Shooters

by Jonathan Snowden

  Danny was world junior heavyweight champion for years and was a perfect fit as a legend in Oklahoma and other parts of the South and Midwest. The rest of the country had no idea what they were missing. . . .

  . . . if you dropped him into New York as the world junior heavyweight champion, the people there would look at him and say, “Oh come on! Who are you trying to bullshit?”

  They would have prejudged him based on his size and appearance, because he didn’t have a musclebound physique, and I don’t know how his southern talk, peppered with “dadgums,” and “gollys,” would have gone over.

  As the right man, in the right place, at the right time, Hodge took to the business right away. He was the world champion within a year taking the title from Angelo Savoldi in front of 6,000 fans at the Stockyards Coliseum in Oklahoma City. The feud was given a boost by Hodge’s father, Billy. No one clued the elder Hodge into wrestling’s worked nature and he went after Savoldi one night with a penknife. Wrestling historian Tim Hornbaker recounts, “Savoldi bled excessively from injuries on his arm and back, requiring 70 stitches at a local hospital, while Danny’s father was arrested. In what appeared to be a complete lack of awareness of the dramatics of wrestling, Bill attacked the heel pummeling his son with blind anger. The unscripted moment was captured in the minds of all who witnessed it, and, of course, played perfectly into the promoter’s cashbox.”

  Hodge would hold the title for four years unbeaten, well short of McGuirk’s 11-year reign, but impressive none the less. He also fit into the free-wheeling lifestyle like a hand in a glove. He was a ribber, playing jokes on his fellow wrestlers, mostly involving his enormous grip strength. Hodge would go into the locker room and rip off all the hot water handles in the showers, leaving the boys to freeze. Fans who tried to get cute were also in for a rude awakening. Hodge would offer to diffuse any tension with a handshake. When the fan would try to impress him with a hand-crushing grip, Hodge would turn up the pressure, driving the man to his knees, literally making him beg for mercy with a simple handshake.

  He also took matches that others might consider an indignity and turned them into a challenge. One night, Hodge and Watts ended up booked to wrestle a real live bear. A staple of the southern wrestling scene, matches with a bear could leave you permanently scarred if you weren’t careful. Watts had a plan for an easy night with the bear, then a match to send the crowd home. Hodge, in turn, wanted to see if he could actually beat the bear.

  “Danny was so strong and agile that he was making the bear nervous,” wrote Watts. “The bear came to the center of the ring, stood up, and came forward to wrestle, just like a human on two legs. Danny got behind the bear, put a scissors hold on and squeezed hard. The bear squealed and was getting scared and angry.”

  Hodge was also the perfect man to teach rabid fans a lesson when they wanted to test one of the wrestlers. He was always up for a challenge, and if it turned into a fight, well, that was okay too. Hodge had learned his hooks early in his career from the great Ed “Strangler” Lewis. Combine his knowledge of crippling holds with his unmatched wrestling and strong boxing, and you had a dangerous customer on your hands.

  “I remember wrestling one boy, I took him down and he scratched me. I reached up, felt the blood on my face and said, ‘Something’s got to give.’ So I turned him over and started pushing his elbows up past his head,” Hodge recalled. “The arm that scratched me? Well, I broke it. That was the only time it went that far, but I needed to show the people that I wasn’t somebody they could just run over.”

  Hodge’s most memorable rivalries with two-legged opponents were with Angelo Savoldi, Hiro Matsuda, and Sputnik Monroe, all for the junior heavyweight title, but his Olympic credibility opened up main-event possibilities with top heavyweights all over the country like Verne Gagne, Lou Thesz, Jack Brisco, and the Funk brothers. He made almost $100,000 a year, a monstrous sum in the 1960s and ’70s.

  Hodge was so revered in the business that all the tough guys wanted to test him. Florida, especially, was well known for its back room matches, mostly due to promoter Eddie Graham’s obsession with shooting.

  “Hiro Matsuda spent about 10,000 bucks with Karl Gotch to learn all the shooting holds, the wrestling holds,” wrestler Ox Baker remembered. “He wanted to try Danny Hodge out. After about five minutes with Danny, Matsuda looked up and said, ‘I just wasted $10,000.’”

