“If I asked for 500 squats, I did it with them. They really couldn’t complain that much, although it was tough,” Robinson remembered. “When I went to Wigan, I wasn’t allowed to submit or tap out unless Billy Riley said, ‘That’s enough.’ If I complained, I’d get kicked out of the gym. They wouldn’t show me any more. Yes they were good, but they all worked hard. I was going to make those guys work hard too.”
Robinson was hard on everyone, but the brunt of his attention went to Khosrow Vasiri, an Iranian wrestler fresh off of a 1971 AAU Greco-Roman championship at 180.5 pounds. Vasiri, who would later go on to fame and fortune as the “Iron Sheik,” still had a wrestler’s mentality and wasn’t humble enough for Robinson’s liking. When Vasiri speculated he could outwrestle the professional, Robinson put him to the test.
He put Vasiri in the down position, on all fours, but couldn’t turn him over. Vasiri thought he had proven a point until Robinson drove a knee into his hip and quickly turned him over and pinned him. In a pure wrestling competition Vasiri was getting the best of him — but Robinson changed the rules midstream and taught an important lesson or two — most important likely being “Never trust Billy Robinson.”
“He thought any amateur could beat a professional wrestler. Because that’s what he’d been brought up to believe . . . He said, ‘I can beat anybody at anything.’ So we started and 15 seconds later he had to go to the hospital,” Robinson said, recalling a different version of events. “We got a call from his amateur friends later, asking if we could take him back — just don’t hurt him. He was a great amateur wrestler.”
Robinson was involved in several out-of-the-ring scuffles that have become a part of wrestling lore. He and Jack Brisco destroyed a hotel room with an impromptu wrestling match in Australia, putting Brisco’s NCAA championship credentials up against Wigan’s submission style. Both ended the night with newfound respect for each other.
A street fight with Peter Maivia is also a thing of legend. Robinson didn’t lose an eye in the confrontation, although that is a popular telling of the story, he did quickly learn the difference between a wrestling match and a fight.
“They are both drunk and they get in this fight, and Billy goes to hook some suplex move, and he throws Maivia down on the ground and lands on top of him,” Larry Zbyszko recalled. “Maivia, who was now under Robinson, started biting Billy in the chest through his shirt. Billy did the great wrestling move, but he’s getting eaten alive. Soon Billy’s screaming, ‘My bloody God, my bloody God. Get bloody off me.’”
For his part, Robinson remembers Maivia as out of control and disrespectful to their Japanese hosts. The two had words and the “High Chief” swung on him, missed, and Robinson grabbed him around the waist. Before he could make his next move, Robinson says Maivia bit him on the cheek. Robinson proceeded to throw him down and kick the crap out of him — literally. “It was the only time I ever kicked a man when he was down,” Robinson admits.
Wrestling lore also tells of Robinson being egged on by his fellow wrestlers when talking trash about Gagne back stage. The boys wanted to know if Robinson could take his boss, an Olympian and one of the toughest guys in the business. Gagne had outwrestled the best of the best and had punched out the tough bar brawler Dick the Bruiser to boot. Knowing Verne’s office door was open, Robinson loudly proclaimed that “Verne can be done at any time.”
Despite being in his 40s Gagne’s blood was up and he came storming out of the office, saying, ‘How about now?’ The two locked up and Gagne quickly got the upper hand, locking Robinson in a front facelock and having the entire locker room come by to give him a spanking. The story smells of hyperbole, but the distinction between truth and fiction in the world of wrestling is often hard to determine.
“Verne was a tough amateur but without the submission repetoire of a Wigan guy,” catch wrestling expert Jake Shannon said. “I wasn’t there so I don’t know, but if I were a betting man, I’d find it unlikely Verne did anything except pay Billy.”
Robinson, like many of the great technical wrestlers of the 1970s, was in high demand in Japan. He had great matches with Antonio Inoki as well as Giant Baba and “Jumbo” Tsuruta. His Snake Pit pedigree helped get him over with the fans almost as much as his smooth in ring work.
