The Fights That Made Antonio Inoki: #2 Roland Bock, and the Secret History of European Shoot Style
Back in July, I posted the first in a limited series of short biographies of key opponents in the career of Antonio Inoki, with a look at The Great Antonio.
Since then, the weekend before I began writing this entry, Antonio Inoki passed away, bringing to a close one of the most singular, unlikely and incomparable careers in professional wrestling. Inoki was unarguably one of the most influential figures in post-war professional wrestling, reshaping its DNA in myriad ways that have filtered through to every corner of the business, and into Mixed Martial Arts and popular culture. Inoki himself is covered extensively in my forthcoming book, so rather than attempt a biography of him here, it seemed a fitting time to return to this series, and to look at another of the fights that made Antonio Inoki.
It was November 25th, 1978, in Stuttgart, Germany that Antonio Inoki and Roland Bock crossed paths, in a match that would briefly make a cult hero of Bock in Japan, and would enter into infamy. Inoki, along with other key NJPW talent, were in Germany for the month-long Catch Europa Tournament, and “Killer Inoki”, as he was advertised, spent much of his German adventure coming out on the winning end of matches or fighting European stalwarts like Otto Wanz and "L'Aristocrat Du Catch" Rene Lasartesse to time limit draws and disqualification finishes. His eventual match with Roland Bock, though, was a different matter entirely.
Bock was the promoter for the entire tour, and was seemingly, one way or another, either aggrieved by Inoki, or intended to save face against a foreign champion in his home promotion and home country, and refused to sell any of Inoki's offence. As the match went on, Bock worked stiffer and stiffer with every strike, out-grappling his opponent at every turn, even forcing the father of NJPW to resort to the infamous crab-walk leg kicks he utilised against Muhammad Ali. While against many opponents, Antonio Inoki would have been able to hold his own, or to force a hold and secure a decision, he was no match for the skills, nor the bulk and terrifying presence of an embittered and bloodied Roland Bock. At the end of a lengthy match, Inoki had been beaten, dragged and thrown around the ring by a superior pure wrestler, and Bock was awarded the win on a judges' decision. Allegedly, Karl Gotch - one of Inoki's mentors - had warned Inoki that he couldn't take Bock if things turned to a shoot.
Inoki was rarely defeated - his only two other singles losses in 1978 coming at the hands of Andre The Giant and WWF Champion Bob Backlund, both by count-out - so a decisive beating at the hands of a relative unknown sent shockwaves through the Japanese wrestling press, particularly when, to the embarrassment of Inoki, the match was aired on Japanese television. Whatever the intended result had been, and whatever ultimately transpired between the two wrestlers, Inoki and NJPW were able to rely on their unmatched ability to make lemonade from life's lemons, and in 1981 they brought Roland Bock to Japan in the hope of building to a hotly anticipated rematch on Antonio Inoki's home soil. By the time he reached Japan, Bock had been slowed down and hampered considerably as the result of injuries suffered in a car accident, and he couldn't match the speed, power or intensity of his work in Europe. He was protected with a series of matches that rarely clocked in at more than five matches, or in tag team situations where his partner could do most of the work - in one instance, teaming with Stan Hansen in perhaps the manliest tag team in recorded history.
Bock wrestled his final recorded match, against Inoki, in 1982, the main event of that year's New Year Super Fight at Korakuen Hall - a card that also featured one of the critically lauded Tiger Mask vs. Dynamite Kid encounters, a WWF Title defence for Bob Backlund against Tatsumi Fujinami, and a brief but compelling catch wrestling exhibition between Yoshiaki Fujiwara and Karl Gotch.
But who was Roland Bock, to be able to boss around and bully Antonio Inoki, to limp his way into a featured NJPW main event, and to become a cult gamer favourite as a massively overpowered character in various iterations of the Fire Pro Wrestling series?
