#I was livid when I saw the Japanese voice cast

[romance-incubomp3]

fucking mario fans in japan getting fucking mamoru miyano as fucking mario. fuckers. im so fucking jealous.

[turtlepated]

The Turnings of Fire

HellboyxOC fic

Since Tumblr is being a butt and makes me dig back through my whole blog, I’m not gonna repost chapters 1 and 2 right now. I may go back tomorrow and repost all three together in case anybody wants to catch back up (since Tumblr also won’t let me link the previous chapters...)

Hopefully chapter 4 will be quickly forthcoming, I’ve actually already started it and I have a general idea for what happens. Anyway, here’s chapter 3! 

@accioturtur

----

Chapter 3: 

“Uhhhh,” Hellboy said eloquently, at a loss for words as his eyes swept up and down the strange woman standing feet from him. She wore work gloves, a flashlight in one hand, and her jacket was zipped up almost all the way to her neck. She must be sweltering, he thought. “Hi?” he offered with an awkward wave of his flesh hand. Without a word in response she began to back away from him, turning on her heel and marching quickly the way she’d come. “Hey, hey!” he called after her, his feet carrying him forward in long strides. “What do you think you’re doing here? You’re gonna get yourself killed! Hey, stop!”  

Far from stopping, however, the woman began to run. Hellboy could understand why, after all there was a seven-foot-tall man with red skin and sawed-off horns chasing her and yelling, but he really didn’t have the luxury of a more genteel approach. He had to catch her and get her outside before something bad happened. “Hellboy, what is going on?” asked Daimio in his ear. “There’s somebody else in the tunnel,” he answered, speeding up to keep her in sight as they rounded another bend in the passageway. The lantern threw chaotic dancing shadows on the walls as it bounced in time with his heavy footfalls. This was taking too long and it was getting too conspicuous. Wyrms could be territorial and aggressive at the best of times, but a pregnant female would not take kindly to all this ruckus. The babies might be small enough to handle, but a fully-grown adult could be up to twenty feet long and weigh hundreds of pounds. Not something Hellboy looked forward to tussling with, but he was more concerned about the human woman who’d be even less of a match for an angry wyrm. 

“Would you just wait a second?! I’m not gonna hurt ya!”  

Another curve, and he lost sight of her. He cursed under his breath and he sped up, wondering how she could have gotten so far ahead of him so fast that he couldn’t even see the glow of her flashlight anymore. He was so intent upon catching up to her that he nearly ran her over. She was stooped on the ground, her hands outstretched as though searching for something. Her head jerked back to look at him as he came charging around the curve, her eyes wide and round as she let out a yelp of surprise and ducked. Hellboy swore again and backpedaled ineffectively, ending up taking two gigantic steps sort of over and around her to avoid a painful collision. 

“Je-SUS!” he gasped out, staggering to an ungainly stop before turning to face her. “Why the hell are you on the floor?” The bottom of his long trench coat had swept over the top of her and mussed her hair into almost comical disarray, his tail accidentally whacking her in the head. “Accidentally”. She reached up with one hand and snatched the handkerchief down to her neck, her face livid and her breathing just as elevated as his after the near trampling. “I tripped and dropped my flashlight!” she snapped, glaring daggers at him. “I didn’t know you were gonna come barreling down the tunnel like a Japanese bullet train!”  

“I was trying to stop you!” he barked back. “You need to get outta here, pronto! It’s dangerous, you could die!” He sighed harshly, glancing up and down the tunnel as he realized that if her flashlight was gone, there was no way she could get back out of the tunnels on her own: he’d have to go with her and then come back. “Son of a bitch,” he growled to himself. This ‘easy-peasy’ mission was proving to be much more of a pain in the ass than he had anticipated. “Ah-ha!” cheered the strange woman and he looked around to see that she’d found her light. Kneeling on the ground she clicked it again and again, shaking it, smacking it with an open palm, but all to no avail. “Crap… must’ve broken the bulb…” Hellboy let his head fall back, groaning in exasperation, the sound echoing up and down the corridor. “Come on, get up,” he said. “I’ll take you back, but we gotta be fast.” 

She whipped around again, scowling up at him from the ground. “What? No, I’m not leaving.” He clenched his teeth, growing more irate by the second as he stepped very deliberately closer and glowered down the length of his nose at her, casting extreme emphasis on his much larger frame and build. “That was not a request,” he said lowly, his voice rumbling from deep in his chest. “One way or another, you are leaving; either on your own two feet or, so help me, over my damn shoulder.” Hellboy saw her hand tighten around the handle of her flashlight as she rose smoothly and slowly to her feet, unflinching as she stared him down. Or rather up. 

