Sumo Wrestling Championship Brings Out Heavy Competition

In the world of sumo wrestling, big is beautiful.

Just ask Manny Yarbrough, who at 6 feet, 8 inches tips the scales at 700 pounds. At lunch on Friday, he sat at a table that groaned with mountains of food.

Four pieces of corn sat on one plate. A heap of fried chicken graced another. A hill of rice was stacked on a platter. A basket of bread was wedged between the plates.

The 32-year-old athlete was one of more than 25 wrestlers in town Friday for the first North American Amateur Sumo Wrestling Championship, being held at Hollywood Park Casino in Inglewood.

The casino is hosting the two-day event as well as preparing all the meals for the athletes, which means the kitchen is going into overdrive.

For Friday’s breakfast, the chefs cooked up 500 eggs for 40 people, including 28 wrestlers, said Moe Kanoudi, the casino’s director of food and beverage operations.

As Yarbrough sat at the table, people stared at his enormous size. But the gentle giant said he is comfortable with his weight, even if his knees are giving him problems.

“This is what I call my natural progression in life,” said the sumo wrestler. “I was always a big guy.”

Big is an understatement. Heads turns when this New Jersey native walks by. When he was in India to do a movie, people swarmed over his car to get his autograph.

When he was in Japan, advertisers wanted him to do commercials. He has already appeared in two American movies, one Japanese movie and an Indian film.

But Yarbrough’s girth also piques a certain curiosity about the Japanese art of sumo wrestling, which dates back 2,000 years and used to be a fight to the death.

“There is a certain spirituality to it,” said Yarbrough. “At first, I thought it was just two guys bumping bellies.”

Sumo wrestling is gaining a toehold in the U.S. sports world, which is why the North American Amateur Sumo Union decided to stage an annual competition between wrestlers from various countries throughout North America.

On Friday, teams from Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Canada and the United States took to the casino floor mat and wrestled each other during a two-hour match.

On Saturday, individual sumo wrestlers are scheduled to compete.

The sport has attracted amateurs such as Sione Pulotu, a former football lineman at Brigham Young University who weighs 450 pounds.

For most of his working life, he has been a baker. But five years ago, he took up sumo wrestling--ironically, as a way to keep his weight down. After giving up football, his body ballooned to 525 pounds.

Pulotu, 32, has participated four times in the World Championships in Japan and finds it a challenge to push someone else out of the 15-foot-wide ring in a matter of seconds using the 75 techniques that sumo wrestlers learn.

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“Wrestling has been around ever since there were two brothers fighting with each other,” Pulotu said.

“Sumo is just Japan’s form of wrestling because it has different rules and points of view.”

Then there are participants such as Roger Heffernan, 44, and his son, Kena Heffernan, 23, a former Yale football player who graduated last year.

By sumo standards, the pair are classified as middleweights, but compared to Roger, they look like lightweights.

Roger is 5-foot-9 and 230 pounds. Kena is 6 feet but lighter at 225 pounds.

Sumo wrestling was a way for the father and son and a 21-year-old brother to share in a sport that is part of their heritage in Hawaii.

Wrestling, they say, is great--except for one drawback. “I’m still shy about showing my butt to the public,” Kena said.