Ali vs. Inoki (25 page)

To make the matches mixed, they had to figure out a way to cover fighters' knuckles. This was supposed to be sport, not the bloody Brazilian variety of mixed fights called Vale Tudo, which translates from Portuguese as “anything goes.”Among taekwondo grandmaster Jhoon Rhee's accomplishments, inventing, patenting, manufacturing, and selling a line of safety equipment— including a small hand pad he called the “knuckle punch” for use on a heavy bag—is right near the top of the list. In total the University of Texas
engineering grad created over twelve U.S. patents. Rhee's Safety-Face, a soft helmet, was put on permanent display in New York City's Museum of Modern Art in 1998. Rhee says the inventions saved the martial arts industry because insurance companies soon wouldn't cover any school, dojo, or academy that did not use safety equipment.

“Jhoon Rhee's glove is what inspired me to do this,” Viola said. “The very first martial arts movie he made, it covered his hands and only weighed about two ounces. It had a piece of string on the front of it you put your fingers in. It was absolutely perfect for what I wanted, because you could grapple with it. You had an open hand. This was an openhand glove. This was perfect. We could not have been able to pull it off without Jhoon Rhee's gloves. A boxing glove, even an eight-ounce glove, you couldn't grab anybody. For the wrestlers and judo guys, this thing was perfect.”

Their first try turned out a standing-room-only crowd of 2,500 to a Holiday Inn. Viola says boxing people were upset that mixed fighting was selling out venues while they couldn't bring out more than three hundred to four hundred people a show. MMA has never had trouble creating headlines, and CV Productions' Super Fighters League (SFL) quickly received local press. Events built momentum. Then Pennsylvanian politicians moved to shut them down. State Senate Bill 632 (Session of 1983 Act 1983-62) banned “any competition which involves any physical contact bout between two or more individuals, who attempt to knockout their opponent by employing boxing, wrestling, martial arts tactics or any combination thereof and by using techniques including, but not limited to, punches, kicks and choking.”

“The boxing commission at that particular time were pudgy and punch-drunk. They didn't want to hear anything,” Viola said. “The mob had a lot of control over boxing. They did a lot of the betting. We were plucking the hornet's nest. We were upsetting them. We were transparent. The athletic commission could not control, tax, or regulate us. They had no damn clue on what they ought to do with us. So what's the thing to do? Outlaw us. They put us out of business by legislation. Which is a travesty. The people who came after me, the boxing commissioner was arrested for corruption. Some legislators who passed the bill went to jail. They weren't the most stand-up citizens. They were corrupted and shady. It's just one of those things.”

Pennsylvania became the first of many states in the U.S. to ban this form of combat sport. Most of that took place more than a decade later, after the UFC gained its initial popularity in the mid-1990s and critics such as John McCain, the Republican U.S. Senator from Arizona, equated the action in the cage to “human cockfighting.” In 1997, McCain, whose wife, Cindy, is heir to Budweiser, which was heavily invested in boxing at the time, sat as the Chairman of the Commerce Commission and worked with cable operators to purge the UFC from pay-per-view.

Fans were relegated to commiserating in online chat rooms and forums in the early days of the internet, and “tape trading” took off in a burgeoning underground market for MMA videos as the sport went dark in the U.S.

History repeated itself as authorities tried to ban the action. But edicts from Roman emperors and laws passed by representative governments are entirely different things, so
over time modern people, for good or for ill, demanded and received what they wanted.

The wall began to crack in April 2000 when California became the first state to produce rules and regulations for MMA. New Jersey literally followed their lead that day and used the same rules to start sanctioning events. The first regulated card in the U.S., promoted by the International Fighting Championship, took place at the Tropicana Casino and Resort in Atlantic City, September, 30, 2000. Two months later the UFC, still under the old SEG regime, promoted at the Trump Taj Mahal.

Pennsylvania eventually legalized the regulation of MMA in 2009, and the UFC, promoted by a riding-high Zuffa regime, drew 17,741 fans to the Wachovia Center in Philadelphia for a gate of $3.55 million.