Roland Bock was born into crushing poverty, in 1944, to a backdrop of the bombing raids of Stuttgart. His first home was a badly bomb-damaged apartment with missing walls and windows, his first memory was of his mother throwing herself on top of him during an Allied raid. In the first two years of his life, his home neighbourhood of Feuerbach and nearby districts suffered more than 300 deaths and almost a thousand injuries, many of them foreign forced labourers, the remainder ordinary working class Germans like Roland Bock and his family. The end of war brought no succour; the young Bock was a victim of horrific abuse - his parents divorced after Roland's father attempted to drown him in the family bathtub, his mother routinely beat him with whips and wooden spoons, and his schoolteachers with bamboo canes. Worst of all was Bock's grandfather, a drunken gravedigger who brutally beat his grandson, and locked him in a cold, dark basement, leaving psychological scars that remained well into Bock's adult life.
Like so many children born into the reality of post-war Germany, Roland Bock's personal trauma intertwined with a broader reckoning, a period of emerging blinking into the light after a long national nightmare - looking at the faces of your teachers, doctors, even your parents and grandparents, and wondering what they did during the war, whether they had been members of the Nazi Party, and what horrors had been committed at their hand; and, as a result, what possible moral authority they could lay claim to. That generational tension created masterful works of art, music and cinema, but also countless broken homes, broken hearts, and acts of political extremism and terror. For Roland Bock, it pushed him further into Stuttgart's seedy underbelly, rubbing shoulders with petty criminals, prostitutes and pimps, and with members of the increasingly criminalised and ostracised West German Communist Party. But it also led him to sport, one of the few potential escapes, then as now, from a life of poverty.
The young Roland Bock turned out to be as good with a javelin or on the 100 metre track as he was at fighting on the streets of Stuttgart, but it was a wrestling lesson with his physically abusive Physical Education and Music teacher that revealed his future path. After grappling with fellow students, Bock challenged his teacher to meet him on the mat, and forced him to the floor, compressing his chest until he couldn't breathe. The teacher never laid a hand on Roland Bock again, and Bock had found his calling.
By 1968, Roland Bock was representing West Germany in the Mexico Olympics, but only finished eleventh, blaming his nerves, and being insufficiently prepared for the challenge of wrestling at a far higher altitude than he was used to. Two years later, he crossed the Wall to East Berlin, and won Gold in the 1970 European Wrestling Championships, competing in Greco-Roman in the 100kg+ weight division.
Heralded as the future standard-bearer for German wrestling, Bock's amateur career was impressive, but short-lived. He was forced to miss the 1972 Munich Olympics thanks to a gastrointestinal illness, and when the German Wrestling Association tried to force him to compete regardless, his ensuing tirade on the team bus was enough to get him barred from competition for two years. By missing Munich, Bock missed out on a chance to compete against future AWA super-heavyweight wrestler Chris Taylor.
In truth, while Greco-Roman and freestyle wrestling were all Bock had ever truly excelled at, he was ready to walk away. He resented the treatment of wrestlers by the German Wrestling Association, who he accused of plying him with pills and steroids, and of mistreating their wrestlers, especially compared to the red carpet treatment he witnessed laid out for his counterparts behind the Iron Curtain.
Although Roland Bock had, at the behest of his stepfather - perhaps the one positive influence on his young life - taken an apprenticeship with a local bank, he didn't see himself in a shirt and tie for the rest of his life, and while he had even worked as a P.E. and art teacher during his early amateur wrestling days, he didn't see many career prospects in the ordinary working world, and turned to professional wrestling. It wasn't his first encounter with the sport - in 1964, he had happened across a carnival wrestling booth, with the requisite challenge-all-comers act, but soon realised that the only people being picked to face the carnival wrestler were all audience plants in on the con. He made enough of a fuss when stepping up to be given a shot, and - being an Olympic wrestling prospect - threw the poor sap in a matter of seconds, pocketing his twenty Marks and being told in no uncertain terms to leave.
