The Beast Goes East — page 3

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."

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