Free Ali vs. Inoki by Josh Gross

Japanese. In the fall of 1955, a couple years after Rikidōzan captured the public’s imagination, an eleven-year-old schoolboy was reportedly killed when a fellow student landed a dropkick while imitating the American style of wrestling. Networks, which were saturated with wrestling at the time, created public service announcements essentially telling kids to cool it.
    A growing fervor around Rikidōzan, and Kimura’s cemented reputation as one of Japan’s best fighters, prompted the media to speculate about what might happen if they were matched as opponents instead of teammates. The wrestlers paid attention and agreed it was a good idea to entertain this question. There was money to be made, and for the advancement of Japanese pro wrestling the match needed to happen. So on December 22, 1954, the first pro wrestling heavyweight championship of Japan was contested at the Kuramae Kokugikan, the home of sumo from 1950 until 1985. Without nationalist overtones, the contest between Rikidōzan and Kimura turned out to be a straight power play. Shifting from work to shoot, the former sumo manchopped the judoka to the floor, a double cross apparently justified by an errant kick from Kimura to Rikidōzan’s groin.
    “The first bout was going to be a draw,” Kimura told
Sports Graphic Number
, Japan’s
Sports Illustrated
, in 1983. “The winner of the second will be determined by the winner of a rock-paper-scissors. After the second match, we will repeat this process. We came to an agreement on this condition. As for the content of the match, Rikidōzan will let me throw him, and I will let him strike me with a chop. We then rehearsed karate chop and throws. However, once the bout started, Rikidōzan became taken by greed for big money and fame. He lost his mind and became a mad man. When I saw him raise his hand, I opened my arms to invite the chop. He delivered the chop, not to my chest, but to my neck with full force. I fell to the mat. He then kicked me. Neck arteries are so vulnerable that it did not need to be Rikidōzan to cause a knockdown. A junior high school kid could inflict a knockdown this way. I could not forgive his treachery. That night, I received a phone call informing me that several, ten,
yakuza
are on their way to Tokyo to kill Rikidōzan.”
    A strain of thought exists that suggests Rikidōzan’s stabbing death in 1963 was the
yakuza
catching up with him for the betrayal of Kimura, who, to the surprise of no one, never received a chance to wrestle or fight the former sumo stylist again. As with most things having to do with Rikidōzan, who he was and what he did relative to his public perception were very different.
    Rikidōzan and American Lou Thesz wrestled to a sixty-minute draw in Tokyo’s first-ever “world title match” in 1957, scoring a record 87.0 rating on Japanese television—two of his matches rank in the top ten most-viewed programs inthe country’s history and tens of thousands of people packed the streets to watch. His matches against Thesz, the only American wrestler Rikidōzan admitted to having respect for, represent the crowning achievements of his enormous ring success.
    When Rikidōzan visited Los Angeles a year later to face Thesz—the best shooter in the world, a man chiseled from granite like Ed “Strangler” Lewis—the message was clear: If Rikidōzan could put up a fight against a man like Thesz, if he could beat Thesz and claim the NWA international heavyweight belt, which he did in L.A., well, he could do anything.
    So too could the Japanese.
    Not only had the face of Japanese strength adopted the American manner of wrestling, he adopted the American way of life and business. In L.A., Rikidōzan asked Gene LeBell, then twenty-six, to hold $15,000 cash in crisp $100 bills. “He said keep it until the match is over,” recalled LeBell. “I could’ve gone down to Mexico.” No matter what happened at the Olympic Auditorium that night, a top-of-the line Rolls-Royce