This time, however, would be a slightly more measured introduction to what in much of West Germany was still largely called "Catch", rather than Berufs Ringkampfe, or Professional Wrestling. That distinction remained important for Roland Bock for the remainder of his career, similar to how many present-day fans make the distinction between “professional wrestling” and the neologism “sports entertainment”. Bock's training was brief, and covered only the absolute basics - he was taught how to bump, and how to run the ropes, two things he would never be particularly keen on doing during his actual career. In his first match, Bock demolished his opponent in a matter of seconds, and was read the riot act by the promoter, who explained that audiences expected a show, and that he needed to drag things out and make them entertaining. In time, Bock would come to learn showmanship, selling, and audience interaction. While - as anyone who's seen the Inoki match can attest - he never grew comfortable cooperating with opponents, or allowing any wrestler to get one over on him that couldn't manage it for real, he grew fascinated by how wrestlers could control an audience and influence their reactions. In time, he became a more conventional professional wrestler.
That is until he was approached by Gustl Kaiser, whose own wrestling career began way back in the early 1930s, but ended abruptly thanks to the outbreak of World War 2 - he went on to far greater success as a promoter, and it was in that capacity that he encountered Roland Bock. Kaiser believed that wrestling should be more legitimate and believable than the farce or "affentheater" (literally, "ape theatre") that he believed professional wrestling had become, and in Bock he found a kindred spirit. Working for Kaiser, Bock downplayed his showmanship and amped up his Greco-Roman and legitimate freestyle skills, and quickly earned the respect of wrestlers and audiences.
In a sign of what was to come against Antonio Inoki, one of Bock's final matches for Kaiser was against George Gordienko, a superb Canadian wrestler forced into a peripatetic, wandering existence of wrestling all over the world after being deported from the United States for disseminating Communist literature. Gordienko was in his late 40s, and in spite of his exile from the US, could boast of a long career with matches against the likes of Lou Thesz, Stu Hart, Billy Robinson, Peter Maivia, World of Sport standout Tibor Szakacs, "Judo" Al Hayes, Canadian strongman Jean Baillargeon, key Antonio Inoki ally Toyonobori, Dusty Rhodes, Andre The Giant, Dory Funk Jr., Jack Brisco and, in what must be a rare claim indeed, both Kendos Nagasaki - competing against Kazuo Sakurada in his version of the gimmick for Stampede Wrestling, and against Peter Thornley under his Japanese "Mr. Guillotine" persona. Little did Gordienko know, however, that his match with Roland Bock would be his last. Both men worked stiff, and gave little room for the other to get in any offense, and as the match wore on, Bock began to feel that the older man had it out for him. In his defence, Bock targeted Gordienko's leg, tying it up in a series of tight submission holds, and inadvertently breaking his ankle, bringing Gordienko's career to an abrupt end.
Visiting his former opponent in hospital, Bock learned that Gustl Kaiser had put Gordienko up to the task of humbling and humiliating him, in the hope that it would bring him into line and make him easier to work with. If anything, it had the opposite effect, and Bock walked out on Kaiser to go it alone.
Roland Bock wanted to promote his own shows, feeling he could do better than the competition, and with himself as the featured star. While Kaiser wanted wrestling to be believable to a point, Bock wanted to take that idea even further, and what he saw from NJPW led him to believe they would be the perfect promotion to partner with. Coming off the back of Antonio Inoki's bout with Muhammad Ali, he would book Inoki in a series of bouts with fighters from other disciplines, before ultimately vanquishing him himself at the tour's climax.
Over the course of Bock's Catch Europa Tournament, Inoki faced a familiar foe in judoka Willem Ruska - who had already wrestled in New Japan - but also wrestled the Austrian second-generation Olympic wrestler Eugen Wiesberger Jr., Bock's fellow 1968 Olympian Wilfried Dietrich, and former European Heavyweight Boxing Champion Karl Mildenberger. The cards were bolstered by other NJPW standouts like Yoshiaki Fujiwara, and by great European touring wrestlers like Mile Zrno, Rene Lasartesse and Pete Roberts. On days that he wasn't facing Antonio Inoki, Willem Ruska faced Austrian Olympic judoka Klaus Wallas in "Judo Jacket" matches.
The mixture of experienced hands and relative newcomers with laudable backgrounds in legitimate combat sports must have appealed to Antonio Inoki, and feels both historically and geographically out of sync with wrestling as a whole - here, in a few shows in Germany, were the suggestions, mere glimmers, of what would grow into the Japanese "shoot style" phenomenon of the 1990s. Could it be that what is widely considered a uniquely Japanese approach to professional wrestling had unrecognised roots laid down in Western Europe?
