Looking Back on The Biggest Wrestling Event of All Time — Collision in Korea
Prologue:
Antonio Inoki defeated Ric Flair in the Main Event of Collision in Korea, a jointly produced pay-per-view event by World Championship Wrestling and New Japan Pro Wrestling. The event occurred on April 29, 1995 in Pyongyang, North Korea. The show holds the all time attendance record for a single event. This is part two my examination of how it all came together. If you’ve yet to read part one, you can do so here. Enjoy.
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International travel is many things. But “simple”, “easy”, or “efficient” are three words I’d steer clear of when describing the hassle that is getting yourself from one country to another. It’s a complicated dance with words like “itineraries”, “credence”, or “immunization and authorization records” associated with it.
I mean, don’t misunderstand me. Traveling, seeing new place — it’s one of the greatest joys in life. If you ever have the desire, motivation, and mean$ to do it — you’d be a fool not to seize the opportunity. To entrench yourself in another’s culture. To see the world, live the world, as other sets of people do. It’s one of, if not thee, best methods in comprehending exactly how you live your world. And thus, gaining a more fully developed outlook on who you are, where you are, and where you want to be going.
Your movements, however sedentary or wide-ranging, positive or negatively, shape who you are. Perhaps the greatest modern American traveler, Anthony Bourdain, recommends journeying “as far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food…” Or, if I may add, watch their style of wrestling.
The United States Government, I would think, has nothing against its citizens visiting other countries. They do, however, forbid an American from flying U.S. to North Korea direct.
And that’s true even to this day.
As per usual live events, the logistics of move the roaming carnival that is professional wrestling from one place to another proved to be complicated. In addition, this wasn’t a traditional pro-wrestler rental-car-type-job from Atlanta to New Orleans. This was international flight plans to a country Americans were forbidden to fly to.
With this in mind, Eric Bischoff, contemplating the logistics of getting fifteen of his high-profile employees from the States to NK, decided against consulting the federal government. “I had friends that worked at CNN in the news division,” said Bischoff, “I asked them, flat-out: ‘What will happen if I go over there without permission from the government and bring 15 very high-profile celebrities with me?’”
The answer was what Bischoff wanted to hear. The US Government wasn’t going to charge or arrest a famous citizen. The worst that could happen was he’d be questioned and detained by the State Department. In essence, they’d inflict as much annoyance as they could — a slap on the wrist so that next time the WCW President would think twice about doing something he shouldn’t have done. For the biggest event in the history or professional wrestling… Bischoff could live with a day spent in a concrete room. He proclaimed “If I’m not going to jail, I’m on a plane”.
Ric Flair, similarly to Eric, consulted some folks more informed than he, “I talked to some friends of mine in politics and asked what they thought, and they all thought I was crazy for going.” But that didn’t deter him, neither. At the time, April 1995, Flair was in the backseat of the Main Event scene in WCW. Aligned with Vader, Flair found himself playing second fiddle to the WWF’s biggest star. In hindsight, thinking of what Flair had been for WCW, and where he had managed to take it as the top talent on the roster, one can envision the frustration he felt. Never is the absurdity of what was an intellectually devoid and completely effortless product more apparent than WCW [i]Uncensored[/i]- which featured a Flair dressed in drag, emerging from the audience to interfere in a match between Randy Savage and Avalanche. If that wasn’t enough, Flair also found himself involved in the main event Leather Strap Match between Hulk Hogan and Vader. A match where you could only achieve victory by dragging your opponent and tagging all four ring-posts. A match that… for reasons that escape me, Hogan, Flair, Bischoff, or even Ted Turner can’t explain… ended with Hogan dragging Flair from corner to corner. Flair wasn’t even a participant in the match.
This is how toxic the political climate was in WCW at the time. Ric Flair was the only man willing to do the job. A testament to The Nature Boy’s monumental professionalism (when he’s not stupid drunk at a Meet and Greet) and dedication to Pro Wrestling.
