Ali vs. Inoki Read online

  “One lick. One lick,” Ali crowed. “I gotta get one. I gotta get one.”

  From Ali’s corner came advice to take his time and leave the hard work to Inoki, who responded with kicks to the right side of Ali’s hip and the inside of his left leg. Again “Bundini” Brown raised his voice.

  Ali turned vicious.

  “Shut up motherfucker,” Ali yelled. “Shut up motherfucker. I got this sucker. I got this faggot. I got this homosexual faggot.”

  If Brown was correct and Inoki couldn’t understand what was being said—by most accounts he could have because his English was more than suitable at the time—he, like any lucid person, would have recognized the tension in the boxer’s voice. While Ali may have been clowning around before, his tone now was of someone not to be trifled with.

  “You could see the frustration in Ali when he acted out of character,” Goodman said as he recalled the event years later. “There were some times in fights when Ali would turn his mean switch on, like when he fought Ernie Terrell and he meant to do some damage. And he did.”

  A member of Ali’s entourage seated ringside meekly tried to placate the champ: “Kick him in the thigh, Ali.” Inoki was the one doing the kicking, though, and after several swings and misses he dug a shin into Ali’s rapidly tenderizing left quadriceps. Another hard shot followed, eliciting “oohs” from a crowd begging for action. Ali danced to close the third.

  “It’s very difficult to score this match against a completely unorthodox combatant,” Lisker said. “However if we watch closely at Muhammad’s shins, this is Inoki’s obvious plan. To slow down Ali’s legs by kicking him, which is illegal under the rules unless the kicks are made with the side of the foot soccer style. Now he has not adhered to this. He has also kicked low in the groin area more than once.”

  Lisker was calling it very tight, as there had not been any obvious low blows to that point. Regarding kicks, both men had landed with the points of their shoes. Ali’s corner became disgruntled, and Dundee shouted to LeBell that he failed to start a count whenever Inoki hit the floor.

  “You gotta count, Gene,” yelled the trainer. “What’s he gonna do, jerk off all night? It’s ridiculous.”

  “Only if the shoulders are on the canvas,” responded LeBell.

  In the opposite corner, Karl Gotch was dying to respond but kept quiet.

  Meanwhile Ali kept up his verbal attack. To that point he hadn’t mustered a physical one, throwing exactly zero punches. This fight, though, wasn’t going to be won or lost based on punch output.

  “One punch. One punch. I want one punch,” Ali said. “I’ll slap you, coward. You slack-bellied coward.”

  ROUND 4

  Ali walked to the center of the ring shaking a fist in the air. Inoki greeted him. Action had been slow to materialize, with no real sense that a fight was about to break out, but it was still early. That unexpected moment people expected remained lurking in the shadows.

  Inoki missed on a jumping side kick, then crab-walked towards Ali. “Get out of that corner!” yelled Brown. But this is where Ali wanted to be. He placed his glove-covered hands on the ropes, pressed up as if doing body-weight exercises, and flailed his legs like Quint had against Jaws, the killer great white shark that terrified audiences in movie houses the previous summer.

  LeBell jumped between the fighters. “Break, break, break, break! Break!” he roared.

  Inoki delivered a cheap low kick between LeBell’s legs that connected to Ali’s right shin, causing LeBell to raise his voice. “Wait! Wait!” shouted the referee. Ali made like he was going to go after Inoki and turn it into a street fight. He stuck out his tongue and rammed his chest into LeBell’s back. “Hold it!” demanded the 180-pound official, who was seemingly capable of beating either fighter in a one-on-one contest. LeBell swiveled towards Ali, turned 180 degrees to face Inoki, then restarted the action after the boxer extracted himself from the corner.

  “OK,” LeBell said, “wrestle!” Instead, Inoki swung and missed with this right leg. Ali’s frustration boiled over. “I thought Inoki could wrestle!” he screamed. “I thought Inoki could wrestle! I thought Inoki could wrestle! I thought Inoki could wrestle!” Inoki followed with a kick that nearly reached Ali’s chin, drawing complaints from the boxer’s corner. “That’s a foul, Gene,” said Dundee. Color commentator Jerry Lisker agreed. In broken English, Ali decided to make his case to the crowd: “Inoki cannot wrestle. No wrestle. No wrestle.” With that Inoki stood and Ali smiled. “Now,” said Ali, waving on the Japanese fighter. “Inoki cannot wrestle. Inoki sissy. Inoki girl. Inoki girl. Inoki girl lady. Lady fight on floor. Man stand up and fight! Man fight.”

