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

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Unlike all-time great Jack Dempsey, Ali actually agreed to take on a mixed-style test. He wanted it and so did Inoki, and in the end their rules weren’t so different than what Dempsey and Lewis floated to the public during the 1920s. Ali laid down and Inoki accepted a challenge to determine the best fighter in the world. Yet many English-speaking boxing scribes maligned the heavyweight champion for participating in a “farce”—otherwise known as something great boxers have always been connected with.

ROUND THREE

Marcus Griffin, in 1937, authored an apparent attempt to uncover the world of professional wrestling. Whether Griffin acted as a reporter or a flack is up for debate, as are reported events strewn throughout the pages of his book, Fall Guys: The Barnums of Bounce—The Inside Story of the Wrestling Business, America’s Most Profitable and Best Organized Professional Sport. Sorting fact from fiction in the wrestling world did not come easy then, and it still doesn’t. Wrestling is as underhanded and shifty a business as there ever was. Indisputable, however, is that Fall Guys exposed the wrestling world to the public in a way it hadn’t been before, and that Griffin earned full credit for coining the “Gold Dust Trio.”