A generation removed from Ali–Inoki, as opposition to MMA in the U.S. hit its fevered pitch, Japanese promoters, television executives, and organized crime bosses made moves towards expanding mixed-style fights in Japan.

Predicated on the work laid down by Inoki, whose desire to represent pro wrestling as the strongest style of fighting manifested in many ways, the Pride Fighting Championships sparked a new and hugely influential chapter in the history of modern MMA.

“I think the Ali–Inoki show was a successful event, except for the fight itself was failure,” said Pride executive Hideki Yamamoto. “It was a fact that the show caught the minds of many boys. When we started Pride those boys were in their mid-thirties and in position to manage budgets and
projects. The memory of the show motivated those boys to join or invest into Pride.”

Drawing 47,869 fans to the Tokyo Dome, Pride's inaugural event in October 1997 was headlined by an Inoki disciple, Nobuhiko Takada, and Rickson Gracie, the supposed best fighter in the family, mythologized with a 200–0 record, who was passed over in favor of Royce Gracie at UFC 1. In several ways it was the perfect clash to animate the Japanese mixed fighting industry. Takada carried with him the mixed fighting tradition that was cultivated by Inoki and Karl Gotch—pro wrestling is a martial art rooted in catchas-catch-can. Even if Takada wasn't much of a shooter he understood the value of lining himself up against legitimate fighters, a major theme of Inoki, Gotch, and the New Japan Pro Wrestling at that time.

“When it came to Inoki's wrestlers, the New Japan Pro Wrestling dojo training is hard, not just because they need tough wrestlers but because they expect them to be able to hold their own and take care of business and be physical and be in shape because that's what Gotch believed,” said Josh Barnett, who trained with the sadistic Belgian legend and both wrestled and fought for Inoki in Japan. “Gotch said conditioning is your greatest hold, so you better be in shape. He revolutionized the way Japanese professional wrestling is by coming in and showing even more of the catch wrestling lineage, showing more of the real fighting lineage, which would eventually get them even interested in learning Thai boxing and boxing and all these things which became the shoot fighting of UWF and Pancrase.”

In the years following Ali–Inoki, Japan continued playing with mixed styles. That mostly pertained to grappling
and pro wrestling, which looked nothing like the stuff that emerged from the theatrical influence of America's Gold Dust Trio. Inoki's camp issued newspaper ads declaring pro wrestling the strongest fighting style and that all challenges were welcome. And that's what he and his team portrayed any time they stepped into the ring, shoot or work.

Including Ali, Inoki “fought” twenty mixed martial arts contests—that's what the wrestler, his manager Hasashi Shinma, and Vince McMahon Sr. called them starting in 1975. Inoki lost just once against sixteen wins and three draws until his retirement from these kinds of bouts in 1989. Three months after the Ali match, Inoki returned with another “martial arts” contest against Andre the Giant. Giant challenged Inoki by claiming that the man who went fifteen rounds with Muhammad Ali didn't really represent the sport of pro wrestling. It had always been Vince McMahon's hope to see Ali matched with Andre the Giant, but that wasn't going to happen. So if it was a tournament of sorts to crown a mixed martial arts champion, which McMahon Sr. did in 1978, Inoki versus Andre made sense. Inoki won by technical knockout in the twenty-fourth minute. It was probably all fake. Some contests were more gimmicky than real, but some were real.

Like Ali, Inoki had a way of elevating his opponents. Inoki's profile never busted out as he hoped in the West, but matches in the Asian part of the world went over huge.

In December of '76, Inoki visited Karachi National Stadium to take on the star of a famed Pakistani wrestling family, Akrum Pehlwan. The original plan was to execute a “Broadway,” a draw where neither side loses face—like the Ali result, some might say. But the day of the event Pehlwan
declared that he was going to have his hand raised. Inoki said no, he wouldn't lay down for Pehlwan and they could do it for real instead.

