Quotes of the Day
The 9:08 a.m. bullet train for Yamagata left Tokyo station just minutes
ago, but Bob Sapp has already plowed through several plates of take-away
sushi and a liter of apple juice. Sapp is hungry for a great many
things—fame, money and respect, to name just a few—but often,
very often, the 1.93-m, 170-kg giant simply needs food. "With my
metabolism," he says from across the aisle of the nearly empty
first-class cabin (he buys, and occupies, two seats whenever he
travels), "if I don't eat every few hours, I start feeling kinda
light-headed."
Suitably nourished, Sapp settles in for the three-hour ride to the sleepy northern town where he's scheduled to be the master of ceremonies for a kickboxing match tomorrow and marvels at the sudden turn his life has taken. "A very unique situation, I am in," he says as Tokyo's endless urban sprawl whizzes past. Just two years ago Sapp was living in Atlanta, a National Football League (NFL) washout and failed professional wrestler reduced to answering help-wanted ads for mortuary assistants. "It was $125 per body for moving corpses," he says. "I was, like, 'Yeah, man, that's good money!'"
Today, at age 28, he's far more likely to create corpses than move them, having transformed himself into one of the most fearsome professional fighters on the planet. Even though he is a novice—Sapp admits that his technique is terrible—he has racked up astonishing victories against some of the world's best martial artists. In one memorable two-month stretch last winter, Sapp, a.k.a. The Beast, beat his league's reigning champion to a pulp—twice.
His success in the ring, however, is overshadowed by the pop-culture phenomenon he has become in Japan. Aided by his outsized work ethic, charisma and unapologetically naked ambition, Sapp has leveraged his success in a novelty sport into a level of superstardom rarely experienced by the country's top baseball players, rock musicians or actors. Working with K-1, the Japanese professional fighting league that has Sapp under contract, The Beast has become The Franchise. Since early last year, he has given more than 1,000 interviews, appeared on 200 TV programs and become the pitchman for 15, maybe 20 products (he has a hard time keeping track), including Panasonic televisions and Nissin instant noodles. The man who just a couple of years ago considered $125 per body a princely sum will likely make well in excess of $3 million in 2003.
Some have gone so far as to call him the most famous foreigner to live in Japan since General Douglas MacArthur. "Think of a cross between a young Muhammad Ali and Elvis Presley and you are starting to get it," says Scott Coker, an American fight promoter who works with K-1. Jason Hall, a Seattle-based video-game executive and friend of Sapp, is stunned at how his pal—a nobody in the U.S.—attracts a mob of fans and newspaper reporters wherever he goes in Japan. "I came to Tokyo to bear witness," says Hall. "Bob was always telling me, 'Dude, I am getting really famous over here.' But the reality is overwhelming. It is like nothing I have ever seen."
For that reason, Sapp is relishing this train ride. The solitude here in this protected capsule is a valuable respite from the frenzy that usually surrounds him. "Everybody wants a piece of The Beast," he says as he gently touches his swollen right eye, an injury sustained six days ago during his surprising first-round, knockout loss to Croatian former antiterrorist agent Mirko (Cro Cop) Filipovic. Shaking his head, still more astonished and proud than annoyed by the attention, Sapp says, "I can't go out anymore, I get mobbed. Nobody sees me as a human being. They see me as this cartoon character. When I am eating, people will come up to me and want pictures and autographs. So many that I can't finish dinner. Or sometimes they'll just try to touch me; that's all they want, to touch me. People say I am a K-1 toy. In some ways they are right. I come out of my box, out of my room, and do my thing—doh-ti, doh-ti, doh—and then I go right back in. I can't really do anything normal anymore. It's not like I can go shopping or something."
As if on cue, one of Sapp's handlers approaches, kneels in the aisle before him and presents the star with a pair of sunglasses to conceal his angry eye. "O.K.," the young man says in halting English, "when we come to Yamagata, yes? There will be, um, many TV cameras, O.K.? And so you must do The Beast, O.K., when we get off? Rowr, rowr," he growls, imitating one of Sapp's signature roars. "Taka, we are not going to be there for three hours, man!" Sapp yells in exasperation. "Will you just let me relax for two seconds?" Taka smiles nervously and slinks away. Sapp shakes his head and mutters, "See what I'm talking about?"
