released to the public. Two of the ten pertained to Dempsey, who was obligated to wrap his hands in soft bandages, wear five-ounce gloves, and refrain from hitting Lewis when he was down.
The rest restricted the wrestler: a common theme as these matches were discussed.
Among the notable instructions, Lewis could not hit with a bare hand or fist, and strangleholds were barred, as were butting and heeling. To win, Lewis had to pin Dempsey for three seconds. If Lewis spent more than ten seconds at a time on the canvas while Dempsey stood, the wrestler would be disqualified.
While talk captured imaginations across America, the spilled newspaper ink failed to manifest into a real contest. Reports of a signed match were labeled “bunk” by the pugilist. Instead Dempsey turned a desire among fans to see the best from boxing meet the best from wrestling into leverage, agreeing to fight for promoter Tex Rickard on the Fourth of July, 1923. But not against a wrestler. The promoters—oilmen from Montana who originally offered Dempsey $200,000 to fight an unknown opponent and put an unknown boomtown on the map—caved and upped their guarantee to $300,000, the same amount of oil money Dempsey ignored to face Lewis in Wichita.
Two days before the fight, reports indicated that the last of three $100,000 payments to Dempsey had not been made, so the event was publicly cancelled. Dempsey’s money came through at the last minute, but not before newspaper stories were published and 200 ten-car trains riding the Great Northern Railway, totaling thirty-five miles if someone wanted to connect them all at once, stopped running. A disaster. The city of Shelby, population 400, had spent a reported $1 million (nearly $14 million in 2015’s values) to prepare. They laid eleven miles of new track, erected a stadium with sixteen entrances and eighty-five rows of seats on a six-acre plot of land, created a 160-acre automobile tourist camp, issued four hundred building permits, and budgeted city improvements costing $250,000. Grocery merchants within one hundred miles of Shelby were on call to make shipments to a town that now featured more than thirty places to grab food. Drinking booze and beer was legal, and six dance halls were available in the evenings. If anything got out of hand, the governor of Montana, Republican Joseph M. Dixon, was prepared to send in two units of the National Guard.
Since rail was the prime way spectators would have arrived at a newly built octagon-shaped wooden arena scaled for 40,208 seats, ticket sales produced just a small fraction of the expected gate. Dempsey went on to win an uninspired decision over Tommy Gibbons, and the host oil enclave of Shelby, Montana, was forced to endure a historic fiasco. The New York Times called the bout “the greatest financial failure of a single sporting event in history.” Only Dempsey, his manager Kearns, and Gibbons walked away with cash. Everyone else got wiped out. Three banks connected to the financing of the fight closed their doors within a week—bad mojo, perhaps, for Dempsey avoiding the “Strangler.”
Two decades later, Dempsey, then forty-five, stuck his toes in rasslin’ waters. Long retired, he mixed it up as a referee and quickly found himself embroiled in a fracas with a wrestler named Cowboy Luttrell. They settled the matter a couple months later, July 1, 1940, in Atlanta. Wearing the lightest gloves that Georgia officials allowed, Dempsey waited for Luttrell on an overturned beer case in his corner between rounds—a sad sight that did not go unnoticed by newspaper columnists. In front of more than 10,000 spectators, the “Manassa Mauler” smashed the wrestler in a round and a half. Exhibitions in which boxers boxed wrestlers usually rendered down to no match at all. This sort of setup wasn’t grounds for debate. Under similar circumstances, few people would have given Antonio Inoki a serious shot at lasting as long against Ali as Luttrell did with Dempsey. But that wasn’t the paradigm Ali established for his boxer-wrestler foray in Tokyo, and that certainly wasn’t what Inoki had in mind as he hustled to get the fight made.
Smart promoters played up these conflicts, which is why the August 1963 issue of Rogue magazine, an early competitor to Playboy, is still spoken of today. Jim Beck’s article “The Judo Bums” threw down a well-worn martial arts gauntlet by offering a $1,000 prize to any judoka who could beat a boxer. Kenpo karate legend Ed Parker recruited “Judo” Gene LeBell to answer the challenge. “You’re the most sadistic bastard I know,” Parker told LeBell at the judo man’s hardcore Hollywood dojo. The prospect of walking away with $1,000 was incentive enough for LeBell, who didn’t need selling or history lessons to accept Ed Parker’s request.
LeBell fit the bill, for sure. Famous for many things, including handing out thousands of patches to people he strangled cold upon request, LeBell will say that Ed “Strangler” Lewis, Lou Thesz, and Karl Gotch—his “hooker” mentors (pro wrestling speak for legitimately skilled tough guys)—were meaner than he ever was.
“These guys were fanatics,” he said.
The trio represented grappling at its purest, highest class, and each made it a point to prove themselves against top strikers and wrestlers of their day. The historic implications of a grappler fighting a boxer were certainly not lost on LeBell, and a chance to prove himself while defending the teachings of the men who showed him the way was an incredible opportunity.
LeBell’s experience convinced him that competent martial artists should, under pressure, be able to employ a wide variety of striking and grappling techniques. He was ahead of the curve because combining styles wasn’t in vogue while Asian martial arts proliferated in popular culture after World War II. Also, among the folks who trained, the vast majority didn’t fight. That’s why, when LeBell answered Beck’s call, the event poster promised “something new for sport fans.” As a point of clarification, it was new in that spectators likely hadn’t seen anything like it before, well, at least not for a generation or two.
In the aftermath of the Great War, boxer-grappler and mixed-style skirmishes became popular again, though not to the degree they were when jiu-jitsu competitors travelled from Japan to share their knowledge with the world at the start of the 1900s. The judo practiced by UFC bantamweight superstar Ronda Rousey in the Octagon is derived from interactions with folks like LeBell, who studied based on the techniques brought to America by the four “guardians of judo” at the behest of their teacher, judo founder Kano Jigorō, to make Japanese martial arts accessible to the wider world. Kanō’s philosophy was that judo benefits everyone. Mitsuyo Maeda was one of Kanō’s judo acolytes, and in late 1904 he operated out of a gym in New York, taking on exhibitions in colleges up and down the East Coast. Maeda was ambitious, and when throwing strongmen and football players bored him, he searched out more difficult challengers. In America those came mostly from professional wrestlers, who were open enough to incorporate some of the unique skills people like Maeda offered up.
Men clad in suits may have lined Parisian streets and filled Parisian theaters to catch a mixed-fighting fad as it swept across the continent. Big crowds may have reveled in watching the world’s best fighters across any style make front-page news as far away as Hawaii and Australia. But there were periods in which these types of clashes fell out of favor, and by 1963 boxing was the combat sport worth caring about in America. Wrestling and grappling, for all its rich history, had fallen on harder times after scandals trivialized it. Proven lessons were largely forgotten by the public, and wrestling became the thing people didn’t talk about.
That was soon to change.
Thirteen years before Ali stepped in the ring to fight Inoki, a generation ahead of Art Jimmerson’s contest with Royce Gracie at UFC 1, and nearly five decades before James Toney and Randy Couture tangled in the Octagon, the first boxer-grappler showdown broadcast live on American television—LeBell vs. Savage—represented a key moment in the large arc of these events.
At first LeBell angled for the fight to take place in Los Angeles, where for almost forty years his notoriously tough mother, Aileen Eaton, promoted many of the biggest boxing and pro wrestling events on the West Coast at the Olympic
