SUMO -- The January Basho

 

We haven't posted about Sumo recently because there has been abysmal Sumo coverage on YouTube. The Japanese broadcasting company with the rights to show the tournaments clamped down on anybody publishing videos of their product. Thankfully, NHK has started putting out English language broadcasts of the 15-day tournaments. 

This was the perfect time to sell your product in America. 

There is going to be a changing of the guard. The great Yokozuna Terunofuji retired after a bad start in this tournament. He was a favorite of ours. So, his retirement was a sad event. But he had bad knees. It was time. 

But there was also a new hope: Hoshoryu. He ended up winning this basho with a 12-3 record followed by a win in a three-man playoff. The council that decides Yokozuna promotion will consider whether he will be elevated to that highest rank. He has another recent tournament win in his favor, and he has been amazingly consistent in obtaining winning records in bashos over a long period of time. 

His uncle was a Yokozuna. 

He has a style reminiscent of the greatest Yokozuna of all, Hakuhō. His recent Sumo has been dominant and exciting, and Sumo needs a Yokozuna. 

But the council that decides the promotion must also look at his negatives. First of all, he is Mongolian, and the Japanese have hungered for a Japanese Yokozuna for quite some time. This is not part of the promotion equation, but you have to feel that it will be an undercurrent. 

Secondly, his recent performances have been very, very good but not the domination you want to see from your Yokozuna. He won this basho at 12-3. He was runner-up in the tournament before that with a 13-2 record. This is all very good, but in the tournament before that, he was 8-7 and lost to many basic rikishi. Before that, he was 9-4-2 and before that 10-5. 

Is that Yoko material? 

To put it into some perspective, the now-retired Yokozuna Terunofuji won or finished runner-up in six of the seven bashos right before he was promoted to the highest rank.  

Finally, Hoshoryu also has a total of two basho wins and two runner-ups in 27 upper-division tournaments. Is that Yoko material? Probably not, but he's one of my top two favorite Sumo wrestlers, so I'll be rooting for his promotion. My gut tells me that they will wait for one more tournament to see how he does. 

On another subject, the three-rikishi playoff showcased not only the potential new Yokozuna Hoshoryu, but also Oho and Kinbozan. Oho is Japanese, and he's always had the talent, but he's never fully achieved the results that his talent demands. In this tournament, he did. 

Interestingly, in his very first professional tournament back in 2018, Oho had to face another debutant named Hoshoryu. And Oho beat him! 

The other player in the three-person playoff was Kinbozan, a native of Kazakhstan. He came pretty much out of nowhere to reach the top on the leaderboard on the final day. He has the height and the weight (6'5" and nearly 400 pounds), but except for his first tournament in the upper division where he finished 11-4, he had a losing record in six out of nine bashos. 

In fact, he was demoted to a lower division a couple tournaments ago and had to win his way back to the spotlight. The big question for him is this: Will he become the most famous Kazakhstan wrestler in the future, or will that always be Borat? 

GLOSSARY:

SUMO -- Japanese wrestling in a raised ring.

YOKOZUNA -- Highest rank in Sumo. 

RIKISHI -- Sumo wrestler. 

NHK -- The Japanese broadcasting company with the rights to upper-division Sumo. 

BASHO -- Sumo tournament. 

Here's a video that talks about the recent basho and the Yokozuna debate: