Ali was simply playing off his strengths. He was already a poet, creating and reciting lines about his favorite boxers and moments, so it wasn’t as if George inspired him to make rhymes. More to the point, this was brashness recognizing itself in an unadulterated, propped-up form. Ali loved the show business side of pro wrestling, and George woke him up to what was possible.
It was a full house for George and Blassie, about double what Ali and Sabedong managed to produce the following night. Angelo Dundee’s charge watched the man that captivated him go through his usual shtick. George stepped into the ring on a cutout of a red carpet. “Pomp and Circumstance” played over loudspeakers. He tossed out gold-colored bobby pins that were removed from his hair to a hissing, snarling crowd. “Georgie pins,” the 14-karat version, were reserved for friends and well-wishers willing to swear an oath never to confuse regular bobby pins for these. The wrestler’s personal valet, whether lady or gentleman, used a super-sized sterling silver atomizer to douse his corner, the referee, the crowd, and, sometimes, his opponent in the sweet-smelling “Chanel No. 10,” a concoction that existed only in the fanciful world of “Gorgeous” George. His marcelled platinum locks, courtesy of Hollywood’s famous Frank & Joseph Hair Salon, were perfectly suited for the lacy, frilly gowns and sequined satin robes he wore into the ring.
“I don’t really think I’m gorgeous,” the wrestler, a natural brunette, was known to say. “But what’s my opinion against millions?” Once he stepped between the ropes and prepared to put on a show, he delighted in slowly folding his robes, reportedly valued at as much as $2,000 apiece. The slower the fold, he discovered, the more the crowd despised him. Against Blassie, George wore a form-fitting red velvet one. He was absurd, but that was the point. More than a third of his fans were women, and on plenty of occasions George dealt with the threat of having a purse hurled at him. Men were known to stick lit cigars into his calves. They hated him but they watched, especially in Los Angeles, where the Olympic Auditorium was home for “G.G.”
“When he got to the ring, everyone booed,” Muhammad Ali would later tell Dundee, according to John Capouya in his book Gorgeous George: The Outrageous Bad-Boy Wrestler Who Created American Pop Culture. “I looked around and I saw everybody was mad. I was mad! I saw 15,000 people coming to see this man get beat, and his talking did it. And I said, ‘This is a gooood idea.’”
Ali needed no gimmicks to attract or repel people. He was a magnet, always; it just depended on the other side’s polarity. The public’s feelings about the boxer throughout his career were based on tangible things: cockiness born from self-belief and success in real competition; a conversion to Islam; unconventional political views; changing his identity from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali; challenging the U.S. government as a conscientious objector during the war in Vietnam; civil rights activism; and dozens of other important stances he took throughout his career. Ali changed the way fighters approached publicity. Unafraid to consider consequences in the ring and out, Ali spoke like no boxer before him, offering statements on serious topics or clownish things as he wished. The man was much more than a lug, but when he incorporated an over-the-top feel to his language, when he harangued opponents for being ugly or looking like a bear or, in Inoki’s case, a pelican, or when he began bragging about himself, which he hadn’t done much until pro wrestlers changed his perspective, people simply ate it up.
When George Wagner bumped into Ali in Las Vegas, the bright lights had long dimmed on the wrestler’s career. Following promotional wars and match-fixing scandals that emerged out of pro wrestling’s turbulent 1930s, George’s buffoonery was the sort of thing no one watching could be confused about, and the total lack of a sporting attitude actually helped propel him to prominence and rekindled a new kind of interest in pro wrestling in America. Pro wrestling needed to be fake and not many of the boys were less real than “Gorgeous” George.
In a Las Vegas locker room following the “no contest” with Blassie, Greb brought Ali to see George, whose advice served the boxer well. “You got your good looks, a great body, and a lot of people will pay to see somebody shut your big mouth,” George is quoted as saying in Capouya’s book. “So keep on bragging, keep on sassing, and always be outrageous.”
That ability put George in the main event of the first pro wrestling show at Madison Square Garden since a twelveyear ban in New York that was inspired by a historic double cross. The Gold Dust Trio fell apart in 1929 after Mondt walked away following a dispute over control with Billy Sandow’s brother. Mondt learned much about the business and carried on as a major player through the rest of his days. Wrestling, meanwhile, became fragmented, and the lack of a true national champion against an emerging reality of various regional championships confused the public and elicited criticism from the press. One of these champions was Danno O’Mahoney, a showman with little shooting gravitas who operated at the mercy of bookers and hookers. He just couldn’t protect himself, so it seemed everyone tried to snatch the belt from him no matter what any script said.
A wrestler named Dick Shikat took his chance at O’Mahoney, and while some of the sport’s most powerful promoters were aware of what might happen, it was primarily the challenger’s call once they stepped in the ring. Shikat hooked the fish in less than twenty minutes, and all hell broke loose. Burned promoters played games, booking Shikat unbeknownst to him in numerous states until he was barred by many commissions for being a no-show. This prompted a trial in Columbus, Ohio, at which all the major promoters were forced to testify. The lid was blown off wrestling: whatever credibility the business had as a sports venture was gone so far as the public was concerned; the media covered it less and less until it didn’t at all, and a multimillion-dollar national spectacle devolved into a regional program that allowed basically everyone to claim they were a pro wrestling world champion.
Fifteen of these so-called champions existed when George appeared at Madison Square Garden in 1949. He was not among them at the time, though even he held a title once. Two days after George appeared at the Garden on February 22 of that year, the New York Times’ Arthur Daley led his column, “Sports of the Times,” with this: “If Gorgeous George has not killed wrestling in New York for good and for all, the sport (if you pardon the expression) is hardy enough to survive a direct hit by an atomic bomb.” Less than five years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that was quite a statement. Daley was wrong both ways. George wouldn’t kill pro wrestling in New York or anywhere else, and the business wasn’t impenetrable, though, like the proverbial cockroach in a nuclear explosion, it’s a reputed survivor. Despite the weeping of newspaper writers, George’s peak through the mid-1950s brought him much fame and money. As gimmicks go, yes, George’s panache went stale, yet it was captivating enough even at the tawdry end to rope in someone like Ali.
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,