Ali vs. Inoki

by Josh Gross

  “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.

  Five months after American Willie Williams, a six-footseven Kyokushin karate competitor, placed third out of 187 competitors from 162 countries in the second world open karate championships in November 1979, he faced Inoki in the most heated contest of the wrestler’s mixed martial arts series.

  Kyokushin—a form of karate created by Mas Oyama, a Korean-born Japanese national regarded as one of the most fearsome fighters in history—is the art Gerard Gordeau, the long lanky striker who slammed a foot into Teila Tuli’s face, represented at UFC 1. Years later Gordeau told sherdog.com that based on his experience, there wasn’t one best martial art, but Kyokushin, contested in open-weight elimination tournaments, was where the “real motherfuckers” proved how tough they are. That was Williams, who clawed and scraped his way through the Inoki match.

  If it was worked it was a hell of a work that featured hard strikes to the head and body. At the very least it was wild; Inoki and Williams tumbled out of the ring several times. The contest, ruled a draw, ended when Inoki apparently broke Williams’ elbow with an armbar on the floor—not the canvas, the floor. Inoki’s ribs were also said to be fractured.

  A decade after Ali, Inoki took to the ring with Leon Spinks, who split a pair of boxing bouts with The Greatest. The Japanese hero won by pin to close another panned boxer versus wrestler affair. Inoki “fought” five times in the 1980s. His closing two contests in 1989 were especially memorable.

  Chota Chochoshvili, a two-time Olympian from the Soviet republic of Georgia in the Russian Caucasus who won the gold medal at ninety-three kilos in the Munich Games, threw Inoki hard onto the canvas on April 24, 1989. It was an odd open setup inside the Tokyo Dome, basically four pillars without ropes for the New Japan Pro Wrestling–promoted event. To the shock of Japan, Inoki was counted out at 1:30 of Round 5 and relinquished the WWF martial arts title. Chochoshvili coughed up the belt back to Inoki a month later by submission, a tried-and-true Kimura, and Inoki retired from mixed martial arts “competition” the same way he started: claiming victory over an Olympicgold-medal-winning judoka.

  Almost three decades years later, Japanese wrestler Shinsuke Nakamura, using his “Bomaye knee” named in honor of Inoki, who took the phrase from Ali, is the king of strong style seeking to expand his reach to America after signing a deal with the WWE.

  Fueled by an embrace of shoot-style pro wrestling, the Universal Wrestling Federation formed in 1984 after New Japan–trained grapplers branched off to focus on matches that were essentially choreographed fights made to look legitimate. No jumping off the ropes. Punches and kicks and takedowns came at near full power. The wrestlers knew they were going to suffer in a match, and much of the time working came in the form of letting an opponent slip out of a submission hold.

  UWF was very popular with fans, but behind the scenes it was plagued with problems and fell apart from the inside. In its place sprang up Shooto, UWF-International, RINGS, and Fujiwara Gumi, among other splinter groups, that brought a shoot style of wrestling back into the spotlight.

  Structurally speaking, Fujiwara Gumi wasn’t much better than UWF despite Yoshiaki Fujiwara, a top Gotch disciple, running the ship. Worked-shoot matches were puroresu, but some of the wrestlers were less than satisfied. Masakatsu Funaki and Minoru Suzuki, who idolized Inoki during their experience as young boys in NJPW, left Fujiwara to show what legitimate combat looked like under pro wrestling rules. With Gotch’s blessing, Pancrase—a variant of pankration—began hosting real fights in a pro wrestling space, bridging old-time shooting to modern-day pro wrestling and MMA. Starting in 1993, a couple months before UFC, Pancrase represents an incredibly influential organization in the growth of organized mixed fighting.

  “I had done my homework on Pancrase and was convinced it was 80 percent work and 20 percent shoot,” said Art Davie. “It was a more sophisticated version of American pro wrestling, but there were shooters in Japan. Funaki, as an example. There were people who had some skills. The question with that early on was separating the wheat from the chaff, and I was pretty good at that. Who was bullshit? Who was real? That was one of the genres I investigated. Above and beyond Vale Tudo in Brazil, I began to look at the whole wrestling situation and shooting and working in Japan.

  “I think that the Japanese were very sophisticated in understanding the nuances of these things and how to combine elements that would be something new.”

  Pancrase took off and brought legitimacy back into pro wrestling. It was a different experience for puroresu fans used to drawn-out drama. Matches in Pancrase often ended early. For the most part it was shoot fights, stiff style, with an emphasis on submission wrestling. This was high-level hooking. Hearkening back to the good old days of catch, wrestlers had to know what they were doing in order to survive. Foreign stars were brought in to build up the talent. Frank Shamrock, Ken Shamrock, Bas Rutten, and Maurice Smith—all future UFC champions—made Pancrase cosmopolitan and exciting to watch. Passed down through Suzuki and Funaki, Gotch’s techniques helped groom a new generation of fighters who soon enough would have a chance to participate in the UFC, which lifted the veil off of everything.