Before she could open her mouth to deliver whatever retort she’d prepared, his LED lantern winked out without a sound, leaving them both standing in complete and impenetrable blackness. Hellboy sighed loudly. Sure, he thought, fuming quietly. Why not? “Alllllllllllliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice…..” he called on the radio. “What is it?” she replied, her voice crackling slightly as though the signal were weakening. “Did you find whoever it is you saw?” “Yes I did, but I can’t do anything about it since I can’t see my hand in front of my own face,” Hellboy replied. “The lantern just went out.” 

“Oh, bollocks,” Alice answered. Not a promising response. “The batteries must be dead! Sorry, HB.” “Fantastic,” he said. “Do you have a cell phone?” asked the woman, and he jumped slightly, having almost forgotten how close she was to him. “I don’t think Amazon delivers underground.” 

He couldn’t see her expression but he could practically feel the irritation coming off her like heat. “Not for the phone, smartass, for the light,” she said crossly. Grumbling to himself, Hellboy withdrew his phone from an interior pocket, feeling for the power button in the dark. “For all the good it’ll do,” he said pessimistically. “It’s not gonna last us very long.” They were bathed in faint, cool light as the home screen opened and he navigated to the flashlight feature. “It doesn’t need to,” replied the woman. “I’ve got an idea.” He watched her flip her own defunct flashlight around and unscrew the bottom of the cylinder, getting the gist of where she was going as she dumped the batteries out into her palm. 

“Give me your light,” she said, and he handed it to her. She turned it over and over for a moment or two, looking for the battery compartment. “Keep your fingers crossed,” she added, sliding the plastic cover back. Hellboy saw her grin triumphantly in the beam of light from his phone. “C’s. We’re back in business.” She quickly replaced his batteries with her own and the tunnel was again illuminated with bright, LED light. “We’ll just have to share,” she said matter-of-factly, shrugging a backpack off one shoulder and stowing the now useless flashlight inside it. 

“Um, no? Absolutely not,” Hellboy protested, simultaneously frustrated and a little bit impressed by her total disregard for the peril she was in. “Did you hear anything I’ve been saying? Lemme repeat, and I’ll go slow and use small words for you: danger? Not safe? Excruciating death?”  The woman rolled her eyes as she set her backpack securely over both shoulders again. “Are you always this cheerful?” 

He scowled darkly at her, snatching the lantern back with his stone hand. “Hey, I’ll still carry you outta here like a sack of potatoes,” he threatened. “How did you even get down here?” She frowned in annoyance, reaching for the light as she answered, “I found an opening and I went down it. Probably the same way you did.” Hellboy raised his arm, holding the lantern out of her reach. “Also, how are you not dying of hypoxia? This tunnel’s full of toxic gas, even I can’t breathe this air without a respirator; so how’s a human with a cops-and-robbers hanky even conscious right now?” 

“Well, you know how camels can store water in their humps and survive without drinking for months at a time?” she replied with a sardonic smile, straining to reach the lantern. “It’s like that, but with air.” He exhaled slowly through his nose, his jaw tightening impatiently at her flippant dismissal as she pulled at his elbow, trying to bring it low enough to get ahold of the lantern. “Look, miss, I got a job to do. In my line of work, humans don’t last all that long so you need to leave,” he said, appealing once again to her seemingly miniscule sense of self-preservation. “I’ll help you get back to the surface, but we gotta go now.” 

“Give me back my batteries, then,” she demanded, hands fisted on her hips. Hellboy scoffed incredulously. “What? Why? Your flashlight’s busted, they won’t do you any good!” “Your lantern’s dead without them, so they won’t do you any good!” she fired right back. “Either we can work together, or we can both go stumbling around in the dark.” What was the deal with this crazy chick? Hellboy could only stare at her, the aggravation draining out of him to be replaced by amused befuddlement. She hadn’t budged an inch when he loomed over her, and he knew for a fact that he could look downright terrifying even when he wasn’t trying. She acted utterly unconcerned about the mortal danger he had warned her about, repeatedly. 