Going to Korea was just another attempt by Flair to boost the WCW name. Another chance to honor Pro Wrestling. Another chance to be a team playe, saying “Back then I was just a team player, and they wanted me to go.”
Meet-up in Nagoya
Since the American Party couldn’t travel straight from the states to North Korea, the entire crew rendezvoused in Nagoya, Central Japan, the birthplace of Ultimo Dragon.
But it wasn’t as simple as purchasing tickets Airline tickets from Nagoya to Pyongyang.
The locked doors of the communist, isolationist Dictatorship of North Korea wasn’t a simple pick. The travellers included Bischoff, Flair, Too Cold Scorpio, Rick and Scott Steiner, Road Warrior Hawk, Scott Norton, Chris Benoit, Sonny Onoo, and a number of Japanese performers.
However — by and by it looked as if things would fall into place, as they seemed to do when Antonio Inoki is involved. Transport was promised by the Japanese government who had set aside political practice and policy to negotiate safe passage for the party. No non-North Korea controlled planes were allowed in Korean airspace, and so, they waited for Korean Military personnel to drop in with a plane to personally escort them into the land of Supreme Leader.
So picture this scene. Eric Bischoff and Ric Flair are sitting on their luggage. These guys are in the middle of Japan, a land that views their wrestling in a much more serious light than many do in the States. Shinya Hashimoto is there, his IWGP Championship (NJPW’s Top Title) lies across his lap. He’s the hero of the nation, still to this day the longest IWGP Champion of all time at 489 days. They’re waiting for the North Korean military to come swoop them up. You can imagine their nerves. Maybe The Steiners told a story to help calm everyone down.
Suddenly, in the distance, comes a cavalcade of cars. It pulls up in front of them. As they seem to do, paparazzi materialize out of nowhere. The flashbulbs are blinding. People are going nuts. The car door opens. And out steps The Louisville Lip. The Greatest of All Time. Mr. Muhammad Ali himself. Shining that bright smile, face lit with joy. He slices through the cameramen, and they part like the Red Sea. Ali points a finger. He makes a B-line to… Scott Norton, who recalls it like this, “He’s pointing at us. He kept saying, ‘I want you! I want you!’ I’m kind of looking around and all of a sudden I’m realizing he’s talking to me. This is the most unbelievable thing.”
Muhammad Ali. Scott Norton mark.
“What are we getting ourselves into?”
Everybody, including Ali and his entourage, boarded the small transport plane embellished with the North Korea flag on its side that arrived for them in Nagoya. And they were off.
“It was an old plane…” said Sonny Onoo, “I distinctly remember looking for my seatbelt and there wasn’t any. People were kind of freaking out.”
What did you expect? A G5 Private Jet?
Norton, more adventurous that I’d ever be, said a number of the entourage ordered beers. He says “It was just a heap. We try to order a beer and they give everybody a different kind of beer and they’re all hot. There’s nothing refrigerated. The flight was terrible.” Oh. And Scott Norton is 375 pounds. And claustrophobic. Steiner reports that the turbulence was awful, and not much was said aside from a couple prayers.
At this point, the only thing that the wrestlers are certain of is that sometime in the next couple of days they’ll be wrestling. Aside from that, it seems, they had no earthly idea what to expect. Never is that more evident than in Too Cold Scorpio’s words here, “We were told to be careful about talking bad about their country because nine times out of 10 the plane is filled with microphones and bugs. That was one of those things like, Oh, my gosh, what are we getting into?”.
The lone source of excitement was Ali himself.
“He would tell Hawk, ‘I want you’ and start to do the same thing he did with me,” says Norton, “Hawk had his little spiel: He’d go, ‘WELL…’ and start cutting a promo on Ali. And Ali would just sit there and laugh like a little kid. ‘Do it again!’ The more Ali laughed and liked it, the more Hawk cut promos on him.”
