PHOTOGRAPH FOR TIME BY AYUMI NAKANISHI

Mugging: Mobbed by fans in a restaurant in Yamagata

The Beast Goes East
	A failed American football player finds fame and fortune in Japan by beating people senseless
	By Jim Frederick | Tokyo

Posted Monday, June 2, 2003; 21:00 HKT
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.

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