Ali vs. Inoki Read online

  Praise for Ali vs. Inoki

  “It’s only fitting that Josh Gross—an early MMA adopter and as fine a writer/reporter as the sport has—gives us this dispatch of an original boxer-versus-grappler contest. Our only question: When’s the movie coming out?”

  —L. JON WERTHEIM, executive editor, Sports Illustrated

  Copyright © 2016 by Josh Gross

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

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  Printed in the United States of America

  First E-Book Edition: June 2016.

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  ISBN 978-1-942952-20-6

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  and Lisa Story Author photo courtesy of Eva Napp

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  For my mom, who gave me the chance to tell this story

  TABLE of CONTENTS

  Foreword by Bas Rutten

  Round 1

  Round 2

  Round 3

  Round 4

  Round 5

  Round 6

  Round 7

  Round 8

  Round 9

  Round 10

  Round 11

  Round 12

  Round 13

  Round 14

  Round 15

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  FOREWORD

  I was a kid, all of eleven years old, when the fight between Muhammad Ali and Antonio Inoki took place in 1976. At that time, the two biggest names in martial arts were Bruce Lee and Ali. As a kid who got bullied because I suffered from a skin disease, severe asthma attacks, and being very skinny, I often dreamt: “If I only had skills like them, the bullies would be in trouble!”

  Several years later, having beaten my childhood bullies, I watched the documentary Kings of the Square Ring. That was when I saw the match between Ali and Inoki, which took place in the Nippon Budokan in Tokyo. I would have never guessed that many years later I’d successfully defend my Pancrase world title in that same arena by stopping Frank Shamrock.

  Crazy how life goes, right?

  Still to this day one of my biggest wishes is to meet the legend Muhammad Ali. This guy had it all: looks, charisma, skill, and he could walk the walk. Later in life, when I knew what pro wrestling was—we don’t have pro wrestling in the Netherlands—I realized that Ali took a lot of notes from that art to promote himself. Getting everybody riled up, you either wanted to see him win or lose. Love him or hate him, he sold tickets.

  The other great thing about the way he talked was that he made opponents really angry. And, when competing, anger is not something that belongs in the martial arts world because it clouds your mind.

  I really liked Ali’s nonchalant way of approaching a bout, so I did it as well when I was fighting. Training and competing would be the serious part, so why not have fun in between? Plus this way fans could also connect with me and see a “person” not just a “fighter,” because let’s face it, many people still perceive fighters as being angry all the time. I didn’t want to be as outspoken as Ali was, though. Just being colorful was enough for me.

  During my time competing in Japan, the name “Antonio Inoki” was mentioned in a conversation on many occasions. Everybody I talked to told me that he was not only a great pro wrestler but had real fighting skills as well. And, of course, the match between him and Ali would always come up.

  Pro wrestling in Japan is called puroresu—that’s just the way they say “pro wrestling”—and it’s considered a “strong style,” meaning they use real submission holds and prefer to connect with hard strikes or not at all.

  Many great wrestlers like Yoshiaki Fujiwara, Karl Gotch, Masakatsu Funaki, and Minoru Suzuki are considered strong-style wrestlers. And all these guys tie into Inoki. Inoki was Fujiwara’s shisho (teacher). Fujiwara and Gotch were Funaki and Suzuki’s teachers.

  I competed in Japan for the Pancrase organization from 1993 until 1998, and that organization was founded by Suzuki and Funaki. There were different rules than the ones we have in modern MMA. Open-hand strikes to the head, closed fist to the body; you wore shoes and shin protection— it looked like pro wrestling, only it’s real. Unfortunately, we didn’t use foreign objects like chairs to hit each other.

  I was a striker. Growing up I studied karate, taekwondo, and Thai boxing. I always thought that “strikers” were the baddest dudes on the planet until I had my first submission class. For people who don’t know how submissions work, let’s just say that it’s about manipulating pretty much any limb in the direction it’s not supposed to go.

  I was a good “striker,” but that submission class showed me that I wasn’t a badass in “fighting.” They tore me up and I had no chance whatsoever. I got choked. Leg locked, armbarred. Neck cranked. You name it. I realized I needed to learn this art because if I were to miss a strike to an opponent and he was able take me to the ground, I would be in major trouble.

  Chris Dolman was my first “submission coach,” but since his gym in Amsterdam was a two-hour drive from my home in Eindhoven, I didn’t spend a lot of time there. When I was competing in Japan I would train at the official Pancrase Dojo. I would come in a few days earlier for the fight so I could hone my submission skills. It took me three losses by way of submission to finally make the decision that I needed steady training partners in Holland; otherwise this “losing” would keep happening. And that was it—after I found a training partner I never lost again and ended my career with an unbeaten streak of twenty-two.

  I’ll give you one story so you can understand why there were some rules changes just before the Ali and Inoki fight.

  I was walking in Tokyo with a group of fighters the day before a match in 1994. We heard this big loud voice saying, “Hybrid wrestling, Pancrase.” We looked to the side and saw the biggest TV screen we had ever seen. When I say at least forty feet wide, I am not exaggerating. We were looking at the promo for our fight the next day; it was a compilation of KO’s and submissions from previous events.