Roland Bock's vision certainly aligned well with what was to come, and he would not have looked out of place had he been able to wrestle a decade or so later, competing in the likes of the UWFi, Fighting Network RINGS, or PWFG, but there was a germ of shoot style growing in Europe all along. Karl Gotch, the spiritual forebear of NJPW and the entire shoot-fighting concept, was a Belgian who honed his craft in Germany, and was prone to be just as uncooperative as Bock ever was. Akira Maeda's Fighting Network RINGS featured a substantial European roster, mostly from the Netherlands. Chris Dolman, one of the standouts of RINGS' Dutch contingent, was so impressed by the promise of Inoki's Different Styles Fights with Willem Ruska in NJPW that, in 1981, he hosted a full-contact "modern Pankration" tournament in Amsterdam, more than a decade before Pancrase or the UFC, won by a bodyguard of infamous Dutch drug lord Klaas Bruinsma. RINGS would, in time, expand to include a Dutch offshoot. Clearly, there was something in the water. In 1987, Chris Dolman even had a worked shoot match with legendary British strongman and shot putter Geoff Capes!
The notion of “European Shoot Style” may all be something of a fanciful exaggeration, but it's an interesting exercise in the imagined futures that wrestling presents, to think that there was a convergent evolution of shoot-style wrestling and hybrid fighting arts in the European underground just as that ball started rolling in Japan, if only the right promoter could get behind it. Unfortunately, Roland Bock turned out not to be that promoter. While thousands of people came to see the Catch Europa tournament, he had booked venues that would have held thousands more, and the fee for Antonio Inoki was swallowing most of his profits. And what of that match with Inoki? In Bock's retelling, he took just as much of a beating as Inoki, and the judge's decision came about because Inoki was the one refusing to do business, unwilling to lay down for the local promoter.
And why, if Inoki wished to capitalise on the match, did it take almost two years for him to bring Bock to Japan? That one, at least, we can answer. Catch Europa had been a disaster, and Bock was left owing millions of Marks to countless business partners. As a result, he was sentenced to prison for three years, and got out early on good behaviour. And the money he made from the rematch in Japan? Hidden away in a Hong Kong bank account, Bock claimed to have forgotten where it was and, caught out by the taxman, found himself back in the slammer.
Out of prison, Roland Bock returned to promoting wrestling, and attempted to remain the main attraction even though he was physically broken down and barely capable of a conventional wrestling match. So it wouldn't be a conventional wrestling match. Bolstering his cards with bloody brawls and publicity stunts that couldn't be further removed from the shoot-style realism he once espoused - he once staged a car crash between two feuding wrestlers - Roland Bock's headline act would be straight out of the carnival sideshows he once derided; he was going to wrestle a bear (but only after having initially dismissed the idea of wrestling an orangutan). He toured his newfound wrestling bear, somehow leased from Stuttgart Zoo, around circuses and carnivals, and finally secured a booking on ZDF, one of the biggest TV channels in Germany. In the middle of the Sportstudio set, two of Roland Bock's wrestlers - encouraged by Bock to go all out - worked a violent, vicious match that saw one dripping blood all over the studio, to the disgust of the audience, the network, and the hosts; not least of all because of the worry that the scent of blood might drive the bear mad. Bock never got to wrestle the bear on TV, so instead he took to wrestling bulls in the hopes of getting the photos in the newspaper, but audiences were already tiring of his antics.
One of Bock's most loyal wrestlers throughout his promotional career was Wolfgang Saturski, who passed away in July of this year. His career spanned from the '50s to the '80s, a third-generation competitor even in those early days, his grandfather having competed in Germany and Switzerland in the '20s and '30s, before world events ultimately put a stop to that. Perhaps most notably, he competed against Fritz Kley, a former contortionist nicknamed the "Human Eel" who was brought to the United States by that great wrestling eccentric, freak-finder and securer of European talent for the American audience, Jack Pfefer. Saturski earned his keep for Bock when on a tour with Prince Wilhelm Von Homburg.
