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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
Prohibited from striking, LeBell had to figure out how to navigate his way past Savage’s strikes to get inside and clinch. To make matters more difficult, Savage wore a gi top designed for karate, which meant it was constructed of lighter material than the judo uniform and more difficult to grip. And it was slathered in Vaseline, according to LeBell. The grappler’s plan to induce Savage to come at him was only reinforced after LeBell felt the boxer’s power as a punch to the stomach snapped the judo man’s obi—the black belt that tied together his kimono. “I towed broken down motorcycles with them. I’ve never had ’em stretch or break on me, but when this guy hit me it broke right in half,” LeBell said. “This guy hit pretty hard. You could do it a thousand times, I don’t think it would happen again. He just hit me right.” LeBell alleged that underneath Savage’s thin gloves he wore metal plates. Arms in tight, Savage was tentative to attack with anything but distance-controlling jabs, and LeBell, willing but unable to trade strikes, bided his time.
Inevitably LeBell found what he was looking for and locked up in a clinch—a result-defining position in any unarmed combat scenario. A modern boxer clinches to avoid getting hit, and referees are tasked to break up fighters, make them take three steps back, and hope they come out swinging. Wrestling is based very simply on tying up an opponent on the inside. Invariably the clinch favors anyone who knows how to grapple, which most successful boxers did quite well before the Marquess of Queensberry rules superseded London Prize Ring rules in 1867, essentially removing wrestling as part of the skill set required to win bouts. No longer did boxers need to know how to grapple above the waist and throw opponents to the floor. Clinching and holding remained relevant, mostly as a defensive mechanism, but the ability to grapple for takedowns, a benefit of going at it bare-knuckle, was engineered out of the sport.
When Jack Johnson operated atop the boxing heap, his clinch game was derived from the grappling techniques of wrestlers like William Muldoon, a famous athlete and fitness nut tasked with whipping into shape the last London Prize Ring rules champion, party boy John L. Sullivan. Part of the straight-laced Muldoon’s regimen for Sullivan was wrestling. Between competition and sparring, boxers seemed to get the message. Corbett, who supplanted Sullivan as the sport transitioned to a gloved affair, said as much when asked by a reader of his syndicated column.
“Ninety-nine times out of one hundred the wrestler would win,” Corbett wrote in 1919. “About the only chance for victory the fighter would have would be to shoot over a knockout punch before the echo of the first gong handled away. If it landed, he would win. But if he missed, he’d be gone. And every ring fan knows that the scoring of a one-punch knockout is almost a miracle achievement in pugilism. Years ago Bob Fitzsimmons attempted to battle the debate. Fitz was a powerful man, almost a Hercules. His strength was prodigious. And Fitz knew quite a bit about wrestling—and how to avoid holds and how to break them. So he scoffed when someone remarked that in a contest between a wrestler and a boxer that the former would win.”
Ernest Roeber, a European and American Greco-Roman heavyweight champion, ended up stretching Fitzsimmons straight.
Rules defining boxing became hyperfocused on one aspect of the discipline—molding the acts of punching and defending punching into the “sweet science.” Boxers still use clinch skills traceable to the days of London prizefighting, though so degraded is the notion of boxers maintaining meaningful clinch games, that a modern-day question persists about whether Ronda Rousey would throw Floyd Mayweather Jr.—the best boxer of his time and a stone heavier than the female judoka—on his head in a real confrontation. By the early 1960s, boxers hadn’t needed to earnestly practice holds in the clinch for nearly a century. Those tricks managed to survive through grappling-based systems, like judo and catch-as-catch-can, which LeBell practiced at a masterful level.
During the fourth round, despite aggravating an old shoulder injury earlier in the fight when Savage awkwardly shucked him off in the clinch, LeBell set up for the kill. “Judo” Gene dropped his left arm, baited Savage to throw a right cross, deftly maneuvered underneath the punch, and tossed his opponent to canvas. LeBell clung to the boxer’s back and Savage, unaware of what else to do, grabbed a thumb to sink his teeth into it. LeBell threatened Savage. If the boxer bit him, LeBell promised, Savage would lose an eye. That’s when a rear-naked choke was set and LeBell made good on his promise from the television broadcast the night before. The referee, a local doctor, didn’t know how to react when LeBell strangled Savage unconscious. He hadn’t worked a fight that included impeding blood circulation to the brain as an option. Media reports indicated the boxer was out cold for almost twenty minutes, an absurd length that these days would require at least a siren-filled ride to the hospital.
Adding insult to injury, LeBell “accidentally” stepped on Savage’s chest as he walked away. He winked. This incensed a riled-up crowd, already uncomfortable with the idea that boxing was bested by an Asian martial art. Well before Savage came to his senses, the Salt Lake City crowd grew spiteful. Chairs and cushions flew. A fan attempted to stab LeBell after he stepped out of the ring. The martial artist half-parried the attack and moved past his assailant, but he got stuck nevertheless. “I kept on going but it went through me,” LeBell said. “It was pretty big.” Still, the judo man survived, won the day, and martial artists rejoiced.
With LeBell assigned as the referee, and Ali facing Inoki, the martial arts community reacted in 1976 as if a great opportunity to score another big win over boxing was theirs for the taking. “The way it was billed, we were so excited,” said William Viola Sr., a martial artist out of Pittsburgh, who bought all-in on the attraction. “The catch wrestler, Inoki, would actually be able to use all his skills. Ali was the boxer and he’d box. The buildup was unbelievable.”
Unlike all-time great Jack Dempsey, Ali actually agreed to take on a mixed-style test. He wanted it and so did Inoki, and in the end their rules weren’t so different than what Dempsey and Lewis floated to the public during the 1920s. Ali laid down and Inoki accepted a challenge to determine the best fighter in the world. Yet many English-speaking boxing scribes maligned the heavyweight champion for participating in a “farce”—otherwise known as something great boxers have always been connected with.
ROUND THREE
Marcus Griffin, in 1937, authored an apparent attempt to uncover the world of professional wrestling. Whether Griffin acted as a reporter or a flack is up for debate, as are reported events strewn throughout the pages of his book, Fall Guys: The Barnums of Bounce—The Inside Story of the Wrestling Business, America’s Most Profitable and Best Organized Professional Sport. Sorting fact from fiction in the wrestling world did not come easy then, and it still doesn’t. Wrestling is as underhanded and shifty a business as there ever was. Indisputable, however, is that Fall Guys exposed the wrestling world to the public in a way it hadn’t been before, and that Griffin earned full credit for coining the “Gold Dust Trio.”
No one uttered that term prior to Griffin’s work being published, but everyone in the pro wrestling world remembered it afterwards. The group nickname stuck because in many ways the Gold Dust Trio bridged pro wrestling’s lingering competitive nerve, the roots of catch-as-catch-can, to part-of-an-angle exhibitions indicative of WWE’s product in 2016.
“Strangler” Lewis, Billy Sandow, and one of the smartest pro wrestling people that ever lived, Joe “Toots” Mondt— whom Griffin, a newspaperman, was rumored to be on the payroll of from 1933 to 1937, and whose interviews were used as Fall Guys’ main source—changed pro wrestling. Mondt’s shift in ring philosophy and practice, Sandow’s approach to consolidating wrestlers under exclusive contracts, and Lewis’ star power, when combined, were that meaningful.
Mondt, a young wrestler, booked matches, plotted storylines, and envisioned an open style that blended elements of combat sports without the trouble of sport—an impediment, from time