Middle America?
The U.S. Sumo Open Offers a Peek (and Then Some) at Sports Past and Future

By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 9, 2007

LOS ANGELES Attention, American people! The sport of the future is sumo -- a contest of great guile and strength, of heart and mind, that seems to offer nothing but exciting possibilities for a nation prone to pack on a few extra pounds.

At the U.S. Sumo Open here at the Los Angeles Sports Arena on Saturday, the largest (pun both intended and not) amateur sumo contest in the country, 50 combatants battled in the circular ring, grunting and slapping and shoving each other to the wild squeals of a crowd that booed and cheered for both master and underdog. It was WrestleMania, with super-size-me stylings -- and nothing about it was fake.

Here are some things we learned about U.S. sumo. First of all, in America, the sport is still dominated by foreigners and immigrants, best of all the Mongolians. Some of the athletes snack most heartily during their breaks. There is also a timeout called for lunch. They carry heaping piles of noodles, very popular, as they strut-waddle around in their bathrobes like Tony Soprano going down the driveway to get his morning paper.

And the victors? We admire any sport where the winners not only get a medal, but are awarded a 12-pack of Sapporo beer or an extra-large bottle of sake.

And there's more. One of the biggest crowd-pleasers of the day turns out to be a blond Norwegian named Hans Borg (6 feet 2, 331 pounds) who showboats around the ring goosing the crowd of 2,500 with raised fists, the kind of performance that would never happen in tradition-bound Japan, the birthplace of this ancient, ceremonial martial art.

In a brief interview ringside with Borg, we ask the too-obvious question. Sumo? Norway? Whaaa? "I am a special guy from Norway," Borg says and grins with mock menace. "No one like me." This is a guy who would definitely not fit into the middle seat on any commercial airliner, but then you look down at his legs, and see pure rippling muscle logs. Says one of his opponents after he was flung airborne from the ring by Borg, "He comes at you like a fully loaded freight train."

We also learned that sumo here is fought in weight divisions. There are lightweight (up to 187 pounds), middleweight (up to 253) and heavyweight (over 253), and when we say over, we mean over. There were matches on Saturday in which the combined mass of the two wrestlers topped 800 pounds. And the sport, which has Olympic aspirations, also includes women. Six competed Saturday, and they fought like well-fed tigers.

Having weight divisions means that sumo is not just the sport for the biggest boys on the block. Consider Art Morrow, bald and bespectacled English teacher from Palm Desert, Calif., who at 42 years of age and a mere 185 pounds was an obvious underdog. "People ask me, 'What are you doing this weekend?' and when I tell them I'm going to get my butt kicked in an international sumo tournament, they're not sure if they want to believe me," says Morrow, who mostly did get his rear handed to him, but with a lot of class.

So. How did Art decide his Rocky Balboa dream was sumo? He'd lived in Japan for 10 years and there he became infatuated with the sport. "But obviously, it wasn't something I could pursue in Japan." True. But the weight classes opened the door for him in America. He thinks sumo should be an Olympic sport but says, "I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon."

Why not?

"I think the problem is the attire. I'm not sure the world is ready for big guys with their cheeks hanging out."

Ahh, the buttocks. It does take a little getting used to. In sumo, a spectator is exposed to a wide landscape of fleshy, jiggling, muscular (and sometimes less so) bottoms, because remember that in sumo, the two fighters begin their contest from a low squat, like football linemen. Depending on a fan's vantage point in the arena, one could indeed see all the way to France.

The sumo wrestler, as we all know, wears a thick, elaborately tied canvas belt around his gut with a sling thing that slips between the legs; it's called the mawashi. The garment is central to the sport, because one of the main moves in sumo (which has surprisingly few rules: no eye-gouging, no hair-pulling, no closed-fist punching) is for a wrestler to grab hold of the mawashi of his opponent for purchase and to use that fulcrum to twist or flip or push his foe out of the ring or onto the mat.

"The stereotype," explains Murrow, "is that sumo is big fat guys fighting in diapers. We hate that term. They're not diapers. If anything, they're more like thongs."