  Funny enough, it was a man in a mask who may have pulled pro wrestling as close to real fighting as it could get. New Japan’s famous “Tiger Mask,” Satoru Sayama, wanted to create a sport that focused on realistic and effective combat. That became Shooto, a seminal organization and sanctioning body known for developing some of the best welterweight-and-under Japanese talent of all time. In 1994, Sayama, notorious for his brutal training sessions, including whispers of canings, added closed-fist punches to the face of a grounded opponent for the first Japan Vale Tudo tournament. For five years the JVT produced excellent cards with legitimate contests under real fight conditions.

  Rickson Gracie won the JVT tournaments in ’94 and ’95, and became the man everyone challenged. Gracie never even considered competing in the UWF because, as he saw it, they fix fights and he had no need to risk his reputation as a k
iller on an organization that went against what he was about. So UWF’s Yoji Anjo, a pretty good fighter compared to his peers, tracked Gracie to the doorstep of the Brazilian’s Los Angeles gym. After getting a call that there was a crew of Japanese folks looking for him, Gracie hopped in his car and wrapped his hands on the way. According to Gracie’s telling of events on The Joe Rogan Podcast, when he arrived, a van full of photographers and reporters were waiting to document what happened.

  The first thing Rickson did was bar them from the gym. Anjo wanted a fight and Gracie was willing, but he wasn’t going to let the media get a glimpse. A few minutes later, Anjo walked outside after being beaten up and choked unconscious. His broken nose leaked blood onto his T-shirt, and the photos and story were reported all over Japan. A few days later, Anjo returned to Gracie’s gym with a package. He apologized as he handed Gracie a samurai helmet. When Anjo returned to Japan, however, he claimed he had been jumped. Gracie smartly filmed the fight, and he was the only one with a copy. When he sent tape of the demolition to Japanese media it was obvious his version was accurate and his reputation exploded.

  About a year before Anjo came knocking on Gracie’s door, Hideki Yamamoto visited Rickson’s gym in Los Angeles and began training there as a white belt. Yamamoto’s wife, Yukino Kanda, worked in events and her company shared business ties with Nobuyuki Sakakibara. Sakakibara represented Tokai TV and was in charge of promoting UWF and K-1 in Nagoya. Takada, a UWF star who was backed by gangster Hiromichi Momose, confided in Sakakibara that he wanted to fight either Mike Tyson or Rickson Gracie before his retirement. Takada had already followed the Inoki playbook by taking on mixed-style challenges. In 1991, for instance, he expelled boxer Trevor Berbick from the ring with leg kicks—not the sliding Ali kick, but a heavier more traditional Dutch- or Thai-style hammer. Berbick, incidentally, was the last man to fight Muhammad Ali, scoring a unanimous decision after ten dreary rounds in Nassau, Bahamas, in 1981.

  Sakakibara and Kanda flew to Los Angeles to begin negotiations with Rickson in 1996.

  Japan’s K-1 was the dominant martial arts promoter on the planet, hosting opulent, exciting events that brought strikers of any style into the ring for single-night elimination tournaments. Kazuyoshi Ishii, a Kyokushin black belt, was the powerful owner of K-1, and Sakakibara approached him because of their television ties to say that Tokai TV, which is a part of the Fuji TV network, was interested in promoting Rickson Gracie’s match with Takada. According to Hideki Yamamoto, Master Ishii, as he was known, insisted on investing money in the event. As the project moved forward, Ishii had second thoughts about promoting mixed fighting, which could potentially threaten K-1’s market share in Japan. He was never a fan of grappling-inclusive events anyhow.

  Prior to UFC 1, Ishii sat down for an expensive breakfast with Art Davie and Rorion Gracie at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills on a fact-finding mission of sorts. Ishii told them he wasn’t interested in events with grappling, and eventually that same feeling caused him to withdraw his money and support for the Gracie-Takada fight. By 1998, Davie had left the struggling UFC to work with K-1.

  Sakakibara then went to a man who had apparently been betrayed by Ishii, a shadowy yakuza figure named Mr. Ishizaka (aka Korean-born Kim Dok Soo). The underworld in Japan involved itself with events. If something big was happening, they felt entitled to a piece. Whether Rikidōzan or Antonio Inoki brought the crowds, fight game politics and organized crime were easily intertwined.

  Inoki was certainly a player in front of and behind the curtain for Pride. The alliance was practical in the beginning, said Yamamoto. Sakakibara needed talent from New Japan Pro Wrestling to fight for his promotional company, Dream Stage Entertainment, which usurped control of Pride when KRS vanished upon Naoto Morishita’s apparent suicide on January 9, 2003. DSE hired Inoki as a contractor and ended up booking some fights that hurt the pro wrestling business in Japan. Inoki, however, seemed to be just fine.

  Since Sakakibara had not dealt with NJPW before, “to have control over Inoki, DSE hired Mr. Momose,” Yamamoto said. “So payment was made through Momose to Inoki. It was always cash so that Inoki did not have to file income.”

  In his 2002 autobiography, The Phantom of Pride, Momose described himself as a strategic planner for many companies, including DSE. Considering he was the person who came up with the first 50 million yen to start DSE, it’s easy to understand how Momose, who always sat alongside Inoki at Pride events wearing a baseball cap with “Young at Heart” stitched into it, earned his ghostly sobriquet.

