Unlike Wagenheim, Kevin Iole continued to love wrestling into his high school days, especially the McMahonowned WWWF (World Wide Wrestling Federation). And for Ali to insert himself in that world made the closed-circuit event a must-see. Iole took a seat in the small ballroom at Monzo’s Howard Johnson’s in Monroeville, Pa., as the summer prior to his senior year was getting started. “I didn’t think for one second it would be a real thing,” recalled the prolific boxing writer who, while working for the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2004, was among the first American newspaper reporters to give the fledgling sport of mixed martial arts his attention. “I thought it’d be a work and we’d get a kick out of it, and who knew what Ali would do or say.”
Noted handicapper Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder explained that he was unwilling to post a line on the fight, highlighting the difficulty in guaranteeing the bona fides of such a spectacle. “How do I know it’s anything but an exhibition?” he wrote in his newspaper column on June 3. “I’ve been bombarded by karate lovers who insist Ali doesn’t have a chance, that no fighter can beat a wrestler.” At the fabled Olympic Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles, bookies ignored history and installed the boxer as a 3-to-1 favorite.
The Olympic, like Shea, hosted a live wrestling undercard the night of the Ali–Inoki dustup. It was one of several venues scattered amongst pro wrestling territories from the Northeast to the Southwest, under the auspices of the National Wrestling Alliance, that held talent-rich cards in support of the closed-circuit broadcast from Tokyo.
By comparison, Saturday’s afternoon action at the Budokan offered little attraction outside the main event. Demonstrations of a traditional Iranian martial art as well as Goju Ryu karate preceded a pro wrestling tag-team match for Japanese fans, whose reputation as intelligent, mindful watchers of combat is well earned. If a sense of uncertainty circulated among American audiences, the Japanese were utterly fixated on the enormous event that, courtesy of Inoki, had arrived on their shores.
Hideki Yamamoto, a fourteen-year-old junior high student fond of Coca-Cola packed in 350-milliliter steel cans, was in his second year at Wakasa Junior High School. On Saturday afternoon the left fielder was supposed to be practicing with his baseball club, but he and some of his teammates slipped out of training and found their way to a teachers’ lounge.
“There was a TV set, and some teachers, including our baseball coach, surrounded it,” recalled Yamamoto, who years later served as an executive for Japan’s seminal mixed martial arts promotion, the Pride Fighting Championship, with which Inoki was also affiliated. “I found out it was the live TV broadcast of the fight. The coaches said something but I could not hear what it was. They did not blame my friends and allowed them to keep watching.”
Ali’s presence in the match made people across Japan stop whatever it was they were doing to watch. This was precisely what Inoki wanted. While the businessmen who put up the money saw fortune, the ambitious wrestler envisioned his name being exposed to the wider world. Up to that point, he had been largely anonymous outside of Japan. Inoki touched fame in Asia, and some diehard stateside pro wrestling fans knew of him, but his ego demanded a larger audience. So he set out to find one.
During final preparations before his ring walk, Ali preened in front of a mirror in his locker room. Padded with white gauze and bandages, Ali’s prized hands expertly tied off his white Everlast satin shorts accentuated by a black waistband and black stripes down each side—the same color scheme he wore for so many indelible moments in the ring. Surrounded by members of his boxing entourage—Angelo Dundee, Drew “Bundini” Brown, Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, and Wali Muhammad—and people there just for this night— Freddie Blassie and Korea’s Jhoon Rhee, who popularized taekwondo in America—Ali primped before shooing away a Japanese cameraman.
As a rookie reporter for United Press, Andrew Malcolm worked the occasional boxing event from ringside. He had learned the risk of being so close to the action that snot and spit might fly in his direction, so years later as the Tokyo bureau chief of the New York Times, Malcolm chose to settle in fifteen rows back from the apron. Ali and Inoki were expected to enter the ring around 11:30 a.m. local time and as the middle of the day approached, Budokan Hall was stifling. The mugginess made Malcolm squirm in his seat, which was set up with a full-service telephone line connected to a recording room in New York that collected reporters’ phoned-in stories or notes. As an event unfolded, staff could take those accounts and begin working them into stories. Narrating the blow-by-blow back to New York was Malcolm’s first task, though he felt silly talking on a trans-Pacific phone without someone listening on the other side. Next would be arranging time to speak with Ali after the bout for a feature on how smitten Japan was with him and the match.
From his vantage, Malcolm saw the trio of officials chatting as best they could in a neutral corner. Two Japanese judges, hefty grappler Kokichi Endo and boxing official Kou Toyama, joined American referee “Judo” Gene LeBell, who sported red pants to match his ginger hair, a blue shirt, and black bow tie. He had nearly donned a red tie, but opted for a more formal look. LeBell, an influential martial artist and prolific stuntman out of Los Angeles, was set to play a crucial part. He would control the action in the ring and assign a score after each round, based on a five-point must scoring system and heavily negotiated rules.
Concerns about corruption and fighter safety made this judge-referee combination rare after the early 1980s. Each job is difficult enough without having to worry about doing both at the same time. Still, the use of LeBell’s services in both areas made good sense. An accomplished grappler who could box? LeBell was literally one of the few people at the time who had intimate knowledge of mixed matches, though he had not refereed one before.
“Ali knew me as a good wrestler, at least he thought so,” said LeBell, who for all this expertise was paid $5,000 in crisp new hundred-dollar bills to officiate the contest. “He wanted me to be a referee. Ali saw me working out at Main Street Gym and that was his world. It was very casual. Ali and Inoki said we want you as the referee because all the guys that were up for it, they’re either wrestling referees or boxing. And I did both.”
Before cameras picked up LeBell communicating with his fellow officials, he was backstage watching the closed-circuit feed out of Flushing, New York. In Ali’s locker room LeBell stood with Blassie, a trusted friend, while the sevenfoot-four, roughly 500-pound André René Roussimoff (aka Andre the Giant) dumped Chuck Wepner over the top rope to take the WWWF co-feature at Shea Stadium by count out. Of course, the action in Queens was show business.
Watching alongside Blassie and LeBell, Ali was engrossed. He said he pictured Inoki going after him with “a pro wrestling style” and sounded confident that if he was in there with Andre the Giant, he could have won. LeBell’s wisdom compelled him to conjure a much different outcome. The first televised bout of this type in the United States ended when LeBell strangled a boxer unconscious on a wild night in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1963, which is why the referee figured Ali would be forced to the canvas and, if things went really bad, would get something broken or be strangled out cold.
“Inoki was a scary guy. He was always calm and spoke in a casual way, about breaking Ali’s arm, or pulling out a bone, or a muscle. Ali would always banter with him, but I think he too was concerned, because of the unknown pieces,” said publicist Bobby Goodman, who worked with Ali in Tokyo on behalf of Top Rank. “Bob Arum put this together with Vince McMahon Sr. and it came not too long after the Richard Dunn fight in Munich. So the length of time Ali usually had to prepare for fights didn’t really exist, especially for something he hadn’t experienced before.”
As Ali readied himself to engage in a form of combat that presented challenges he wasn’t equipped to handle, the unflappable boxer, the most famous face on earth, grew anxious in a way earthquakes or flying on a plane that had run out of gas could not make him.
ROUND