  Inoki made a windmill motion with his hands. Ali sized him up, stepping side to side.

  “Crack him and pack him, Ali,” yelled “Bundini” Brown. “Knock him out. Knock him out!”

  Again Ali started in on Inoki, calling him a girl just as the thirty-three-year-old face of Japanese professional wrestling thumped another kick off Ali’s left thigh. Inoki followed with a push kick to the same leg, and then a double push kick. Ali didn’t like any of this, so he supported his weight in a neutral corner and his legs dangled off the floor. The boxer’s team, including his advisor Gene Kilroy, went mad as Ali pressed himself into the air. LeBell stepped between them and sat on Inoki’s knees. Ali’s mouth opened as wide as it could, and he stepped off the ropes. The crowd loved this.

  At the sound of the bell ending the fourth, Ali stood up straight and stared at his opponent: “Inoki girl. On the floor. Fight on floor like girl.” With that LeBell walked the heavyweight champion to his corner. Ali turned and raised his glove. “Inoki girl,” he repeated before pointing to the floor and waving his glove. “On the floor. No man.” To the Japanese crowd, Ali hammered home his point. “Fight on floor like sissy,” he said. “Man stand up. Man stand up. Man stand up. Inoki girl. Man stand up. Inoki afraid. Inoki afraid. Inoki afraid.”

  Ali paced around his side of the ring. Meanwhile, Inoki stood quietly in his corner getting toweled off.

  “Well it seems to me that the referee is allowing Inoki to get away with more than just a casual breaking of the rules,” Lisker said. “Now I have counted seven times where Ali’s been kicked to the groin area. It is absolutely essential for the referee to watch those kicks to the groin. Ali’s ploy to call him a sissy, an old man, an affront to the masculine gender has obviously [not worked]. He wants Inoki on his feet.”

  Ali continued with his histrionics in the center of the ring, and LeBell stepped between them before the commencement of the next round.

  ROUND 5

  “Muhammad Ali has not thrown a punch,” Bannister told audiences back in the U.S., who needed no reminder as they grew increasingly restless. “This is about the longest he’s gone in his boxing career without throwing a punch. But this is different.”

  Indeed.

  Inoki launched himself towards Ali and slammed a kick into the boxer’s lead leg. That’s “lead” as in “forward,” not the bluish-gray soft metal listed on the periodic table, although as the kicks added up and Ali’s capillaries began to burst, the champ’s puffed-up thigh must have felt heavier than normal. The hard blow knocked Ali off his feet, propelling the crowd to life. Ali bolted off the canvas and Inoki lurched forward, wildly taking an illegal bare-fisted swing with his left hand that nearly connected. Inoki picked up his aggression. Ali responded by dancing away and making him miss. The crowd roared “Ali! Ali! Ali!” and the boxer raised his right arm asking for more. Following another leg salvo, Bannister made mention of the accumulating welts and blood on Ali’s shins.

  When a kick or a punch really stings, some fighters act like it didn’t hurt at all. Almost an involuntary response, like blinking. The next kick Inoki landed made Ali dance to his left and wave away the strike as if it were a gnat. But he felt that one and responded by talking again.

  “Inoki fight like coward tonight,” he said. “The Japanese people see Inoki not so great.�
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  Inoki wasn’t necessarily happy with the fight to this point. How could he be? He was being berated in front of his people and made to look ineffectual when in fact he found some success in a situation that was designed to hamstring him against the greatest boxer on the planet. “Bundini” Brown called for Ali to hit Inoki on that big chin, but another solid kick, this time to the back of Ali’s left thigh, forced the man from Louisville to dance out of a corner. Brown stood, not liking what he saw, and placed a hand on Dundee’s right shoulder. Inoki crawled towards Ali, kicking the inside of his left calf until the boxer grabbed the Japanese wrestler and dragged him a few inches before the bell sounded.

  For the first time at the conclusion of a round, Budokan Hall offered some appreciation with applause.

  “Now I think the trainer is going to have to start looking at the blood on Muhammad Ali’s legs,” Bannister suggested, “and Angelo Dundee is checking that right now.”

