Ali vs. Inoki (11 page)

“I think that at his peak Inoki was probably the third most popular athlete in the country,” Meltzer said. “As big as
wrestling was, it wasn't the biggest sport in the country. For a pro wrestler to be that big culturally, it really was amazing. Americans can't grasp Inoki because most think Hulk Hogan. Hogan was big. The Rock was big. Steve Austin was big. As wrestlers, none of these guys were even close to as big as Inoki was in Japan.”

Grit and determination were hallmarks of Inoki's matches. He rallied against the odds and looked good doing so. Inoki never turned heel (became a bad guy, in wrestling speak), but his matches were so heated that even a good guy like him could only take so much abuse. Inoki showed his fist and made a big deal of what he was about to do before doing it. In a lot of ways, Inoki's gimmick was a forerunner to Hulk Hogan's. Charisma and unique facial features, courtesy of that protruding, pointed jaw, certainly helped set Inoki apart.

“He's an incredible performer,” Barnett said. “Hearing about his taking on these other practitioners of martial arts and fighting arts. Even seeing pictures of him and his matches, he's a great worker. If you just sit back and watch, he has tons of charisma and appears to be the real deal when he's out there. He's great at being a wrestler and captures your attention right away.”

Inoki and his band of wrestlers embraced a “strong style.” The closer the action looked to a real fight, the better, because Inoki sought to give audiences the emotion of a real struggle with less song and dance.

“He would end up breaking the rules of wrestling in almost all his matches,” Barnett said. “He had a system of getting pushed so far that he couldn't take anymore. He
would punch with a closed fist. He was brutal. It would look brutal as hell when he would take out people.”

“Whether it was working or shooting, Inoki's mindset was ‘real.' You're really doing everything real all the time, in Inoki's mind. It's just whether or not you're actually shooting, having a real fight, or working, doing a predetermined match. If you treat it real, keep it real, keep your mind real, then whatever it is you do out there will come off as real, and the people will be more engrossed and involved in it and they'll feel the emotion of the match more than the moves that you're doing. Trying to keep the suspension of disbelief going, because that will draw the emotional investment out besides just throwing out a bigger and more expensive firework.”

ROUND SEVEN

A
n American cultural icon out of the turbulent, status quo–challenging 1960s went global by the mid-1970s. This is why throughout the emergence of the jet and satellite ages, Muhammad Ali grew accustomed to working at odd hours.

In 1974, for instance, Ali challenged George Foreman at 4:00
A.M.
in Zaire. A year later, he stepped into the ring for a torturous third time with Joe Frazier, not as he had in thier first encounter in primetime on a New York night at Madison Square Garden but at a quarter to eleven in the morning several miles outside of Manila.

More than a decade had passed since Ali took the most popular first name on Earth as his own, and the world champion's traveling carnival was at its craziest when he and Frazier went to war in the “Thrilla in Manila,” on October 1, 1975.

“That was one of the great fights of all time, that third fight,” Pacheco said. “One of the hardest fights I've ever seen.
I can go back all the way to Jack Dempsey, nobody fought like Ali. When he put on the gloves, you thought, oh, that's the champion. He would beat the shit out of people.

“If there was a fight you were looking to stop boxing, to make them stop it as a sport, that was it. That was so rough, so tough you were looking at death in the ring. When Frazier quit, one more punch could have put him out. And when you were looking for the good stuff, that was the one. Boy those guys were tough, tough, top of the line, toe to toe, and it's me or you. For Ali, it was him. He was giving Frazier everything he could possibly give him to knock him out, and he did.”

In the later rounds Ali pummeled Frazier, prompting the proud Philadelphian's trainer, Eddie Futch, to save his fighter from the possibility of a terrible end. Frazier's left eye was completely closed. He couldn't see so well out of his right. Everything Ali threw landed and Frazier spat up blood. When the decision to stop came from Frazier's corner, Ali, who indicated to his camp after the fourteenth round that he was overwhelmed and wanted out, collapsed in his corner.

Later Ali would say the experience was the closest thing to death that he knew of.

“Right after the fight all the press was waiting for us,” recalled publicist Bobby Goodman. “I ran up to Ali's dressing room and he was laid out. He was exhausted. Man I never saw him as tired as that. I said, ‘Muhammad, the press is waiting outside.' Ali said, ‘I just can't do it. I'm too tired. I'm exhausted.' He was shot. I didn't know quite what to do so I ran across the hall to Joe Frazier's room. He was being consoled by Eddie Futch, who had his arm around Frazier.
I think there were some tears. I said, ‘Joe, the press is downstairs. You got nothing to be ashamed of. You fought a great fight.' Eddie says, ‘OK, let's go Joe. Let's go down.' He said, ‘OK' and he toweled himself off. He got his shoes and that was what I needed. He started moving so I ran back across to Ali and I said, ‘Champ, Frazier is on his way down.' He said, ‘Frazier is going? Frazier is going to the press conference? Where's my comb?' He started picking his hair. He put his shoes on and went down.”

