Gene LeBell, regarded as America’s first
martial arts sensation before parlaying his athleticism into a career as a professional wrestler, actor and stuntman, has died at the age of 89, his family confirmed.
LeBell, who had been in declining health for the past eight months, died in his sleep at home in Sherman Oaks, with his loving wife of years, Midge, by his side on Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2022.
“He was larger than life, and he was so kind. If you said you liked his shirt, he would take it off and give it to you,” Midge LeBell said. “I am devastated. It’s very difficult. I have been with him for so many years. I don’t know how you go on without him. I am so used to him being there. He’s not hurting anymore. He was a wonderful man and was so good to so many. There is nothing bad you can really say about him. He was a good person, so I am sure he is doing well where he is at now. I am sure he is happy now. I want to thank everybody in the world who has said such wonderful things about him and all the prayers that were said for him. I am thanking them for both he and I.”
Midge and Gene were married twice. The second time, they said their vows on a motorcycle as Gene performed a wheelie with Midge holding on, followed close behind by the minister on a four-wheeler. The couple wore matching red, white, and blue wedding attire and Midge wore flowers in her helmet.
“Judo Gene” LeBell was revered for his strength and tenacity and often referred to as “the toughest man alive.” Beneath the rugged demeanor, the “Godfather of Grappling” was also known for his warmth and generosity. For years, he taught martial arts in Southern California.
Born Ivan Gene LeBell on Oct. 9, 1932, in Los Angeles, LeBell grew up at the famed Olympic Auditorium, where his mother, Aileen Eaton, was a boxing and wrestling promoter from 1942 to 1980. Eaton was the first woman inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
“Fighters practically raised the young LeBell at the Main Street Gym where he started going at 7 years old,” Midge LeBell said. He once sparred with legendary boxer Sugar Ray Robinson as a teenager. He also trained with wrestlers Lou Thesz, and Karl Gotch while growing up.
It’s no wonder LeBell flocked to combat sports and martial arts.
In 1954 and ’55, LeBell won the AAU National Judo Championships heavyweight and overall divisions. He then embarked on his professional wrestling career, implementing his years of judo and catch wrestling and helping popularize the holds and submission attempts that remain in the sports entertainment industry to this day.
LeBell famously wore a pink gi and would invite anybody to take a turn on the mat with him if they had anything to say about it. The pink uniform originated from a trip to Japan where a pair of red socks, or shorts, made their way into the laundry, turning his white uniform to pink. With only one uniform, he wore it and beat the competition. The newspaper the following day had a story saying the American radish wins. LeBell thought it was because he had red hair before someone told him it was because of his pink attire. He wore the pink gi from then on.
LeBell was a pioneer in the sport of MMA before there was MMA. One of the first martial artists to train in wrestling, judo, boxing, karate, and other combat arts, he blended the techniques into an efficient fighting style. In 1963, in Salt Lake City, LeBell took on boxer Milo Savage the fifth-ranked light heavyweight boxer in the world. Kenpo Master Ed Parker asked LeBell to take on the fighter after a challenge was issued stating that a boxer could easily beat any martial artist. LeBell wore a gi for the fight, and Savage had his body greased to make it difficult for LeBell to grab him. LeBell was victorious, choking out the boxer in the fourth round, sparking a riot in the auditorium.
Highly decorated in judo and jiu-jitsu, LeBell also began teaching grappling to notable names: Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Benny “the Jet” Urquidez, Roddy Piper, Bill “Superfoot” Wallace, Gokor Chivichyan, Steve McQueen, George Reeves, Robert Duvall, John Saxon and many more.
LeBell’s top student, Gokor Chivichyan, started training with him at the age of 16 and now runs the Hayastan MMA Academy in North Hollywood. “I look at Gene as my second father. He had a big heart. He was a good man. We are going to miss him a lot,” Chivichyan said of his teacher.
In 2006, LeBell even welcomed an unsuspecting Daily News reporter to the Hayastan Academy for a lesson that went about as you would think when LeBell started it with his common non-serious threat: “Alright, you bums! Let’s get working, or I’ll burn your houses down.”
