Ali vs. Inoki (2 page)

ROUND ONE

T
he southern coast of Honshu, the largest and most populous of Japan's four main islands, trembled at 10:19
P.M.
local time, Friday, June 18, 1976.

Thirty-eight miles away in Tokyo, the most famous man on the planet and some of the troop that followed him everywhere he went had just settled into their rooms on the forty-fourth floor at the upscale Keio Plaza Hotel. This marked the end of the first full day of fight week promotion building to a spectacle in Tokyo pitting a boxer, the one and only Muhammad Ali, against a professional wrestler, Japan's
puroresu
star Antonio Inoki.

Gene Kilroy, an Ali confidant, one of many people to claim close ties to the man during his iconic twenty-one-year boxing career, was shaving when the 4.4-magnitude quake rumbled through. Kilroy heard a bang and, through the reflection of a bathroom mirror, saw his clothes swinging in the closet. Later, he learned that structures in the area were
built on rollers to cope with city life along the Ring of Fire, the seismic-heavy zone of volcanic activity surrounding the Pacific Ocean.

The evening jolt apparently did nothing to faze 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 the couch. Using catchphrases cultivated over four decades of working every pro wrestling territory worth knowing, Blassie plowed over that “pencil-neck geek” Stevenson. As it was, Ali was attempting to sell a legitimate fight, not a pro wrestling bonanza, and he sensed Blassie's over-the-top shtick would confuse the audience. So the boxer cut him off.

Ali leaned forward.

“There's $10 million involved,” he said, which was an exaggeration since he had agreed to a purse of $6.1 million while Inoki was set to take home in the neighborhood of $2 million. “I wouldn't take the sport of boxing and disgrace it. I wouldn't pull a fraud on the public. This is real. There's no plan. The blood. The holds. The pain. Everything is going to be real. I'm not here in this time of my life to come out with some phony action.”

The next night Charlton Heston and comedian Kelly Monteith had the pleasure of welcoming Johnny Carson back to Burbank, Calif. After hearing Ed McMahon describe a wacky time at a bicentennial gathering in the West Chicago suburb of Wheaton, Ill.—“You told me never to play a fairgrounds, and I made a mistake,” McMahon admitted to Carson. “I didn't listen to you.”—the late-night king lamented his days touring the Midwest.

Professional wrestlers knew as well as anyone what it was like to play in front of fairgrounds fans. The tradition of wrestling tours, like America, is long and vast, and in significant ways linked to the man Ali signed to fight in Tokyo.

Inoki, a famous disciple of the father of Japanese professional wrestling, better known as Rikidōzan, was the B-side of a contest poised to produce the largest purse and audience for a bout of this type. Ticket prices at the Nippon Budokan arena were exorbitant, yet, with Ali involved, the fight was a sellout. Ringside seats for regular wrestling shows at the Budokan were 5,000 yen (roughly $17 at the time). For the Ali–Inoki rumble, that price put fans in the nosebleeds of a 14,000-seat building. The face value of the most expensive ticket available to the public was $1,000 ($4,100 today). Sponsors could access “royal ringside” seats for three times that price.

“My memory was, ‘Oh my God, you're charging how much?'” recalled Dave Meltzer, a sixteen-year-old fanatic with a pro wrestling newsletter who watched the match at the Santa Clara Fairgrounds, one of four Bay Area venues carrying the closed-circuit feed from Tokyo.

“It was announced in Japan long before it was announced in the United States,” he said. “And even though it was announced in Japan, I thought the Japanese wrestling people were just making noise because there was no way in hell this was ever going to happen. And they actually announced it and I was stunned. There was always in wrestling historically this idea of a boxer versus a wrestler going back to ‘Strangler' Lewis and Jack Dempsey—it never happened, probably because when the boxer started training with real wrestlers it was like, wow, this is a really dumb idea.”

At Shea Stadium in Flushing, New York, 32,897 spectators gathered to watch Ali meet Inoki after a World Wide Wrestling Federation extravaganza, “Showdown at Shea,” a precursor to modern-day WrestleMania events. For the sake of business that night, a gimpy Bruno Sammartino returned
to the squared circle two months after fracturing his neck in a match at Madison Square Garden against Stan Hansen. Anchoring the event before Shea Stadium went dark for the Ali–Inoki contest, Andre the Giant faced Chuck Wepner— Sylvester Stallone's inspiration for Rocky Balboa. (Decades later, most people believe the action at Shea and Tokyo also prompted Stallone to include a boxer-versus-wrestler scene in
Rocky III
. Through his publicist, Stallone denied any truth to that.) Cards like these took place across North America that night, and at the behest of Vince McMahon Sr., were billed as a sort of “Martial Arts Olympics” to support the so-called World Martial Arts Championship.

Whatever trepidation Ali felt ahead of the Inoki bout, it was at least rooted in combat sports reality. Unlike earlier generations of American audiences, fight watchers in the mid-1970s weren't clued into matches that allowed for more than trading punches. Boxing was
the
combat sport, in large part because of Ali, who ably served as its king and jester. Martial arts in the age of Bruce Lee were repurposed as flash for film and television, further eroding the prominence of American grappling arts that had been influenced by Japanese martial arts missionaries and European immigrants during the Industrial Revolution. By the summer of America's 200th birthday, when fans gathered in arenas across the globe to watch Ali fight Inoki, a sense of excitement brewed on all sides. Ali was the best boxer on the planet, The Greatest of All Time, and anything he did received huge attention. But this? This was unique. Something mysterious. And that made it potentially something bigger.