a sample on Wide World of Sports a few days ago when I beat these rasslers to bloody messes. That’s right. And that’s what I’m gonna get. Plus he’s starting to talk. He’s talking about, I better bring a sling and crutches with me, and I don’t like fighters or wrestlers who talk too much.”
The Carson stand-in and the audience howled with laughter. Stevenson noted that Inoki, whom he called “Hokey Finoki,” causing Ali to turn and poorly conceal his snickering from the crowd, was willingly taking kicks to the face in preparation for the impending onslaught.
“He got two or three teeth knocked out, I understand, accidentally,” Ali said. “People jumping on his face because he don’t do this for rasslin’. He’s trying to get ready for shock, but the shock he’s taking isn’t like my punches.” Ali then showed a little bit of humility, considering what he was facing. “I’m a little nervous, I must admit. If this man grabs my arm, or gets in behind me and gets one of those body-snatchers or those backbreakers on me, I’m in trouble. But I’m counting on my speed and my reflexes, because if I hit him right and he don’t fall, then he can do what he wanna do.”
Charged with protecting Ali from body-snatchers, backbreakers, and everything else he wasn’t used to was a man the champ had long admired: beguiling retired pro wrestler “Classy” Freddie Blassie, who, at fifty-eight, still cut an imposing figure. Blassie emerged from behind the multicolored The Tonight Show curtain without his cane, a staple of his pro wrestling gimmick after becoming a “manager” in the sunset years of his fondly remembered career. The cane, he liked to say, wasn’t a tool to lean on. A man of his distinction simply required a walking stick—not to mention a respectable weapon should the need arise. The blond Blassie strode towards Carson’s occupied desk draped in his usual getup—a Hawaiian shirt and khaki slacks—and Ali gladly made space for his “new trainer” by sliding over next to Ed McMahon on the couch. Using catchphrases cultivated over four decades of working every pro wrestling territory worth knowing, Blassie plowed over that “pencil-neck geek” Stevenson. As it was, Ali was attempting to sell a legitimate fight, not a pro wrestling bonanza, and he sensed Blassie’s over-the-top shtick would confuse the audience. So the boxer cut him off.
Ali leaned forward.
“There’s $10 million involved,” he said, which was an exaggeration since he had agreed to a purse of $6.1 million while Inoki was set to take home in the neighborhood of $2 million. “I wouldn’t take the sport of boxing and disgrace it. I wouldn’t pull a fraud on the public. This is real. There’s no plan. The blood. The holds. The pain. Everything is going to be real. I’m not here in this time of my life to come out with some phony action.”
The next night Charlton Heston and comedian Kelly Monteith had the pleasure of welcoming Johnny Carson back to Burbank, Calif. After hearing Ed McMahon describe a wacky time at a bicentennial gathering in the West Chicago suburb of Wheaton, Ill.—“You told me never to play a fairgrounds, and I made a mistake,” McMahon admitted to Carson. “I didn’t listen to you.”—the late-night king lamented his days touring the Midwest.
Professional wrestlers knew as well as anyone what it was like to play in front of fairgrounds fans. The tradition of wrestling tours, like America, is long and vast, and in significant ways linked to the man Ali signed to fight in Tokyo.
Inoki, a famous disciple of the father of Japanese professional wrestling, better known as Rikidōzan, was the B-side of a contest poised to produce the largest purse and audience for a bout of this type. Ticket prices at the Nippon Budokan arena were exorbitant, yet, with Ali involved, the fight was a sellout. Ringside seats for regular wrestling shows at the Budokan were 5,000 yen (roughly $17 at the time). For the Ali–Inoki rumble, that price put fans in the nosebleeds of a 14,000-seat building. The face value of the most expensive ticket available to the public was $1,000 ($4,100 today). Sponsors could access “royal ringside” seats for three times that price.
“My memory was, ‘Oh my God, you’re charging how much?’” recalled Dave Meltzer, a sixteen-year-old fanatic with a pro wrestling newsletter who watched the match at the Santa Clara Fairgrounds, one of four Bay Area venues carrying the closed-circuit feed from Tokyo.
“It was announced in Japan long before it was announced in the United States,” he said. “And even though it was announced in Japan, I thought the Japanese wrestling people were just making noise because there was no way in hell this was ever going to happen. And they actually announced it and I was stunned. There was always in wrestling historically this idea of a boxer versus a wrestler going back to ‘Strangler’ Lewis and Jack Dempsey—it never happened, probably because when the boxer started training with real wrestlers it was like, wow, this is a really dumb idea.”
At Shea Stadium in Flushing, New York, 32,897 spectators gathered to watch Ali meet Inoki after a World Wide Wrestling Federation extravaganza, “Showdown at Shea,” a precursor to modern-day WrestleMania events. For the sake of business that night, a gimpy Bruno Sammartino returned to the squared circle two months after fracturing his neck in a match at Madison Square Garden against Stan Hansen. Anchoring the event before Shea Stadium went dark for the Ali–Inoki contest, Andre the Giant faced Chuck Wepner— Sylvester Stallone’s inspiration for Rocky Balboa. (Decades later, most people believe the action at Shea and Tokyo also prompted Stallone to include a boxer-versus-wrestler scene in Rocky III. Through his publicist, Stallone denied any truth to that.) Cards like these took place across North America that night, and at the behest of Vince McMahon Sr., were billed as a sort of “Martial Arts Olympics” to support the so-called World Martial Arts Championship.
Whatever trepidation Ali felt ahead of the Inoki bout, it was at least rooted in combat sports reality. Unlike earlier generations of American audiences, fight watchers in the mid-1970s weren’t clued into matches that allowed for more than trading punches. Boxing was the combat sport, in large part because of Ali, who ably served as its king and jester. Martial arts in the age of Bruce Lee were repurposed as flash for film and television, further eroding the prominence of American grappling arts that had been influenced by Japanese martial arts missionaries and European immigrants during the Industrial Revolution. By the summer of America’s 200th birthday, when fans gathered in arenas across the globe to watch Ali fight Inoki, a sense of excitement brewed on all sides. Ali was the best boxer on the planet, The Greatest of All Time, and anything he did received huge attention. But this? This was unique. Something mysterious. And that made it potentially something bigger.
Seven minutes before Ali and Inoki stood in the ring together, the first images from the Nippon Budokan were beamed by satellite to the rest of the world. Closed-circuit sites—predominantly movie houses with stadiums and arenas sprinkled in—filled with people hoping for a great show on a Friday night.
In San Jose, Calif., Meltzer and some high school friends put the finishing touches on a debate that had raged for weeks. “Beforehand we didn’t know if it would be real or not,” said Meltzer, who, forty years later, is a highly respected pro wrestling and combat sports journalist. “The prevailing view in the media was that it was going to be a fake pro wrestling match.”
Was this thing on the up-and-up? Could a boxer, even someone as great as Ali, really beat a wrestler? Oh my God, what if Inoki takes Ali to the ground and hurts him? These discussions played out wherever people congregated to take in the action.
Jeff Wagenheim spent fifteen dollars on a ticket to watch at the Liberty Theater in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Having graduated high school a week before the match, Wagenheim, who went on to cover mixed martial arts as a reporter for Sports Illustrated, had mostly matured past the wrestling fandom of his childhood. Yet after hearing of the Ali–Inoki pairing, he and a friend decided to see what the noise was about.
“I remember the air-conditioning wasn’t working,” Wagenheim said. “As soon as we got in the theater I started
