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Ali vs. Inoki. Josh Gross
Читать онлайн.Название Ali vs. Inoki
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781942952206
Автор произведения Josh Gross
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Ali’s presence in the match made people across Japan stop whatever it was they were doing to watch. This was precisely what Inoki wanted. While the businessmen who put up the money saw fortune, the ambitious wrestler envisioned his name being exposed to the wider world. Up to that point, he had been largely anonymous outside of Japan. Inoki touched fame in Asia, and some diehard stateside pro wrestling fans knew of him, but his ego demanded a larger audience. So he set out to find one.
During final preparations before his ring walk, Ali preened in front of a mirror in his locker room. Padded with white gauze and bandages, Ali’s prized hands expertly tied off his white Everlast satin shorts accentuated by a black waistband and black stripes down each side—the same color scheme he wore for so many indelible moments in the ring. Surrounded by members of his boxing entourage—Angelo Dundee, Drew “Bundini” Brown, Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, and Wali Muhammad—and people there just for this night— Freddie Blassie and Korea’s Jhoon Rhee, who popularized taekwondo in America—Ali primped before shooing away a Japanese cameraman.
As a rookie reporter for United Press, Andrew Malcolm worked the occasional boxing event from ringside. He had learned the risk of being so close to the action that snot and spit might fly in his direction, so years later as the Tokyo bureau chief of the New York Times, Malcolm chose to settle in fifteen rows back from the apron. Ali and Inoki were expected to enter the ring around 11:30 a.m. local time and as the middle of the day approached, Budokan Hall was stifling. The mugginess made Malcolm squirm in his seat, which was set up with a full-service telephone line connected to a recording room in New York that collected reporters’ phoned-in stories or notes. As an event unfolded, staff could take those accounts and begin working them into stories. Narrating the blow-by-blow back to New York was Malcolm’s first task, though he felt silly talking on a trans-Pacific phone without someone listening on the other side. Next would be arranging time to speak with Ali after the bout for a feature on how smitten Japan was with him and the match.
From his vantage, Malcolm saw the trio of officials chatting as best they could in a neutral corner. Two Japanese judges, hefty grappler Kokichi Endo and boxing official Kou Toyama, joined American referee “Judo” Gene LeBell, who sported red pants to match his ginger hair, a blue shirt, and black bow tie. He had nearly donned a red tie, but opted for a more formal look. LeBell, an influential martial artist and prolific stuntman out of Los Angeles, was set to play a crucial part. He would control the action in the ring and assign a score after each round, based on a five-point must scoring system and heavily negotiated rules.
Concerns about corruption and fighter safety made this judge-referee combination rare after the early 1980s. Each job is difficult enough without having to worry about doing both at the same time. Still, the use of LeBell’s services in both areas made good sense. An accomplished grappler who could box? LeBell was literally one of the few people at the time who had intimate knowledge of mixed matches, though he had not refereed one before.
“Ali knew me as a good wrestler, at least he thought so,” said LeBell, who for all this expertise was paid $5,000 in crisp new hundred-dollar bills to officiate the contest. “He wanted me to be a referee. Ali saw me working out at Main Street Gym and that was his world. It was very casual. Ali and Inoki said we want you as the referee because all the guys that were up for it, they’re either wrestling referees or boxing. And I did both.”
Before cameras picked up LeBell communicating with his fellow officials, he was backstage watching the closed-circuit feed out of Flushing, New York. In Ali’s locker room LeBell stood with Blassie, a trusted friend, while the sevenfoot-four, roughly 500-pound André René Roussimoff (aka Andre the Giant) dumped Chuck Wepner over the top rope to take the WWWF co-feature at Shea Stadium by count out. Of course, the action in Queens was show business.
Watching alongside Blassie and LeBell, Ali was engrossed. He said he pictured Inoki going after him with “a pro wrestling style” and sounded confident that if he was in there with Andre the Giant, he could have won. LeBell’s wisdom compelled him to conjure a much different outcome. The first televised bout of this type in the United States ended when LeBell strangled a boxer unconscious on a wild night in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1963, which is why the referee figured Ali would be forced to the canvas and, if things went really bad, would get something broken or be strangled out cold.
“Inoki was a scary guy. He was always calm and spoke in a casual way, about breaking Ali’s arm, or pulling out a bone, or a muscle. Ali would always banter with him, but I think he too was concerned, because of the unknown pieces,” said publicist Bobby Goodman, who worked with Ali in Tokyo on behalf of Top Rank. “Bob Arum put this together with Vince McMahon Sr. and it came not too long after the Richard Dunn fight in Munich. So the length of time Ali usually had to prepare for fights didn’t really exist, especially for something he hadn’t experienced before.”
As Ali readied himself to engage in a form of combat that presented challenges he wasn’t equipped to handle, the unflappable boxer, the most famous face on earth, grew anxious in a way earthquakes or flying on a plane that had run out of gas could not make him.
ROUND TWO
Muhammad Ali met Ichiro Hatta, a fellow Olympian and president of the Japanese Amateur Wrestling Association, at a reception in the United States in April 1975. The story goes that Ali nudged Hatta, an instrumental figure in Japan’s Olympic movement, with a dare: “Isn’t there an Oriental fighter who will challenge me? I’ll give him one million dollars if he wins.” Respected for, among other things, introducing Western-style wrestling to Japan in 1931, Hatta devoted himself to grappling, in the way that Japanese strive to find and repeat perfection over the long course of their professional lives. Therefore, unbeknownst to Ali, Hatta was quite simply the best person to relay his message to the Japanese press, which predictably played up the remark. As it happened, a professional wrestler responded.
There are numerous examples of great wrestlers chasing fights with great boxers. There are far fewer examples of great boxers chasing great wrestlers, but that’s what Ali seemed to have in mind. Ali’s interest in Inoki’s offer hinged, of course, on a massive payday. But his love of professional wrestling, and the notion that the boxer-versus-wrestler debate had not been settled, were quite compelling to Ali. That was particularly true, he explained, because a boxer of his caliber, in his prime, taking on a top-form “rassler” was rare. The possibility of what might happen wasn’t much of a mystery, though. Documented mixed-style fights date as far back as the days of antiquity, when Athens and Rome cradled civilizations, and the results suggested grapplers held a significant edge when allowed to ply their trade.
The influential sport of pankration, a Greek term that translates to “all powers,” is the ancient version of mixed fighting. Mythologized as the martial art Theseus used to slay the Minotaur in the labyrinth and Hercules employed to subdue the Nemean lion, pankration in the real world during the seventh century B.C. blended a mix of unbridled striking and grappling that left all attacks on the table. The wide-ranging barbarism of pankration, save eye gouging and biting, was only too restrictive for Spartan fighters, who, true to their reputation, boycotted competitions unless no holds were barred. The Greeks, however, were on board—it was said Zeus grappled with his father, the titan Kronos, for control over Mount Olympus. Mere mortals became godlike if they found success among the three wrestling forms that rounded out the combat sports lineup at the ancient Olympiad. A quite vicious form of boxing, known for disfiguring faces with fists wrapped in hard leather straps, was also featured as sport.
Until 393 A.D., when Theodosius I, the last man to rule the entirety of the Roman Empire, abolished gladiatorial combat and pagan festivals including the Olympics, pankration created many star athletes celebrated by the Greeks. Mixed fighting held a prominent place in that part of the world for more than a thousand years, yet at the return