The Fights That Made Antonio Inoki: #1 The Great Antonio
Chapter 4 of my forthcoming book, Kayfabe: A Mostly True History of Professional Wrestling, deals with how notions of kayfabe and suspended disbelief in professional wrestling were reshaped and altered by the advent of Mixed Martial Arts, and the ways that nascent forms of MMA commingled with professional wrestling. Nowhere was that more true than in Japan, the home of "shoot style" wrestling.
One of the defining figures of that chapter is Antonio Inoki - if you don't know who Inoki is, the briefest overviews is that he was the founder of New Japan Pro Wrestling, the man who coined the term "Strong Style", who fought Muhammad Ali in a Boxer vs. Wrestler match, headlined record-breaking shows in North Korea, cosied up to numerous dictators, and once allegedly embezzled huge sums of money in the hope of developing a perpetual motion machine. He is, in short, a complex figure in wrestling's history.
In the book I do, of course, go into far greater detail on Inoki's background, his influence, and what we really mean when we talk about Strong Style. Sufficient for our purposes here is to say that "Strong Style" was an approach toward wrestling that, in theory, eschewed bells and whistles in favour of realistic, plausible techniques. With the intent of popularising Strong Style, and proving its superiority over not just other forms of professional wrestling but all martial arts, Inoki competed against professional wrestlers from all over the world, but also exemplars of other disciplines - the most high profile of which was the aforementioned encounter with Muhammad Ali.
In this series, The Fights That Made Antonio Inoki, I will look at the stories behind some of the fights that stand out from the pack, that I didn't have scope to discuss within the book. These are the fights that cemented Inoki's legacy, that made headlines, or that otherwise merit a closer degree of scrutiny.
Today, we look to 8th December 1977, and Antonio Inoki's bout with The Great Antonio - a match that had a curious afterlife as something of an early viral video, a curio in discussions of "when wrestling goes wrong", and an object of hilarity. I'm here to argue that it was something more, and that The Great Antonio deserves better than to be the perennial butt of the joke.
Before he was “Great”, he was born Anton Baričević in Veli Lošinj (known then as Lussingrande), Croatia (then part of Yugoslavia). Baričević’s stories of his own upbringing cloaked the depressing reality of his near poverty with the tall tales of outlandish feats that would come to be his stock in trade - functionally illiterate throughout his life, and put to physical labour from the age of six, he claimed that by the age of twelve he was able to uproot trees singlehandedly with only the aid of a cable tied around his neck.
Today, Lošinj is known as "the healing island" for its air quality and natural beauty, but in Antonio's youth it was a site of conflict and Nazi occupation, and firmly under the heel of the fascist puppet Ustaše government. At the end of the Second World War a twenty year old Anton found himself as one of nearly 10,000 refugees assigned to the Displaced Persons Camp in Bagnoli, Italy. There, he and countless others suffered from the effects of overcrowding, from a lack of resources, and from the risk of death by starvation or from the quick spread of disease that saw a measles pandemic run through the camp, and many young children succumb to stomach disorders and pneumonia. In his later years, Anton reportedly never spoke of the period of his life that spanned from the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 through to his departure from Bagnoli, a decade later, when he boarded the S.S. Anna Salen on 26th November 1951, bound for Quebec, his name listed as Antonio Barichievich - the spelling he would retain for the rest of his life - his profession listed as a Miner and Shop Assistant; most likely, his most recent work had been as a blacksmith's striker in a copper mine's maintenance shop.
(Many online biographies written about The Great Antonio claimed he arrived in Montreal in either 1945 or 1946, but the ship's manifest for the Anna Salen, and surviving paperwork from the Bagnoli camp supports an arrival date of 1951)
Little other documentation exists for the early life of the future Great Antonio, but CM/1 files held by the Arolsen Archives reveal that Marco Barichievich, born 19/7/1927 in Lussingrande, listed his only living family members as his mother Caterina, and older brother Antonio. The documents held on Marco’s appeal for assistance state that his father was deported by the Nazis in August 1944, and subsequently died in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp; Marco himself, after attempting to flee to Italy, spent three months in an Italian concentration camp on the island of Lipari. It’s a near certainty that the Antonio listed as Marco’s brother was the future Great Antonio, in which case it’s likely that, prior to his time in the refugee camps of Italy, he too was a survivor of the horrors of the Holocaust, which claimed the life of his father. Marco’s appeal to emigrate to Canada, out of fear of returning to Yugoslavia where he claimed his family’s property had been seized by the UDBA, the country’s Communist State Security Service, was declined, and he instead emigrated to New York in 1959. In later life Antonio always claimed to have no family, so it’s doubtful he ever saw his brother or mother again, and may not have even known where Marco ended up.
