A WRESTLING PIONEER: RIKIDOZAN
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Their match started out conventionally enough, as the two grapplers exchanged takedowns, throws, and holds with the kind of methodical, deliberate pace one would expect of a bout of that era. After the opening minutes, however, things began to look slightly off. Rikidozan resisted an ippon seoi nage, a classic judo shoulder throw, in a way that seemed to surprise Kimura, and made both wrestlers look sloppy. Was this all part of the act? Was this a simple miscommunication, a blown spot? Or was Rikidozan feeling Kimura out for real? From that point on, Kimura looked cautious and uncomfortable as the two exchanged only the most basic holds. Gone were the throws and takedowns of the opening minutes, replaced with exchanges of simple and safe positions.
Kimura seemed particularly on edge as Rikidozan began to threaten with his famous karate chops. Maybe Kimura was still only acting the part; this may not have been caution itself, but a performance of caution. Maybe he was still working. But Rikidozan was not. After Kimura ducked under Rikidozan’s attempt at a collar-and-elbow tie-up, Rikidozan let fly with a stiff right hand to the jaw that staggered Kimura. Even by the rough standards of Japanese pro wrestling, in which strong blows are routinely exchanged to heighten the apparent realism of a contest, this didn’t look right. Kimura covered and backed into a corner as Rikidozan pursued behind a whirlwind of open hand chops and strikes to the head. Kimura tied him up, and seemed to want to take his opponent down for real this time, but when Rikidozan hooked his arm over the top rope, and the referee intervened, Kimura broke.
What was Kimura’s mindset in this moment? Was he still working? Did he think Rikidozan was simply getting a little carried away with his strikes as part of an honest effort to put on a good show, or did he sense that there could be real danger there? The referee and Kimura exchanged words briefly after the break, and Rikidozan seized this lapse in Kimura’s attention to begin his assault anew, connecting with strong, stiff rights and lefts. Kimura again looked towards the referee, clearly unsure how to handle this situation, and Rikidozan connected with a swinging slap to the ear that put Kimura to a knee. Then, in a vicious attack that would be extreme even by the later standards of the soccer-kick-friendly Pride FC, Rikidozan connected with a completely unprotected knee to the face, a kick to the face, and a stomp to the base of the neck. Kimura regained his feet and stumbled into the corner as the referee approached and, after a cursory inspection of the obvious trauma to Kimura’s face, told him to continue. But Kimura just stood there in apparent disbelief, one hand on the ropes to steady himself. A few more swinging, clubbing blows sent Kimura slumping to the canvas, lying face down and immobile while the referee counted to ten. Rikidozan’s hand was raised in victory while the battered Kimura’s cornermen rushed to his aid.
“Rikidozan became taken by greed for big money and fame,” was all Kimura could make of the situation, decades later. “He lost his mind and became a mad man. When I saw him raise his hand, I opened my arms to invite the chop. He delivered the chop, not to my chest, but to my neck with full force. I fell to the mat. He then kicked me. Neck arteries are so vulnerable that it did not need to be Rikidozan to cause a knock down. A junior high school kid could inflict a knock down this way. I could not forgive his treachery. That night, I received a phone call informing me that ten yakuza are on their way to Tokyo to kill Rikidozan.” It didn’t happen that night, and it’s doubtful that between December 22, 1954, and December 8, 1963, the night Rikidozan was fatally stabbed by a urine-soaked yakuza blade, that the gangsters were nursing a grudge. There’s no clear line connecting the yakuza outrage over Rikidozan’s betrayal of Kimura’s trust and his eventual untimely death. But the night it happened, the night Rikidozan decided to shoot on the shooter, it was enough to raise the yakuza’s ire.
Kimura called off the gangsters who respected him so much, but this may have been real life foreshadowing. Rikidozan liked to play with fire in his personal life. He knew no fear and would treat people he didn’t like with horrifying disrespect, even going so far as to pull down his pants and masturbate in public if he thought someone was wasting his time. Still, despite his personal foibles, the match with Kimura bolstered Rikidozan’s tough guy reputation and the crowds he attracted continued to grow. His stardom is mind boggling in retrospect. An October 6, 1957, match with NWA World Champion Lou Thesz drew 27,000 fans to the Korakuen baseball stadium in Tokyo. More importantly it drew an 87.0 rating for a live broadcast. Thesz, who had wrestled all over the world, was impressed: “I discovered very quickly that Riki was no fool. I’d already figured out for myself he had built a money-making machine, but I had no idea of its magnitude until he mentioned, almost off-handedly, that he’d gotten a quarter-million dollars — a fortune in those days, especially in yen, from his television network for the rights to televise our Tokyo match. He’d used the money shrewdly, buying advertising and doing heavy promotion, so interest in our match was actually front-page news.”