Let’s just take a break from all of this foreboding of what awaited them in North Korea. Let’s put that to the side. Put aside the legacies, or lack of legacy, these wrestlers have left on the business. Their accomplishments, their failures… brush it aside. Imagine how special this experience right here, having a personal audience of Muhammad Ali, begging you to do your shtick over and over again. Like he’s a fan. Like he’s a kid. Like he’s not one of the baddest dude’s to ever breath. That’s special, man. That’s something you never, ever forget. And a story nobody could ever top. Forever, you’d be the winner at the dinner party when everyone is telling tales. You win. Forever.
Alright back to it.
Bischoff summarized the flight like this,“I had a chance to sit right next to him on the plane and we talked a long time about his memories of professional wrestling and how it affected his career. He literally modeled the Cassius Clay persona after a professional wrestler named Gorgeous George. It was the first time I’d ever heard that story and to hear it directly from him was just fascinating. It was just he and I chatting on a plane. It’s still magic. I get giddy.”
Too Cold Scorpio, adding, “And to actually take a picture with Muhammad Ali meant more to me because my dad, when he was younger he used to spar with Cassius Clay as a semi-pro boxer.”
Through everything, no matter what happened on the trip, this experience had to make it all worth it.
Right?
…right?
A Bird’s Eye View of
North Korean Landscape
“It looked almost like The Walking Dead or something.” That’s what Scott Steiner had to say recently, thinking back on how he saw Korea for the first time, looking out the window of the miniature transport plane that escorted the VIPs of Collision in Korea from Nagoya, Japan to Pyongyang, North Korea.
“There was a skyscraper…” says Sonny Onoo, “Everything was gray. Nothing was painted. And one of the reporters told me, once we landed, that a lot of these buildings had nothing in it. It was just a facade.” This was, history will show, in the early stages of the countries “Arduous March” — a general famine brought on by a poison cocktail of economic mismanagement, natural disasters, and a military first policy. What Onoo and Steiner were seeing was the dawning of an event that would kill roughly 600,000 people. With some estimates claiming up to 3.5 million lives. The faux-skyscrapers came to represent how vital North Korea deemed keeping up with appearance, with money being poured into these lies instead of real infrastructure or crop development. And to be blunt, the fact that these men were flown in at all, and paraded as the main event of such a large and expensive event, is but another offshoot of this pretense of a healthy, vigorous nation. In reality, North Korea was a brittle bone, with rice and corn harvests showing nearly half of the usual returns on production.
Steiner’s Walking Dead comparison, sadly, is a lot more apt than I think he ever even meant. The ground had become barren for a cavalcade of reasons. And it would prove to be a death sentence for hundreds of thousands.
So Bischoff’s summarization seems particularly apt, “It was the most barren, stark, void of any kind of life — plant life, animal life, birds, anything — that I’ve ever seen. I literally thought we were landing on Mars.”
It’s like… we were landing… on Mars.
They certainly were strangers in a strange land. And as they stepped off the planes, perhaps with their faces still smiling from Ali’s antics… they were greeted by North Korean military officials. Who divided them into groups and assigned each member a personal handler. Someone to mind every move they made, or, to be a personal chauffeur throughout the Nation. Someone to show you the sights, but also make sure you didn’t speak ill of Supreme Leader.
This could be a good thing, right? Almost like a security detail.
Not exactly. And it didn’t seem like the Minders were attempting to hide what exactly their purpose was. “And the first thing she did was ask for our passports,” Bischoff says, “…which was their way of saying, [i]We control you.[/i] What good is a passport in North Korea? It’s not like you were gonna run to the embassy with it. You can’t jump on an airline and get out of the country. It’s a worthless piece of paper once you land on their soil in terms of its ability to help you.”
And that was that. They were official guests of Supreme Leader. Guests of the State. And completely helpless for what was to come next. There was forty-eight hours until showtime. And in that time, they did what anyone does as a tourist. They did a little sight seeing.
What could go wrong?
Find out next week, right here, on Reading Between the Ring Ropes.
To Be Continued….
Quotes from Dan Greene of SI and his amazing Oral History of this event.
