The Beast Goes East — page 2

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.

By mid-2000, Sapp was living in Atlanta, fat, broke and depressed—but he had a plan. Atlanta is the hometown of World Championship Wrestling (WCW), and Sapp figured that with his size and athleticism he might make it in the show biz that is the American pro wrestling game. He created a stage persona for himself: The Beast—a Tarzan-speak, basso profundo man-child with a villainous laugh. He played the league's farm circuits for a while. Though he never rose much in the rankings, the exposure attracted the attention of the FX cable network, which was looking for someone to box ex-Chicago Bear William (The Refrigerator) Perry—someone better known for his freak-show girth than his playing ability—in a three-round celebrity amateur boxing match called the Toughman competition. Though Sapp had no boxing experience, he was willing, and knocked out the flabby 37-year-old Perry in the second round.

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.

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