Upon arriving in Montreal, it didn’t take long for Antonio Barichievich to start turning heads. Working by day as a longshoreman, and in a scrapyard, where he allegedly also lived in a shack made of wood and scrap metal he had built himself, this unusual presence was quietly tolerated by his colleagues in return for Antonio’s ability to lift and carry what would otherwise have been immovably heavy chunks of scrap iron, and his prodigal strength soon began to attract attention outside the confines of his workplace. As admiring members of the public compared the young Antonio to great French-Canadian strongmen of the past, he began to learn and be inspired by the stories of the likes of his contemporaries the Baillargeon Brothers - Paul, Tony, Lionel, Adrien, Jean and Charles, all six of them strongmen, weightlifting champions and successful wrestlers - of “The Canadian Samson” Victor Delamarre, and most of all of Louis Cyr, a legendary touring strongman believed to have been among the strongest men who ever lived, and who in 1901 wrestled the 8’2” Édouard Beaupré, a popular attraction at the Barnum & Bailey Circus, in a match that lasted all of three embarrassing, fumbling minutes.
Stories of these men, who made headlines and fortunes through public feats of strength, appealed to the young Antonio, and pointed the way for this illiterate, penniless refugee to find fame and fortune in his new home. Standing 6’4” and by his mid-20s weighing in the vicinity of 300 lbs, by the mid-1950s he was strong enough, without any formal weight training, to pull buses unaided. With an instinctive eye for publicity, but with a lacklustre understanding of planning and permissions, he entered into local legend by commandeering a bus full of passengers, chaining himself to the front bumper, and dragging it down the street to the protests of the driver, who was already running late on his schedule. In 1952, just one year after arriving in Montreal, Antonio entered into the pages of the Guinness Book of Records for the feat of pulling a 433 ton train for a distance of 19.8 metres. He would set at least one more record in his lifetime, when in 1960 he pulled four city buses, complete with passengers, the length of downtown Montreal’s St. Catherine Street.
It was in the late 1950s that Antonio first took to professional wrestling, at the suggestion of Montreal's legendary Vachon family, who wanted to capitalise on his strongman fame. He was usually billed as The Great Antonio, but on occasion banking on his bodybuilder physique and strong profile as Narcissus, or Sweet Narcissus. Working throughout Canada, Antonio was the consummate gimmick performer - never more than a rudimentary wrestler, he made his name in short, sloppy brawls, in handicap matches and Battle Royals that allowed him to showcase his immense size and incredible strength by defeating multiple opponents at once, or in that most carnivalesque of attractions - wrestling live bears. When other promoters were reluctant to book him, he would promote his own shows, often in small towns in Canada's near and far north, centred around his feats of strength, until they stood up and took notice. In spite of his limitations, Antonio was soon in demand not just in Canada but also all over the United States, where he often teamed with fellow eccentric wildman Pampero Firpo, and wrestled names as big as Bruno Sammartino, Antonino Rocca, Buddy Rogers, and Ricki Starr, and even headlined Madison Square Garden. It’s difficult to ascertain the identities of many of Antonio’s opponents on his self-promoted shows, as the majority of the advertising was built around “Great Antonio vs. 3 Men”, and words to that effect, but the most common throughout the 1960s seem to be Dominique Tombari, billed as a 400 lb European Champion from Italy, the 320 lb Black Marvel, and the 380 lb Paul Bertrand. Much of Antonio’s promotional tactics were built around himself, his feats of strength, and claims that he had drawn “3 ½ million people in Tokyo”, though one advertisement in the Times Herald on 21st September 1965 also promoted the appearance of a wrestler named Mr. Wonder, who had lost both legs in a car accident but still pursued a career in professional wrestling, a special attraction on small regional shows in the early 1960s through to the 1970s, but largely forgotten today. While Antonio's most successful show drew upwards of 1400 fans in Owen Sound in Southern Ontario, those fans weren't impressed by the quality of wrestling on display by the lumbering heavyweights Antonio favoured, and he was never able to reach the same heights again - word must have spread, because when he attempted a promotional comeback the following year, he was allegedly run out of town in Wawa, Ontario, and was unable to secure a license to run wrestling (admittedly, it's unlikely he ever had one in the first place).
Great Antonio’s glory days in wrestling were short-lived, as he developed a reputation for being difficult to work with, for never fully grasping that the cooperative nature of wrestling meant that he should be working to make his opponent look good, and for demanding larger and larger pay-offs, fully believing himself to be the reason for the majority of ticket sales.
