I’m watching Sumo wrestling on ESPN right now and seeing these blubbery (but strong) 300+ pounders waddling around trying to push each other out of a ring, makes we wonder why some 300+ lb US football players who (I think) have a lot more muscle couldn’t go over there and rule the sport?
300+ sumo wrestlers? Is that the lightweight division? 
Today’s sumo wrestlers lift weights and have plenty of muscle under that flab. Don’t be fooled.
NFL linemen who trained in sumo wrestling for a while would probably – but not necessarily – be competitive.
Setting aside the societal/cultural/spiritual aspects of Sumo (not just any dude can waltz in off the street and expect to get a match), for the same reason Sumo wrestlers don’t come over here and rule football. Adequate size is just starting point. There are skills and knowledge involved, and it takes years to learn enough to be effective and competitive. Muscle ain’t enough against someone who knows what he’s doing.
It also takes a lot of time and training to become a top notch sumo wrestler. Most of your US football players will have skills in football which are not useful in sumo. They would have to forget their current skills and learn a whole new set, this is not trivial.
Though, take a big, burly, lineman fresh out of college, and you might have a real tough competitor in a few years.
Them sumos could probably knock Shaq around with one hand…
Sumo wrestlers aren’t as fat as they appear. Their average body fat ratio is around 24%, and even the 380-lb Musoyama reportedly has a body fat ratio of 28%. Pretty high for an athlete but still healthy.
And the extra weight does help - which has better traction, an empty pickup truck or one with a 200 lb sandbag placed over the drive wheels? If the weight didn’t provide competitive advantage, they wouldn’t go to all that trouble to gain it.
[slight hijack]
I was thinking about starting a thread about this, but I guess here is as good a place as any. . . .
Have fellow sumo fans noticed a distinct increase in, for lack of the correct Japanese term, “bitch-slapping?” In the last year or so of bashos, I’ve noticed slapping becoming a more popular technique.
While I know it’s legal to do so, to me, it seems less honorable than a true test of agility and strength. It seems like its frequency is increasing with every basho, with some wrestlers seeming to use it as their primary method of combat. Is that technique frowned upon in any way? Are the slappers the new “bad boys” of sumo?
US Football players would probably be uncomfortable going out to compete in the sumo gear.
What SI’s Paul Zimmerman said in one of his recent mailbag columns about the sumo wrestlers playing in the NFL:
Since my dad was in the Air Force my family happened to be stationed in Japan for 3 years. While I met only one Sumo wrestler I did watch the sport on TV. First - the guy I met was not just fat (he was) but also “body thick” – he looked like he could kill you just by falling on you. — Second -I can tell you that under all that guy’s arm blubber were some pretty damn big biceps. No – I didn’t feel him up - but I did notice that when he bent his arm the fat retreated and what looked like a 28’ bicep appeared. Only part of their workout is suppertime. Now big arms doesn’t make him a guy who can dunk a basketball or a quarterback — BUT he didn’t specifically acquire muscle and other body mass to acheive that. What hes gotten pretty good at is grapping that huge rope and tossing other 310 lb guys out of a small circle. That takes mass, knowledge, and muscle. So my vote goes with the Sumo guy.
Sumo can be considered a martial art. They train pretty much their whole lives in techniques that would break a football player in two.
The requirements and training for Sumo are so entirely different that you might as well ask why ping pong players don’t break into tennis.
In sumo, skill is just as important as speed. At about 300 pounds, the new yokozuna Asashoryu is a lightweight but he is damn fast and has a very good repertoire. My (now retired) favourite wrestler, Terao only weighted 250 pounds but on a good day, he’d send opponents twice his size flying out of the ring.
Sure, Musashimaru, at 520 pounds, wins a lot of matches simply by bullying his opponents out of the ring, however if he needs to he can show impressive skills.
The comparison with football is flawed, as Zenster said, they’re entirely different disciplines. Sumo is much, much more like judo.
It might look at first like all they’re doing is pushing each other, whereas in fact there’s a huge number of techniques and strategy is very important. To think that a football player could somehow just master years worth of training is a bit condescending.
There’s no doubt that both football linesmen and rikishi are very heavy and very strong, however the kind of strenght is different. Sumo riskishi train intensively to be able to lift their opponents. One typical excerice they do is throwing medicine balls as far high as they can.
I believe you must become a Japanese citizen to do sumo, so it would be quite a commitment for the football players.
Regards,
Shodan
Shodan… not true, a lot of sumo wrestlers competing in Japan are Hawaiian.
Al Davis’ suggestion that sumo wrestlers don’t have the stamina for American football got me thinking. What the hell kind of stamina does the average lineman have? Line up, knock the other guy over, play is over in at most 10 seconds.
Then you have a few seconds of downtime, then another play. Football players’ stamina wouldn’t need to be even close to the conditioning of (soccer) football or rugby or hockey players; this isn’t an anti-football flame- I’m a Bucs fan, and have been since the orange and white days, but Al Davis seems just plain wrong on this one…
I saw something on ESPN2 a number of years ago where a bunch of U.S. Marines had gotten into sumo on their own time, and scheduled an exhibition with some actual (low-level, but trained) sumo wrestlers. The Marines were huge, and seriously built, but in the Western fashion, mostly shoulders and chest.
The true sumo wrestlers wiped the floor with them. It was amusing at first, but eventually it just sort of became embarrassing. Over the course of the tournament, the sumo guys seemed to lighten up a bit on the Marines so as not to completely humiliate them.
I learned a lot about sumo from that.
Except it isn’t quite like that. You’d have to line up against a 300 plus man and block him. That means an awful lot of shoving and just pressing. While it doesn’t sound tiring, it is after a while. Try it out with your amigos. Just lock into each other and try to move each other as hard as you can for about 10 seconds. Wait about 20 then do it again. See how long it takes you to get a bit tired.
Look at Gilbert Brown back when he was a beast. Well, more of a beast. His big weakness was that he could be worn down over the course of the game and he wasn’t nearly as effective if he didn’t sit a lot of plays. Imagine now someone that size who hasn’t had the practice to build up even that modicum of stamina.
Not quite accurate, though you touch on a good point.
Per regulation, every stable is limited to only one foreign wrestler, which seriously limits the number of “imports”. (There are 52 stables.)
Only Japanese citizens, however, can receive the post-retirement title of oyakata (more or less equivalent to “coach”).
Off the top of my head, here is a list of the succesful foreign rikishi: (Name, highest rank, place of origin).
Takamiyama - Ozeki (Hawaii)
Konishiki - Ozeki (Hawaii)
Akebono - Yokozuna (Hawaii)
Musashimaru - Yokozuna (Samoa/Hawaii)
Kyokutenho - Sekiwake (Mongolia)
Asashoryu - Yokozuna (Mongolia)
Out of this list, only the two Mongolian rikishi aren’t Japanese. Kyokutenho is thinking about becoming a citizen and there appears to be some sort of legal grey zone on the Mongolian side, as no Mongolian citizen has ever taken the Japanese citenzenship.
Well, considering the problem with face masks, imagine if this were to happen routinely.
about the only weak spot on a sumo wrestler are their knees. the tummys may look soft and squishy, but there is a brick wall under there.