Is Mayweather v McGregor for real? Well, it happened the day a Japanese wrestler fought Muhammad Ali

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Antonio Inoki might not be a big name in Britain, but in Japan he is revered as the country's greatest ever professional wrestler. He is also generally considered the man who invented Mixed Martial Arts, and once faced Muhammad Ali in a legendary cross-discipline bout.

Inoki was born in the Japanese port of Yokohama, roughly 50 miles from Tokyo, during the height of the second world war in 1943. He emigrated to Brazil in 1957, where he not only became Brazilian national champion at the shot put and the discus, but also picked up the nickname 'Antonio' which he went by ahead of his birth name Kanji.

At the age of 17, however, he returned to his homeland and became one of the leading lights of Japanese professional wrestling. At 6'3" and 17 stone of pure muscle, Inoki was enormous by the standards of his countrymen at the time, and quickly became the biggest star of the sport which he was a key figure in popularising.

Becoming the king of Japanese wrestling was never enough for Inoki, however, and he struck upon the bright idea of setting up bouts against some of the greatest judoka, karateka and kung fu fighters of his day.

After facing karate legends Everett Eddy and Willie Williams - the latter bout coming to an end when both competitors fell out of the ring in the final round - Inoki took advantage of a rash comment by Ali at a press conference to set up the biggest bout of his life.

"Isn't there any Oriental fighter who will challenge me? I'll give him one million dollars if he beats me," Ali had roared at a reception with a Japanese wrestling chief in 1975.

Inoki jumped at the gauntlet being thrown down, and his backers got together to promise Ali a vast purse of $6 million - or £18 million in today's money - to take part in the bout, and a date of June 26, 1976 was set.

The ticket sales tried hard to justify the payday. Tokyo's Nippon Budokan was a 20,000 seat sell-out despite seats costing as much as £2,000, while 32,000 people bought tickets to watch a live closed-circuit TV showing of the bout in New York's Shea Stadium. 150 other venues across the USA and hundreds more around the world also held similar showings as excitement grew about the undisputed heavyweight world champion taking on the king of oriental fighting.

Even better, it quickly emerged that the fight would not be stage-managed - as many exhibition bouts at the time were - but a real fight. Boxing writer Jim Murphy has claimed that the original plan had been for a spoof fight which involved Ali knocking out the referee and Inoki knocking out Ali while the ref was down, with the ref recovering just in time to declare the Japanese star the winner. Ali apparently refused to lose, despite the huge guaranteed payday, and the bout was on.

Rather than the making of the bout, however, that proved to be its undoing. Excitement grew when the two fighters met a few days beforehand, but Ali was reportedly spooked by a combination of Inoki's pre-fight rhetoric ("I hope he's not taking me lightly because I'm going in fighting. I may well break both his arms") and a trip to watch Inoki training a few days before the bout, a session in which the Japanese floored a succession of sparring partners with devastating flying kicks to the head.

A terrified Ali apparently instructed his camp to insist on a series of new rules, preventing Inoki from grappling with or aiming a kick at the boxer - with Inoki only permitted to kick his opponent so long as he had one knee on the canvas.

That led to a most bizarre spectacle: Ali running backwards round the ring jabbing at thin air, while Inoki scuttled around the ring on his knees aiming ineffective kicks at his opponent's ankles. Inoki was unable to attack his opponent; and the fact that he was almost on the canvas already made it effectively impossible for Ali to punch him, and the boxer spent most of the fight shouting at his opponent to get on his feet and fight like a man.

Ali took seven rounds to throw his first punch, an effort provoked by Inoki finally managing to flip his opponent onto the canvas - at which point he tried to press home his advantage by sitting on the head of perhaps the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time.

In the end, the greatest threat to Ali were the sharp ends of Inoki's shoelaces, which actually opened up a few cuts on the American's legs; Inoki, for his part, faced no danger at all as Ali threw a grand total of six punches in 15 rounds. Inoki was scored a 6-3 winner in the fight, but docked three points for rules infractions making the bout, conveniently, a face-saving draw.

The crowds around the world were furious, calling for refunds; organisers lost money despite the healthy sales, thanks to making Ali and Inoki so rich; but for the fighters, there was no real down side - apart from a nasty infected blood clot in Ali's much-kicked legs, which took a while to heal - and the pair became good friends. Inoki in particular got a huge boost: after the fight he became, and remains, as big a name in Japan as Ali is in America, and his slide-kick-while-on-your-back attack is a staple of playground scraps across Japan.

After the fight, Ali and Isoki's career and life trajectories took very different courses. After the last few years of their careers in the ring both retired - but while Ali was soon afflicted with the Parkinson's disease which has blighted his life, Inoki was lucky enough to get a second spell in the limelight in politics.

He was elected as an MP in Japan's lower house for the now-defunct Sports party in 1989, but he was no mere figurehead. A year later he successfully negotiated with Saddam Hussein the release of several Japanese hostages captured during the first Gulf War.

He lost his seat in 1995, but returned to politics in 2013, and earned a place among Japan's most powerful men with his election to the nation's upper chamber - the equivalent of the US Senate. Not quite as glamorous as fighting the world's most famous sportsman, but not bad for a 70-year-old who could have spent the rest of his days trading on his reputation earned one night in the summer of 1976.