One opponent saw something special in The Great Antonio, though, and that was The Great Togo, a pioneering Japanese-American heel, and one of the first wrestlers to play off anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States following World War 2, with a stereotypically “Oriental” gimmick and persona, and a litany of kayfabe “relatives” that grew to include future James Bond villain Harold Sakata (under the name Tosh Togo), and karate legend Mas Oyama. From the late 1950s, Togo began working as a manager for the godfather and perennial champion of Japanese wrestling, Rikidozan, during his appearances in the United States, and as a booking agent for the JWA in Japan. In 1961, Togo brought The Great Antonio to Japan, where he arrived at Haneda Airport to a crowd of hundreds of curious onlookers. Playing the part of an uncivilised wildman to perfection, Antonio growled and roared animalistically, throwing chairs and scattering reporters and fans alike. The Great Antonio, who by this point had grown his hair and beard long and wild, and was quickly expanding from a svelte bodybuilder physique to broad shoulders and an enormous gut that allegedly required him to wear a size 90 suit, had been selected by Togo as the latest foreign monster for Rikidozan to vanquish, and was given all the requisite hype and publicity. He appeared in public being dragged around in chains by Togo, attacked Rikidozan at publicity events, rode the streets of Tokyo in a JWA parade, and, of course, performed his requisite feat of strength, pulling four two-ton city buses. Then, it was time to wrestle. Great Antonio was booked in the JWA in much the same way he had become accustomed to elsewhere - he spent much of the 1961 tour winning three-on-one or four-on-one handicap matches against groups of relatively unimportant Japanese wrestlers, with the occasional singles match almost invariably resulting in either a count-out or a disqualification, and rarely coming out on the losing end. All of that was designed to prepare Antonio for a match with Rikidozan. But Antonio wasn’t the only foreign wrestler in town, and he had started to rub the American contingent the wrong way with his prodigious ego, demands for money, and his insatiable appetite for food and alcohol - apparently, for a man who claimed to eat twenty-five chickens in one sitting, Japanese cuisine left a lot to be desired. With Togo and Rikidozan willing to turn a blind eye to Antonio’s indiscretions, the wrestlers took it upon themselves to get a measure of revenge - a pair of rugged journeymen named Hercules Romero and Ike Eakins used the opportunity of rare singles bookings against Antonio to take out their frustrations on the big man, with Romero stretching him in punishing submission holds, while Eakins snuck in a few legitimate punches before losing his match. Dr Bill Miller and Karl Gotch took things a step further, giving Antonio a beating in the locker room before a match in Okayama, seemingly with the implicit approval of Rikidozan himself. The Great Antonio’s tour of the JWA was cut short, and he was sent home by boat with none of the attendant publicity that greeted his arrival. His eventual match with Rikidozan lasted less than five minutes, and only one fall of an advertised two out of three falls bout, before ending by count out after a wild flurry of brawling that saw Rikidozan take advantage of Antonio with some well-placed, legitimate strikes.
Antonio returned to Canada and the United States, where he continued to take the occasional wrestling booking - including a number of matches teaming with legendary amateur wrestler Danny Hodge, which is one of the stranger odd couple pairings I’ve ever seen - but his star power in the ring was diminishing, and his bookings became less and less frequent, and by the end of the decade he was solely reliant on self-promoted handicap matches, usually against the same two or three opponents. After a brief run wrestling for Stu Hart’s Stampede Wrestling promotion in Calgary in 1971, where Hart allegedly considered putting the North American Heavyweight Championship on Antonio until fans more accustomed to the super-workers that the territory made its name on soundly rejected the big man, but not before he became a firm favourite of a young Bret Hart, he largely abandoned professional wrestling in favour of his earlier publicity seeking exploits. He toured carnivals and circuses with strongman performances, and appeared on numerous television shows, including the Ed Sullivan Show and NBC’s Real People, and claimed to be making enough money to buy a new Lincoln Continental every two years. Life was pretty good for The Great Antonio; though his then-wife, Jannine, suggested otherwise, in a 1971 interview with Montreal's Gazette detailing all the ways that life with Antonio was expensive - the food bill was astronomical, going through upward of ten steaks in a single sitting when "getting his strength up", he needed two seats to accommodate his bulk on any commercial flight, and he routinely broke hotel beds, chairs, and even sinks, accidentally tearing taps from their fittings. It's perhaps because of that long list of broken chairs that Antonio, at one point, became the proud owner of the world's largest rocking chair.
It was that other Antonio, Antonio Inoki, that presaged The Great Antonio’s return to the ring in 1977, at the age of 52 and in the worst shape of his life. Ever desperate for attractions that would draw crowds, and for opponents that would make Inoki look like a conquering Japanese hero, New Japan Pro Wrestling turned to an old Rikidozan foe, and one that even the great Rikidozan himself had never managed to score a decisive win over, having only accomplished a victory via count-out. The story was clear - could Inoki achieve what his mentor Rikidozan could not? In November 1977, The Great Antonio returned to Japan.
