advice served the boxer well. “You got your good looks, a great body, and a lot of people will pay to see somebody shut your big mouth,” George is quoted as saying in Capouya’s book. “So keep on bragging, keep on sassing, and always be outrageous.”
That ability put George in the main event of the first pro wrestling show at Madison Square Garden since a twelveyear ban in New York that was inspired by a historic double cross. The Gold Dust Trio fell apart in 1929 after Mondt walked away following a dispute over control with Billy Sandow’s brother. Mondt learned much about the business and carried on as a major player through the rest of his days. Wrestling, meanwhile, became fragmented, and the lack of a true national champion against an emerging reality of various regional championships confused the public and elicited criticism from the press. One of these champions was Danno O’Mahoney, a showman with little shooting gravitas who operated at the mercy of bookers and hookers. He just couldn’t protect himself, so it seemed everyone tried to snatch the belt from him no matter what any script said.
A wrestler named Dick Shikat took his chance at O’Mahoney, and while some of the sport’s most powerful promoters were aware of what might happen, it was primarily the challenger’s call once they stepped in the ring. Shikat hooked the fish in less than twenty minutes, and all hell broke loose. Burned promoters played games, booking Shikat unbeknownst to him in numerous states until he was barred by many commissions for being a no-show. This prompted a trial in Columbus, Ohio, at which all the major promoters were forced to testify. The lid was blown off wrestling: whatever credibility the business had as a sports venture was gone so far as the public was concerned; the media covered it less and less until it didn’t at all, and a multimillion-dollar national spectacle devolved into a regional program that allowed basically everyone to claim they were a pro wrestling world champion.
Fifteen of these so-called champions existed when George appeared at Madison Square Garden in 1949. He was not among them at the time, though even he held a title once. Two days after George appeared at the Garden on February 22 of that year, the New York Times’ Arthur Daley led his column, “Sports of the Times,” with this: “If Gorgeous George has not killed wrestling in New York for good and for all, the sport (if you pardon the expression) is hardy enough to survive a direct hit by an atomic bomb.” Less than five years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that was quite a statement. Daley was wrong both ways. George wouldn’t kill pro wrestling in New York or anywhere else, and the business wasn’t impenetrable, though, like the proverbial cockroach in a nuclear explosion, it’s a reputed survivor. Despite the weeping of newspaper writers, George’s peak through the mid-1950s brought him much fame and money. As gimmicks go, yes, George’s panache went stale, yet it was captivating enough even at the tawdry end to rope in someone like Ali.
ROUND FOUR
Two hundred forty pounds. Barrel-chested. Serious. No hint of fragrance to be found. In most ways Rikidōzan couldn’t have been more different from George Wagner. Yet, as the “Human Orchid” bloomed over American pop culture during the 1950s, retired sumo wrestler Rikidōzan grew to an even greater stature in Japan. An honest-to-goodness icon. How? By capitalizing on anti-Western sentiment and mollifying the depressed spirit of a people decimated by war.
Television, timing, theater, and good ol’ jingoism proved more potent for Rikidōzan than “Gorgeous” George’s “Chanel No. 10.” Then, after he had acted as savior to a people that loved him only because they did not truly know him, the blade of a yakuza gangster’s six-inch hunting knife plunged into Rikidōzan’s battle-hardened abdomen. His untimely demise in 1963 unveiled a face long shrouded in secrecy.
Kim Sin-rak arrived in Japan in 1939 at the age of fifteen after a touring scout signed him to one of the several licensed sumo houses in that country. At Tokyo’s Nishinoseki stable, Sin-rak, strapping young man that he was, received the shikona (ring name) “Rikidōzan,” which fittingly translates to “Rugged Mountain Road.” It was decided that this new identity also required an elaborate fiction. The public wasn’t considered capable of accepting a nonnative Japanese rikishi, let alone a Korean, beating their own in sumo. That’s how Kim Sin-rak from the South Hamgyong Province in northeast Korea, a citizen of the Japanese empire, became Mitsuhiro Momota, pure-blooded Japanese son of Minokichi Momota, the Nagasaki-based scout who discovered him. Years later, well into his incredible pro wrestling stardom, Rikidōzan felt his background, if revealed as false, would have cost him much of his fan base—basically halving the country of Japan—such was the breadth of his popularity and the pervasiveness of anti-Korean sentiment among the population following the annexation of Korea in 1910. It wouldn’t be officially revealed until 1978, and even then many hagiographies glossed over or ignored the truth of Rikidōzan’s heritage and rise to fame.
The same year Rikidōzan began his journey up the difficult sumo ranks, Isamu Takeshita became the third president of the Japan Sumo Association. Fluent in English, Takeshita enjoyed quite a life. A half century before passing away at the age of eighty, Takeshita set up President Theodore Roosevelt with a judo and jiu-jitsu partner, Yamashita Yoshiaki, who at the president’s request taught technique at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he interacted with an assortment of styles including catch-as-catch-can wrestlers. In fact, the pinning of Yoshiaki led the Naval Academy to hire a wrestler rather than a jiu-jitsu man to teach young midshipmen. Still, Takeshita’s diplomatic transaction blazed a trail for four Kanō Jigorō students, including the supremely influential Mitsuyo Maeda, throughout the Americas in the early 1900s. Their efforts created the conditions for the proliferation of Japanese submission arts that are essential to the way the world understands and applies martial arts today.
Takeshita made five trips to the United States between the Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt administrations. During a summer radio broadcast from San Francisco in 1935, six years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, he proclaimed, “No Japanese warship has ever crossed the Pacific except on a mission of peace. No Japanese soldier has ever come to these shores except on a similar mission.” Yet the retired admiral, who received a Distinguished Service Medal from the United States for his actions in the Japanese Imperial Navy during World War I, played a significant role in militarizing Japanese youth and sports in the ramp-up to war in the Pacific.
Joseph Svinth, for the Journal of Combative Sport, noted, “The fascistization of Japanese sport was among [Takeshita’s] duties in these positions, and during the late 1930s Takeshita was responsible for organizing regular foreign exchanges with Germany’s Hitler Youth.”
Takeshita’s considerable influence and fondness for sumo helped it grow into a national sport, but even he fell short in shielding the country’s indigenous wrestling style from the impact of war. As the empire churned in the years leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese life was essentially co-opted by the military. School-aged children were prescribed a physical education curriculum that translated directly to war fighting. Sporting arts were derided as unnecessary, and budō—the martial ways, specifically the Japanese martial arts spirit—was consigned to hand-to-hand fighting. The central authority for Japanese martial arts, the Dai Nippon Butoku Kai, was controlled by the Imperial Army, which promoted boxing because of the belief it engendered the right kind of spirit, while downplaying Kanō Jigorō’s Kodokan judo, which was thought to be too sporting. Kendo and sumo were simply impractical. Boxers such as Tsuneo “Piston” Horiguchi remained busy competing, and, like some sumotori, participated in war bond drives. Athletes in the East and West were useful for this sort of thing, as manipulating sports into effective propagandist tools was hardly new.
Dwindling resources, intensifying attacks from American B-29 Superfortress bombers around Tokyo, and a closely guarded military project halted sumo competition ahead of the summer tournament of 1944. Young battering ram Rikidōzan was close to touching its upper echelon before he and his stable were pulled into the war effort, apparently assigned to factory work during this time. Stories exist that he punched American prisoners of war whose output in forced labor camps wasn’t sufficient,