Of all the things that made Ali great, the simple yet crucial piece was desire. He needed the rivalry with Frazier to extend himself as far as he could go without breaking. Outside the ropes, though, he sometimes went further than that.

Compelling, charismatic, handsome, and a notorious ladies' man, Ali was in the midst of a torrid love affair with Veronica Porche as he faced Frazier in '75. Ali had met Porche the previous year after the model and actress was one of four women chosen to travel the U.S. promoting the “Rumble in the Jungle” before flying to Kinshasa for the fight with George Foreman. Soon, Ali boldly brought Porche almost everywhere he went while his wife at the time, Belinda Ali, remained home taking care of their four children.

Ferdie Pacheco said one reason Ali took the fight in Manila was to spend time with Porche, which meant getting away from his wife for six weeks. Sometimes Porche was Ali's “cousin.” Other times, according to photo captions in
People
, for instance, the “nanny.” To no one's chagrin but Belinda's, Porche was also called Ali's better half—which was just about the last straw. In Manila ten days before the fight, the boxers had the occasion to meet with Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda, the “Steel Butterfly,” who became known
for her collection of more than one thousand pairs of shoes. As Marcos spoke, he paid respects to Ali and his “beautiful wife.” No one corrected the president of the Philippines, who since 1972 had run the country under martial law.

“Your wife is beautiful, too,” Ali had the audacity to respond.

Newsweek
reporter Pete Bonventre was in Manila covering Ali, and in his piece for the magazine, “The Ali Mystique,” he referenced that the “stunning Veronica Porche, sometimes known as ‘Ali's other wife,' was touring Manila with the champ.”

After the article was published, Belinda, all five-foot-ten 160 pounds of her, flew to Manila. Some insiders looked forward more to Belinda vs. Veronica, the L.A. beauty pageant winner, than Muhammad vs. Joe.

Belinda Ali told her husband that if what she read in
Newsweek
was true, and Porche was sleeping in the same room with him, then she was showing up with divorce papers. According to Pacheco, Ali's wife also arrived with about sixty suitcases. Very costly suitcases. And she told Ali that either Porche goes or each of the bags would be filled with outrageously priced goods from Manila and Tokyo. After giving Ali a piece of her mind for an hour in his hotel suite, one of fifty-two rooms under the champ's umbrella, she flew home.

Porche stayed.

“It wasn't nice but it was deserved,” said Pacheco, who claimed Ali felt he'd bought freedom for cheap.

A serious decline in the boxer's ring presence loomed as his physical prowess faded over the next five years. Yet his stardom burned as bright as ever, and that meant there was
money to be made. This wasn't the “radical” who conscientiously objected his way to the United States Supreme Court during the Vietnam War. By 1975, in the wake of America's withdrawal and Saigon's fall, Ali was rich, commercialized, and accustomed to being a global star.

Yes, Ali lived lavishly and treated the people around him very well, but he also faced divorce and aimed to keep Porche happy. A significant portion of his money went as quickly as it came, particularly in the direction of the Black Muslim movement the Nation of Islam. While Ali left the Nation in 1975 and converted to the more mainstream Sunni branch of Islam that year, his manager, Herbert Muhammad, the third son of Elijah Muhammad, remained tied to both for years to come. Muhammad was the organization's chief business manager until his father passed away in Chicago in '75, operating several entities, including a newspaper he founded with Malcolm X. With a significant portion of the funds delivered by the champ, Muhammad opened the Masjid Al-Faatir mosque in 1987 in a predominantly black neighborhood of Chicago called Kenwood. The opportunity to build Chicago's most impressive mosque was largely owed to Ali's success.

Despite the intense flame of celebrity and an ability to generate millions of dollars per fight—more than anyone before him by a wide margin—Ali's closest confidants say he was never affected. To the boxers who met Ali in the ring in the mid-1970s, however, his magnetism was always felt. Ali made them the biggest purses of their careers, and when they fought him they became known at least to some degree.

Four months after Manila, Ali weighed 226 pounds when he stepped into the ring in Puerto Rico against the
relatively harmless twenty-nine-year-old Belgian champion Jean-Pierre Coopman. “Let me have a little rest in between [hard fights],” Ali said at a New York press conference before the bout. He got away with one—who could hold it against him? Coopman famously drank champagne before and during the fight before staying down in the fifth round.

Resting wasn't something Ali did often and his seemingly boundless supply of energy was tested in 1976. After the Coopman victory, Ali officially announced his participation in the Inoki match at a New York City news conference in late March at the Plaza Hotel.

Under the verbal onslaught of Ali, surrounded by the media, with something to sell, Inoki took the stoic approach.

“When the wind blows, I shall bend but not break,” Inoki said through a translator.