“When I first came into Japan, the guy that had been teaching them was Karl Gotch . . . his style is Wigan-style wrestling,” Robinson said. “So, when I got to Japan all the Japanese were wrestling a style that I was probably the best at in the world. . . . They asked me to stay and coach and they named the gym “The Snake Pit” after the Wigan gym. They got Lou Thesz, Danny Hodge, and myself to do the opening ceremonies. I stayed there to coach for 10 years.”
Between them, Gotch and Robinson taught a generation of wrestling stars who went on to revolutionize the industry in Japan. Students like Yoshiaki Fujiwara, Masakatsu Funaki, Satoru Sayama, and Kazushi Sakuraba would change pro wrestling in Japan forever. But the most important man in the Japanese wrestling industry, the man who helped grease the wheels for a mixed martial arts explosion, was a Brazil-based track and field star with the ambition and drive to become a leading light. Simply put, without Antonio Inoki, mixed martial arts in Japan might have never taken hold and fans might have missed out on some of the top martial artists of his era — including two judo masters who had turns as professional wresting stars.
15
JUDO GENE and Bad News
If there’s something that gets adrenaline pumping, Gene LeBell has done it. He’s fought and wrestled his way around the world; won amateur championships in Judo; and trained martial arts movie legends, showing them how to fight and then letting them beat him up in his role as a movie stuntman. He’s wrecked cars, leapt out of buildings, been a motorcycle stunt rider, and choked actor Steven Seagal until the action star defecated on himself. He was allegedly even part of a murder. But today, “Judo” Gene LeBell is best known for a televised bout aganst a pro boxer, a fight that answered many of the questions that would be asked by the Ultimate Fighting Championship three decades later.
When LeBell met Milo Savage in a famous “boxer versus judo” match on a pro wrestling card in December 1963, two worlds came together for the California-based grappler. His mother, the legendary “Redhead” Aileen Eaton, was Los Angeles’s leading boxing and wrestling promoter. At the famed Grand Olympic Auditorium, she called the shots, holding more than 10,000 boxing matches in a decades-long career that ended with her enshrined as the first woman in the International Boxing Hall of Fame. According to Sports Illustrated, Eaton, despite her diminutive size, was a powerhouse in the city of angels, in sport and politics: “Do not think of her as a delicately declining lady on the brink of warm milk and a shawl and nice long drives in the country. For one thing, no one takes Aileen Eaton for a ride. She does the driving, in the longest Cadillac in southern California, and usually to a place where you pick up cards and dice. The Lady moves, that is, when she has time. Politically lethal, she has been a forceful figure in at least two campaigns, in one of which Attorney General Thomas Lynch won and Pierre Salinger lost. She once ran for the city council and lost, too, but that was the exception. Do not try to beat her on her own turf.”
While LeBell once sparred with legendary boxer “Sugar” Ray Robinson and loved the sweet science, his family forbade him to box. Instead, it was the colorful wrestlers who really took him under their wing, making him one of their own. Sports Illustrated details his early training:
Lacking a father figure, Gene LeBell was enthralled by the larger-than-life figures who worked for his mother. He got his first wrestling lesson at seven when he asked former professional heavyweight champion Ed (Strangler) Lewis for instruction. The 300-pound Lewis obviously had a soft spot for children. “He slapped a Deadlock on me, and I felt like the room was spinning for 10 minutes,” says LeBell.
It was these wrestling chops that helped LeBell win the A
AU National Judo championships in both 1954 and 1955. LeBell came out of nowhere to win as a 21-year-old kid, pinning John Osako, an American judo legend who ruled the scene in the Midwest and was considered the top heavyweight in the country, in his very first match. LeBell credits much of his early judo success to wrestling basics.
“A lot of people won’t admit it, but judo is wrestling with handles,” LeBell said. “If you want to do a ‘whizzer’ throw in wrestling, it’s the same as an uchimata in judo. An ogashi (hip throw) in judo is the same as a hip lock in wrestling . . . the only thing that is different is that judo has strangleholds, which aren’t done in wrestling.”