Nothing in Sapp's past suggested he would one day become the biggest thing to bulldoze his way through Tokyo since Godzilla. The second of four children, Sapp was born and raised in Colorado by his father, a police officer; his mother left home when he was age 8. Living in a strict household with curfews and plenty of chores, Sapp cultivated an interest in sports, mainly out of boredom. "I wasn't allowed to go to R-rated movies, and I couldn't think of anything else to do," he says. "So I tried every sport there is." A natural athlete, he excelled at football and was recruited by the University of Washington to play defensive guard. Though a knee injury forced him to move to the offensive line, Sapp possessed outstanding agility and flexibility in a position usually populated by laggardly fat boys. Today, Sapp is still remembered in Seattle as the hero of the 1994 "Whammy in Miami," when he fell on his own quarterback's fumble to score the game-deciding touchdown. The defeat brought the University of Miami's legendary 58-game, home field winning streak to an end.
In his senior year, he was named All-Pac-10 and was selected in the third round of the annual college draft by the Chicago Bears. But after Sapp failed to live up to coaches' expectations at training camp, the Bears cut him before the regular season even started, turning him into the year's best trivia question: Who was the NFL's highest-drafted player in 1997 not to make his team? "He just never improved," the Bears' then head coach Dave Wannstadt said to the Chicago Tribune at the time.
Sapp did find a home in 1997. The Minnesota Vikings hired him to be their third-string tackle; he saw action in just three games. The following year, after sitting out the first 10 games of the season, he etched his name on the ignominious sports trivia rolls again, by becoming only the second player in Vikings' history to be suspended for violating the NFL's policy on anabolic steroids and related substances. After serving a four-game suspension, the team axed him.
Sapp denies he ever took steroids, calling the test he failed "a false positive" caused by a testosterone-increasing dietary supplement he was taking. Moreover, he says he might have had a real NFL career if he were better managed—the Vikings, for example, tried to convert him to play another position without giving him time to adjust. Sapp says, "I fell through the cracks." He tried for two more years to make a team until Achilles tendinitis sidelined him for good.
TV ratings for the November 2000 fight were good, but even that seemed like a one-off, a dead end. Not only that, the finances of WCW were shaky and the league's prospects were in doubt. That's when going back to school, selling insurance, becoming a security guard, even moving dead bodies, all started looking like realistic options for Sapp. "I was sitting on my couch, playing a lot of Playstation then," he says.
Then the phone rang. A man on the line said there was someone in Japan named Master Ishii who had seen the Toughman fight and was very impressed. Master Ishii had a kickboxing league of his own in Japan, the man said, and would very much like to meet Sapp. He was sending a limo to take him to the airport the next morning. "I was like, Master who?" laughs Sapp. "I almost didn't pack. There was no way a car was coming to get me in the morning. But sure enough, there it was."
Sapp didn't know it at the time, but Master Kazuyoshi Ishii was something of a celebrity in Japan, a legend in martial-arts circles and an ambitious entrepreneur. The former karate-school owner had created K-1 nearly a decade earlier. It brought together fighters from various disciplines such as karate, Taekwondo, kung fu and kickboxing to compete against one another to determine the baddest of the bad.
From the beginning, Ishii emphasized spectator-friendliness. He made the rules easy to understand and the fighting acceptably violent. All types of hand and foot strikes are allowed, though two successive knee strikes are forbidden and head butts and elbow blows are outlawed entirely. And he kept the matches short (three to five rounds of three minutes each), which ensures that combatants are always on the offensive, looking for the spectacular knockouts that fans crave. With that simple formula, Ishii created a thrilling spectacle that has blossomed into the most popular of the country's fighting and wrestling leagues. During the 2002 K-1 world championship last December, 74,500 fans packed the Tokyo Dome (a stadium record) and another 30 million tuned in to watch on Fuji TV.
What makes K-1 a hit is its remarkable ability to attract a crossover audience. It appeals to a traditional boxing crowd thirsting for something faster and edgier. It also attracts those who love the spectacle of professional wrestling—the indoor fireworks and booming heavy metal—without the carefully scripted fakery. As 2001 began, however, Ishii was on the hunt for new faces and fresh talent. That's when he came upon a videotape of Sapp, and found The Beast exactly what K-1 needed—the perfect combination of show-biz savvy and physical ferocity.
When Sapp entered the ring on April 28 last year (after six months of training) to take on Norihisa Yamamoto, he was like nothing that any mixed-martial-arts competitor or fan had seen before. Most fighters are slim, fast, tightly wound bundles of sinew weighing about 100 kilos. Sapp is a broad but surprisingly agile mountain of muscle, an irresistible force who relies on power (and a weight advantage often in the neighborhood of 70 kilos) to overwhelm better, more technically proficient fighters. To see him hunt down and pulverize his prey can be a terrifying sight. He once knocked an opponent out in 11 seconds.