“What are you doing down here at all? What’s the attraction?” he asked, hoping for but not expecting a straight answer as he transferred the lantern to his other hand and held it behind his back, turning in place as she tried to circle him. She looked just as frustrated as he felt, strands of her hair fallen loose from the clip at the back of her head and fluttering down into her face before she blew them harshly away. He had to admire her dogged determination, she kept trying to get the lantern back from him no matter which way he held it but finally she seemed to have had enough. 

“To find whatever’s tear-assing around down here and stop it!” she burst out at last. “Before it lets the fire spread! Same reason you’re here, right?” That certainly piqued his curiosity. There were, of course, other organizations in the world in the same vein as the BPRD, so it was very possible that someone else was aware of the infestation under Centralia. It was equally possible that other paranormal monitoring entities would send an agent out to assess the situation. However, any of the organizations Hellboy could think of would definitely not send a human agent underground into a toxic environment with a handkerchief and a cheap backpack for equipment. “How do you know about that?” he asked, all the ire and acerbic edge gone from his voice, genuinely intrigued. “Who are you?” 

She huffed angrily at him, dropping her arms to her sides and fixing him with a piercing glare. “No one,” she bit out and he chuckled. “No one? Are you Arya Stark?” Grinning now he held up his right index finger and tilted his head playfully to one side, mimicking the pose of Game of Thrones’ famed fictional fencing instructor. “What do we say to the god of death?” he teased. If he got her riled up enough, she might let something slip. “Are we about done?” she seethed, deadpan and uncooperative as ever. Hellboy sighed again, weighing his options before coming to a begrudging compromise. “All right, look,” he began. “Against my better judgement, I’ll let ya tag along, but on two conditions: number one, you have to do what I say, because whatever I tell you to do, like run or hide or get behind me, is to make sure you get outta here alive. Capiche?” She sullenly crossed her arms over her chest and surveyed him with a look of deep misgiving, but finally gave a curt nod. “And number two?” 

“Tell me what I’m ‘sposed to call you,” he said. “If you agreed to the first one, the second one’s even easier. Just give me a name.” She didn’t appear to concur, however, and he watched her chew her lip thoughtfully. He was tempted to point out that they were wasting a lot of time, but they’d finally gotten at least a little bit of traction and he didn’t want to say something to piss her off and make her clam back up again. At length, with a deep sigh, she extended her right hand to him with an expression of resignation. “Claire,” she told him at last, and he gently took her right hand in his own and shook it once. “There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” he drawled with a smirk that made her roll her eyes. “I’m Hellboy.” 

“Yeah, I kinda figured that,” Claire replied with a cynical half-smile of her own. “You’re sort of famous. There’s even a comic book series about you.” He chuckled and ducked his head, making a show of scratching his sideburn so he wouldn’t have to look at her. “Stardom doesn’t suit me,” he admitted. “Hard enough going out looking like this.” Claire’s smile widened a bit at his weak joke. “Saw you on TV not long ago, in fact. Something about bear attacks in Canada?” Hellboy nodded, remembering the assignment of the previous month. “Oh yeah, volkolak. Shapeshifter; right pissy old bastard who liked to dress in a bearskin that turned him into a monster so he could hunt and eat his neighbors.” 

Claire hummed absently then squared her shoulders like an eager soldier. “Well let’s get to work,” she said, turning to head back the way they’d come. “Our best bet’s gonna be that room back there with the other tunnels connecting to it. This is the way I came, there’s nothing down there.” Hellboy stood where he was a beat longer, shaking his head after her. “Hellboy, do you copy?” asked Daimio. “Yeah?” Hellboy answered, still bemusedly wondering where Claire thought she was going when he still had the only light. “Do you have a visual on the subject?” 

He snickered to himself. “More or less. Says her name’s Claire and she’s lookin’ for the wyrms, too. That’s all I’ve got for now, but she’s sticking with me for the time being. Somethin’s up, but I dunno what yet. I’ll keep you posted.” With that he followed after her. 

They pressed onward in near silence, returning to the hub and choosing a path that seemed to delve further down into the ground. Hellboy made a few valiant stabs at friendly conversation, but Claire consistently gave vague or monosyllabic answers and made it very clear she wasn’t up to sharing. As they descended deeper and closer to the burning coal seams the temperature continued to rise. Hellboy checked his IR thermometer, which now read in the triple digits. He spared a glance at Claire, who had replaced her handkerchief over her nose and mouth but appeared otherwise unbothered by the growing heat. 