The Great Antonio’s two month stint with New Japan Pro Wrestling was remarkably similar to his time with the JWA, and the formula that he stuck to more or less everywhere he worked. He spent the majority of his time in three-on-one, four-on-one, and even five-on-one handicap matches against younger preliminary talent - including future luminary Riki Choshu, a half-Korean wrestling legend who competed in Greco-Roman Wrestling for South Korea at the 1972 Olympics after being turned down by the Japanese team due to his ethnicity - followed by short singles matches with Antonio Inoki and Seiji Sakaguchi, culminating in a disqualification and a no contest, respectively.
On the final night of the tour, The Great Antonio, managed by his friend, the Pakistani wrestler-turned-manager and Montreal mainstay Deepak Massand, faced Antonio Inoki in a rematch. Within seconds, the match turned sour when it became clear that the extremely out of shape Great Antonio refused to sell any of Inoki’s offence, nor did he offer up much in the way of competent wrestling of his own. While the initial no-selling may have been a lacklustre effort by the ageing Antonio to present himself as an “immovable object” for Inoki to overcome, what came next was all too real - after a couple of lumbering blows to the back, Great Antonio perhaps inadvertently catches Inoki with a blow to the back of the neck. Incensed, Inoki repeatedly peppers The Great Antonio with palm strikes to the face, catches a single leg takedown, and repeatedly - legitimately - kicks his opponent square in the face, bloodying him and rendering him unconscious, until the referee steps in and stops the match.
The Great Antonio would never wrestle again, and this match helped to bolster Inoki’s legend as a legitimate fighter in Japan, while in the rest of the world it acquired a second life of notoriety among wrestling tape traders and online fans, even surfacing on YouTube with commentary provided by comedian Bill Burr. While The Great Antonio would go on to appear in the movie Quest For Fire alongside fellow wrestlers “Exotic” Adrian Street and Giant Haystacks, and would continue to push for bigger and bigger publicity stunts, claiming he wanted to pull a Boeing 747, and telling Don King he would box on pay-per-view for a million dollars, he never wrestled again, and by the beginning of the 1980s he was divorced, and fell into a peripatetic existence as a homeless local Montreal legend, forgotten about in the rest of the world, much of his money lost to unscrupulous agents. He saw out the last few years of his life with long, thick dreadlocked hair, which he claimed to have never cut, and which he covered in masking tape and metal, reinforced so that he could use it to hit golf balls or play tug of war. He could be found selling autographs, handmade collages and photos of his exploits, and pencils and other trinkets on the streets of Montreal, using a local Dunkin' Donuts as his base of operations, and he loved to haunt the fringes of the Montreal Film Festival, performing feats of strength in the hope of entertaining the superstars and celebrities that, in his mind, he still counted himself among. He spoke often about fictitious upcoming projects, film appearances or meetings with Hollywood producers, and about his fame in Tokyo, and for years insisted that he would return. Even in his 50s, he was still pulling Montreal buses. He was never without a yellow plastic bag full of photographs and press clippings, which showed him alongside celebrities like Muhammad Ali, Johnny Carson, Liza Minelli and Michael Jackson, and politicians like Bill Clinton and Pierre Trudeau, and he would delight in sharing stories of his past fame and exploits in his own idiosyncratic, multilingual stream of consciousness way, with anyone who expressed an interest. When he passed away aged 77 in 2003 as a legendary eccentric, it came as a shock to many citizens of Montreal to discover just how many of Antonio Barichievich’s wild stories turned out to be true.
For a man who craved the spotlight, he achieved a measure of it in death. Penniless and at a risk of being interred in a pauper's grave, an anonymous donor came forward with a $3000 donation toward the cost of his funeral - ultimately, the funeral home, out of respect for a Montreal local legend, put on what would ordinarily be a $15,000 ceremony for just the price of that $3000 donation. As Antonio's body lay in an open casket, his beard neatly trimmed and hair cut cut short for the first time in decades, it was standing room only - people stood outside, straining to hear, unable to squeeze into the packed ceremony. TV cameras were there, as were all walks of Montreal life - or, as as a 2019 edition of the Gazette put it, "there were goth girls, muscle boys, and sentimental seniors". All human life is here. When the funeral started, Antonio was given a minute long standing ovation.
It’s a sad fact that The Great Antonio is today largely remembered as a comic figure for his match with Inoki, rather than as a survivor of extreme poverty, of childhood trauma, mental illness, and the horrors of Nazism, who found a new life in a new country and crafted a career and a persona that won the admiration of thousands.
He may well be the only man Antonio Inoki ever wrestled whose life was even more remarkable, more unique, and more full of surprises than Inoki's own.
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