Soon Rikidozan was expanding his business empire. He already owned a thriving wrestling promotion. Condominiums and nightclubs followed, as did an increasingly complicated relationship with the Japanese mafia. On December 8, 1963, it all came to a head in the bathroom of a Tokyo nightclub.
It was there Rikidozan, dependent on drugs and alcohol and living the high life, ran into Katsushi Murata. The gangster had been part of a group supplying vending services at professional wrestling and other entertainment events all over Japan. They had lost big money when a rival took over their business. The mega mob Yamaguchi-gumi had bought exclusive rights to wrestling matches nationwide, leaving Murata and his crew out in the cold. As the two men crossed paths, words were exchanged and Rikidozan punched the smaller man in the face, knocking him to the marble floor. After that, Murata said he could do nothing but fight for his life against the 240-pound wrestler. Historian Robert Whiting recounts, “As he lay flat on his back dazed, Rikidozan then leapt atop him and, crazy with anger and alcohol, began raining blows onto his face. Murata said he grabbed for the six-inch hunting knife he kept fixed to his belt and thrust the blade into his attacker’s belly. As Riki rolled over in pain, Murata clambered to his feet and fled.”
Rikidozan died a week after the stabbing on December 15, 1963. His passing was treated like a state funeral. Thousands came to pay respects at Tokyo’s Ikegami Honmonji Temple, where wreaths lined the walls. He was 39 years old.
Return to Brazil
Kimura, undaunted by the Rikidozan double cross, spent the rest of the 1950s traveling, wrestling, and, on occasion, fighting, most notably in two contests against Valdemar Santana, a young Helio Gracie–trained Brazilian who had fallen out of the Gracie fold and publically challenged his teacher. Santana had defeated the much older, smaller Gracie in a grueling contest that had lasted hours. Against Kimura, he would not fare so well: their first, grappling-only bout ended when Kimura once again used ude garami; the second, under the anything-goes rules of vale tudo, ended in mutual exhaustion and a draw after 40 minutes.
After these hard years, Kimura quietly settled into a coaching position at Takushoku University in 1960, where he produced such champions as All-Japan winner Kaneo Iwatsuri and Olympic silver medalist Doug Rogers. Despite his return to the amateur roots of judo, however, Kimura’s rank was never advanced beyond the seventh-degree black belt he had been awarded in 1947 at age 30.
When Mitsuyo Maeda traveled the world, spreading Kano’s judo while wrestling to make ends meet, he was celebrated by the Kodokan. When Kimura did much the same, he was shunned. Exactly why is not exactly clear; transparency and openness are not necessarily among the Kodokan’s principal qualities. But regardless of Kimura’s status in the hallowed halls of the Kodokan, it’s clear where he ranks in the worlds of competitive judo and professional wrestling, as well as a key competitor in the early contests that helped shape what would become mixed martial arts.
Kimura, of course, was not alone in preparing the next generation of Japanese martial artists for combat. Another man also played a pivotal role. But before we can tell his story, we first must journey across the planet to a small mining town in England where catch wrestling, long forgotten in most of the world, still had a small band of ardent practitioners teaching and competing in the ancient art.
14
WIGAN
The roof of the gym was corrugated tin. Inside there were no weight machines, no treadmills, no modern comforts of any kind, not even a toilet. In the winter it was heated by a coal stove, noxious fumes filling the room as the wrestlers tried to keep up with the old men who ran the place. Nothing was soft in Wigan, England — least of all its men.
Broken noses and cauliflower ears were part of the uniform. At Billy Riley’s famous Snake Pit, wrestlers learned their trade on a rough mat. Brick walls about knee high served as the boundaries. Riley, even as an older man, wouldn’t hesitate to get into the thick of things to demonstrate techniques. It was, to be frank, a brutal place.