That’s not to say LeBell didn’t respect judo or its practitioners. His earliest experience with the sport saw him get thrown repeatedly by a judo black belt. He was powerless to stop him and decided then and there he would work on the sport until he could defend against it.
“The exotic writing and the sight of people in white pajamas throwing each other around inside intrigued me,” said LeBell. “I was very confident in my wrestling and boxing ability and I went to a legitimate dojo. I went against a very short man who threw me high in the air. I jumped up and said, ‘I bet you couldn’t do it again’ and he did. Then I decided I had to learn this stuff. And I wanted to beat this older man. It took me about a year, but then I was hooked. . . . In judo or any other sport, the harder you work the luckier you get.”
It was only after winning two judo championships that LeBell really started to get serious about the sport. He traveled to Japan, spending time at the Kodokan, learning from the greats. Like many serious students, he often ran the gauntlet, what he calls “the slaughter line.” Victims would be lined up, some of the Kodokan’s top players, and LeBell would take them on one by one, until he was finally bested. He often handled 20 or more highly skilled grapplers before someone could stop him.
Japan was also where LeBell first started wearing a pink judogi. What would become his trademark started as an accident — he inadvertantly threw in a bright red garment with his whites when doing the laundry. What emerged was the famous pink gi. While some might have cringed, LeBell embraced it — especially when it empowered potential victims to talk a little trash in the gym. LeBell was all too happy to use a pink gi to attract opponents he would then stretch until they cried uncle.
But there was no money in the martial arts, especially judo, so LeBell joined the family business. “I had won more than 100 trophies in judo, but even melting all of them down wouldn’t make a single house payment,” LeBell said. “There was no money back then in the martial arts. So I turned to wrestling.”
GENE LEBELL
COURTESY GENE LEBELL
LeBell, by most accounts, was a horrible professional wrestler from a technical perspective. Despite being a tough guy, nothing he did was believable. Somehow, one of the world’s toughest men looked soft in the ring. Even though he was the brother of promoter Mike LeBell, Gene rarely moved up from the undercard. But the family did find some use for him.
“Not only was he one of the top martial artists in the country, he’d trained for wrestling with some of the most vicious shooters in the business,” Fred Blassie wrote in his book Listen, You Pencil Neck Geeks. “When the family needed an enforcer to step into the ring with a wrestler who didn’t want to go along with the program, all they had to do was open Gene’s bedroom door and tell him to get into his wrestling gear.”
Family connections, so important in getting him started in the industry, may have ended up hurting LeBell in the long run. His brother Mike, the promoter in Los Angeles, was not well liked in the business and some of that had to have rolled downhill. Gene hit the road, wrestling both under his own name and under a mask as “The Hangman.” Friends say as the business became more about ringside antics and less about in-ring wrestling, LeBell tuned out.
“Gene is one of the greatest guys in the industry and it wasn’t easy being a great guy,” Lou Thesz wrote. “ He had to overcome his family ties and a world that was slowly phasing out the sport of wrestling. He had too much ability for pro wrestling and no passion for what it was becoming.”
LeBell often thinks about the wrestling business he missed out on, coming up, as he did, in the era of television and heavy gimmicks. “You have to have show business now. You look at Lou Thesz — he never over-acted and he always went for the finishing holds — and they believed it. When I first went to Japan and saw some of the superstars from over here clowning around, the audience said ‘no way.’ We want something that we can believe.”
Boxing vs. Judo
There had been plenty of wrestler-boxer confrontations before LeBell’s famous match, including Jack Dempsey’s destruction of wrestler “Cowboy” Clarence Luttrell. But while not the first of its kind, the mixed fight with Milo Savage was pretty unique, a chance for LeBell to put himself to the test.
In the August 1963 issue of Rogue Magazine, a less classy version of Playboy, writer Jim Beck not only called all judo and karate men “bums,” he challenged them to a match against a professional boxer with $1,000 of Beck’s cash on the line: “Judo bums hear me one and all! It is one thing to fracture pin boards, bricks, and assorted inanimate objects, but quite another to climb in the ring with a trained and less cooperative target. My money is ready.”
