More Than Just Hardcore (12 page)

There was tension between Inoki and Baba, and a lot of tension in the company overall. Both men ended up forming their own groups, which became huge, and becoming lifelong rivals. Their rivalry was rooted in business, but it was always personal. There was true animosity between those two, which probably made for one of the truly greatest wrestling eras in the world. There was great wrestling on both sides. It produced the talent mixtures and the variety of styles that enabled people to see so many different types of wrestling.

My brother had a match with Inoki on this tour. A lot of the guys were worried that Inoki was going to go south on Junior, but Junior was tough and could take care of himself, so he wasn’t afraid of being crossed up. Just to make sure, I was standing at ringside, ready to punt Inoki’s head like a football if there was trouble.

This was the beginning of our long relationship with Baba, as we joined the All Japan Wrestling group that he started. He never did anything except impress me as a very smart businessman. He was a very wise man who would only say what was necessary and nothing more. I never have met many people who would contemplate an answer and give as much thought to the consequences of that answer to the degree Baba did.

My first tour for All Japan was the inaugural tour for All Japan as a company. It was also the only time I ever wrestled with Bruno Sammartino. He was a perennial champion for Vince McMahon Sr.’s WWWF, while I was always an NWA man in the 1970s, so our paths rarely crossed. Bruno, a burly power lifter and an incredibly strong man, was a great guy and a really underrated worker, because he knew how to get a response out of a crowd. Bruno also had a great heart and a lot of love for Baba.

Bruno’s loyalty to Baba ended up putting him at odds with Vince Sr., who was aligned with Inoki’s New Japan Pro Wrestling. Even though he was Vince McMahon’s champion and doing so meant heat with McMahon, Bruno refused to go to Japan for Inoki. He was just loyal to his friends to the end, putting his own livelihood in jeopardy over his loyalty to his friend Baba. I really admire that.

Bruno Sammartino was one of a rare breed in the wrestling business—a guy who was always as good as his word, with a lot of integrity. With Bruno, what you saw was what you got. And if he told you something, you could bank on it. Even on the tour I met him on, he was one of the top stars in the world and could have been making a lot more money than he was by appearing for his friend Baba, who wasn’t able to pay very well at that time. The highest compliment I can pay to a guy in the wrestling business is that he stands up for what he believes in, stands up for his friends, and is true to his word.

One of the real characters on that tour was “Bulldog” Dick Brower. He said repeatedly, “I got to get my little girl something from Japan before I go.”

This burly, mean-looking wrestler always talked about his little girl and what a sweet girl she was. One day he finally went to a store and got a kimono, but it was a size 24! I guess his “little girl” must have weighed 300 pounds! Or maybe he was a cross dresser. Who knows?

One of the most memorable series of matches I ever saw in Japan was during one of my first tours there, when Don Leo Jonathan went up against Anton Geesink. Don Leo, at six foot eight, was one of the most amazing athletes I’ve ever seen, and Geesink was a famous Olympic judo champion before getting into pro wrestling. But physically, he was no match for Don Leo, and Don Leo goosed him pretty good every night. I mean, he just ate Anton’s lunch. Of course, their matches all had preplanned finishes, and they were both professional enough to stick to those plans, but Don Leo had a little fun with him every night along the way. But on the last night, they had a judo jacket match, and that match was a different story. Anton was in his element, and on that night, Don Leo met his match. That was the one night he got a little revenge on Don Leo.

There were differences in how Baba and Inoki promoted their products to the fans. Baba was into gradually changing the business. He would stick with his formula and only develop and tweak it slightly. Inoki, on the other hand, was always trying to put out something different. He wanted to innovate in the world of wrestling. Inoki was more experimental. For example, he was the first one to really make good use of the European wrestlers and their unique, mat-based style.

That was out of necessity, because as the NWA-backed promotion, we pretty much blocked him from using any talent from the United States, except for talent from New York.

We were also involved in training Tomomi “Jumbo” Tsuruta, who would be one of Baba’s biggest stars for about 20 years. To be honest, Junior had a lot more to do with training him than I did.