“Y’know you’re hardly the first spookchaser I’ve ever dealt with,” he told her, trying again to engage her in a way that might reveal more about her. Seemingly despite herself, she looked at him with furrowed brows. “The first what?” Hellboy shrugged. “Like stormchasers, only with monsters and ghosts and stuff. They show up every now and then on our missions. Most get scared off pretty quick, some aren’t that lucky. And one or two we’ve actually hired at the BPRD.” 

“That so?” Claire replied, casual as if they were talking about the weather. “Are you offering me a job?” “Might be,” he said, watching her out of the corner of his eye. “We’ll have to see how the interview goes.” Even with half her face covered he could tell that he’d made her smile. “I’m flattered,” she laughed. “But I already have a job.” “Oh yeah? What do you do?” 

Claire scoffed then and eyed him with exaggerated suspicion. “Are we really still on the ‘getting to know you’ part of the mission?” He grinned, but the next moment he was on high alert as the ground and walls around them began to gently tremble. Loose dirt started drizzling down on them from the ceiling, quickly intensifying into a cascade while the trembling grew to full on quaking. The tunnel was collapsing. “Move!” Hellboy bellowed, grabbing Claire by the top of her backpack and all but throwing her ahead of him. They sprinted down the passage, the ground lurching under their feet as they dodged falling debris and struggled to see through the dense rain of earth. Hellboy’s heart leapt into his throat as the entire ceiling began to give in to gravity and crash down on top of them with a thunderous clamor, but at the same moment the floor of the tunnel split open beneath them and they found themselves falling.

For several interminably long moments the world was a disorienting whirl of deafening noise, pitch darkness and blinding light blurring together like a yin-yang as the lantern slipped from his grip and tumbled away. After an unforgiving impact with hard ground that knocked the wind out of him and set his ears to ringing, Hellboy took a beat to assess the situation. Everything hurt, which was a pretty good sign that he was still alive. It had gotten quieter, which meant that for now at least the tunnel collapse had stopped. Also, it was significantly hotter now than it had been only minutes before. With a reasonable amount of pained grunting, Hellboy raised himself up onto his hands and knees to see where they’d landed, half buried in loose rock and dirt from the cave in. “Oh boy…”

They had dropped down into what was clearly a former passage of the abandoned coal mine. He could still see timber support beams along the walls and ceiling. The remains of electrical lighting and cables still hung from one side of the tunnel, though there’d been no power to them in decades. There was also very visible steam rising from the ground and the walls around them. The fire must be very close now. Unearthing the lantern, Hellboy searched his immediate surroundings for his unexpected sidekick. “Claire?” he called, setting the lantern down to begin sifting through the remains of the collapsed tunnel with both hands. “Claire, you okay?”

Dirt and rocks shifted as something moved beneath them, and next minute Claire was heaving herself upright, sitting in the rubble and sputtering on dirt and grit. She patted her hands against her jacket, sending clouds of particles swirling into the air. “Awesome,” she coughed, turning to look up at him. She tugged off her handkerchief and mopped at the grayish brown dust coating her face and her head and everything else. “You don’t think they’ll charge extra for that ride, do you?” she asked with a grin. He chuckled at the cheesy battle humor, checking his IR thermometer and the gas detector. The temperature had climbed substantially following their plummet into the mine tunnel. In addition, the levels of toxic gasses in the air had skyrocketed. Hellboy eyed Claire’s dirty handkerchief grimly as she tied it back in place, glancing up at the hole in the ceiling they had fallen through. Somehow or another he had to get them back up there. It wasn’t exactly oxygen-rich, but it would be better than down here, where he fully expected his human companion to keel over any second.

Just as he was wondering how in the Hell he was going to pull that off an ominous cracking sounded from somewhere under his feet and steam started rising around them in alarmingly thick columns. He and Claire both froze in place, sharing a wide-eyed glance. “Ahhhh dammit,” he grumbled as the ground began to crack and the fallen dirt to seep through the fractures like sand in an hourglass. “Go, go!!” Claire spun and started to run but they didn’t make it far before they were falling again. Hellboy reached out and grabbed Claire’s wrist in his left hand, his stone fingers scrabbling against the side of the crevice opening up beneath them in search of a handhold. A blast of scorching air shot up through the fissure, hot enough to make even Hellboy wince. He finally found purchase, grunting in pain as momentum slammed him against the rough, rocky side of the crevasse. “Oh my God!” Claire exclaimed in horror, reaching up to grasp his wrist with her free hand. Gritting his teeth, Hellboy glanced down into the chasm below them.