Riley didn’t bring his hardscrabble form of catch-as-catch-can wrestling to Wigan, a mining town in Lancashire, England. Instead, it was a product of the environment. In Wigan, two sports mattered — rugby and wrestling. Both were diversions for hard-working miners after a long day at work. Both were just violent enough to satiate a very physical working class. Wrestling was in the blood of Wigan, England, and Riley was just one of many to follow its siren call.
“Wrestling’s been handed down in Wigan from generation to generation. I used to hear my mother talk about wrestlers,” Riley said. He was the British middleweight champion in the 1920s, taking the skills he learned from local miners and putting them to good use.
“His mother used to back him wrestling,” Riley’s student Roy Wood said. “They’d fix a match up and even when Billy was 15 he was fighting all the top men. And the top miners. They’d put a lot of money down. Hundreds of pounds, which in them days was a fortune. They say when Billy won, his mother would buy a row of houses. They owned a lot of property.”
By the time he opened his own wrestling gym, Riley had retired from the sport. His goal was to train a new generation of wrestling stars and men came from all over, often by invitation, to learn real wrestling from the Wigan masters. Wearing a suit and hat even when he demonstrated techniques on the mat, the dapper Riley was a hard-driving taskmaster. There were two rules in the gym: “Billy is always right” and “You can never train too hard.” Luckily the men of Lancashire and Northern England were used to hard work.
“I was in the quarries. And the money was very little really. Shifting 50 or 60 ton a day. Five P a ton. Five pence a ton! You cannot believe it,” said Lancashire wrestler Jimmy Niblett, who wrestled as “The Man of Granite” Bob Sherry. “It’s the same with wrestling. You’ve got to do more. I always seemed to be that bit ahead. By doing more.”
Riley and his gym, since fallen to the ground, would be lost to history if not for his famous pupils who took the Wigan style to America and, most successfully, Japan. With his right-hand men Joe Robinson and Bob Robinson (who wrestled as Billy Joyce in Britain), Riley trained two students, Billy Robinson and Karl Gotch, who would go on to spread his legend worldwide. Although Joyce was the best wrestler of the bunch (“He used to toy with Karl,” Billy Robinson remembers) his career was spent primarily in England. It was Gotch and Robinson who took the Wigan style to the world.
The Other Gotch
Gotch, who represented Belgium in the Olympics in 1948 as Karl Istaz, did more than anyone in a century to spread the art of catch wrestling to a new generation. A survivor of German prison camps during World War II, Gotch was tough and proud, but not too proud to admit he needed the knowledge he could get only from Riley and the wrestlers at the Snake Pit.
Gotch told Eugene Robinson in Fight: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Ass-Kicking But Were Afraid to Ask, “I started doing pro matches and then someone casually told me about these fellows up in Wigan, run by Billy Riley, and said I should stay away from them because they would tear me a new asshole. Well, I needed a new asshole, so off I went. . . . These guys in there were like a pack of hungry wolves. So I pick the biggest guy in there and I take him down like I would in amateur wrestling, and once we’re down, he grabs my ankle, and I’m screaming, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ And he says, ‘Wrestling.’ So I say, ‘Oh, that’s how you wrestle, eh?’ and we go again and I head-butt him and try to run him into the wall.”
After barnstorming Europe for a few years, Gotch was brought to North America on the word of Édouard Carpentier, the Canadian star whom he had met in Germany. From there, Al Haft, a promoter who loved to mentor legitimate tough guys, brought him in to wrestle in his Ohio territory, changing his last name to “Gotch” in honor of the great Frank Gotch. Although Gotch would later say Riley wasn’t even the best man in his own gym (which wasn’t surprising considering he was in his 50s by the time he trained Gotch), early in his career in America Gotch was quick to credit his old teacher for his success in the ring.
“Well, you know what a snakepit is . . . a dangerous place! And that’s just what Wigan is if you can’t take care of yourself. Billy Riley has no time for a man with no guts, to put it bluntly, so his training is on a ‘kill or be killed’ basis. In other words, you smarten up fast at Wigan and learn to defend yourself against any attack on the mat,” Gotch said. “I give any credit for success to Billy Riley, the ‘Old Master’ at Wigan. What a fantastic man. When Riley trained you, you learned to wrestle in the strictest sense of the word. You learned the basic moves first — really learned them — and then refined them. Nothing was neglected! When a man left Wigan, he took with him the imparted knowledge of Riley’s thousands of matches and years of training.”
