Ali vs. Inoki Read online

  Yes, Ali lived lavishly and treated the people around him very well, but he also faced divorce and aimed to keep Porche happy. A significant portion of his money went as quickly as it came, particularly in the direction of the Black Muslim movement the Nation of Islam. While Ali left the Nation in 1975 and converted to the more mainstream Sunni branch of Islam that year, his manager, Herbert Muhammad, the third son of Elijah Muhammad, remained tied to both for years to come. Muhammad was the organization’s chief business manager until his father passed away in Chicago in ’75, operating several entities, including a newspaper he founded with Malcolm X. With a significant portion of the funds delivered by the champ, Muhammad opened the Masjid Al-Faatir mosque in 1987 in a predominantly black neighborhood of Chicago called Kenwood. The opportunity to build Chicago’s most impressive mosque was largely owed to Ali’s success.

  Despite the intense flame of celebrity and an ability to generate millions of dollars per fight—more than anyone before him by a wide margin—Ali’s closest confidants say he was never affected. To the boxers who met Ali in the ring in the mid-1970s, however, his magnetism was always felt. Ali made them the biggest purses of their careers, and when they fought him they became known at least to some degree.

  Four months after Manila, Ali weighed 226 pounds when he stepped into the ring in Puerto Rico against the relatively harmless twenty-nine-year-old Belgian champion Jean-Pierre Coopman. “Let me have a little rest in between [hard fights],” Ali said at a New York press conference before the bout. He got away with one—who could hold it against him? Coopman famously drank champagne before and during the fight before staying down in the fifth round.

  Resting wasn’t something Ali did often and his seemingly boundless supply of energy was tested in 1976. After the Coopman victory, Ali officially announced his participation in the Inoki match at a New York City news conference in late March at the Plaza Hotel.

  Under the verbal onslaught of Ali, surrounded by the media, with something to sell, Inoki took the stoic approach.

  “When the wind blows, I shall bend but not break,” Inoki said through a translator.

  Ali played his usual games, and said he “cannot miss” Inoki’s protruding jaw. It was then that the boxer dubbed the wrestler “The Pelican.”

  “When your fist hits my chin, I hope you do not hurt your fist,” Inoki replied as he smiled. Inoki then said he hoped Ali would not duck out at the last moment.

  “If I ain’t afraid of walkin’ down a back alley in Harlem, I ain’t afraid of you,” Ali barked back.

  Both men insisted the contest would be real, though the rules had yet to be hammered out. “I think Ali thought it would be more of a show,” said Bobby Goodman, whose father, Murray, a Boxing Hall of Fame publicist, worked the New York portion of the June event at Shea Stadium. “But the first time we got together with them about the dos and don’ts and rules of the fight it became very obvious to me that Inoki’s people were serious.” Discussions to that end were at the preliminary stage, and Ali spoke with excitement about the desire to punch when he was on the ground.

  Boxing writers questioned whether or not it was demeaning for an active and defending heavyweight champion of the world to participate in a contest of this sort. Ali, the only three-time lineal world heavyweight champion, said it was not.

  “I’ll be going outside my speciality,” he said, “and I’m drawing the greatest crowds in the history of the world.”

  Andre the Giant, the ostensible eighth wonder of the world, attended the press conference at the Plaza Hotel and shared the stage with Ali.

  “You think you can beat me up?” Ali asked the massive Frenchman.

  “I could beat you up and throw you out of this building,” said the Giant, whom Gene Kilroy described as incredibly gentle and sweet.

  With the Inoki match slated for the summer, Ali ever so slightly turned his attention back to boxing. A similar setup to the Coopman bout was arranged for April 30 in Landover, Md. Tasked with fighting the journeyman Jimmy Young, a bored Ali showed up pudgy—230 pounds, the heaviest of his career until his final bout against Trevor Berbick in 1981.

  Newspaper reports before the bout with Young indicated Ali had spent time preparing for Inoki with The Sheik, a famous wrestler and fellow Muslim operating out of Detroit. He made occasional trips to Ali’s home outside Chicago, and was said to be training with the boxer a week before Ali headed off to Tokyo.