Like something right out of the Book of Revelations, stretching fifty yards across and deeper than he could even see was a pit of fire. 

[yahoo-cagewriter-blog]

How Muhammad Ali’s ugliest fight paved the way for Mayweather-McGregor

Muhammad Ali fights Antonio Inoki. (AP)

Muhammad Ali hoisted himself up on the top rope of the ring, bellowing over the referee’s head. The Greatest of All Time was fumbling his way through his ugliest fight ever. Below him, on the canvas, his opponent, Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki, scuttled like a crab … a crab that was delivering kick after vicious kick to Ali’s legs. Ali, incensed, could do no more than yell at the empty air between him. Ali was fighting a completely unfamiliar opponent, and for the first time in the ring, he had absolutely no idea what to do. When Floyd Mayweather Jr. steps into the ring against MMA legend-in-the-making Conor McGregor on Aug. 26, he won’t be breaking new combat-sports ground. For as long as there’s been boxing, there have been boxing champions who have wanted to challenge masters of other combat disciplines—none more celebrated than The Greatest himself.

Cast your mind back to the summer of 1976, an era when red-white-and-blue patriotism was running nearly as high as gas prices. Ali was at the absolute peak of his celebrity, if not his boxing prowess. He was less than a year removed from the Thrilla in Manila, where he and Joe Frazier literally nearly beat each other to death.

“In the summer of 1976, Muhammad Ali might [have been] the most famous man on the planet. He was clearly the most famous athlete in America,” said Josh Gross, author of the book “Ali vs. Inoki.” “Maybe the Pope was more known than Ali at this stage.”

Around this time, Japanese fight promoters came to Ali’s management team with an intriguing offer: $6.1 million—the equivalent of about $26 million today—to fight Antonio Inoki, one of Japan’s premier wrestlers. Japan would be putting up all the money, and Ali would simply show up and … well, those details would be worked out later.

Wrestling hadn’t yet achieved the headlock on public consciousness it would hold in the 1980s. The World Wrestling Federation was still in its infancy; in those days, wrestlers would still stomp the canvas at the same time as they threw a punch to sell the effect. Ali, a longtime wrestling mark and always a hyper-competitive fighter—plus a guy in need of money—threw himself into the Inoki idea with his typical style: arrogant bravado and challenge-the-planet lip.

Inoki, meanwhile, wasn’t quite as well-known globally as Ali, but in Japan, he’d already achieved legend status inside the ring. “He was The Rock, Hulk Hogan, and Stone Cold Steve Austin wrapped up in one,” Gross said. “Except while those guys were showmen—and I’m not saying they’re not tough guys—but [Inoki] was a genuinely skilled competitor … Inoki was very well versed in real fighting, real submissions. He knew how to tie someone up and strangle them.”

“I couldn’t figure how they were going to do this,” Bob Arum, at that time Ali’s promoter, told Yahoo Sports. “So I went to see Vince McMahon [Sr.], who I’d worked with previously on Evil Knievel Snake River Canyon jump.” The fact that Knievel’s attempt at jumping the Snake River ended in sputtering failure didn’t deter Arum or McMahon, who worked up a scenario for the “fight.”

As McMahon imagined it, Ali would pound on Inoki, who would carry a small razor blade into the ring and slice his own eyebrows. Blood would be everywhere, and Ali would plead with the referee to stop the fight. While Ali had his back to Inoki, the Japanese wrestler would leap on him, pin him, and the fight would be over. Ali would get to his feet and bellow, “This is just like Pearl Harbor!” and cash a fat check, political sensitivity be damned.

“Ali would play the good Samaritan with this guy’s blood pouring down from his face,” Arum said. “He would lose, but he would lose with honor. Ali was fine with that.”

Podcast: How Ali’s worst fight paved the way for Mayweather-McGregor

Subscribe to Grandstanding • iTunes • Stitcher • Soundcloud

To promote the bout, Ali began a series of promotions for the Inoki fight that put him in wrestling hotbeds. On June 1, 1976, Ali “just happened” to be ringside during a Pennsylvania wrestling match that featured the 400-pound Gorilla Monsoon. Ali and Monsoon exchanged words, and then Ali stripped out of his suit coat and shirt to climb into the ring.