KLONDIKE BILL COLLECTS A KARL GOTCH ELBOW STRIKE RIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES
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Many promoters tried to work with Gotch, to turn his fearsome back room reputation into a championship reign. It wasn’t easy. He’d adapted the attitude of his mentor Billy Joyce, considered by most who trained with him to be the best of the Wigan heavyweights, who refused to put over less talented wrestlers, saying, “If I can lick ’em, I’ll lick ’em.” Even a talented wrestler like world champion Lou Thesz wasn’t above Gotch’s hazing. Once when he saw Thesz torturing a non-wrestler during a match, not letting him off the mat and embarrassing him, Gotch delivered a warning to the promoter. “If he tries that with me,” Gotch said. “I’ll break both his arms.”
The two men had a complicated relationship. Thesz embraced Gotch like a brother, taking him home to meet his parents, recognizing a kindred spirit and countryman, both being Hungarians. But Gotch was resistant to taking Thesz’s professional advice. He feuded with wrestlers and promoters alike, seemingly unable to get along with anyone. Later, the two would drift apart over the wrestling business, to the point Gotch refused to cooperate with Thesz when Thesz was writing his autobiography.
“That relationship was an especially disappointing one for Lou,” Thesz’s biographer Kit Bauman wrote at WrestlingClassics.com. “It’s true that there was genuine heat between them . . . He said Karl was always full of himself and very difficult to deal with; he also said, for the first of what would be many times, that Karl blew his chance at being a major star in this country by refusing to listen to others (namely Lou) about how to best handle himself. Lou had enormous respect for Karl as a wrestler, but he didn’t care for the individual; he said Karl was arrogant and stubborn and, ultimately, in the sense of understanding wrestling as a business, a poor businessman.”
Lou’s widow Charlie Thesz added her own insight:
Lou wanted Karl to have great success because Lou had his own vision of pro wrestling, and Karl definitely fit the profile. Karl had his own concept and his own definition of success. When two German Hungarians are at od
ds in their ideas it is not pretty! Lou felt Karl had the same potential for being a champion and Lou wanted to share his formula for success with Karl. Karl did not want it, but I do honestly feel he resented Lou in some way for his success and probably felt Lou “sold out” to get it.
. . . Lou had a tremendous amount of respect for Karl as a wrestler. His disappointment came from Karl not taking his advice and having a different career, instead of being a champion in every sense for professional wrestling at its best. Lou succeeded in distancing his pride from his payday. As Ray Steele once counseled him — it was not a hobby!
Thesz, by then 48 years old, took Gotch on in a series of bouts for Haft in the Ohio territory. Thesz had come out of retirement for a sixth title run as NWA champion and was reclaiming local championships, like the American Wrestling Association version of the title Gotch held in Ohio. The two met five times in the territory in 1963 and 1964, with the men wrestling to a draw or Thesz winning by disqualification each time, until a fateful May night in Detroit. Thesz, looking for his trademark back suplex, was blocked by Gotch. The counter to his suplex did more than make Thesz look foolish — it also succeeded in breaking his ribs. Panicked, believing Gotch to be shooting on him, Thesz immediately went for a hook, catching Gotch with a double wristlock and ending the match.
Gotch’s top student Joe Malenko remembered many conversations with Karl about his issues with Thesz. “Thesz used to pick people up for the [back suplex]. When you do that, you’re going to do it right. You’re going to lay a guy down in the proper manner. If you do that, it’s very difficult for him to hurt himself. You’re going to lay a guy down flat,” Malenko said. “Thesz wasn’t always so careful about that. His attitude was ‘This is my hold, I’m going to make it look good and you’ll land however you land. If you hurt yourself, fuck you.’ So Karl said, ‘Okay.’ And this isn’t just Karl talking, I’ve had a lot of people tell me this — Karl blocked the hold and ended up landing on top of Thesz . . . Karl was very strong willed about this stuff. He was a black and white guy. And a tough guy.”
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