The first time I met Tsuruta, he was wearing a pair of size-14 sneakers, a shirt and a pair of pants that had been worn too much. It was the best stuff that he had. He was just an overgrown kid. Baba told us he had been in the Olympics and now wanted to be a pro wrestler.

Tsuruta took to pro wrestling like a duck to water, and it was immediately obvious he was destined for big things. He picked up a lot of Junior’s style, including the European forearm smash that my brother had seen Billy Robinson, the shooter from Great Britain, use. Tsuruta also had a lot of financial sense, too, which was very important. He kept his mouth shut and learned by listening. He ended up spending his entire career with Baba, and made good money under him.

Unfortunately, Tsuruta died of liver failure while undergoing a transplant in 1999.1 was out of the loop with Baba at that point, so the only way I found out Tsuruta was even having health problems was through a couple of the boys who called to let me know.

My relationship with Baba wasn’t always harmonious. When I called in 1977 to cancel a tour because I was filming Paradise Alley, Baba just said, “OK,” although he was very, very unhappy about it. And I knew how he was going to answer that before I even called. It probably came back to haunt me, though. Later they had a date for a big show, and didn’t have me on it. Well, I was over with the fans in Japan at that time. I also know Baba was presented with some ideas for me to do some commercials in Japan, but they were never followed through on, strangely enough.

Anything I did on the side, the All Japan office wanted more than its fair share of, but that’s just the way it was. Baba was not happy with some of the licensing deals I made over there. He wanted the company to have a piece of things, like the record I made in 1983 (which contains some of the most godawful singing you’ve ever heard). Jimmy Hart wrote the songs for me because I was too cheap to pay for the rights to songs that people had already heard. All the songs on that album had one thing in common—they all sucked. One of them was called, “I Hate School”! Can you imagine? Who in the hell would think it would be a good idea to have a 35-year-old man singing “I Hate School”?

After we finished recording, I flew back home, and that was when I found out this country isn’t as free as we might want it to be.

I had been working with studio musicians, and when we finished they presented me with an electric guitar that I couldn’t play, but I wanted to bring it back because my kids might have wanted to bang on it someday.

I was only in Japan for a day before flying right back to the States. As I came through customs, with my long hair and guitar, the customs man said, “Come with me.”

He took me into a room and asked, “Where are you coming from?” “Well,” I said, “I was coming over from Japan, you know, just cutting an album.”

“You got a guitar in there, sonny?”

I said I did, and they searched me like I was Public Enemy No. 1.

I had some Motrin, an anti-inflammatory, and they broke up my pills, pulled down my pants, made me spread my cheeks, and stuck a finger up my ass! I think it was his finger. Hell, I hope it was his finger!

I swear to God, they tore everything apart in every bag I had. They thought they had a goddamned hippie, punk-rock singer, or something. Hell, who knows? Maybe the guy knew who I was. He had an Indian look to him. Maybe he was a Brisco fan. Maybe that was a tomahawk he’d stuck up my ass.

Baba inspired a great deal of loyalty on the part of guys who wrestled for him in All Japan, the group he formed after Japan Pro Wrestling collapsed. I would like to say it was only because of money, but that wasn’t all of it. I often like to think of myself as a good soldier, and I think a lot of Baba’s success came from his ability to select good soldiers. Those soldiers transformed into money guys over a long period of time.

When Inoki formed New Japan, he didn’t try to get the Funks on board. He didn’t reach out for very many established stars. Inoki went at it as very much a loner. When he started up I knew there was no way he’d be anything but successful. He landed the TV slot he needed, and with his talent and ability, there was no question he was going to make it over there. Inoki had talent, and he had a mind for the business. He still continues to be creative in 2005. But it wasn’t a matter of making it at that time. It was a matter of one side preventing the other from finishing the war, because in Japan, with those two organizations it was a 15-year battle that we thought would only end with one of them swallowing the other. Many times they had us in the casket, but didn’t get that last nail in, and vice versa.