For his debut bout, 10 million viewers tuned in to watch Sapp dispatch Yamamoto with a technical knockout in the first round. After Sapp's next match, against a middle-bracket karate fighter named Tsuyoshi Nakasako a month later, the legend of The Beast really took off. During the first round Sapp jumped on Nakasako's head, prompting Nakasako's cornerman to leap into the ring and go after Sapp. Both corners emptied. A street brawl ensued. Once the fracas was broken up, Sapp was disqualified for an illegal maneuver. The Tokyo press went bonkers. He became a household name almost overnight.
With its triumphant views from the 52nd floor of Tokyo's Park Hyatt, the New York Grill is where the famous, the foreign and the powerful come to eat. Sapp is wearing a pale yellow golf shirt, blue denim shorts and white, size-17 Nike basketball shoes. The manager comes over to his table to welcome him, to thank him so very, very much for coming. Sapp orders a porterhouse steak, asparagus and mashed potatoes, then launches into the tale of how, in the wake of the Nakasako incident, he shook off his bad-boy image and became the subject of unbridled adoration.
Even the most popular members of K-1 have tended to be stone-faced Europeans, he explains, who see themselves as fighters and nothing more. Sapp, on the other hand, considers himself an entertainer first and a fighter second. As soon as he could, Sapp started making TV appearances, showing up on any talk or variety shows that would have him. "With The Beast, you have this big, scary, beat-you-up, loudmouth guy," Sapp says, popping a hunk of meat into his mouth. "I am their nightmare. But then they look at me in other contexts, on TV or whatever, and they can see that I am acting. They see that I don't bask in the glory of hurting people in the ring. And they see that I am just having fun clowning around and they say, 'Hey, this guy is a big jokester.'"
Indeed, in contrast to the barbarian he must become in the ring, Sapp on TV is smart and soft-spoken, a natural comedian with more silly-putty facial expressions than Jim Carrey and a desperate willingness to do anything for a laugh. "Sapp seems to have learned showmanship and how to please fans well from his experience in the NFL," says Masahide Takahashi, the producer of a variety show called Chikara Awasete Go Go Go! on which Sapp frequently appears. "And even though he doesn't speak Japanese, he understands the atmosphere and tempo of our show really well."
His appeal to ordinary Japanese is harder to explain. "The Japanese are not aliens, you know," Sapp says, giving it a try. "Some things are funny in any culture." Sapp the entertainer drapes himself in feather boas, dances goofily to Madonna tunes, runs in terror from spiders and talks dreamily about his love for his cat, Trinity. Fans eat it up. Some ad campaigns he has done would be considered taboo in the U.S. because of their racial overtones. To promote a wrestling match, he was shown eating bananas in front of the gorilla cages at a local zoo, while an ad for Panasonic TVs has him dressed like a hipster pimp. You don't need to be a French poststructuralist to realize that much of The Beast's appeal in Japan is not rooted in the universalism of slapstick humor but in the fact that he is a curious and foreign specimen—a seemingly terrifying yet ultimately harmless embodiment of the Other.
His jovial harmlessness makes him an attractive pitchman. He hawks everything from fabric softener to gummi candy. This endears him to a new set of fans who don't care (or even know) that he's a kickboxer. "I've got a fan base that runs from four years old to 99," says Sapp, tucking into an assortment of pastries. This is true: in Yamagata, Mayumi Takeda waits with her five-year-old daughter Yumiko at Sapp's hotel for an autograph. As Yumiko sings the Puccho candy jingle—"Bob-bu Sapp-u, Bob-bu Sapp-u"—over and over again, her mother says, "She didn't even know that he was a fighter until a few days ago. She just thought he was this big funny man who made her laugh."
Sapp's appeal, in turn, has had a dramatic impact on K-1's fortunes. Marketers, TV executives and advertisers talk frequently about what they call "the Sapp effect." Kevin Musikanth, who trains league fighter Mike Bernardo, observes, "K-1 has been growing in popularity for the past few years, but in 2002 it just absolutely exploded. Is it because of Bob? Yeah, it's because of Bob." At last December's K-1 world championship, for example, the first in which Sapp appeared, ratings averaged 28.4% compared with 20.1% in 2001.