  Ali maintained a target weight for most of his thirty-one fights after returning to the ring in 1970. A couple pounds either way wasn’t a big deal, but Ali always liked to come in around 220 pounds. “Ali was a little bit egotistical sometimes about that weight,” Goodman said. “It was important to him. He didn’t want to seem like he was sloppy.” Such that he was against the passive Young. The pair made for an awful heavyweight title fight, one that failed to entertain anyone who watched a slow, undertrained Ali win by unanimous decision.

  Acknowledging the poor showing against Young and a let-down public, Ali promised never to look so bad again.

  Twenty-three days later Ali stood on a stage in Munich, Germany, to make weight for his next defense against England’s Richard Dunn. The bout with Dunn, promoted by Bob Arum and set to air live and free in the U.S. on May 24, 1976, was not selling well. Dunn wasn’t considered any kind of threat, and coming off the dud against Young, German fans weren’t interested in watching a potentially unmotivated Ali stink up Munich’s Olympiahalle. As he said he would, Ali showed up in much better condition, hitting that 220 pound mark.

  “I was handling the scale weighing Ali and all of a sudden the stage collapsed,” Goodman recalled. “Down went Ali and the scale and everything. I was left standing there on the edge of the platform. Everyone was in a hole. It was odd.”

  Ali and his team were put up first-class in one of the city’s finest old hotels, the Bayerischer Hof. Like in Zaire, Ali travelled with an entourage of more than fifty people at the time. One way or another they served some purpose, but many were also a drain of Ali’s precious time and resources and had been for several years. With bills piling up in Munich, Goodman said, the abuse was bad enough that Ali had to call the group together to tell them not to squander their good fortune by looting his.

  “Guys you can’t keep spending an hour on the phone calling home with your wife or your girlfriend or your kids,” Ali told them, according to Goodman. “You can’t order anything any time you want.”

  Typical Ali, he couldn’t keep up the bad-guy routine. And the more he spoke, the softer his approach turned.

  “If you’re hungry and you want another steak you can order it but don’t waste it,” he said. “If you gotta call home, call but do it once a day.”

  Said Goodman: “Imagine fifty or sixty people calling from Germany every day. The bills can add up.”

  Ali wanted everyone around him to enjoy themselves and handle their duties. And while he generally wished the group well, this mostly hinged on his desire to have people near him feel good no matter what. When it came to relationships with friends, strangers, and loved ones, this was his instinct and where he focused his energy.

  As for hangers-on, vultures, and sycophants, Ali couldn’t move more than three feet without twenty people descending upon his footsteps. Bonventre’s story in Newsweek described Ali’s entourage: “Solemn Muslim guards have given way to streetwise hustlers. Liberals who cherished him as a symbol of pro-black antiwar attitudes have been replaced by wry connoisseurs of pure showmanship.”

  Jhoon Rhee isn’t any of these things and he wasn’t at the Dunn fight, but his presence was felt in Munich nonetheless. The taekwondo grand master met Ali through a mutual friend in Philadelphia, and beginning in March 1975 visited the puncher’s training camp in Deer Lake, Pa., several days a month to train for martial arts. Rhee worked with Ali on the so-called “Accu-punch,” a name the Korean immigrant coined for a strike that melds thought and action into highspeed data flow. The strike required a screwdri
ving motion at impact, Rhee said, calling it a lesson from his days training with Bruce Lee. This made sense to Ali, who obsessed over celerity and beating opponents to the punch.

  Whenever Ali had the time and Rhee could make the two-hour drive from Washington, D.C., the large boxer and diminutive martial artist shared no-contact sparring sessions that never lasted more than thirty minutes. Other boxers usually showed up so Ali could finish his conditioning routine. Otherwise, Ali and Rhee, a martial arts philosopher and idealist, spoke often in the Pennsylvania country compound about Lee.

  Ali took more punches and punishment in the gym than in most of his fights. He would clown around with sparring partners, draping his arms around their shoulders and letting them bang him to the body. This infuriated Angelo Dundee. “Don’t do that,” the trainer warned. “You’ll be pissing yourself ten years from now not knowing why.” Instead, Ali sometimes put his hands up around his ears and invited sparring partners to hit him about the head. His personal physician, Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, had already begun to express concern. Pacheco’s distaste for many of the people around Ali, and the circumstances of the great fighter’s decline, were more prevalent as each fight passed. And the post-Frazier bums like Coopman and Young would only last so long.