In the 1960s, LeBell began acting and doing stunts, including in three movies with Elvis Presley. On the set of “The Green Hornet,” LeBell struck up a friendship with martial arts icon Bruce Lee, and they began cross-training, with LeBell showing Lee his pain-inflicting holds, locks and throws, and Lee demonstrating his lightning-quick kicks and strikes. Lee and LeBell had a rocky start to their friendship after LeBell hoisted Lee on his back in a fireman’s carry without Lee’s cooperation. Eventually, LeBell put Lee down, and the pair became friends.
LeBell’s students included AnnMaria De Mars, the first American to ever win a gold medal at the World Judo Championships in 1984, and De Mars’ daughter, Ronda Rousey, who became the first American woman to earn an Olympic medal in judo by winning bronze at the 2008 Beijing Olympics before embarking on her illustrious MMA career.
“Very, very few people believed in me at the very beginning of my MMA career, you could literally count them on one hand. He was one of the people trying to convince my mom to let me do it, but he was also privately trying to convince me not to do it. He totally supported me, he was telling my mom to let me do it, and he was telling me, ‘I’ve won every R-E-A-L fight and never made a penny and lost every R-E-E-L fight and I am comfortably retired, think about that kid.’ He said he would help me out with this MMA stuff, but he was always trying to get me stunt jobs and to meet the right people in the stunt works so I would have somewhere to go after fighting. He not only tried to help me get into fighting, but he also helped me think about life afterward before anybody would even entertain the thought. He was already trying to get me out and convince me that I am more than just a fighter and capable of so much more,” Rousey said of her longtime friend and mentor, LeBell.
Rousey’s husband, Travis Browne, a former top-ranked UFC heavyweight fighter, met LeBell before meeting his future wife. LeBell gave Browne one of the coveted patches that he always had on hand to make a fan smile. Browne put a patch featuring Rousey and Lebell in his gym bag, and there it remained for five years before he met, fell in love with and married Rousey. “Uncle Gene let him (Browne) know all about me before we met. He put me over to my future husband before we ever met,” Rousey said.
LeBell also helped Rousey secure her nickname “Rowdy” from his former black belt student Rowdy Roddy Piper. “He told Rowdy Piper that he would stretch him if he didn’t let me use it,” Rousey said with a chuckle as she recounted the story.
As Rousey rose to prominence in the UFC as the first woman on its roster and its first female champion, LeBell was always in her corner, often seen with a stopwatch to record her first-round finishes. She has a tattoo of her winning fight times on her right wrist down her forearm. “I got a tattoo of how many seconds it took me to win all my (MMA) matches. My first match, the official time, and his time differed by two seconds, and I was like (expletive) the official time, Gene’s time is what matters, so I tattooed his time.” Rousey and mother De Mars gifted LeBell a new stopwatch for his 80th birthday in 2012.
In a story in the L.A. Daily News in 2011 on Rousey’s breakout potential in the sport, nearly a year and a half before she made her UFC debut, LeBell offered his assessment of his pupil.
“She gets in that ring, and she owns it mentally,” said LeBell, then 78, who couldn’t resist touching upon his pro wrestling background and growling to describe Rousey colorfully. “She says, ‘This is my house. This is my bedroom, my kitchen, my garage and my front room,’ LeBell continued.
“She’s gonna annihilate you. She’s gonna mutilate you. She’s gonna assassinate you.”
In the end, LeBell had appeared in more than 1,000 films, shows and commercials. His roles went from such television series as “Mission: Impossible,” “I Spy,” “The Wild Wild West,” “Baretta,” “Married … with Children,” and “Baywatch” to feature films “Raging Bull,” “Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins” and “Ed Wood.” One of his last appearances was in “Men In Black II” in 2002. LeBell was presented with the Taurus Lifetime Achievement Award on May 13, 2017 for his outstanding contribution to the world of action feature films. The Taurus World Stunt Awards are held yearly to honor stunt performers in movies.
It has been said that Brad Pitt’s character of stuntman Cliff Booth in the 2019 Quentin Tarantino film “Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood,” which included a memorable sequence with Lee, was an homage to LeBell.
LeBell was also at the center of one of the most highly anticipated fights of the 1970s. The “War of the Worlds” pitted heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, against Japanese professional wrestling star Antonio Inoki on June 26, 1976, in Tokyo, with LeBell working as the referee. Watched by more than a billion people worldwide, the fight ended in a draw, with LeBell’s score (71-71) determining the outcome after one judge scored it for Ali and the other for Inoki.
