Tired of Fixed Fights? Try a Different Kind of Wrestling

Big bellies turned New York into a small town on Saturday night.Madison Square Garden’s “Battle of the Giants,” which marked the premiere of a new international Sumo wrestling league, featured many of the best elements of minor league baseball: heroic and accessible (if somewhat unpolished) competitors, a relaxed but buoyant atmosphere, and an eclectic, hollering, wave-performing crowd that came for a good time and went home satisfied.As for the wrestlers (rikishi), the two top finishers were rewarded with checks for $10,000 and $5,000, respectively, in an arena where competitors often earn those amounts for one quarter of play.“I thought it would be good,” Stu Surick, 28, a day trader from Manhattan, said. “And it’s much more fun than I’d anticipated.”“This is so cool,” 13-year-old Harrison Mangines of Fairfield, Ct said. “It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity.”These sentiments were echoed by many in the crowd of about 8,000, who chanted “Sumo! Sumo! Sumo!” as the lights dimmed to a 10-minute depiction of the origins of the sport.A little like Cirque du Soleil and featuring acrobatic dancers and a flute and drum Taiko ensemble, the introduction added an element that was simultaneously nontraditional and Japanese, appropriate since only three of the 24 competitors were from that country.Amid more chants of “Sumo!” from the excited crowd, the tournament began with 305-pound Ronnie Allman of Norway quickly dispatching 461-pound Deszo Libor of Hungary. And so the action continued through the 24 preliminary bouts, with none of the three Americans advancing.Though relatively few Americans have seen a genuine Sumo match, it’s more familiar than you might think. On every NFL play, enormous linemen use combinations of strength, balance, and speed to overcome one another, employing moves that are very similar to those of Sumo.“The principals are the same,” said Yoshisada “Yone” Yonezuka, who coached the U.S. Olympic Judo Teams in 1988 and 1992 and led the American Sumo team to victory at the 1999 World Sumo Championships. “Some of them may weigh more than 400 pounds, but these are not fat slobs. The rikishi are highly skilled athletes in a sport where speed and subtlety are as important as their massive strength.”As with a footballer on the line of scrimmage, the mission of a Sumowrestler appears on the surface to be quite simple. There are only three ways to lose a match: stepping outside the inner circle of the ring, touching the ring with anything but your foot, or using an illegal move, like kicking above the knee, punching with a closed fist, or, worst of all, grabbing the opponent’s sash around the groin area.“One of the greatest things about Sumo is how easy it is to see who wins and loses,” says Coach Yonezuka, who served as trainer for many of the Sumo athletes, including three from the Republic of Georgia. “Of course,” he adds, the more Sumo you see, the more of the subtleties you will pick up.”Saturday’s competitors hailed from nine countries, mostly in Eastern Europe. This international element is part of a plan by SUMO (Sumo Ultimate Masters Organization) to popularize the ancient sport throughout the non-Japanese world. The Garden event marked the new league’s kickoff, which will be followed by a tour of major U.S. cities in the spring and will move on to Europe in the summer. SUMO is sanctioned by the International Federation of Sumo, which governs the sport outside of Japan, and has signed a TV deal with ESPN2. A major marketing and licensing effort is also planned. By featuring competitors from all over the world, the league hopes to build an international franchise.The international cast is part of what made Saturday’s event so crowd pleasing, but it also provided a few rough edges. S.U.M.O.’s athletes all have day jobs ranging from bank manager to warehouse worker; in Japan, rikishi are chosen at a very young age and do nothing but train and compete until retirement.“The difference shows,” said Michael Weinstein, there with his family. “I saw Sumo in Japan 20 years ago, and this doesn’t feel authentic. All the same, it’s fun”According to Anthony Gentile of Abrams-Gentile Entertainment, one of the forces behind S.U.M.O., the plan is to market that fun in the mold of the highly successful World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). “The WWE is a very good business model for us,” he admitted. “They offer a hybrid of competition and entertainment. We will also provide an enhanced theatrical presence, but without scripting the bouts or otherwise corrupting the true sport that is Sumo.”Evidence that the SUMO competition is indeed on the up and up revealed itself early in the competition when Hans Borg of Norway approached the dohyo (ring) for his first preliminary bout. The 342-pound blond played to the crowd, strutting and waving like a wide receiver celebrating a touchdown pass. The crowd responded in kind, chanting “Borg! Borg! Borg!” each time the gregarious Norwegian appeared.Meanwhile, 411-pound Mitshuhiko Fukao, one of three Japanese competitors, was bulldozing his way to victories. He’d storm his opponent and shove him out of the ring with an efficiency that truncated the usually short bouts to the length of a Taiko drum beat. While effective, Fukao’s style made his matches uninteresting, setting him up as a potential foil for the popular Borg.The ideal script would have had the two meeting in the final event, but Borg lost in the quarterfinals to the quiet but also popular Sydney Carty, a 328-pound black man representing the Netherlands. Carty, in turn, lost in the semis to Petar Stoyanov, a beetle-browed 340-pounder from Bulgaria.And so in the end it was Fukao and Stoyanov. For the first time, Fukao didn’t win easily, but win he did, hitting the floor of the dohyo a millisecond after forcing Stoyanov out of the ring.As the rikishi left the dohyo after each bout, they held their hands out, slapping five to those ringsiders who could reach them. Much of the audience left the Garden doing the same.

Tired of Fixed Fights? Try a Different Kind of Wrestling

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