It didn’t go well.

Monsoon grabbed Ali, hoisted him onto his shoulders like a toddler, and helicoptered Ali five times before throwing him to the canvas. Ali staggered back to his corner, then rolled out through the ropes, trying to maintain his dignity. It was all a work, a show to give Ali a cameo in the world of professional wrestling. But it ended up being a bad omen, one that everyone ignored.

Monsoon and Ali had practiced the moves backstage, with Monsoon showing Ali how to fall and land directly on his back to minimize the impact. But on his way down, Ali flinched, and landed on his hip. (You’d do at least that much if you’d been thrown from seven feet in the air.) So Ali wasn’t entirely faking when he staggered out of the ring.

“Oh Christ,” said longtime Ali confidant Gene Kilroy, seeing Ali grimace in pain, “we’re gonna ruin this thing.” And by “this thing,” he meant everything from Ali’s next fight to Ali’s career.

Soon afterward, Ali and crew flew over to Japan, and that’s where all the planning went off the rails. Inoki clearly wanted to use this fight as a venue to demonstrate the validity of wrestling as a discipline, not a show, so somewhere along the line, everyone decided that the script was out the window and a real fight was on. The question now: how to set up a fight between two combatants with completely different skill sets?

Negotiations took two weeks, lasting all the way up to the day of the fight. Since this kind of fight had never been held before, no one knew exactly what was, and wasn’t, allowable or desirable. No bites, obviously, and no groin punches. Ali’s people managed to get Inoki’s fabled grappling banned, a key concession that left Inoki griping that he’d been handcuffed.

(With that in mind, it’s worth noting that the Mayweather-McGregor fight is being held entirely on Mayweather’s turf, which is why Floyd is the overwhelming favorite. If McGregor was permitted to take Floyd to the ground, we’d see a whole different odds structure, but dancing to Mayweather’s tune means McGregor is all but doomed before the opening bell even rings.)

While negotiations dragged on, promotional hype spread. The fight was simulcast all over the country, most notably at Shea Stadium. There, 33,000 fans watched an “undercard” wrestler-boxer matchup: Andre the Giant vs. Chuck Wepner, a match where the Giant slung the boxer several rows deep into the seats. That match would become the inspiration for the Hulk Hogan-Rocky brawl in “Rocky III,” and it would be by far the most entertaining battle Shea Stadium would see that night.

Just hours before the fight, Ali’s boxing brain trust nailed down rules they assumed would ensure the most favorable possible outcome for their man. “They didn’t know about checking tape over there,” Kilroy told Yahoo Sports. “We could have put brass knuckles in there and they wouldn’t have known the difference.” (They didn’t put brass knuckles in Ali’s gloves, but they did use the lighter eight-ounce gloves—the same weight Mayweather and McGregor will be using—rather than the standard 10-ounce ones, meaning punches would land harder.)

But ignorance flowed both ways. When setting the rules for the fight, Ali’s team made a crucial mistake: they didn’t outlaw kicks. Ali’s trainer Angelo Dundee left kicking on the table, and Kilroy says he knew that was a mistake from the start.

“Angelo,” he recalls saying, “that was stupid.”

“Well, if [Inoki] goes to kick,” Dundee replied, “Ali will walk over and knock him out.”

It didn’t happen that way. As soon as the match began, Inoki dropped to the mat, flat on his back. There he stayed for the rest of the match, executing a cunning—if not particularly photogenic—strategy. And it came closer than anyone might have realized to working. Inoki’s back-flop, while graceless, kept him out of range of Ali’s punches … but Ali wasn’t out of range of Inoki’s boots.

“Get up, you yellow bastard!” Ali bellowed. “You’re fighting on the ground! You’re like a woman!” (Remember: this was 1976.)

But Inoki just pounded away on Ali’s legs, kicking Ali more than 100 times with wrestling boots. By the end of the fight, Ali’s left leg, his front in his fight stance, had swollen to nearly twice the size of his right. Not only that, a loose grommet loop on Inoki’s boot had cut Ali’s leg, shredding him with tiny slices.

Ali, enraged, began taking chances, thinking he was quick enough to elude Inoki’s reach. He wasn’t. In the sixth round, Ali dove inward, looking to pound Inoki. Instead, Inoki grasped him and wrapped him up in a clutch that could have spelled doom had Ali not thrown a leg over the rope, forcing the referee to separate the two men.

