Smart promoters played up these conflicts, which is why the August 1963 issue of Rogue magazine, an early competitor to Playboy, is still spoken of today. Jim Beck’s article “The Judo Bums” threw down a well-worn martial arts gauntlet by offering a $1,000 prize to any judoka who could beat a boxer. Kenpo karate legend Ed Parker recruited “Judo” Gene LeBell to answer the challenge. “You’re the most sadistic bastard I know,” Parker told LeBell at the judo man’s hardcore Hollywood dojo. The prospect of walking away with $1,000 was incentive enough for LeBell, who didn’t need selling or history lessons to accept Ed Parker’s request.
LeBell fit the bill, for sure. Famous for many things, including handing out thousands of patches to people he strangled cold upon request, LeBell will say that Ed “Strangler” Lewis, Lou Thesz, and Karl Gotch—his “hooker” mentors (pro wrestling speak for legitimately skilled tough guys)—were meaner than he ever was.
“These guys were fanatics,” he said.
The trio represented grappling at its purest, highest class, and each made it a point to prove themselves against top strikers and wrestlers of their day. The historic implications of a grappler fighting a boxer were certainly not lost on LeBell, and a chance to prove himself while defending the teachings of the men who showed him the way was an incredible opportunity.
LeBell’s experience convinced him that competent martial artists should, under pressure, be able to employ a wide variety of striking and grappling techniques. He was ahead of the curve because combining styles wasn’t in vogue while Asian martial arts proliferated in popular culture after World War II. Also, among the folks who trained, the vast majority didn’t fight. That’s why, when LeBell answered Beck’s call, the event poster promised “something new for sport fans.” As a point of clarification, it was new in that spectators likely hadn’t seen anything like it before, well, at least not for a generation or two.
In the aftermath of the Great War, boxer-grappler and mixed-style skirmishes became popular again, though not to the degree they were when jiu-jitsu competitors travelled from Japan to share their knowledge with the world at the start of the 1900s. The judo practiced by UFC bantamweight superstar Ronda Rousey in the Octagon is derived from interactions with folks like LeBell, who studied based on the techniques brought to America by the four “guardians of judo” at the behest of their teacher, judo founder Kano Jigorō, to make Japanese martial arts accessible to the wider world. Kanō’s philosophy was that judo benefits everyone. Mitsuyo Maeda was one of Kanō’s judo acolytes, and in late 1904 he operated out of a gym in New York, taking on exhibitions in colleges up and down the East Coast. Maeda was ambitious, and when throwing strongmen and football players bored him, he searched out more difficult challengers. In America those came mostly from professional wrestlers, who were open enough to incorporate some of the unique skills people like Maeda offered up.
Men clad in suits may have lined Parisian streets and filled Parisian theaters to catch a mixed-fighting fad as it swept across the continent. Big crowds may have reveled in watching the world’s best fighters across any style make front-page news as far away as Hawaii and Australia. But there were periods in which these types of clashes fell out of favor, and by 1963 boxing was the combat sport worth caring about in America. Wrestling and grappling, for all its rich history, had fallen on harder times after scandals trivialized it. Proven lessons were largely forgotten by the public, and wrestling became the thing people didn’t talk about.
That was soon to change.
Thirteen years before Ali stepped in the ring to fight Inoki, a generation ahead of Art Jimmerson’s contest with Royce Gracie at UFC 1, and nearly five decades before James Toney and Randy Couture tangled in the Octagon, the first boxer-grappler showdown broadcast live on American television—LeBell vs. Savage—represented a key moment in the large arc of these events.
At first LeBell angled for the fight to take place in Los Angeles, where for almost forty years his notoriously tough mother, Aileen Eaton, promoted many of the biggest boxing and pro wrestling events on the West Coast at the Olympic Auditorium. Eaton thrived in the promotion business, but she never had the opportunity to promote a mixed-rules bout because the California State Athletic Commission wasn’t granted the authority to regulate this kind of handto-hand combat until 2006. The commission classified the boxer-grappler contest as an outlawed duel, so the fighters headed instead to Beck’s backyard, Salt Lake City, Utah, which placed no restrictions on that sort of thing. Agreeing to five three-minute rounds, the bout was a jacket match, meaning LeBell would wear his judo uniform and the boxer was required to wear a gi top with a belt, and, if he preferred, boxing trunks, boxing shoes, and light speed-bag gloves. The winner would be determined when a fighter was counted out for ten seconds or incapacitated, and the referee was the sole judge of that.
When LeBell arrived in Utah, he was surprised to learn that instead of facing Beck under these circumstances, Milo Savage would stand opposite him on fight night. LeBell was familiar with the former middleweight contender, having seen Savage box in person once at the Legion Auditorium in Hollywood, Calif. After taking his first twenty-five fights in the Pacific Northwest, Savage headed down the coast with a record of fifteen wins, six losses, and four draws. From October 1947 to February 1949, fourteen of Savage’s next fifteen bouts occurred in Los Angeles, and throughout his twenty-five-year career he made twenty-nine appearances in the City of Angels. As of the mid-1950s, Savage had matured into a ranked fighter and LeBell was experiencing the peak of his athletic career, earning the reputation of America’s best judoka following consecutive Amateur Athletic Union National Judo Championships titles in 1954 and 1955.
The night before the spectacle in Salt Lake City, LeBell, then thirty-one, made an appearance on local television. The host, whom LeBell felt was pro-Savage, implied that chokes don’t work and followed up with a grand mistake when he uttered, “show me.” LeBell snatched him, choked him out, and dropped him on his head. The newsman didn’t even receive a patch. “Judo” Gene picked up the microphone and offered a rant that his pro wrestling buddies back in L.A. would have been proud of. “Our commentator went to sleep,” he said. “I guess he’s quitting. Now it’s the Gene LeBell Show.” LeBell peered into the camera and promised to do the same to the thirty-nine-year-old Savage, now a crafty journeyman prone to trick punches and clowning around in the ring. “Come to the arena tomorrow night and watch me annihilate, mutilate, and assassinate your local hero because one martial artist can beat any ten boxers.” The exotic nature of the contest combined with LeBell’s antics, honed around grand characters in the combat sports worlds, produced a buzzed standing-room-only pro-boxing crowd of around 1,500 at the Fairgrounds Coliseum on a chilly Monday night, December 2, 1963.
Inside LeBell’s locker room, final rules were hammered out for the five-round contest. Savage’s people agreed to let LeBell grapple as he pleased, but he couldn’t strike at all. To confirm what he could or couldn’t do, LeBell pulled out a picture-heavy instructional book he penned that sold for $3.95 via mail order in Black Belt magazine.
“Can I pick him up over my head like this?” he wondered, pointing to a photo in The Handbook of Judo. Savage’s handlers were amused. “Can I choke him?” asked LeBell, placing his hands over his throat in “a comical way.” An L.A.-based lawyer who travelled with LeBell to Utah, Dewey Lawes Falcone, told him to quit screwing around. But “Judo” Gene couldn’t help himself. He was always the type to push buttons. “They’re laughing,” he remembered.