  I saw them together many times while covering Pride in Japan as a reporter until the end of 2003, when Momose was pushed out by Ishizaka as yakuza gangsters faced down at the Tokyo Dome.

  “That had started with Morishita’s death and it continued for the whole year and it culminated at that November event and what happened was that Ishizaka and his group basically had the numbers to take control or take full control of Pride,” Miro Mijatovic, a former fight manager credited with exposing Pride’s yakuza ties following a lawsuit, told Spike TV in 2012.

  Several years after Pride made its mark on the mixedfighting world, Ishizaka (the Korean Kim Dok Soo) reportedly fled to South Korea as Japanese authorities sought him for questioning when his ties to Pride were elaborated upon in a series of articles by the weekly magazine Shukan Gendai. The blowback cost Pride support from Fuji TV in 2006, and without television backing, the promotion rapidly unraveled. Sakakibara, the public face of Pride, endured a tear-filled press conference in Las Vegas before officially selling the show to Zuffa in 2007, solidifying the Octagon as the center of the MMA universe.

  ROUND FIFTEEN

  On 310, located in the second-to-last paragraph of the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero, journalist David Remnick dedicates the work to his brother. Such was the depth of the Remnick boys’ fascination with Ali, the author noted, that they even ventured to the Beacon Theater on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Friday, June 25, 1976, to watch Ali battle a professional wrestler live on closed circuit.

  Used as an adverb, “even” stands out as dismissively revealing. For many reasons Ali was special, and one way or another he tended to leave an impression. There was a sense that whatever Ali did—be it box, protest, make movies, provide his voice and likeness for Saturday morning cartoons, or, yes, even engage in perceived carnival acts like mixedrules fights with pro wrestlers—some redeeming virtue would emerge. What that looked like after the Inoki bout greatly depended on a viewer’s sense of the situation.

  Like most Americans who watched Ali take on Inoki, for the seventeen-year-old Remnick it rendered down to a strange spectacle the value of which, if such a thing existed, resided mainly in Ali’s vibrant presence. Forty years after the fact, Remnick, now editor-in-chief of the New Yorker, offered no recollection of the night he watched Ali–Inoki at the Beacon—other than suggesting it was something worth forgetting. Otherwise, it was as the boxing and wrestling media framed: a fifteen-round farce. A money grab. A footnote. A dangerous waste of time. A disaster. It was Inoki crawling around the floor like a crab. It was the crowd failing to understand what they were watching. It was the West being utterly disdainful of the East.

  The existence of Ali–Inoki was partly a result of the attitude that produced George Foreman pummeling five no-name boxers in under an hour on Wide World of Sports; Billie Jean King besting Bobby Riggs in The Battle of the Sexes inside the Eighth Wonder of the World, Houston’s Astrodome; Bob Arum and Vince McMahon Jr. promoting a closed-circuit event featuring Evil Knievel’s aborted jump on a rocket-powered cycle across the Snake River Canyon; Superstars, which matched athletes from various sports in a multitude of competitions; and Battle of the Network Stars, which did the same with actors and actresses.

  These were the reality shows of their day. The genre became common in American pop culture during the 1970s, yet some events stood the test of time. Riggs versus King, for
instance, came to represent an important cultural moment for the cause of feminism in the U.S.

  Bucking conventional wisdom, Ali versus Inoki has also come to signify more than a sad money grab. The history associated with the world’s greatest heavyweight boxer, perceived then as the world’s greatest fighter, taking on a skilled opponent with divergent abilities, is reason enough for the match to be remembered. It took quite a lot of courage for Ali to do what he did. No one asked him to step outside his comfort zone to take on Inoki. Rather, most people with any sway wished he wouldn’t. He did it for himself, at the zenith of his career and fame, months removed from perhaps his most impressive win in the most trying of circumstances.

  This was, in spite of the rules, a legitimate contest. Nothing between the competitors was scripted or rehearsed, at least. Conceivably it would not have taken much for Ali to end up in a risky situation. He could have been made to look a fool. He could have, regardless of his public protestations in venues like The Tonight Show, brought disrepute to boxing.

  “Ali was always willing to endure ridicule to enhance his name and create interest in him and his sport,” said boxing writer Kevin Iole. “But it could have hurt his reputation and it had the ability to do so. I don’t think Inoki took any risk. It was all upside for Inoki.”

  Discussion around the legacy of the Inoki match rarely centers on the true cost or benefit. Ali was, in fact, hurt in Tokyo.

  Whether or not it was a result of the Frazier contest, the blows to his legs by Inoki, the normal physical price of a long boxing career, or simply how it worked out, Ali wouldn’t put an opponent on the canvas again during his final seven fights over the next five years.

  Following the third Frazier fight, Ali’s reflexes were noticeably slower and his speech patterns had shifted. The Inoki contest only exacerbated his decline because it sapped the heavyweight of whatever remaining mobility he could muster. Early in Ali’s career his defense, offense, and everything else were predicated on the swiftness coming from his legs. Now the decline was obvious for everyone to see.