  In another famous shoot, Hodge ran through Khosrow Vaziri, the future Iron Sheik and a legitimate Greco-Roman standout, like a knife through butter. But shooting matches were few and far between. What mattered was what happened in the ring, in front of the fans, and there Hodge excelled, main-eventing for most of his 17-year career, bringing credibility with him to the ring nightly, even if he wasn’t the most exciting worker.

  Hodge spent the majority of his time as a babyface and was furious whenever anyone booed him. Bill Watts remembers Monroe getting cheered in Mississippi when Hodge was supposed to be the good guy. Danny made him pay for the indignity. Remembers Watts, “Danny got really hot when they booed him and cheered Sputnik, so Hodge killed him — he tied Sputnik in knots and was so stiff with him that poor Sputnik didn’t get a single inch of any match with him. Sputnik could barely drag himself to the back after their last match, but he made it to Leroy’s office, where he dumped the belt at Leroy’s feet and said, ‘Fuck you! Here’s the belt! I’m outta here!’”

  Wrestling Hodge was no picnic for his opponents. Not only did he demand a credible and hard match, his gas tank was unrivaled. A program with Hodge often involved doing a series of grueling 60-minute matches that ended in a draw. Those matches would be followed with a match that went 90 minutes — Hodge was one of the few who could go an hour and a half and make it interesting. His opponents, quite often, weren’t prepared.

  “I always stayed in pretty good shape,” Hodge says with a wink. “That helped me out quite a bit over my career.”

  It was a career cut short by tragedy. On March 15, 1976, Hodge became one of many wrestling victims of America’s roadways, breaking his neck in an automobile accident.

  “It got cold and I turned the heater up and I fell asleep. I hit this bridge and turned upside down. My car was on its rooftop going along the rock banisters and every time it hit one I could feel my teeth and neck break. My first thought was ‘God, how much more can I take.’

  “I’m waiting for the car to come to a stop and hoping I don’t hit anybody,” continued Hodge. “It’s like 3 a.m. and then all of a sudden my car went off the east edge of the bridge down into the water and the water covered it. As I lay there I felt this water gush over me. I said to myself this was an awful way to go. I got out through the dash window, although my car was bent down to the dash and the seat, you can’t imagine what little space there was but I got out through there and swam to the shore.”

  Holding his own broken neck in place, he knocked out the car window and made his way to safety. Hodge, through force of will, survived his accident. His career wasn’t as fortunate. His broken neck forced him to retire, and his days on the mat were over. In his prime, Hodge was as good as any man had ever been. Across the Pacific there was another man who could make the same claim — a judoka who humbled a Gracie and almost everyone else who ever dared compete against him.

  13

  NO ONE BEFORE KIMURA, and No One After

  Given the Gracie family’s well-known antipathy towards professional wrestling, it’s perhaps surprising that Mitsuya Maeda is the crucial figure in their story. It was the first time, but certainly not the last, that a professional wrestler would figure prominently in the history of the first family of mixed martial arts. Some of these encounters would be celebrated, others played down lest they upset the Gracie family’s carefully crafted narrative, a story they carried with them into the Octagon at the very first Ultimate Fighting Championship, Rorion Gracie’s carefully stage-managed tournament d
esigned to bring Gracie Jiu-Jitsu to the broadest audience it could reach. “When Royce Gracie steps into the Octagon,” the announcers reverently intoned, “he brings 65 years of tradition with him. That’s how long the Gracie family has been undefeated in no-holds-barred competition.” This statement, of course, doesn’t bear the least scrutiny. Was the skinny, unathletic Royce Gracie a revelation? Absolutely. Was the Gracie Jiu-Jitsu he used to dominate bigger, stronger opponents, for real? Undeniably. Did the Gracie family possess a proud fighting history? Without question. But for all their accomplishments, for all the genuine achievements of their art, they were not undefeated, and hadn’t been for decades. That’s because Helio Gracie, to his credit, had the guts to step onto the mat against Masahiko Kimura, judoka and professional wrestler.

