18 OctOber 17 - 23, 2024 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents conventions and bars. In early 2022, they were hosted by Rollertown Beer Works in Celina, where they got the crowd involved. “They were these two guys who were drinking in the audience,” Morrison says. “They looked rough and tough, and they got in with us at the demo. It was fantastic.” As it turns out, the Garza brothers both had years of high-school wrestling experi- ence, but hadn’t competed in years. “I felt very stagnant competition- and ex- ercise-wise for a long time,” Bubba Garza, 29, says. “I didn’t really have a physical out- let for most of the stress I felt. I guess we were just in the right place at the right time.” After one fateful day at the brewery, the Garza brothers became some of the club’s most loyal members. “They’ve never stopped,” Morrison says. “And they roped their sister into doing it too.” In March 2023, the Garzas’ younger sis- ter Luce, 27, joined the club. “The three of us have wrestling back- grounds so we were familiar with fighting and training before sumo,” she says. “Learn- ing a new fighting style and competing with them is familiar. Growing up together, they were my first opponents, sparring partners and coaches.” Most sports are male-dominated as it is, but female sumo wrestlers aren’t even al- lowed in Japan. It’s one of the club’s few de- viations from Japanese tradition. “Being a woman in a male-dominated sport is not a new experience for me,” Luce says. “I started wrestling at 13 and was part of the small population of girls participating in full-contact sports in Texas. Then and now, I’m here to fight just like everyone else in the room.” Luce isn’t the only woman in the club, nor the only one recruited by her brothers. “I hear someone get slammed on the ground, so I look and see people fighting. This is cool,” says Etan Perez. She was at- tending an anime convention in Dallas where the club booked a demonstration. Rick Garza walked through the crowd of onlookers and asked for a volunteer, just as he once was. Perez volunteered, removed her jewelry, and entered the ring against another woman. “She beat my ass. I’m not gonna lie to you, my pride took a hit because she was a lot smaller than I am,” Perez says. “I was like, ‘How are y’all going to put me up with this girl that’s a foot shorter than me?’ Then she threw me to the ground three times. My ego, my pride, my everything ... I gotta come back.” At the very next practice, Perez showed up for revenge. “I only planned to go to the practice to get my lick back,” she says. “I just wanted to beat her, and that never happened, so I stayed.” Two years later, Perez has built a trophy case of nine gold medals won at tourna- ments in Texas, Poland and Japan. As of this fall, the Dallas Sumo Club moved its practices from the Arlington School of Defense to Malicious Grounds in Oak Cliff. Weekly practices are on Sunday afternoons, and anyone who shows up is treated to three hours of exertion. Inside Malicious Grounds, soft black mats coat the floor, but not all of the walls. A particularly aggressive match could send its loser careening toward exposed concrete about 2 feet from the roped circle. Morrison urges members to stand along the edges of the rope to catch these falls, but it doesn’t al- ways work. This time, it really hasn’t. Rick Garza was just shoved out of the ring, back first, into the wall, which prompts a grimace, a grunt and then a fist-bump to the victor. It’s Edobor Konyeha, who looks to be a foot and a half shorter than Garza and maybe 200 pounds lighter. He’s chiseled like a Greek statue, using his own explosive brand of sumo that’s more about speed and velocity than overpowering strength. When there’s a height deficit, he launches his fore- head into the chest of his opponent, throw- ing off their equilibrium before he spears them out of the ring. “The response I always get is that I don’t look like a sumo wrestler or that you have to be big to be a sumo wrestler,” he says. “I’ve always been the kind of person that strug- gled to put on weight.” He weighs 185 lbs. now, 25 pounds heavier than when he started. He’s a veteran of all forms of mixed martial arts, but sumo is unlike any other. “The stakes are a lot higher in sumo than other sports because you don’t get another chance,” he says. “Don’t touch the ground. Don’t leave the ring. It’s more thrilling than other combat sports.” For Sunday practices, he commutes from Jacksonville to train with the club. He’s one of its most devoted members, something that’s especially impressive to Morrison. “Generally, about 50% of people that do a full warm-up with us throw up