Into his 80s, LeBell was still working as a Nevada and California Athletic Commission MMA judge, scoring fights ringside with his ever-present bag of candy, which he always shared, tucked inside a larger bag resting at his feet.
Tributes came from around the world following the announcement of his passing, including on Twitter from Chuck Norris, Triple H, Titus Welliver and others.
LeBell is survived by his wife, children, and grandchildren.
***
One day in 1966, stuntman
Gene LeBell was called to the set of the television series “The Green Hornet” to deal with Bruce Lee, the future martial arts superstar, who played Kato, the crime-fighting Hornet’s sidekick. Lee, it seems, was hurting the other stuntmen.
The stunt coordinator asked LeBell — a former national judo champion and professional wrestler — to teach Lee a lesson, perhaps with a headlock.
LeBell would later recall in many interviews that he went further: He picked Lee up, slung him over his back and ran around the set as Lee shouted, “Put me down or I’ll kill you!” When LeBell relented, he was surprised that Lee didn’t attack him. Instead they came to appreciate their different skill sets, and LeBell became one of Lee’s favorite stuntmen.
They also trained together, with LeBell’s expertise as a grappler meeting Lee’s fist-flashing kung fu brilliance.
LeBell never became as famous as Lee, who died in 1973, but into his early 80s — when he played, among other roles, a corpse falling from a coffin in an episode of the TV series “Castle” — he remained busy as one of Hollywood’s most soughtafter stuntmen. At 20, he was walloped by John Wayne in “Big Jim McLain.”
Nine years later, he was kicked by Elvis Presley in “Blue Hawaii.”
And he was knocked around a few times by James Caan.
“Every star in Hollywood has beaten me up,” LeBell told AARP magazine in 2015. “The more you get hit in the nose, the richer you are. The man who enjoys his work never goes to work. So I’ve had a lot of fun doing stunts.”
LeBell died Aug. 9 at his home in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 89. His death was announced by Kellie Cunningham, his trustee and business manager, who did not specify the cause.
Ivan Gene LeBell was born Oct. 9, 1932, in Los Angeles. His mother, Aileen (Goldstein) LeBell, promoted boxing and wrestling matches at the Olympic Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles; his father, Maurice, was an osteopath and diet doctor who died after being paralyzed in a swimming accident in 1941. His mother later married Cal Eaton, with whom she promoted fights.
LeBell started to learn to fight at 7, when his mother sent him to the Los Angeles Athletic Club.
“I went up to Ed ‘Strangler’ Lewis and said, ‘I want to be a wrestler,’” LeBell was quoted as saying by the Slam Wrestling website in 2005. Lewis, he recalled, asked him: “Do you want to roll? Do you want to do Greco-Roman? Do you want to do freestyle? Or do you want to grapple?”
“What’s grappling?” Le-Bell asked.
“That’s a combination of everything,” Lewis said. “You can hit ‘em, eye-gouge ‘em.”
He was sold. He started learning judo at 12 (although his mother told The Los Angeles Times in 1955 that he had been inspired a little later, in high school, when he was beaten up by a smaller teenager who knew judo), and by 1954 his proficiency had grown to an elite level: He won both the heavyweight class and the overall title in that year’s national American Amateur Union championships. He successfully defended his title the next year at the Olympic Auditorium, in front of his mother.
Realizing that judo was no way to make a living, he shifted to professional wrestling later in 1955.
LeBell never became a big name in the ring or even a great wrestler, either under his own name or in a mask as “the Hangman.” But he gained notice in his role as an enforcer, in which he compelled other wrestlers to stick to the script, even when they didn’t want to.
His work as a stuntman began in earnest in the 1960s and continued on TV series such as “Route 66,” “I Spy,” “The Incredible Hulk” and “The Fall Guy,” in which Lee Majors starred as a film stuntman. He also appeared in movies such as “Planet of the Apes” (1968), “The Towering Inferno” (1974) and the Steven Seagal crime drama “Out for Justice” (1991).
LeBell had a long list of acting credits as well, mostly in bit parts. He often played referees and sometimes a thug, a henchman, a bartender or, as in “Raging Bull” (1990), a ring announcer.
