Sumo wrestling does, well, fascinate. As a heroic goiter might. Or the blazing wen on some derelict’s nose. In fact, I watched it from one eye corner: straight-on staring didn’t feel polite. No sport combines religion with such consummate vulgarity. These men are human metaphors for climax inflation. So fat they’d be hard put to have an out-of-the-body experience. You ask what we got in exchange for baseball and MacArthur: three days of sumo at Madison Square Garden. Sport dumping to go with car dumping.
Weight hangs differently on an Oriental frame. The buttock is characterless, just more thigh. (Japanese women have puffy, dense ankles and knees.) Caucasian musculature—broad chest, definite bicep and pectoral—is rare. Yet sumo wrestlers are improbably strong: you don’t clean-jerk a 350-pound opponent off the ground with cellulite. And they are supple: each can touch chest to floor while doing a full split. Konishiki, the one American (born in Hawaii), is all chafe. Age 21, 498 pounds, and sensation in Japan: the heaviest sumo ever. He doesn’t have a double chin, it’s squared, cubed. No Toyota could hold him. “Gee,” the woman behind me said, “no wonder their eyes slant.”
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