K-1 has loaded up Sapp's schedule with so many commitments, promotions and TV shows that he often has only a few hours left for sleeping, eating and getting fit enough to fight. "We never get the opportunity to train him properly," laments Maurice Smith, a fighter, friend and one of Sapp's trainers. "But you can see why they are doing it. He sells even when he loses. Bob's a business, he's where the money is."
Limelight lover that he is, Sapp doesn't feel particularly exploited. In fact, his primary worry about K-1 is that it is not exploiting him enough. He's talking business over dinner at Capricciosa, a chain Italian restaurant in what passes for downtown Yamagata, downing pasta with cream sauce, sautéed vegetables, pizza and seafood soup. There's a crowd, at least 100 strong, outside the window watching him eat. Every once in a while he looks up and mugs for his fans, clenching his fist and giving them one of his menacing stage faces. The spectators go nuts and 20 or more mobile-phone cameras flash simultaneously.
Back to business: Hollywood studios are calling with movie parts now, he says. The NFL—sweet comeuppance, the NFL!—has just made him its spokesman in Japan. This may be his shot at the American big time, and he worries that K-1 is not up to the challenge. He has a 15-fight commitment left with the league, an obligation that could take years to fulfill, and he's worried that it's blowing deals left and right. "I don't wanna think about the amount of money we have left on the table. We did 10 commercials in four or five months. It could have been 10 times that," he says. "I mean, K-1 looks like a big organization but they've only got 10 people! They don't even have an answering machine!" he roars. "Can you believe it? They are just not set up for this type of stuff." Indeed, he claims bungled opportunities have cost K-1 as much as $10 million in lost revenue.
Certainly K-1 has its problems, thanks to a shocking (and almost comically inept) tax-evasion scandal and trial involving the league's previous public face, founder Master Ishii. On May 7, Ishii and his former accountant, Sanshi Terakubo, pleaded guilty to evading $2.5 million in corporate income taxes by underreporting some $7.5 million in earnings between 1996 and 2000. Ishii initially denied all allegations, telling prosecutors that he had signed a contract for a project to invite Mike Tyson to Japan in 1999 but had to pay $8.3 million in penalties when the deal fell through. Unfortunately for Ishii, the cops determined that the Tyson story was fiction. A bogus contract that Ishii hastily drew up bore K-1's current mailing address, even though the agreement was dated and purportedly signed long before the company had moved there. Although Sapp frequently claims he is hanging with K-1 for the long haul, he just as frequently sounds as if he's looking for a way out. He often professes his love for Japan and his desire to stay, yet he bought a $500,000 home in Seattle last fall. "What's gonna happen to K-1 when Bob is gone?" says Sapp. "That's the biggest question."
Dinner's over and it's time to leave. It's going to be a challenge to break through the horde of onlookers dying to get a piece of The Beast. Sapp and co. are on their feet, trying to figure out an escape route. Seeing this, the fans outside have started to rush through the doors. They are shouting, snapping pictures, clamoring for autographs, pressing in simply to touch Sapp. A tide of human bodies is flooding in, and even Sapp—all 170 kilograms of him—is being buffeted. Chad Bannon, a fledgling fighter sitting at the next table, yells, "Bob, it's like you're the Beatles! Hey, you should record a CD!" The joke, of course, is that Sapp himself realized this months ago. "Already done it, my man," he shouts back. "Debuted on the charts at No. 28!" And with that, the crowd pushes Sapp out the door.
The next week, The Beast's bullet train to fame will head to the U.S. for a month or two. Sapp wants to have his injured eye checked out, attend a K-1 fight in Las Vegas and meet with various Hollywood-types in Los Angeles. Now that he's tasted success, he's ravenous for more—and afraid that this sweet dish will be snatched away from him. He is still dumbstruck by his sudden wealth and notoriety, sure. But he also knows that the Japanese public is notoriously fickle.
That's why there's no time to rest, why he is already planning his next
move and the moves after that. He's aware that the odds of turning his
popularity in a fringe entertainment into a real and lasting
career—in Japan or in the U.S.—are daunting. Guys such as
bodybuilder turned movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger and pro wrestler
turned Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura are overwhelming exceptions. But
that doesn't mean he isn't going to try. On the trip back to Tokyo, the
day after the fight in Yamagata, Sapp says, "I am just trying to make
the most of every opportunity, you know? Just trying not to screw this
up." Then he looks out the window and utters a bemused sentence that is
one of his most frequent observations these days: "This has been a wild,
wild ride." Bob Sapp is intent on making it last as long as possible.
- Jim Frederick/Tokyo
- Bob Sapp, fighter and franchise extraordinaire, hits the big time