Ali vs. Inoki

by Josh Gross

  One fight in and no one could condemn the UFC to a reputation of not being action-packed or violent enough. Ali versus Inoki this was not. Inspired by pankration, Davie envisioned a portal to Olympia. With some luck an exalted fighter would emerge for Davie to promote. His own Polydamas, perhaps, one of the great pankrationists. If another emerged, a rival, then he would really be in business.

  In some sense Davie was looking to revive a franchise through rebranding. The record shows that people watch this form of entertainment when given the chance—in Ancient Greece; in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century; throughout America before World War I; in packed Brazilian stadiums and living rooms; at venues around the world showing satellite images live from Tokyo—and that’s what the UFC set out to claim on pay-per-view.

  “That was seminal research for me in the years 1991, 1992, and 1993 when I was putting together the business plan for the Ultimate Fighting Championship,” Davie said. “I knew that there was a long history in grapplers versus boxers, yes.”

  Making another nod to the past, Davie wanted Gene LeBell to referee UFC 1. He went to his partner, Rorion Gracie, and mentioned that LeBell had shared the ring with Ali and Inoki. But Gracie wasn’t interested because he and LeBell had butted heads on the set of ABC’s Hart to Hart. (The judo man did stunts and the jiu-jitsu man filled in as an extra on the mystery television series. The crux of their dispute stemmed from working with officers from the Los Angeles Police Department and quarreling over the best technique to teach for handgun-retention defense.)

  As he made the rounds with television executives, Showtime’s Jock McLean, HBO’s Lou DiBella, and ESPN’s Michael Aresco never brought up Ali–Inoki as a reason why they weren’t interested in broadcasting UFC 1. “What they brought up was the demise of PKA Kickboxing and that martial arts, in their minds, was basically Karate Kid movies,” said Davie. “Fantasy shit.” The success and subsequent failure of PKA Karate on cable was something that was waved at Davie. “It had a high point. It sagged and faded. It’s not selling today,” the executives told him. “That martial arts shit, that karate shit don’t sell.”

  With martial arts, like fashion, what’s old is new and old again. The key to leaving a mark is the where and the when.

  “I believe there was some spiritual forerunners to the UFC,” McClaren said. “That match with Muhammad Ali really was a spiritual forerunner. Its effect on the UFC was limited except to say we didn’t want it to be like that. It was more what we didn’t want. People said we were crazy to do no rules. No! If you actually try to figure out how to make rules, martial art versus martial art—because that’s what it was, it wasn’t MMA when it launched—what rules do you use? I saw it more retroactively. But I was aware how convoluted the rules were, and that’s what influenced me and the UFC. The only way we could do this was if we ‘don’t have rules.’”

  In 1976, McClaren was making grades at Berkeley in an “elevated state.” He didn’t care much about it but was nonetheless aware of that summer’s Ali–Inoki showdown, which is easy to understand considering all the press it received. Any major daily worth reading in the U.S. featured coverage of the match in the months leading up to the fight, and most sent reporters to Tokyo to report on it live during fight week. Because of how big Ali was at the time, and how many papers he sold, the match received global media coverage, the scope of which was more intense than any mixed-style bout before or after.

  Forty years after the match, fighters during UFC’s Zuffaera of MMA dominance have grown accustomed to receiving plenty of headlines and being treated like any marketable mainstream athlete. Under the vision and resourcefulness of UFC’s second ownership group, Las Vegas casino owners Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta, and their minority partner and face of the company Dana White, Zuffa made an American, Ronda Rousey, and Irishman, Conor McGregor, the most popular mixed martial artists on the planet in 2015.

  Being the woman who brought women to the Octagon and quickly emerging as the first mixed martial artist, regardless of gender, to transcend the UFC brand into popculture stardom aren’t comparable to Muhammad Ali’s legacy, of course, but more people have heard of “Rowdy” Ronda Rousey than any mixed-style fighter before her— other than of Ali, of course—and that means something.

  William Viola Sr., then a twenty-six-year-old martial artist and part-time kickboxing promoter out of Pittsburgh, was heavily invested in the Ali–Inoki media coverage. Before premium cable, pay-per-view, and the internet, Viola always found a way to stay up-to-date on the fights. For Ali, the superhero trained in the sweet science, to fight Inoki, a mystery martial artist with several disciplines to rely upon, well, Viola was enthralled.

  On Wednesday nights Viola ran an open class out of his dojo, meaning anyone of any style could show up to train. Judo guys, jiu-jitsu guys, boxers, full-contact fighters. “We had the full gamut of all the different arts,” he said. “We didn’t call it mixed martial arts. We just called it combined martial arts. We just combined things.” They figured knowing one style was good, but not nearly as good as knowing several, especially when that meant harmonizing striking and grappling skills.

  This martial arts interplay added a great deal to Viola’s Ali–Inoki intrigue.

  “To me Ali was a hero,” Viola said. “He was a champion of champions at that time. I remember Ali was shooting his mouth off about either a Japanese or Chinese man couldn’t beat him. That really got the martial arts community excited. Since we trained all the different people the big question in my dojo was who would actually win: Muhammad Ali, Bruce Lee, or Bruno Sammartino?”

  Then the match happened.

  “It was a dog and pony show,” Viola said bitterly. “The martial arts community, they knew it was a disgrace. For a great athlete of that stature to lower himself to do that, it was pitiful. It was humiliating. I actually felt humiliated for him myself. He was a great boxer. I don’t know why he had to do that. I knew it was real but I couldn’t believe it. Inoki had no chance to win. It’s like a race car, but he wasn’t allowed to get out of first gear. That’s exactly how I look at that. How could you change the rules the day or night before the fight? And the loser was the people like me that bought tickets.”

  Three years after watching a wrestler literally and figuratively flop against a boxer—setting the stage for a rare moment when Ali made people feel like they didn’t get their money’s worth—Viola set out to do mixed fighting his way. Style versus style was dated, he thought. Viola wanted to pit competitors with varied skills against one another. It should be about the best fighter, not style, because one discipline wasn’t going to make the cut. With Frank Caliguri, Viola established CV Productions, which they claim is the first MMA-based promotional company in American history. Viola took to codifying standards that aren’t far from the Unified Rules governing MMA in 2016, and used them over 130 times under a sanctioning body they established, the World Martial Arts Fighting Association.

  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.