That’s the truth. That never got out.”

      “Throw” is a sports term that connotes corruption. In sumo, for example, match fixing is called yaochō. For an assortment of crooked reasons it continues to happen everywhere. While pro wrestling could be thought of as a sort of con because of the faux competition, by the mid-1970s money wasn’t being waged on outcomes rooted in performance art instead of legerdemain. McMahon told Ali he should take the fall and get pinned. The boxer responded that he went down for no man who couldn’t make him. The fact that at the apex of his popularity Ali preferred the risk of a real fight over scripted outcomes spoke to his state of mind as a competitor. The industrial influence of Jabir Herbert Muhammad, who managed Ali starting in 1966 after the boxer’s conversion to Islam, helped create the right financial picture, including sealing the deal on a live broadcast from Tokyo with the help of his partner at Top Rank, Inc., Bob Arum.

      A potential audience of 1.4 billion people in 134 countries was able to partake in the events from Tokyo thanks to the advent of the closed-circuit telecast. Through a groundbreaking satellite-age technology that let audiences congregate and experience far-flung events in real time, more than 150 sites in the United States showed the fight. When the hybrid-rules bout was officially announced at a press conference in New York City on May 5, 1976, Arum proclaimed that the match would “sell more closed-TV seats than any fight event in history. It will be bigger than the Foreman-Joe Frazier fight and all three of the Ali-Frazier bouts.”

      Two nights before arriving in Tokyo, Ali asserted on The Tonight Show how serious this fight was to him. Actor McLean Stevenson spent the final of four consecutive guest-hosting spots fawning over Ali in a way that must have made his previous visitors—Sonny Bono, Harvey Korman, Suzanne Somers, Kreskin, Bernadette Peters, Phyllis Diller, and Rip Taylor—feel like nobodies.

      “I have no idea what to say,” Stevenson murmured once Ali sat down. “I suppose we could start with, ‘How did you get started boxing?’ Now if you find any of these questions stupid, just punch Ed in the mouth.”

      As the studio laughter subsided, Ali said, indeed, it was “a stupid question.”

      “I’ve been asked that so much,” he replied. “I thought you were going to ask me how I got started rasslin’. Boxing is old news. We’re in a new field now. We’re going to Japan to take on this Antonio Inoki, the world’s heavyweight karate wrestling champion. This is a whole new thing. People have always wondered how would a boxer do with a wrestler. I’ve always wanted to fight a wrestler. I’ve seen them grabbing each other. Throwing each other down and twisting each other’s arm. And I said, ‘Boy I could whoop him. All you gotta do is hit him, hit him really fast and hard and move off of him.’ And now I’m going to get a chance to do it. This will be something. I predict this will outsell all of my fights, and I’m the biggest draw in the world. Everybody should watch this fight.

      “Listen, I’m going to play the ropes. We’re going fifteen rounds, three-minute rounds. He’s allowed to use his bare fists. He’s allowed to use karate. No punching in the eyes and no hitting below the belt. If I can grab the ropes when I’m down he’s going to have to turn me loose, and you saw a sample on Wide World of Sports a few days ago when I beat these rasslers to bloody messes. That’s right. And that’s what I’m gonna get. Plus he’s starting to talk. He’s talking about, I better bring a sling and crutches with me, and I don’t like fighters or wrestlers who talk too much.”

      The Carson stand-in and the audience howled with laughter. Stevenson noted that Inoki, whom he called “Hokey Finoki,” causing Ali to turn and poorly conceal his snickering from the crowd, was willingly taking kicks to the face in preparation for the impending onslaught.

      “He got two or three teeth knocked out, I understand, accidentally,” Ali said. “People jumping on his face because he don’t do this for rasslin’. He’s trying to get ready for shock, but the shock he’s taking isn’t like my punches.” Ali then showed a little bit of humility, considering what he was facing. “I’m a little nervous, I must admit. If this man grabs my arm, or gets in behind me and gets one of those body-snatchers or those backbreakers on me, I’m in trouble. But I’m counting on my speed and my reflexes, because if I hit him right and he don’t fall, then he can do what he wanna do.”

      Charged with protecting Ali from body-snatchers, backbreakers, and everything else he wasn’t used to was a man the champ had long admired: beguiling retired pro wrestler “Classy” Freddie Blassie, who, at fifty-eight, still cut an imposing figure. Blassie emerged from behind the multicolored The Tonight Show curtain without his cane, a staple of his pro wrestling gimmick after becoming a “manager” in the sunset years of his fondly remembered career. The cane, he liked to say, wasn’t a tool to lean on. A man of his distinction simply required a walking stick—not to mention a respectable weapon should the need arise. The blond Blassie strode towards Carson’s occupied desk draped in his usual getup—a Hawaiian shirt and khaki slacks—and Ali gladly made space for his “new trainer” by sliding over next to Ed McMahon on

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