  From his seat at ringside, Jerry Lisker didn’t like the looks of Ali’s leg either: “It is badly bruised. It is red. It is raw. And I don’t know how long those beautiful legs of Muhammad are going to be able to take these kicks.”

  ROUND 6

  The first third of the fifteen-round affair had, so far, been a dud, which is why Ali could say things like the “Japanese see a coward” and come off reasonably fair.

  Ali predicted an eighth-round finish of Inoki, yet thus far he gave no indication of how that might happen. To find his finishing punch he needed to actually throw one. Meanwhile, Inoki kept to what was working and began the most interesting stretch of the fight with a side kick that concluded with him crawling on the canvas again. The wrestler wasn’t wrestling much, nor was he standing and striking, but he was safe from everything save Ali’s words.

  A kick to Ali’s groin prompted LeBell to remind Inoki that he could not connect with his toe, only the top of a foot that was wrapped in a wrestling boot laced up to the middle of his shins. From the stands someone yelled, “That’s a foul,” to which Ali offered encouragement. “Every time he fouls you tell them,” said the boxer, whose front thigh absorbed another heavy shot, fair and square, causing him to dance the cha-cha.

  From Ali’s corner came a call to move to the right, to move away. Inoki, however, had his range dialed in, and as Ali heeded the advice another kick cut into the boxer’s thigh. Ali pursed his lips and made a face as if to say no, that hadn’t hurt. Of course, it did.

  With Ali standing directly over him, Inoki took hold of the back of the boxer’s left shoe while thrusting his hips up and forward. As if he was a child Ali tumbled to the canvas, showing just how little balance he possessed when a man his size wished to sweep him off his feet. The crowd screamed because Ali was on his back and Inoki was sitting on him.

  “This is what the people have been waiting for,” Bannister said.

  So excited was a white-and-red clad member of Inoki’s team that he nearly jumped into the ring. Well aware of the danger, Ali grabbed around Inoki’s waist and slung his right leg over the bottom rope, a prudent play that was all LeBell needed to break the fighters apart and restart them on their feet. However Inoki wasn’t going to let Ali get away without taking at least one good shot. Facing the boxer’s feet, Inoki uncorked a blatantly illegal backwards elbow that bounced off Ali’s forehead. Dundee and Brown jumped onto the apron, yelling obscenities while pointing at Inoki.

  “That’s illegal! That’s illegal!” Dundee screamed. He mimicked the elbow and called Inoki a “son of a bitch.”

  Rescued by the rules and the referee, Ali stood with a look on his face that gave every indication of how pissed he really was. LeBell took a double take as Ali expressed his displeasure. The boxer touched the right side of his head with his right glove and noted, for the record, “it was an elbow.” From ringside, members of Ali’s entourage howled: “That’s a foul, you son of a bitch. That’s a foul.”

  Inoki was unfazed. The ropes saved Ali, and he knew that. He couldn’t have locked in a submission even if he wanted—and there were several available to him. So he enjoyed his cheap shot and strolled to the center of the ring.

  LeBell called for action to resume but Ali protested. “You gotta take a point off,” Ali said. LeBell walked to Inoki, explained that elbows are a no-no and attempted to restart again. Ali didn’t budge. He stared at Inoki and made a downward elbow motion with his right arm while shaking his head “no.” For clarification, LeBell touched his tricep as if to say that’s fine, then did the same with the point of his elbow and said this is not.

  In Inoki’s corner, the big Belgian Karl Gotch was as animated as he’d been all fight. “Make him come down!” he bellowed. “Make him come down!” Gotch wanted nothing more than to twist Ali into an assortment of knots, and it was unfathomable to him that in more than fifteen minutes of action Inoki had not yet done so. As the bout resumed, Ali looked intent on hurting Inoki. They mixed it up in one of the corners and were separated again when Ali used the ropes for offense as he kicked down at Inoki. “Hold it! Hold it!” said LeBell. “You can’t do this when you attack.” Ali didn’t move from his spot and waved Inoki forward. His expression changed. “I’m a nigga,” he said, before uttering something about black people.

  The sixth and most eventful round of the fight came to a close.