  In that promo I saw a fighter sitting in a certain position and he went for an inverted heel hook on his opponent. An inverted heel hook is a move that enables you to twist the lower leg from your opponent while his upper leg stays in the same position. You can actually twist it about 180 degrees. Needless to say, that’s not good for your knee since you can twist it out of the socket. Anyway, I was still “green,” only had four fights over there, so when I saw that technique I thought, “Hey, that’s a cool move, I should remember that.”

  The next day I am fighting and what do you know? I am in that position! So I figured, “Let’s try that thing I saw yesterday.” Now since I had never trained for this, I had no clue what would happen; I
just did what I had seen the day before on the big screen.

  It resulted in me snapping my opponent’s shinbone in half—apparently his knee was stronger than his shinbone. It freaked me out. That was the moment when I realized that “submission fighting” might be even worse than “striking.” I mean, you can break or dislocate pretty much anything in the human body when you are wellversed at submissions.

  Back to Inoki! So I had heard about “Inoki-san” many times and apparently he had heard about me as well, because in 2000 I was asked if I wanted to join his company, New Japan Pro Wrestling. To talk about this new deal I was asked to come and meet the great Inoki at his gym in Santa Monica.

  When I walked in the first thing I noticed was somebody stretching on the wrestling mat, doing full splits as his upper body and face were flat on the ground. When he sat up I saw it was Inoki, then fifty-eight years old and still in great shape. He immediately stood and came over to shake my hand, a very friendly and charismatic person. You knew instantly why people are drawn to him.

  It was an easy conversation, like I knew him already. We talked, shook hands, and the deal was done.

  When Inoki left I talked a little bit more to his son-in-law, Simon Inoki. We talked about the company and what other things his father-in-law had done, and almost immediately the fight with Ali came up. Now I was always under the impression that the fight he was talking about was a “worked” fight, just like in pro wrestling, but Simon assured me that it was a real fight and he went over all the details.

  Talking later to Don Frye, a superstar at New Japan and an early killer in the UFC, he assured me as well that it was indeed a real fight. All the other pro wrestlers that I came in contact with told me the same.

  I was also working for the Pride Fighting Championships (PrideFC) as a commentator and in 2002 we had the biggest show ever, called Pride “Shockwave.” Over 91,000 people were in the attendance. It was an outdoor event and when the show started Mr. Inoki came parachuting in to ringside. It was crazy, because first of all it was dark, but there was also a very strong wind coming into the arena. No problem for him. The sixty-year-old adrenaline junkie wanted to make an entrance, which he did.

  Oh, and just so that you know, apparently Inoki was known for the ability to drink a beer superfast. It was funny, they told me that they heard I could drink a beer really fast as well, and that Inoki was the “champion.” So would I like to compete against him? I said: “No thank you, I don’t want to beat the great Inoki-san,” and laughed. And yes, of course the supercompetitive Inoki now had to have the contest. End result? He lost that title when he challenged me at an after-party for PrideFC! Haha!

  I am telling this story because on New Year’s Eve Mr. Inoki had a tradition where people would get up in the ring and he would slap them across the face with a “good luck slap” that was meant to transfer some of his energy to you. It was amazing how many people would line up. Stupid me, I was one of them, and man did he slap me—hard! That’s why I am telling this “beer story”—it’s my payback!

  So this book is about a striker versus a submission artist, both at the top level of their respective fields. Ali connects with a punch, the fight is over; when he doesn’t connect and Inoki gets ahold of him, the fight is over—no room for mistakes on either side.

  In the end, I think the fight between Ali and Inoki was an important one for the history books. Ali took a huge risk, because nowadays when a boxer says he’s the best fighter in the world, I always say, “You’re not. You are the best ‘boxer’ in the world.” The best fighter is good everywhere the fight goes, standing or on the ground, so if Ali would have missed a punch and Inoki would get him on the ground, that would have been big trouble.

  Godspeed, enjoy!

  —Bas Rutten

  ROUND ONE

  The southern coast of Honshu, the largest and most populous of Japan’s four main islands, trembled at 10:19 P.M. local time, Friday, June 18, 1976.

  Thirty-eight miles away in Tokyo, the most famous man on the planet and some of the troop that followed him everywhere he went had just settled into their rooms on the forty-fourth floor at the upscale Keio Plaza Hotel. This marked the end of the first full day of fight week promotion building to a spectacle in Tokyo pitting a boxer, the one and only Muhammad Ali, against a professional wrestler, Japan’s puroresu star Antonio Inoki.

  Gene Kilroy, an Ali confidant, one of many people to claim close ties to the man during his iconic twenty-one-year boxing career, was shaving when the 4.4-magnitude quake rumbled through. Kilroy heard a bang and, through the reflection of a bathroom mirror, saw his clothes swinging in the closet. Later, he learned that structures in the area were built on rollers to cope with city life along the Ring of Fire, the seismic-heavy zone of volcanic activity surrounding the Pacific Ocean.

