Читать книгу Ali vs. Inoki. The Forgotten Fight That Inspired Mixed Martial Arts and Launched Sports Entertainment онлайн

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Godspeed, enjoy!

—Bas Rutten

ROUND ONE

The southern coast of Honshu, the largest and most populous of Japan’s four main islands, trembled at 10:19 P.M. local time, Friday, June 18, 1976.

Thirty-eight miles away in Tokyo, the most famous man on the planet and some of the troop that followed him everywhere he went had just settled into their rooms on the forty-fourth floor at the upscale Keio Plaza Hotel. This marked the end of the first full day of fight week promotion building to a spectacle in Tokyo pitting a boxer, the one and only Muhammad Ali, against a professional wrestler, Japan’s puroresu star Antonio Inoki.

Gene Kilroy, an Ali confidant, one of many people to claim close ties to the man during his iconic twenty-one-year boxing career, was shaving when the 4.4-magnitude quake rumbled through. Kilroy heard a bang and, through the reflection of a bathroom mirror, saw his clothes swinging in the closet. Later, he learned that structures in the area were built on rollers to cope with city life along the Ring of Fire, the seismic-heavy zone of volcanic activity surrounding the Pacific Ocean.