Well now, there's a name that probably warrants a whole biography of his own one day. Real name Norbert Grupe, "Von Homburg" was a former professional boxer, so fit the bill for Bock's old preference for legitimate athletes, but in all other respects, was an even more volatile personality than Bock himself. Before Grupe began boxing professionally, he had worked as a professional wrestler, teaming with his father Richard first as The Vikings, and then as the cape-clad, monocle-wearing Von Homburg Brothers. It was the 1950s and early '60s; wrestling was replete with evil cartoon Nazis, the Von Erichs, Baron Von Raschke, and Karl Von Hess were all on the scene. But while most were opportunistic gimmicks cashing in on world events - and Von Hess was actually a decorated American WW2 serviceman - the Von Homburgs had a dubious boast that few other wrestlers could match. Unlike most “Nazi” wrestlers who donned the garb for easy heat and a healthy payday, Richard Von Homburg held the dubious distinction of having been an actual concentration camp guard. Norbert Grupe would go on to fleeting fame as a Die Hard henchman and as Viggo The Carpathian in Ghostbusters 2, but for now, he was the alcoholic, criminal son of a former Nazi, and he was proving very difficult for Roland Bock to deal with.
That's where Wolfgang Saturski stepped in. Angered by Grupe - and, frankly, one can imagine any number of reasons why that might be - at the tail end of a difficult tour, Saturski threw the former boxer to the ground, cracking his head open on the shower floor. It was only reluctantly that Roland Bock intervened, preventing Saturski from choking out the man who had been a pain in both of their necks for much of the tour. Grupe disappeared into the St. Pauli night, vowing revenge, while the ring announcer was forced to tell the audience that this particular bout had been decided behind closed doors. Bock posted security around the venue, but Grupe never returned.
Even as wrestling passed him by, Roland Bock had an eye for the outlandish, and any opportunity for self-promotion. He organised topless women's boxing events, selling out 1000 seater arenas, but drawing the understandable ire of women's rights movements all over Germany. He opened restaurants and guesthouses, acted alongside Gerard Depardieu, and transformed a disused refrigerator factory in Ludwigsburg into the "Rockfabrik Ludwigsburg" heavy metal venue, where he promoted gigs by the likes of Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax, Iron Maiden, and even Queen. Following his second stint in prison, he left Germany, buying an old bullring in Gran Canaria to convert into a disco, before settling in Thailand, where he ran a guesthouse, exported local art, and organised open-air film screenings. After contracting SARS, he returned to Germany. In 2021, he talked of promoting a Live Aid-style relief concert for the victims of Coronavirus, but he did so from the small, single bedroom apartment in Stuttgart where he now lives, aged 78, with little to show from his wild and varied career. He now makes a living selling shoe trees. Also in 2021, Bock collaborated with author Andreas Matlé on an authorised biography - in an interview with Die Zeit, Bock expressed hope that the book would be translated into Japanese, so that Antonio Inoki could read it.
In Matlé's book, Bock is an unsympathetic figure. He criticises American wrestling as "stuntmen and artists on speed", "with arms pumped up like Popeye" in comparison to the serious presentation of German wrestling, and mocks how much time American wrestlers spend grunting and shouting into microphones, before a few scant minutes of "Rocky Horror Picture Show wrestling". He is no kinder to modern German wrestling, deriding it as "men with full tattoos and quirky hipster beards" who can do spectacular things with ladders, tables, chairs, and rubbish bins, but would be lost when asked to perform a simple wrestling hold.
While Roland Bock blamed other promoters for the decline in German wrestling, relying too heavily on gimmick matches, fat and aging wrestlers, and a lack of young talent and believable wrestling holds, the majority of those same promoters pointed the finger solely at Roland Bock. It was he who had wrestling kicked off television. They even gave his business model a name - "Blut, Busen und Bär"; Blood, Boobs and Bears. Worse still, for his role in burying the German wrestling business, they nicknamed him, "das Totengräber des Catchens"; the gravedigger of wrestling. For the man who bore the psychological scars of abuse at the hands of his gravedigger grandfather, there could be no worse insult.
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