Not everyone in the martial arts community was amused by Beck’s ignorance, confusing judo’s grappling-based approach with karate style kicks and board breaking. Ed Parker, the founder of American Kenpo Karate, wanted to take him up on his challenge — and he knew just the man for the job. LeBell says he hadn’t seen the story until Parker came charging into his judo dojo around the corner from Paramount Studios in Los Angeles:
Ed Parker showed me the story and said, “I want you to fight this guy.”
“Why me?” I asked.
“Because you’re the most sadistic bastard I know,” he replied.
Of course, for a thousand dollars I said I would fight my grandmother but then again she could whip me. A thousand dollars was a lot of money back then and with side bets that I placed on myself, I could come out of this thing with a good chunk of change.
The story of this interesting bout changes every time it’s told. With Gene LeBell it’s never easy to seperate fact from fiction. When you talk to Gene, you don’t interview him as much as listen to his schtick. And the man is full of interesting stories. But, more often than not, those stories are partially the product of his very clever imagination.
Take, for example, the boxing pedigree of his opponent Milo Savage. In his book, LeBell makes the claim that Savage was the number five–ranked light heavyweight in the world at the time of the bout. In fact, he was 39 years old with a pedestrian record of 49–45–9. He was also a career middleweight, not a light heavyweight — none of which stopped outlets as prestigious as Sports Illustrated from repeating this fiction as late as 2010. A cursory internet search would show a journeyman fighter who lost two fights in his first year of competition and never got better, losing bouts on the regular during a career that lasted almost two decades. It’s unlikely Savage was ever ranked in the top five — he never won more than six fights in a row in his entire career.
Savage, in short, was a never-was, worse, an old never-was who was on his way out of the boxing business. He was a sparring partner for Gene Fullmer, not a legitimate star in his own right. Claims that he was in line for a title shot are absurd. That was Fullmer, who indeed fought Dick Tiger for the title twice in 1963. Savage had never even approached the summit, let alone climbed the mountain. Months before, he had fought on the undercard in Salt Lake City, Utah, in front of barely more than 100 fans. You can’t get much further away from title contention than that.
The rules of the bout are also in dispute. LeBell claims they were settled on the night of the fight in the locker room. Dewey Falcone, a lawyer who represented LeBell, wrote an article
in Black Belt magazine that makes it clear the rules were determined in advance and approved by both parties. LeBell’s book says the fight would have gone on until a finish. Black Belt’s account details a fight with five rounds. Both accounts agree LeBell was allowed to use what Savage’s manager called “all that judo crap.” He was forbidden the karate kick, which wasn’t a major part of his arsenal anway.
Savage wasn’t constrained by any traditional boxing rules. He could punch from the clinch and wasn’t required to wear standard gloves. LeBell’s team did insist the boxer also be outfitted in a gi. When Savage came to the ring he had on a small karate gi and speed bag gloves. LeBell would later claim the gloves were even more dangerous than they appeared:
He was wearing brass knuckles covered in leather. It looked like they tried to disguise the brass knucks as a leather glove but you could see what they were. I mean the guy wasn’t taking any chances.
My lawyer said, “You’re not going to fight him with these irons on his hands are you!?!”
I said, “He’ll need the brass knuckles because when I hit him there’ll be two sounds: one when I hit him and two when he hits the ground.”
Considering the other tall tales in LeBell’s recounting of the bout, it’s worth taking that claim with a grain of salt. Either way, when Savage hit LeBell, his hand would hardly be protected at all — LeBell would be hit hard by a professional boxer with 24 knockouts on his resume.
There was significant debate at the time about whether a boxer could beat a grappler or a traditional martial artist, and 1,500 fans came out to the Fair Grounds Coliseum in Salt Lake City, Utah, to see the spectacle — well short of a sell out, but respectable enough. Fans hadn’t yet learned one of the key lessons of mixed martial arts — that a grappler will beat a striker almost every time. But LeBell, who had been around both sports, was confident.
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