Takao Maemizo

Takao Maemizo (前溝隆男)

Profession: Referee
Real name: Takao Maemizo
Professional names: not applicable
Life: 8/??/1937-
Born: Tonga
Career: 197?-1979
Height/Weight: unknown
Signature moves: unknown
Promotions: International Wrestling Enterprise
Titles: none

After an athletic career across multiple sports, Takao Maemizo worked as a referee for the IWE.

Maemizo during his second middleweight title reign, circa spring 1964.

Takao Maemizo was the illegitimate child of a Japanese businessman, born to a Tongan mother while his father was posted there for his trading company. He returned to Japan with his father and was raised as part of his family at home, but after graduating junior high, Maemizo moved to Tokyo and entered sumo in 1952. As a member of the Mihogaseki stable, Takao wrestled as Masunishiki in a five-year career. Allegedly bullied by patrons for his curly hair, Maemizo quit sumo after the first tournament of 1957, and attempted a pivot into professional baseball. He actually passed a tryout with the Daiei Unions, the 1957 merger of the Takahashi Unions and Daiei Stars, but the team closed after one season and Maemizo received no more offers. In autumn 1958, Maemizo debuted as a professional boxer. Besides a handful of fights in Seoul, Brisbane, and Manila, his career was mostly spent at home, where he enjoyed two reigns with the Japan Boxing Commission’s middleweight title in 1962 and 1963. After a final victory in January 1966 against late-career rival Morio Kaneda, Maemizo switched sports yet again to professional bowling. Finally, he joined the International Wrestling Enterprise as a referee. While Maemizo was the promotion’s head referee for a time, after Osamu Abe left in 1977 to unsuccessfully run for public office, he was displaced by noted bodybuilder Mitsuo Endo, and left in 1979 to join Umeyuki Kiyomigawa’s ill-fated joshi promotion New World Women’s Pro Wrestling. That, as far as I know, was the end of Maemizo’s career in sport.