  Against Dunn, the last of three tune-ups from February through May of ’76, Ali scored five knockdowns. Afterwards, speaking to NBC’s Dick Enberg, Ali began with a plug for the upcoming contest against Inoki.

  “I want to say I will be fighting next month,” Ali said. “The wrestling champion of the world.”

  Enberg ignored the statement and asked Ali about Dunn. The American champion talked up his English challenger as a “young man” who’s “gonna be a top-notch contender.”

  “I’m glad I was in shape for this fight,” Ali said. “If I was in the same shape this month like I was last month I would have lost the fight, no doubt, because he’s a great fighter. He’s better than I thought he was. And I predict you’ll hear a lot about Richard Dunn.”

  Ali was better at prefight prognostication than the postfight kind. Dunn lasted two more contests before retiring in 1977.

  Ali’s late-September title defense and rubber match against Ken Norton was mentioned, then the boxer again plugged his pending action against Inoki.

  “First I’m going to get the Japanese wrestler,” Ali said. “I have great karate teachers. From Washington, D.C., Mr. Jhoon Rhee is his name. He’s training me now for the Japanese wrestler.”

  On the NBC broadcast, replays of Ali pounding the southpaw Dunn with right-hand leads appeared on screen.

  “That wasn’t a right hand,” Ali noted. “That was the unique ‘Accu-punch.’ It was a karate chop right. If you watch it again.”

  Enberg giggled: “That’s already your ‘Accu-punch’ you were talking about?”

  “That’s the ‘Accu-punch’ I told you about,” answered Ali. “Keep watching and you won’t hardly see it. It’s so fast.’”

  Up next, a trip to Tokyo and another odd start time.

  ROUND EIGHT

  As with any successfully promoted fight—in this case “success” is determined by the amount of money generated—the point is enticing a large enough group of people to spend their hard-earned cash and participate in a moment.

  Muhammad Ali had long been a master at inciting crowds to, among other things, do just that. By 1976, selling himself and boxing was old hat to the thirty-four-year-old superstar. In some quarters there was a belief that his act had worn stale, though that didn’t change the fact there wasn’t anyone who came off as charismatic as Ali. Combined with his sporting pedigree and status as a showman and statesman, basically anything Ali did was picked up by the media. In this way, he was a publicist’s dream.

  “I worked with many champions,” said Bobby Goodman, the flack hired by Top Rank to work with Ali for the Inoki match. “Everyone stuck to the schedule. They’d talk to the press and maybe give you a little leeway with an hour or so a day trying to fit things in. Ali was an open book. There were some times he said, ‘Jeez, can’t we do a little more?’ I would go to Ali when I couldn’t come up with another idea or the promotion was going slow.”

  In November 1971, for example, Ali faced Buster Mathis at the Astrodome in Houston. Mathis offered little to make Ali angry or competitively aroused. Each time Mathis was in Ali’s vicinity he giggled like a kid on the way to the toy store. He loved Ali. Affection between boxers had never been an effective marketing ploy, so Goodman, who worked with Ali since 1963, asked the boxer for help in the promotion department.

  Ali’s eyes grew big and wide. He had an idea to grab front-page headlines around the world. Goodman listened as Ali detailed his thoughts on perpetrating a fake kidnapping. Get a log cabin in the woods, Ali told Goodman. Set him up with a ring and sparring partners, and a few days before the scheduled bout he would miraculously emerge unscathed and ready. Goodman made a fair point. “If you’re missing,” he told Ali, “no one is going to buy tickets to the fight.” Ali agreed and the boxer said they could come up with something else.

  Most of the time promoters didn’t need a gimmick to sell an Ali fight. The boxer’s presence alone was enough to make it a successful venture. But what about when the fight itself was a gimmick? That, after all, is how most people viewed the Inoki contest, which was sandwiched between Ali’s day job: title defenses against Richard Dunn in Munich and Ken Norton at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.

  Ali was not above stunts. Clearly. But even for a man reputed to push boundaries, selling the Inoki contest stretched the limits of the imagination. Few people knew what to make of it, and one of the major story lines leading up to the contest centered around the notion that it wasn’t on the up-and-up.