LeBell also worked over the years with many wrestlers, including Rowdy Roddy Piper and Ronda Rousey, and trained with Chuck Norris, the martial artist and actor.
More recently director Quentin Tarantino used Le-Bell’s initial encounter with Lee on the set of “The Green Hornet” as the basis for a scene in his 2019 film, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” in which Brad Pitt, as a stuntman, threw the Lee character into a car.
LeBell is survived by his wife, Eleanor (Martindale) LeBell, who is known as Midge and whom he married twice and divorced once; his son, David; his daughter, Monica Pandis; his stepson, Danny Martindale; his stepdaughter, Stacey Martindale; and four grandchildren. His brother, Mike, a wrestling promoter, died in 2009. His first marriage ended with his wife’s death; he also married and divorced two other women.
[New York Times]
***
LeBell died in his sleep early Tuesday morning at his home in Sherman
Oaks, his trustee and business manager, Kellie Cunningham, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Affectionately known as the “Godfather of Grappling” and “Judo” Gene
LeBell, he was a two-time AAU national judo champion early in his
career. Later, he taught his masterful submission techniques to Lee,
Chuck Norris, pro wrestler
“Rowdy” Roddy Piper, MMA fighter Ronda Rousey and many, many others.
With his legendary strong handshake, red hair, weathered face and
battered nose, LeBell was universally admired by fighters and wrestlers
around the world.
By his own admission, “every star in Hollywood beat me up” when he was a
stuntman and actor. Wayne punched him square in the face in
Big Jim McLain (1952), Presley karate-kicked him between the eyes in
Blue Hawaii (1961), Gene Hackman went toe-to-toe with him in
Loose Cannon (1990), and
Burt Reynolds kicked him where it hurts in
Hard Time (1998).
Even
Steve Martin roughed him up and threw him into a swimming pool in
The Jerk (1979).
“The more you get hit in the nose, the richer you are,” LeBell
liked to say.
On ABC’s The Green Hornet, he met Lee for the first time and forged a friendship with the Hong Kong martial arts star despite a rocky introduction.
During taping, it was reported that Lee was beating up on the stuntmen,
prompting stunt coordinator Bennie Dobbins to bring in LeBell to help
set the actor straight by “putting him in a headlock or something.”
In his 2005 autobiography The Godfather of Grappling, LeBell
remembered grabbing Lee, who then “started making all those noises that
he became famous for … but he didn’t try to counter me, so I think he
was more surprised than anything else.”
He then hoisted Lee over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and ran
around the set as Lee shouted, “Put me down or I’ll kill you.”
To LeBell, the altercation revealed that Lee’s repertoire was without
submission maneuvers, armbars and takedowns. “He came to my school and
worked out for over a year, privately,” LeBell
said, “and I went and worked out with him at his school.
“I taught him judo and wrestling and … finishing holds that he later
worked into some movies. And he showed me a lot of his kicks and
striking.”
In The
Way of the Dragon (1972), Lee
polished off Norris with a chokehold, and in
Enter the Dragon (1973), he employed an armbar finish to submit Sammo Hung.
When
Quentin Tarantino made
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019),
he
used LeBell as an influence for the character of stunt double Cliff
Booth (Oscar winner Pitt) and adapted the LeBell/Lee confrontation into a
much-debated fight scene between Booth and Lee (Mike Moh in the movie).
Booth also had an accusation of murder hovering over his head, which
might have been a veiled reference to LeBell being charged in the murder
of private investigator Robert Duke Hall in 1976. LeBell was acquitted
of that charge, and his conviction as an accessory to the crime was
later overturned.
Ivan Gene LeBell was born in Los Angeles on Oct. 9, 1932. His mother,
Aileen Eaton, promoted fights at the Olympic Auditorium and was the
first woman inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
LeBell moved to Japan to study judo and won U.S. titles in the 1950s
before segueing to pro wrestling, learning the art of catch wrestling (a
grappling style) from Ed “Strangler” Lewis, Lou Thesz and Karl Gotch.
From 1962-82, he ran the Los Angeles territory of the National Wrestling Alliance with his brother Mike.
