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

63 страница из 81

ROUND FOUR

Two hundred forty pounds. Barrel-chested. Serious. No hint of fragrance to be found. In most ways Rikidōzan couldn’t have been more different from George Wagner. Yet, as the “Human Orchid” bloomed over American pop culture during the 1950s, retired sumo wrestler Rikidōzan grew to an even greater stature in Japan. An honest-to-goodness icon. How? By capitalizing on anti-Western sentiment and mollifying the depressed spirit of a people decimated by war.

Television, timing, theater, and good ol’ jingoism proved more potent for Rikidōzan than “Gorgeous” George’s “Chanel No. 10.” Then, after he had acted as savior to a people that loved him only because they did not truly know him, the blade of a yakuza gangster’s six-inch hunting knife plunged into Rikidōzan’s battle-hardened abdomen. His untimely demise in 1963 unveiled a face long shrouded in secrecy.

Kim Sin-rak arrived in Japan in 1939 at the age of fifteen after a touring scout signed him to one of the several licensed sumo houses in that country. At Tokyo’s Nishinoseki stable, Sin-rak, strapping young man that he was, received the shikona (ring name) “Rikidōzan,” which fittingly translates to “Rugged Mountain Road.” It was decided that this new identity also required an elaborate fiction. The public wasn’t considered capable of accepting a nonnative Japanese rikishi, let alone a Korean, beating their own in sumo. That’s how Kim Sin-rak from the South Hamgyong Province in northeast Korea, a citizen of the Japanese empire, became Mitsuhiro Momota, pure-blooded Japanese son of Minokichi Momota, the Nagasaki-based scout who discovered him. Years later, well into his incredible pro wrestling stardom, Rikidōzan felt his background, if revealed as false, would have cost him much of his fan base—basically halving the country of Japan—such was the breadth of his popularity and the pervasiveness of anti-Korean sentiment among the population following the annexation of Korea in 1910. It wouldn’t be officially revealed until 1978, and even then many hagiographies glossed over or ignored the truth of Rikidōzan’s heritage and rise to fame.