  The evening jolt apparently did nothing to faze the world heavyweight champion boxer. One time, a plane carrying Ali and his entourage ran out of gas. The pilots initiated an emergency landing, and as the plane shook during its descent, Ali, staring at Kilroy, said calmly, “Allah has too much work for me to do to die like this.” According to many of the people who occupied space around Ali for long stretches of his professional life, this was how it was. Very little bothered the man, which partly explains his great success as a prizefighter. Ali navigated scares on the earth and in the air just like he did in the ring: with a sense of invincibility.

  By the summer of 1976, eight months after the boxer’s heated rival Joe Frazier didn’t answer the bell for Round 15 of the “Thrilla in Manila,” Ali had hit the peak of his worldwide fame. The timing made sense for New Japan Pro Wrestling, Inoki’s promotional company, to find a way to lure Ali to Japan. That meant financing the match, which included spending nearly $24,000 (more than $100,000 in 2015 values) over eleven nights in lodging and food costs for the heavyweight champion and his sizable entourage.

  Less than a week before Ali arrived in Tokyo, Inoki gave the press a guided tour of the penthouse where The Greatest was booked to stay. Ali’s “imperial” suite, priced at a princely $400 a night, boasted seven rooms. “I don’t have to do this, but I will, as I consider Ali to be the greatest boxer in the world,” said Japan’s most famous grappler. The layout “befits a personality of his standing.” Then, with cameras clicking, Inoki punched the bed Ali would sleep in.

  Even after Ali’s arrival, and with the event mere days away, few people interested in watching knew whether the match would be a lighthearted pro wrestling exhibition or a true mixed-rules competition. Ali’s camp operated as if the match was a “shoot”—a legitimate contest—and late into fight week still attempted to negotiate as favorable a set of rules as possible for their guy. The general consensus was that it was crazy for Ali to step away from boxing to tangle up with a wrestler. Everyone from trainer Angelo Dundee to doctor Ferdie Pacheco to promoter Bob Arum thought it was stupid for the most famous boxer of all time to meet a grappler skilled enough to twist arms or slam heads—who, more to the point, was empowered to do so.

  “I didn’t want him to do it,” Kilroy said. “Ali was going into his sport, Inoki wasn’t going into Ali’s sport.”

  Still, Ali did what he wanted and agreed to compete against a grappler, thus fulfilling a long-held desire to know what it was to take on a “rassler.” Only notorious hypeman Drew “Bundini” Brown, convinced the boxer could easily finish Inoki, egged Ali on.

  As the June 26th bout neared (thanks to the international date line, it aired live Friday night, June 25th, in North America), hardcore pro wrestling and boxing fans, Ali supporters, and martial arts aficionados, in small passionate pockets, speculated about the matchup and its legitimacy. Even though the boxer held some hope that the whole thing would end up a “work”—in pro wrestling parlance, a match with a predetermined outcome—talk of that evaporated months earlier after Vince McMahon Sr., a patriarch of American pro wrestling, approached Ali’s camp with the idea.

  “McMahon wanted Ali to throw
the fight,” Kilroy said. “Ali wouldn’t do it. That’s the truth. That never got out.”

  “Throw” is a sports term that connotes corruption. In sumo, for example, match fixing is called yaochō. For an assortment of crooked reasons it continues to happen everywhere. While pro wrestling could be thought of as a sort of con because of the faux competition, by the mid-1970s money wasn’t being waged on outcomes rooted in performance art instead of legerdemain. McMahon told Ali he should take the fall and get pinned. The boxer responded that he went down for no man who couldn’t make him. The fact that at the apex of his popularity Ali preferred the risk of a real fight over scripted outcomes spoke to his state of mind as a competitor. The industrial influence of Jabir Herbert Muhammad, who managed Ali starting in 1966 after the boxer’s conversion to Islam, helped create the right financial picture, including sealing the deal on a live broadcast from Tokyo with the help of his partner at Top Rank, Inc., Bob Arum.

  A potential audience of 1.4 billion people in 134 countries was able to partake in the events from Tokyo thanks to the advent of the closed-circuit telecast. Through a groundbreaking satellite-age technology that let audiences congregate and experience far-flung events in real time, more than 150 sites in the United States showed the fight. When the hybrid-rules bout was officially announced at a press conference in New York City on May 5, 1976, Arum proclaimed that the match would “sell more closed-TV seats than any fight event in history. It will be bigger than the Foreman-Joe Frazier fight and all three of the Ali-Frazier bouts.”

  Two nights before arriving in Tokyo, Ali asserted on The Tonight Show how serious this fight was to him. Actor McLean Stevenson spent the final of four consecutive guest-hosting spots fawning over Ali in a way that must have made his previous visitors—Sonny Bono, Harvey Korman, Suzanne Somers, Kreskin, Bernadette Peters, Phyllis Diller, and Rip Taylor—feel like nobodies.

  “I have no idea what to say,” Stevenson murmured once Ali sat down. “I suppose we could start with, ‘How did you get started boxing?’ Now if you find any of these questions stupid, just punch Ed in the mouth.”