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

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“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 TWO

Muhammad Ali met Ichiro Hatta, a fellow Olympian and president of the Japanese Amateur Wrestling Association, at a reception in the United States in April 1975. The story goes that Ali nudged Hatta, an instrumental figure in Japan’s Olympic movement, with a dare: “Isn’t there an Oriental fighter who will challenge me? I’ll give him one million dollars if he wins.” Respected for, among other things, introducing Western-style wrestling to Japan in 1931, Hatta devoted himself to grappling, in the way that Japanese strive to find and repeat perfection over the long course of their professional lives. Therefore, unbeknownst to Ali, Hatta was quite simply the best person to relay his message to the Japanese press, which predictably played up the remark. As it happened, a professional wrestler responded.