  Kimura was a Japanese judo legend, a four-time winner of the open-weight All-Japan Judo Championship, easily the world’s most prestigious judo tournament before the establishment of regular world championships and the sport’s eventual inclusion in the Olympic Games. Kimura stood only 5'6", but built a solid, imposing 187-pound physique atop that frame; he was famed not only for his technical mastery, but for his uncommon power for a man of his size.

  After defeating eight consecutive opponents at the Kodokan in 1935, Kimura was awarded his fifth-degree black belt at the age of 18; this feat, like so much of what the great champion accomplished, was unprecedented. Although Kimura’s name is perhaps most closely associated with a particular submission hold — the entangled double wristlock, or reverse keylock, that now bears his name — in his own time he was most celebrated for his mastery of o soto gari, an outside trip that he honed both in intense sparring and in solitary practice, slamming his body against tree trunks in endless repetition. After suffering four defeats in 1935, Kimura never lost another match in a judo career that ended with an All-Japan title shared with Takahiko Ishikawa in 1949. “No one before Kimura,” the saying goes, “and no one after.”

  At the conclusion of his competitive career, Kimura fell out of favor with the Kodokan and the rest of the Japanese judo establishment. He turned down an instructorship with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, a position that offered more prestige than financial remuneration, and turned his attention instead to a nascent professional judo organization, which failed not long after its founding in 1950. Kimura, whose wife was sick with tuberculosis, needed money urgently, and in the end, judo didn’t pay — but professional wrestling did.

  Kimura took up with promoters staging events in the Hawaiian Islands, and later Brazil, putting on judo exhibitions, wrestling, and taking on all comers much in the same way Mitsuyo Maeda had done a generation before.

  Helio Gracie was not the first member of mixed martial arts’ leading family to test the family art of Gracie Jitsu. Older brothers George and Gastao were the initial Gracies to represent the family honor in competition, accepting all challengers to their supremacy.

  “Many of these fights happened at gyms and schools,” jiu-jitsu historian Pedro Valente said. “Many times the Gracie brothers invaded other schools, took the press, and challenged the teachers, especially the judo schools. There was already a rivalry between the jiu-jitsu taught by the Gracies and judo schools. The judo people tried to claim jiu-jitsu was old and outdated and that agitated the rivalry.” It was this rivalry with judo players that Valente, who trained closely with Gracie for years, thinks inspired Helio to take his most famous bout.

  More than a decade earlier, in the 1930s, Helio had made a name for himself with a series of highly publicized fights in Rio de Janeiro. Often competing with pro wrestlers, Gracie showed a unique ability to combat men who outweighed him by as much as 100 pounds. The glory days ended with no-holds-barred fights, called vale tudo in Brazil, banned and Gracie out of work.

  It was the return of pro wrestling to Brazil that gave Gracie a second chance at stardom. Kimura and company were the best thing that could have possibly happened for Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. Keen to prove his family’s combat style against the visiting Japanese pros, Gracie challenged and defeated Kimura’s understudy Kato, choking him unconscious, and demanded a match against the great champion himself. In 1951, in front of a crowd of 20,000 in Rio’s Estádio do Maracanã, he got his wish.

  Decades later, Gracie would admit that he knew he was doomed from the outset. “I myself thought nobody in the world could defeat Kimura,” he told Yoshinori Nishi in 1994. “For me,” Gracie said, “fear was surpassed by desire to know what on earth such a strong man like Kimura would do in the fight — he might open the door to an unknown world for me.”

  But if Gracie truly lacked confidence going into the bout, he did his best to create a different impression entirely: “When I entered the stadium,” Kimura recollected in his autobiography, “I found a coffin. I asked what it was. I was told, ‘This is for Kimura. Helio brought this in.’ It was so funny that I almost burst into laughter.”

  The Rio crowd, worked into a frenzy of anticipation, threw eggs as Kimura made his way to the mat. But that aerial assault was the greatest threat Kimura would face that day. “Helio grabbed me in both lapels,” Kimura remembered, “and attacked me with o soto gari and kouchi gari. But they did not move me at all. Now it’s my turn.” He made the most of it. “I blew him away up in the air by ouchi gari, harai goshi, uchimata ippon seoi. At about the 10-minute mark, I threw him by o soto gari. I intended to cause a concussion.” It would not be the first time the famously rough Kimura had sought to end a bout by rattling his opponent’s brain, but this proved impossible, since, accourding to Kimura, “the mat was so soft that it did not have much impact on him.” Clearly, another strategy was called for.