  “Ali wanted Inoki to stand up,” Bannister said. “Now a lot of people know how hard it is to get to the head of the wrestler, especially when he’s able to lay down on his back and score points.”

  For the illegal elbow, LeBell notified both judges scoring with him that he deducted a point.

  “Ali has not thrown a single punch all evening,” Jerry Lisker said. “Inoki seems to be getting stronger. The back of Muhammad’s left leg is so damn livid and angry. If he would only go to the left and receive the brunt of the kick on the other leg, which he hasn’t done. Inoki seems much more confident now. He seems to be able to reach Ali with his kicks better and better. And more and more each round. Ali has got to land a punch.”

  Ali yelled once from his corner: “Coward!”

  ROUND 7

  Ali was a magical boxer, smooth and graceful, effortless in his speed and power. As a kicker, not so much. What he hoped most to do during the fight was hit a man while he was down. That’s what he said leading up to the bout, at least. Yet when the seventh frame began, to the relief of Kilroy, Ali ignored Inoki’s requests to join him on the ground. “Don’t go down into his game,” Kilroy screamed from his seat at ringside. “Make him come up to your game.” He can’t be blamed considering Inoki’s reputation as an arm and leg twister. Instead, Ali offloaded ineffectual silly kicks that brought groans and grumbles from fans who spent their time and money to participate.

  Then it happened.

  Ali produced a punch, a long jab that came from too far to carry much pop. But it was what his supporters desperately wanted to see. “That’s good,” came a yell from the crowd. “That’s good, Ali. That’s it!” Inoki refused to allow Ali to gain any punching momentum and sent a message with a heavy sweeping kick that knocked the champ clean off his feet. This produced a big cheer from the crowd and looks of concern among Ali’s cornermen. Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, in particular, perked up and appeared disgusted. Ali seemed as if he wanted to jab again, but after being swept to the floor he didn’t fully commit. Chants of “Ali! Ali! Ali!” once again rose in the crowd. Inoki put an end to that with a strong forward burst and a hard kick that produced a loud smack.

  “Muhammad Ali has a lot of welts, blood, and scratches on his left leg,” Bannister noted. “That is the leg Inoki is working on with Muhammad Ali. Ali has to find some kind of way to make some kind of range to hit Inoki.”

  Between rounds Pacheco got to work rubbing down Ali’s left thigh with ice and ointment.

  “Dr. Pacheco is keeping very close watch on it,” Lisker said. “He just asked Ali if he was getting much pain.”

  Then Angelo Dundee slid through the ropes and walked over
to Inoki’s corner. Speaking with Karl Gotch, Dundee wanted the toe of Inoki’s right shoe covered with tape. Frank Bannister said on the broadcast that there was concern over a “foreign substance,” but that was wrong. Inoki’s constant kicking had detached the top of the sole on his left boot from the leather, making it protrude and create a razor-blade effect.

  “There is a brass eyelet missing from one of the laces on Inoki’s shoes,” Lisker also indicated. “Angelo Dundee wants the open eyelet to be closed so it can’t cut and scratch into Ali’s legs, which it evidently has done. Now they’re going to tape it. Score one for Angelo.”

  ROUND 8

  By the midway point of the bout, its pattern was all too familiar. As was a restlessness among fans watching on screens across the U.S. Inoki continued to throw himself towards Ali’s left leg. If he connected, fine. If not, he remained relatively safe.

  “My uncle was a real sports fan,” recalled William Viola Sr., the martial artist out of Pittsburgh. “After the seventh round he said to me, ‘If you wanna go anytime early, let me know.’ Everyone knew. It was bad. Really bad. Even the people in the crowd, this is strange, imagine this. When you boo, you boo someone live. They were booing closed-circuit. I couldn’t believe that.”

  Ali predicted Round 8 was when he would put an end to the Japanese wrestler, but by the looks of things a lightning strike would be needed to make that happen. Inoki feinted as action got underway, then launched a kick with the toe of his left boot that dug into Ali’s thigh. Another kick below the inside of the boxer’s left knee cost Ali his balance, though he quickly popped up and mocked the man on the floor. Out of position, LeBell missed that it was a clean kick and cautioned Inoki “not in the balls.” A missed high kick to Ali’s chin prompted another warning. “You can’t do that,” LeBell said, wildly shaking his head no, making his ginger hair dance, as Ali watched from his corner.