Art whips off his kimono to give us an opportunity for closer examination. It is indeed a true man-thong. Murrow, like all the women and about a fourth of the men, is wearing beneath his mawashi a pair of spandex gym shorts. He says he would gladly go commando, sans shorts, but his mawashi is a "club belt," meaning it is shared among wrestlers.

"So for personal hygiene as much as anything else, I fight with the shorts," Murrow says.

Awaiting a bout, we find Kelly Gneiting, a bearded 36-year-old former truck driver and now a statistician for the Navajo Nation, wearing nothing but his mawashi. Gneiting is a gentle giant. He weighs in at 420 pounds, but ringside he is as sweet as a cartoon bear. Gneiting wrestled in college but then kept gaining weight.

"I kept trying to lose pounds, but I just couldn't," he says. "And once you get this big, what are your options, if you're this big guy who still is athletic, and you still want to compete?" One day, surfing the TV channels, he came upon a sumo match, "and I had goose bumps," he says, "because I knew that's what I'd be really good at."

As the wrestlers tugged and shoved in the circular ring (about 15 feet wide and called a dohyo), Gneiting offers his insights. "Sumo," he explains, is not only a physical match of girth and strength, "it's completely psychological." After the two combatants enter the ring, they bow, squat and clap, and then they face off and stare into each other's eyeballs before the referee gives them the go-ahead to collide into each other like particles in an atom-smasher.

He compares sumo to "speed chess," and in fact as part of his training, Gneiting not only jogs in the mountain forests of Arizona, where he also occasionally rams his bulk against trees (we're not making this up), but he plays chess to keep his mind as agile as his body. "A lot of sumo bouts are over in three seconds," he says.

Some of these big fellas are as quick as cats. We're watching Petar Stoyanov from Bulgaria. A glowering mountain of a man with no neck, and arms as long as a silverback gorilla's, he is like lightning in the dohyo. You have to watch the instant replay on the big screen after his matches to see how he plays his opponents with thrusts and trips.

Make no mistake, these sumo wrestlers are athletes. In the women's division, Lindsay Hood (5-5, 190 pounds) explodes out of her squat like a cannonball, and that makes sense, as she tells us that she got into sumo because she plays right tackle in a women's football league and enjoys power lifting.

A public relations manager at an animal shelter in San Diego County, Hood has been doing sumo for only two months. She has a prosthetic left leg below the knee (a childhood genetic illness). She loves sumo, how the aggression meets with the grace. "There's nothing like it," Hood says.

The crowd is a mix of sumo aficionados and groupies -- there's a big contingent of flag-waving immigrants from Mongolia -- and, it must be said, some newcomers to the sport, who are clearly enjoying a few beers and shouting, "let's see some jigglin'!"

The day's field includes wrestlers from Italy, Germany, Kazakhstan, Bulgaria and especially Mongolia, whose fighters are also among the elite competitors in Japan. In fact, the Mongolians do dominate on Saturday. Byambajav Ulambayar is the winning men's heavyweight and Sambuu Dashdulam is the women's. But Americans, including those from Hawaii, put in strong silver and bronze performances.

Several of the American competitors, who trained at the sumo university in Tokyo, say the Japanese are more purist about the sport -- they fight on dohyos made of clay (here it's foam rubber), and their top athletes have their hair in topknots, wear silk mawashi and adhere to the Shinto religious and ceremonial aspects of the sport.

But here's the genius of the American-style sumo: At the day's end, they hold the open contest, where wrestlers of every weight division compete against each other. It's Mutt versus Jeff. Speed versus size. One of the highlights is the match between Trent Sabo, a super-buff 180-pounder, and Mark Sagato, who's at least 420 pounds of pure beef. And the crowd goes nuts as Sabo, quick as a cobra, spins around and grasps jumbo Sagato around his gut and pushes and pushes him. Sagato goes off balance like a mighty redwood toppled by the lumberjack's ax, out of the ring.

"I love fighting the big guys," Sabo says afterward (he was later felled by the Bulgarian giant Petar Stoyanov). "Nothing in the world is like it."

The matches concluded, all the competitors went to the Arena Bar for a nice buffet. America? Let's sumo!