  “While continuing to throw him,” Kimura said, “I was thinking of a finishing method. I threw him by o soto gari again. As soon as Helio fell, I pinned him by kuzure kami shiho gatame. I held still for two or three minutes, and then tried to smother him by belly. Helio shook his head trying to breathe.” Kimura didn’t know it, but Gracie was out. “If Kimura had continued to choke me,” Gracie told Nishi in 1994, “I would have died for sure. But since I didn’t give up, Kimura let go of the choke and went into the next technique. Being released from the choke and the pain from the next technique revived me and I continued to fight. Kimura went to his grave without ever knowing the fact that I was finished.” Indeed, Gracie’s lapse into unconsciousness plays no part in the story as Kimura tells it. “[Helio] could not take it any longer,” Kimura remembered, “and tried to push up my body extending his left arm. That moment, I grabbed his left wrist with my right hand, and twisted up his arm. I applied ude garami” — or, as it would come to be known, the Kimura. “I thought he would surrender immediately,” he continued. “But Helio would not tap the mat. I had no choice but to keep on twisting the arm. The stadium became quiet. The bone of his arm was coming close to the breaking point. Finally, the sound of bone breaking echoed throughout the stadium. Helio still did not surrender. His left arm was already powerless. Under this rule, I had no choice but twist the arm again. There was plenty of time left. I twisted the left arm again. Another bone was broken. Helio still did not tap. When I tried to twist the arm once more, a white towel was thrown in. I won by TKO. My hand was raised high. Japanese Brazilians rushed into the ring and tossed me up in the air. On the other hand, Helio let his left arm hang and looked very sad withstanding the pain.”

  The Gracie clan would understandably claim this loss as a kind of moral victory. Certainly, Helio’s courage in even stepping onto the mat against the bigger, stronger, younger, better grappler is to be applauded, as is the stoicism with which he faced defeat. But the contest itself could not have ended more decisively. Kimura lived up to every bit of his reputation. He may have been traveling the world as a professional wrestler, with his true competitive days behind him, but Masahiko Kimura was still every bit the shooter.

  Rikidozan and the Birth of Puroresu

  In Japan Mitsuhiro Momota was more th
an a wrestler. He was “Rikidozan,” a cultural icon and hero. In the wake of World War II, he restored Japanese pride, doing battle with countless giant Americans, doing what the nation as a whole could never do: winning. With television in its infancy, he became wrestling’s defining figure in Japan. Matches with partner Kimura against the enormous Sharp brothers sent Japanese fans scurrying to the department stores, some to gawk at the spectacle, many others to buy their first television set.

  Matches with the foreign villains ended up being the most lucrative, but high-profile bouts between Japanese stars also occurred, like his infamous December 22, 1954, bout with Kimura for the first Japanese heavyweight title, in which Riki’s double cross of the popular star made him a target for the Yakuza.

  Part of the long-standing lore of professional wrestling is that putting a championship belt on a shooter helps create an aura of credibility around a promotion’s title. Perhaps just as importantly, having a champion who can defend himself for real could prove invaluable should a challenger suddenly decide to go into business for himself and turn a work into a shoot — a prospect much more likely in wrestling’s shady past than in its glossy, sports entertainment present. But wrestling history shows us that even the most skilled and battle-tested shooter can be double-crossed. If it can happen to Masahiko Kimura, it can happen to anybody. And December 22, 1954, at Tokyo’s Sumo Hall, it happened.

  Kimura entered his match against Rikidozan thinking he knew what to expect. It had all been laid out beforehand: “The first bout was going to be a draw,” Kimura wrote in My Judo. “The winner of the second will be determined by the winner of a paper-scissors-stone. After the second match, we will repeat this process. We came to an agreement on this condition.” It wasn’t just the overall structure of their program that had been worked out together; the blow-by-blow details of the match were laid out ahead of time too: “As for the content of the match, Rikidozan will let me throw him, and I will let him strike me with a chop. We then rehearsed karate chop and throws.” But what happened in the ring, in the end, looked anything but rehearsed.