The war between Inoki and Baba had effects in the States, as the NWA promoters argued over which side to give NWA backing to. Inoki had the support of Los Angeles promoter Mike LaBell, WWWF promoter Vince Sr. and San Francisco promoter Roy Shire. My father backed Baba, as did NWA president and St. Louis promoter Sam Muchnick, Carolinas promoter Jim Crockett, Portland promoter Don Owen, Oklahoma promoter Leroy McGuirk, Houston promoter Paul Boesch and Georgia’s Jim Barnett. It was almost like the major population centers on the two coasts against the Midwest, but we ended up having the votes, and the NWA went with Baba.

Florida promoter Eddie Graham was almost in the middle, but he was leaning toward Inoki. He and my father had a friendship, and I think if my father wasn’t there, he’d have gone with Inoki totally, because of ties between Hiro Matsuda (one of Florida’s top wrestlers) and Inoki.

Six years later, we watched as our rival tried to bury us by making himself a superstar on a completely different level. Inoki put on a show where he had a boxer-versus-wrestler match with Muhammad Ali. It was a big undertaking, with the match going out over closed-circuit television into arenas nationwide. Local wrestling promoters would show their own cards, then switch to the feed of Ali-Inoki.

I knew that show would have been the coup de grace for us if it had been successful, so I was very happy to see that it wasn’t. It was a true stinkeroo.

We were almost always over as babyfaces in Japan, but the match that really pushed us over the top was a 1977 tag match against The Sheik and Abdullah the Butcher. That match was really hot, and both the Sheik and Abdullah were excellent.

The Sheik truly could convince you he was the meanest bastard in the world. Hell, when he’d come to Amarillo to wrestle and I was a teenager, I’d run like hell from him! He scared me to death. The Sheik was one of the reasons Lubbock became the best-drawing city in Texas for a short period of time.

Years later, when I wrestled The Sheik in Amarillo, those were the only matches where my wife and kids didn’t want to be anywhere near ringside. If he made a move in their direction, they were gone!

The funny thing is, when I’d sit and talk to him in the locker room, he was really a sweet guy, but you’d still be thinking of the insane Sheik, and you’d be scared to death of him, even as he spoke.

The American wrestlers in Japan had always been the big heels, playing off of the very real animosity left over from World War II. When I went over there, the fans would bring up things for wrestlers to sign. The American wrestlers would write insults like, “You look like you could eat salad out of a fruit jar,” or something stupid like that.

I realized these Japanese fans weren’t dumb—they could read the English we were writing. It was really something for them to associate with an American wrestler, and so I signed all the autographs, without the stupid insults. I showed those fans I really cared about them, and they appreciated it.

The fans in Japan always reacted to wrestling differently than the fans here. A lot of it was the way it was presented to them, in the ring and from the commentators. The sense of realism stretched from their training to their booking. It created a domino effect—from the promotion, to the reporters and then onto the people. We all lived, and were all a part of, the suspension of disbelief. If you don’t believe in what you’re doing, the fans won’t.

One time, Bruiser Brody and I were to appear on a Japanese television talk show. When we got there, they were making fun of the business, with one of Baba’s boys sitting right there, laughing right along. We looked at each other and both said pretty much the same thing: “Fuck this shit. We’re getting the hell out of here.”

We weren’t just going to sit there while these guys sat there and made fun of what we did to make our livings, messing with the suspension of disbelief that was such a key to our business. They were going to present us as a couple of phony-baloney wrestlers. We got up and left.

You might think storming off a TV set like that would have hurt us in the public eye, but it did nothing but help.

To this day I think that suspension of disbelief is important. Yes, I know Vince McMahon sat in a courtroom in 1989 and said it was all predetermined, so he wouldn’t have to pay taxes to the athletic commission. I know the wrestlers do interviews on talk shows and in magazines every week, talking about it as entertainment. And I know that if you were to ask the guy next to you if wrestling was fake, he’d say, “Oh, sure, of course.”

But if I were sitting next to the same guy, we’d get to talking and we’d be talking with that suspension of disbelief.

That’s what we wanted to keep with our fans. They knew, in their heart of hearts, that what they were watching was not purely competitive sport. But we maintained that suspension, whether it was in the ring or walking around on the street.