In the back before the match, Inoki turned to Osami Kito, a training partner, and asked him to hit him. After taking a few punches and slaps to the face, Inoki met Pehlwan in the ring and dominated what was essentially a submission wrestling contest, though the pro wrestler also used the sliding Ali kick and open-hand strikes from back control.

Two minutes into the third round, Inoki was declared the winner after he snatched a double wristlock (a Kimura), bridged, and snapped the Pakistani's shoulder.

“I broke it!” Inoki yelled as he stood.

Three years later, Akrum's nineteen-year-old cousin Zubair Alias Jhara was big, strong, and groomed for vengeance. Pakistan shut down on June 16, 1979, as the thirtysix-year-old Inoki and the boy who wished to slay him met at the Gaddafi Stadium for a fabled match. They wrestled to a five-round draw, but Inoki raised Jhara's hand at the end and the crowd in Lahore, Pakistan, went wild. This gesture endeared Inoki to the Pakistanis, as did his growing embrace of Islam.

In the fall of 1977, Inoki brought American Chuck Wepner to Tokyo.

Wepner enjoyed the experience with Andre the Giant at Shea Stadium. He had been paid very well, and when Vince McMahon Sr. asked him to go to Tokyo a year later, he accepted right away. The rangy Wepner soaked in his firstclass ticket to the newly opened Narita Airport and spent sixteen days in a four-room penthouse hotel suite in the center of the city. “It was almost like being the friggin' emperor,”
said the “Bayonne Bleeder.” In the mornings leading up to the Inoki match, which was “all show business,” meaning a work, Wepner confirmed, an army of photographers waited to take his picture.

“Like that scene with Stallone in the first
Rocky
where everybody was with him and he wanted to get away,” Wepner said. “He picked up and really ran fast. I used to do that and these guys would keep up with me. And they'd be taking pictures. I mean, I'm trying to lose these guys. They'd keep up and be taking pictures at the same time. Everywhere you went. Dinner. Out on the street. Clubs. Martial arts clubs. It was always forty to fifty photographers there. They loved to take pictures.”

During their match Wepner almost messed everything up when an overhand right that was supposed to miss slammed into Inoki's pelican jaw as the wrestler stood up straight.

“He went down like a sack of potatoes,” Wepner recounted. “And I'm saying to myself, ‘Jesus Christ I'm in Japan and I beat this guy. I'm going to get killed before I leave the country. I beat the undefeated karate and wrestling champion.' We continued on and in the next round he got me in the Boston crab—that's where they bend your legs over backwards—and I tapped out,” a surefire way of knowing the outcome had been scripted.

“Inoki was a legend in Japan. A legend,” Wepner said. “They had signs and billboards fifty feet high about the match coming up. Everywhere you went there were signs with Inoki. He was the most tremendously popular athlete of all time. The karate and jiu-jitsu champion of the world. He was . . . everybody Inoki, Inoki. He was six-three, about
225, he was a handsome Japanese guy. He had a beautiful wife. And he was at the peak of his career then.

“The people in Japan treated me tremendously. It was probably the best time I ever had in my life. Whatever I wanted, they gave me. They took a million pictures. And I made friends with Antonio Inoki, too.

“I enjoyed working with, he was such a dear man too, Vince McMahon Sr., I fought for the father, not for the son. Vince McMahon Sr. insisted more on wrestling and stuff. Junior made a lot of money. He's a brilliant guy, more into the theatric things and the makeup and the costumes and the flying through the air and all that other stuff. And he made a lot of money for the wrestlers. But I fought for his father, who was very friendly with Madison Square Garden. That's how I really got the gig. He told me I did a great job, and I was paid well. And I enjoyed myself.”

By the end of 1978, after Inoki won matches in Frankfurt, Germany, and Philadelphia, Pa., McMahon Sr. created the World Wrestling Federation world martial arts heavyweight title. Inoki's manager, Shinma, served as the figurehead WWF president in Japan, and the belt was said to be awarded to Inoki based on his “achievements” representing pro wrestling versus martial arts. Inoki held onto the title for a decade and, real or not, there were some rides along the way.