And there it went, on for the rest of the fight, Ali poking and prodding and Inoki scuttling and kicking. “It was cute for the first round,” Arum said, “but then every round was the same s—.”

The “fight,” such as it was, ended in a draw, with the two judges splitting on their verdicts and referee Gene LeBell scoring it an even 71-71. Not a real fight, not a satisfying scripted outcome, not a decisive winner … Ali-Inoki failed on all counts, and fans across the world were livid.

Even now, four decades later, Arum’s voice drips with disgust at the very idea of the fight. “It was a disaster. It was an embarrassment,” Arum said. “It was something not to be remembered fondly.”

The problem, as he saw it, was that the very idea of a fight across disciplines was flawed at its core. Ali and Inoki brought two completely different sets of skills to the ring, meaning showmanship—not competition—was the only option. When that was out, so too was any chance of an interesting spectacle. “There was no [expletive] way you could make it work unless both parties could rehearse,” he said. “You couldn’t do it with any semblance of reality as an actual contest.”

In the hours after the fight, Ali’s legs were so badly mauled that there was concern about him flying. He’d recover enough to fight Ken Norton for the third time later that year, but he was never the same.

“This was the fight where he lost his legs,” Gross says. “He would never knock anyone down for the rest of his career … This was a pivotal moment in his physical demise.” Ali would go on to fight for another five years; he died last year as one of the most important figures of the 20th century.

Ali and Inoki later became friends, and Inoki would attend one of Ali’s weddings. Inoki, for his part, parlayed his wrestling fame into political capital, serving in Japan’s House of Councilors over the course of several decades. He remains active in Japanese politics to this day.

History hasn’t been kind to the Ali-Inoki fight; those that remember it at all write it off as one of Ali’s worst, an Elvis-in-Vegas excess best forgotten. If anything, Ali-Inoki I-and-only might have lit fires under people who should have known better, football players like Too Tall Jones and Mark Gastineau who assumed their athleticism in one sport would translate easily to another.

“People who don’t realize the difference between [combat] sports are delusional,” Arum said. “It’s like taking LeBron James and putting him in a ring with [current heavyweight champion] Anthony Joshua. He’d get killed. Not because he’s not a great athlete, but he has no training at all in boxing.”

On the other hand, Gross contends that the fight, in a strange way, legitimized wrestling as both sport and entertainment, paving the way not only for the exponential growth of the WWF (later WWE), but in another decade, the birth and growth of MMA. The thrill of seeing two fighters with different skill sets didn’t fade, and MMA bouts standardized rules to let every combatant know what could be coming.

“Even in this terrible fight,” Gross said, “the fact that these two styles came together was inspirational enough for a lot of people to say, ‘this is intriguing. I want to know about this.’”

Plus, there’s this fascinating question: what if Inoki had won? What if his kicks had managed to fell Ali like a chopped redwood? What if Ali had dived at Inoki in the middle of the canvas and couldn’t reach the ropes? What if Inoki had carried through on the Japanese promoters’ threats to snap one of Ali’s limbs? What then?

“I think MMA would have burst onto the scene much more quickly than it did,” Gross said. “I think Ali’s public persona would have taken a hit; I think boxing would have taken a hit. It’s one of the reasons why boxing people really despised this contest, because they saw some risk …. [If Inoki had won] I think you would have seen a lot of fighters gravitate more toward mixed-style fighting and away from boxing.”

Which brings us to one notable figure intrigued by the what-if angle: Conor McGregor. He noted after a public early-August workout that he’s spent time studying the Ali-Inoki fight, the same way he’s studied combat across decades. Neither man played the other’s game, McGregor noted, but that sixth round, when Inoki had hold of Ali, gave us a hint of what could have been.

“If that moment in time was let go for five more seconds, 10 seconds,” McGregor said, “Inoki would have wrapped around his neck or his arm or a limb, and the whole face of the combat world would have changed right there and then.”

You can see why that idea might appeal to McGregor. One twist, one miss, and the farce becomes legend. ____ Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports and the author of EARNHARDT NATION, on sale now at Amazon or wherever books are sold. Contact him at jay.busbee@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter or on Facebook.

More Mayweather-McGregor coverage from Yahoo Sports: • A more measured Mayweather regrets gay slur • Mayweather vows to make McGregor pay for racist remarks • How 5 years, fate led to Mayweather-McGregor superfight • How Mayweather-McGregor could be a betting ‘disaster’