Matey Dave has written:
Back in the early 70s I was working as a bodger at a television newsfilm agency called Visnews which supplied 196 TV stations with news.
Every morning we received from NBC New York a bunch of news stories and am that days items was Gorilla Monson being challenged by none other then Muhammad Ali.
Back in those days Muhammad was known for having a Big Mouth, had not learned to switching his brain on before opening his mouth. Well I thought it was quiet amusing.
Shame Muhammad never worked out the match was faked before climbing into the ring. Silly Billy
This was all to set up the Inoki-Ali fight, which was closed-circuited to several major American territories. The Monsoon angle was 100% a work. The WWWF was actually one of the few promotions to make money on this venture, because they paired it with their hottest match, Bruno Sammartino coming back to face the man who (legitimately, though by accident) broke his neck, Stan Hansen.
The actual Ali-Inoki fight was not a work and Ali's trademark speed was actually never quite the same after Inoki did a number on his legs. The fight, as mentioned above, was a fiasco with a bizarre hodgepodge of rules. The plan was for Ali to get paid a king's ransom to put Inoki over, as several other martial artists like Everett Eddy and Willem Ruska had done or would do. The intended finish was for Inoki to go down off an Ali punch and blade. Ali, going by the rules of boxing, would turn to the ref and ask him to stop the fight on cuts, and with his back turned Inoki would leap up, hit him with his trademark enzuigiri, and pin him. To the Japanese, it would be a gutsy display of fighting spirit on Inoki's part and to Americans it would be the "sneaky" J*p hitting Ali from behind. But late in the game, Ali balked at "doing the job" and the result is the mess that we got.
In hindsight...Ali was taking a hammering from boxing aficionados already for his participation in this, so he probably should have just taken the loss. It wouldn't have hurt him any more than the unwatchable mess of a fight that we got and probably would have been less physical wear and tear.