  Ron Holmes, president of Lincoln National Productions, the California corporation created on March 30, 1976, for the sole purpose of making Ali vs. Inoki, was charged with “promoting” the mixed-rules contest. The week of the match in Japan, amidst swirling rumors and speculation that the matchup was (a) a scripted pro wrestling match, (b) a freak show destined to be a debacle, or (c) a lawless sham, Holmes told Phil Pepe of the New York Daily News that, for $6.1 million—the biggest purse ever awarded to a fighter at the time—“it better be on the level. If I wanted an exhibition, I could have had it for one million.”

  “For six million,” said Holmes, who was also described by the media as Inoki’s American liaison in Japan, “I want to see blood.”

  New Japan Pro Wrestling (Inoki’s group), through Lincoln National Productions Ltd., guaranteed to deliver $3 million to Ali regardless of how well the bout sold at the gate or on closed circuit. The boxer was then promised the first $3 million that Top Rank banked from broadcast-based revenue. Inoki would receive the next $2 million of Top Rank’s television earnings. Presumably, more than enough fans would have bought in that everyone involved could go home happy.

  Of course, that was contingent on convincing the public that this was worth watching, regardless of its legitimacy or not. That required a hard sales pitch from Ali, and, beginning the day the bout was officially announced at a press conference in New York City to the final media events in Tokyo, Ali put in his work. In Japan and the U.S., Inoki did too, participating in multiple press tours during the run-up to the fight. Yet the bulk of the promotion, the reason people cared, fell squarely on the boxer’s shoulders.

  As much as any bout he participated in before or after, this match was Ali’s baby. He pushed for it in the press. He contested that the point needed to be proven. Ali used every ounce of his fame to sell the bout. And this was exactly what the promotion’s other interested parties hoped for.

  New Japan Pro Wrestling was just establishing business ties with the WWWF when Inoki and his manager, Hisashi Shinma, approached Vince McMahon Sr. with the idea for Ali–Inoki. Because of Ali’s history on closed circuit, the wrestling folks looked to attach their train to him. McMahon went around convincing promoters in other wrestling territories to partici
pate. A lot of them were skeptical because it was something new. They had their business and were doing all right. Fronting with Inoki was a bit strange since no one in the U.S. knew who he was, but of course Ali was the biggest thing going, and his presence made the night the first wrestling-affiliated closed-circuit that transcended the genre.

  “You had Vince Junior saying, ‘Wow, I have the most famous person on the planet promoting what I want to do, or at least part of what I want to do,’” said Dan Madigan, a writer for the WWE in the early 2000s.

  Wrestling fans tend to stay within wrestling confines, but the rub from the righteous lineage of boxing, a smart guy could do something with that. During the weeks leading up to the fight, Ali and pro wrestling legend Freddie Blassie, Ali’s “manager,” appeared as guests on numerous talk shows, including The Tonight Show. They joined the ubiquitous Howard Cosell on ABC’s Wide World of Sports and Ali wrestled in scripted showcases in Chicago and Philadelphia.

  On June 1, in the City of Brotherly Love, Ali tangled with Robert Marella, aka Gorilla Monsoon. Before a quick victory for Monsoon, Ali was introduced to the crowd as he took a seat in the front row. After the match, Ali entered the ring, took a few shots at Monsoon, and pointed his finger at him. Monsoon picked up Ali, twirled him around, and dumped the boxer to the canvas.

  “Monsoon was going to put him down gently but Ali got a little scared, and he fell on his hip,” said Gene Kilroy, who joined the boxer at the Philadelphia Arena and witnessed the pre-bit rehearsal. “I saw and said, ‘Oh shit.’”

  Vince McMahon Jr. called the broadcasts for some WWWF shows and interviewed Monsoon at ringside. Ali was a great boxer, Monsoon said, but a lousy wrestler who didn’t know a wristlock from a wristwatch.

  On script were two matches in Chicago at the International Amphitheatre on June 10 in conjunction with one of the WWWF’s territorial partners, Verne Gagne’s American Wrestling Association. Wearing sixteen-ounce gloves, Ali peppered Kenny Jay, thirty-six, a 225-pounder from Cleveland, and curly-haired, twenty-six-year-old Buddy Wolff of St. Cloud, Minn., into bloody wrecks. Ali was tossed around some and even showed a few wrestling maneuvers of his own as 1,000 fans, given free entry into the building, chanted his name for TV cameras from ABC’s Wide World of Sports.