The combat sport pioneer participated in what some credit as the first
televised sanctioned mixed martial arts match on Dec. 2, 1963, in Salt
Lake City when he took on light heavyweight boxer Milo Savage.
The impetus for the bout came from an article written in Rogue magazine by Jim Beck.
Under the headline “The Judo Bums,” Beck wrote that “judo … is a
complete fraud … Every judo man I’ve ever met was a braggart and a
show-off … Any boxer can beat a judo man.” Beck put up $1,000 to prove
it.
LeBell
said he was chosen by his peers because “you’re the most sadistic bastard we
know,” and was put up against Beck’s choice of opponent — Savage.At a
TV interview the day before the bout, LeBell choked out the interviewer,
then screamed into the camera, “Come to the arena tomorrow night and
watch me annihilate, mutilate and assassinate your local hero because
one martial artist can beat any 10 boxers.”
The bout lasted four rounds and ended when LeBell submitted Savage to a
rear naked chokehold. The crowd threw debris and chairs into the ring,
and Savage had to be revived by LeBell’s cornermen.
“It sounds like I’m blowing my own horn, and I don’t mean to — I
represented all the martial arts. I never said I was doing only judo or
karate or kenpo,” he said. “I never said one art is better than the
others. They’re all good. You should learn everything. You’re not a
complete martial artist unless you do everything.”
He was rewarded when he fought Elvis in Blue Hawaii. The King
was so happy with his work, he gave him a $100 bill. “I didn’t have any
money then,” he said. “I used to eat every other day. So, I went out and
I had the biggest fillet mignon and even tipped the waiter.”
He also did stunts for Presley’s Paradise, Hawaiian Style five years later.
While serving as the stunt coordinator on
The Munsters, he appeared
on a 1964 episode as grappler Tarzan McGirk in a bout against “The Masked Marvel” (Fred Gwynne’s Herman Munster in disguise).
As a stuntman across five decades on the small screen, LeBell popped up in everything from Gomer Pyle: USMC, Mission: Impossible, Ironside, Batman and The Beverly Hillbillies in the 1960s to The Six Million Dollar Man and Starsky & Hutch in the 1970s, Taxi, The Fall Guy and Married … With Children in the 1980s and even Reno 911! in the 2000s.
On the big screen, he did stunts, often uncredited, for the original Planet of the Apes movies, the 1974 disaster films Earthquake and The Towering Inferno and the Naked Gun flicks, plus King Kong (1976), Airplane! (1980), Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985), RoboCop (1987), Total Recall (1990), Independence Day (1996), Bruce Almighty (2003) and Smoking Aces (2006).
In
Raging Bull (1980), he had a speaking role as the ring announcer for one of Jake LaMotta’s (
Robert De Niro) fights. Four years earlier, he was in another ring, as the referee in the wacky
Muhammad Ali vs. wrestler Antonio Inoki match in Tokyo.
Legend has it that as stunt coordinator on
Steven Seagal’s
Out of Justice (1991)
, LeBell was involved in an on-set altercation with the actor and allegedly choked him out.
LeBell never denied the incident, though Seagal did.
In Bloodfist IV: Die Trying (1992), he attempted to stop
legendary kickboxer Don Wilson from hot-wiring his car and, naturally,
finished up battered and bruised in a pile of garbage cans.
He trained mixed martial artist and WWE wrestler Rousey and her mother, judo champion AnnMaria De Mars.
“Ronda is the best woman I have ever been associated with, as far as fighting goes,” he
said in 2018. “So, when you see Ronda, tell her Gene sent you, that Uncle Gene sent you. But don’t get her mad. Don’t get her mad.”
He authored more than 12 books, including Gene LeBell’s Grappling World — The Encyclopaedia of Finishing Holds, Gene LeBell’s Handbook of Judo, Pro-Wrestling Finishing Holds and The Grappling Club Master, and filmed his techniques for instructional videos.
Survivors include his wife, Eleanor (he called her “Midge”); children
Monica and David; stepchildren Danny and Stacey; and grandchildren
Daniel, Tyler and Nicholas.
As for his work as a stunt double, LeBell revealed he loved that work
because “they don’t even look at you, talk to you, but then you go and
turn a car over, set yourself on fire and all of a sudden, the star
comes up and says, ‘Hey, that’s great,’ and then you’re buds.”
