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

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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.