Ali played his usual games, and said he “cannot miss” Inoki's protruding jaw. It was then that the boxer dubbed the wrestler “The Pelican.”

“When your fist hits my chin, I hope you do not hurt your fist,” Inoki replied as he smiled. Inoki then said he hoped Ali would not duck out at the last moment.

“If I ain't afraid of walkin' down a back alley in Harlem, I ain't afraid of you,” Ali barked back.

Both men insisted the contest would be real, though the rules had yet to be hammered out. “I think Ali thought it would be more of a show,” said Bobby Goodman, whose father, Murray, a Boxing Hall of Fame publicist, worked the New York portion of the June event at Shea Stadium. “But the first time we got together with them about the dos and don'ts and rules of the fight it became very obvious to me that Inoki's people were serious.” Discussions to
that end were at the preliminary stage, and Ali spoke with excitement about the desire to punch when he was on the ground.

Boxing writers questioned whether or not it was demeaning for an active and defending heavyweight champion of the world to participate in a contest of this sort. Ali, the only three-time lineal world heavyweight champion, said it was not.

“I'll be going outside my speciality,” he said, “and I'm drawing the greatest crowds in the history of the world.”

Andre the Giant, the ostensible eighth wonder of the world, attended the press conference at the Plaza Hotel and shared the stage with Ali.

“You think you can beat me up?” Ali asked the massive Frenchman.

“I could beat you up and throw you out of this building,” said the Giant, whom Gene Kilroy described as incredibly gentle and sweet.

With the Inoki match slated for the summer, Ali ever so slightly turned his attention back to boxing. A similar setup to the Coopman bout was arranged for April 30 in Landover, Md. Tasked with fighting the journeyman Jimmy Young, a bored Ali showed up pudgy—230 pounds, the heaviest of his career until his final bout against Trevor Berbick in 1981.

Newspaper reports before the bout with Young indicated Ali had spent time preparing for Inoki with The Sheik, a famous wrestler and fellow Muslim operating out of Detroit. He made occasional trips to Ali's home outside Chicago, and was said to be training with the boxer a week before Ali headed off to Tokyo.

Ali maintained a target weight for most of his thirty-one fights after returning to the ring in 1970. A couple pounds either way wasn't a big deal, but Ali always liked to come in around 220 pounds. “Ali was a little bit egotistical sometimes about that weight,” Goodman said. “It was important to him. He didn't want to seem like he was sloppy.” Such that he was against the passive Young. The pair made for an awful heavyweight title fight, one that failed to entertain anyone who watched a slow, undertrained Ali win by unanimous decision.

Acknowledging the poor showing against Young and a let-down public, Ali promised never to look so bad again.

Twenty-three days later Ali stood on a stage in Munich, Germany, to make weight for his next defense against England's Richard Dunn. The bout with Dunn, promoted by Bob Arum and set to air live and free in the U.S. on May 24, 1976, was not selling well. Dunn wasn't considered any kind of threat, and coming off the dud against Young, German fans weren't interested in watching a potentially unmotivated Ali stink up Munich's Olympiahalle. As he said he would, Ali showed up in much better condition, hitting that 220 pound mark.

“I was handling the scale weighing Ali and all of a sudden the stage collapsed,” Goodman recalled. “Down went Ali and the scale and everything. I was left standing there on the edge of the platform. Everyone was in a hole. It was odd.”

Ali and his team were put up first-class in one of the city's finest old hotels, the Bayerischer Hof. Like in Zaire, Ali travelled with an entourage of more than fifty people at the time. One way or another they served some purpose, but
many were also a drain of Ali's precious time and resources and had been for several years. With bills piling up in Munich, Goodman said, the abuse was bad enough that Ali had to call the group together to tell them not to squander their good fortune by looting his.

“Guys you can't keep spending an hour on the phone calling home with your wife or your girlfriend or your kids,” Ali told them, according to Goodman. “You can't order anything any time you want.”

Typical Ali, he couldn't keep up the bad-guy routine. And the more he spoke, the softer his approach turned.

“If you're hungry and you want another steak you can order it but don't waste it,” he said. “If you gotta call home, call but do it once a day.”

Said Goodman: “Imagine fifty or sixty people calling from Germany every day. The bills can add up.”

Ali wanted everyone around him to enjoy themselves and handle their duties. And while he generally wished the group well, this mostly hinged on his desire to have people near him feel good no matter what. When it came to relationships with friends, strangers, and loved ones, this was his instinct and where he focused his energy.

As for hangers-on, vultures, and sycophants, Ali couldn't move more than three feet without twenty people descending upon his footsteps. Bonventre's story in
Newsweek
described Ali's entourage: “Solemn Muslim guards have given way to streetwise hustlers. Liberals who cherished him as a symbol of pro-black antiwar attitudes have been replaced by wry connoisseurs of pure showmanship.”