after,” Morri- son says. When the members arrive at 11 a.m., Morrison leads the club in a series of traditional sumo exercises, each training for a specific sumo move. They include shiko (sumo squat), mata- wari (leg split) and suri-ashi (sliding). “If somebody sees us at a demo,” he says, “they might think it’s just a lot of fighting.” Perez was one of those people. “I go in there fully intending to just fight,” she says. “It was three agonizing hours of exercises and getting the forms down. When we eventually did get into the matches, I got beat up again.” The team transitions into another hour of open bouts, known as moshiai-geiko, in which two people compete in a match with the win- ner staying in the ring until a different chal- lenger enters. It’s fast-paced, with nonstop action from nearly every member of the club. It’s in these open bouts where the lack of bravado is most noticeable. In other combat sports, there’s a certain kind of beauty to the flow of outstretched arms and legs whirring at each other in tandem. Every action has a reaction happening at a fast pace. In sumo, those same things are technically true, but they’re happening after the audible slap of skin hitting skin, matched with rigid jockey- ing chest to chest, stomach to stomach. In a practice without onlookers, the vio- lence is dressed up with zero fanfare. There’s a certain primal element when you can hear every grunt, smell every odor and see every droplet of sweat. It’s fascinating. Practice closes with butsukari-geiko, a depletion exercise where one member shoves a teammate back and forth in the ring for two minutes straight. This tight structure is intentional, solidi- fied after Morrison took a trip to Japan to train with the professionals up close. “As a coach, you should be passionate about what you’re teaching, and Corey is,” Perez says. “I know when he went to Japan and learned from the pros he was having the time of his life. Then he brought it back and was like, ‘This is what we’re doing now.’” “We try to be hardcore on tradition,” Mor- rison says. “I don’t want to see sumo change. I would love to see it grow in America, but I don’t think it needs to be Americanized.” Sauer echoes this sentiment. “A compliment that we’ve gotten several times from people who have experienced training in Japan is that this is as traditional as it gets,” she says. “We’re not into that ma- cho man attitude.” Morrison and Sauer’s reverence for the Japanese tradition is respected but not al- ways shared. “Corey is a stickler when it comes to how sumo is supposed to go,” Konyeha says. “In his mind, we have to do it the way the Japa- nese do it. It’s not what I’m used to.” “Life wouldn’t be what it was without Corey,” Perez says. “But for me, I’m not gonna sit around and watch pro sumo for hours on end. I can take tips and do some- thing different, but I don’t put them on a pedestal.” The environment at the Dallas Sumo Club is unlike any other, and Morrison ac- knowledges that he’s curated it specifically to be unique. “You’re gonna have to pry the club from Corey’s cold dead finger,” Sauer says. “It’s a lot to deal with,” Morrison says. “There’s a lot of different personalities. There are people that will laugh, but it’s a nervous energy. You’re surrounded by mostly big dudes wearing only a loincloth, screaming and counting in Japanese numbers as loud as a military platoon. When you get in there for the first time and you see how it feels, you’re like ‘What have I done? What have I fucking done?’ And then you don’t want to feel emas- culated, so you just keep doing it.” That fear forms an irreplaceable bond be- tween members of the club, and it keeps them coming back. “Corey is there every Sunday, regardless of who shows up,” Konyeha says. “It’s very warm, very welcoming. There’s lots of ca- maraderie and acceptance regardless of who you are.” “We usually hang out after tournaments and go to dinner and drinks,” Bubba says. “Everyone tries to make each other better despite the competition. I’ll be doing sumo as long as my body is physically capable.” 決まり手 kimarite/ deciding technique A t the end of a sumo match, one wrestler is either forced out of the ring or has a part of their body, other than their feet, touch the mat. Once this happens, the referee announces the kimarite to the audience and signals the conclusion of the match. “As the Cowboys are America’s team,” Morrison says, “we would love to be Ameri- ca’s sumo club.” Jason Janik The Dallas Sumo Club started with an email to local wrestlers and demos at anime conventions. Practice consists of traditional sumo exercises: sumo squat, leg split, sliding. Sumo from p16 Jason Janik
