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289 Epilogue Every time I wrestle small guys and try to push them, they run around me. Pisses me off more, so when I grab ’em, that’s when I really hurt them. Like that guy Chiyotaikai: I popped his shoulder out the first time I wen’ wrestle him. I grabbed him, I wrapped my arm inside him like this, I dragged him to the rope. All my strength I lifted him up like this. I heard “pop,” so I threw him on the ground. I heard like what I thought was one knuckle popping. The next tournament he was walking sideways, and he get tape all over his shoulder. And when he wrestled me he just tried to slap me down, so I just grabbed him and dragged him out. —Percy Kipapa, November 18, 1998 Covered in sweat and sand all alone in the clay-floored training area, his thick chest heaving up and down as he gulped for air, the sekitori grabbed a towel. Five days into the May 2006 tournament, all of the underlings had either gone off to their matches in the Kokugikan or to the kitchen to prepare his lunch. When he wiped the sweat from his chest and turned towards the door across from where I sat on the viewing platform, the jumpy Japanese beat reporter who was waiting there with me panicked, shuffling forward across the hard wood on his knees, and then piercing the room’s churchlike aura with this: “Sumimasen! Ozeki! If I could just ask you a few questions!” 290 Epilogue Ozeki Chiyotaikai turned and walked straight for the little man, neatly folding his towel and barking, “I’m not through yet!” He laid out the towel on the edge of the stagelike platform and said, “Get back!” The guy scurried all the way back to the wall, and we waited as the ozeki—Chiyotaikai had long ago been promoted to sumo’s second-highest rank, a mere step away from yokozuna—went through a long set of pushups , his thick fingers digging into the towel, narrow bulbs of muscle bulging out on the backs of his thick arms. When he was through with the set, he stood, breathing hard again, looking up with a wince, the sweat now stinging his eyes. He grabbed the fingers on one hand with the other and pulled out, the stubs cracking and his face wincing again. Chiyotaikai was a good six inches shorter than Percy, a compact, round rock muscled with thick legs and pythonlike arms—the ones that flew like pistons during a match—growing out from the kind of bulbous shoulders you’d find on a fullback, not an ounce of fat on him. And he was far from finished. He turned his back to us and filled the room with the sounds of his bricklike feet slapping the hard clay as he lifted each leg high, leaning to the left as far as he could to get his right foot as high as possible, his left quad rippling, swelling, throbbing under the effort, his right leg pausing for just a moment at the top of the arc before coming down, down, down to the clay with a slap!, answered by the sound of his exhaling breath: shhhhhh! And then he did the same with his left leg, and then again, and again. You could see his face wince as he fought to keep his balance, and then when he began to lean just a little bit too far, causing him to shift his weight abruptly so as not to fall over, you could tell that this was not just another mid-tournament morning workout . Chiyotaikai was exhausting himself. Next he walked over to what looked like the smoothed telephone pole in the corner across the room, stood to face it, and sent his thick hands into a slow slap-thudding rhythm against the wood, off-beat with a loud, exhaling shhhhhh!, his muscled back a map of mountains and valleys. As I watched the lone figure of a man safely anchored in the top echelons of sumo training with the focus of some lower-division kid gunning for the top, it finally hit me that Yokozuna Asashoryu, who had recently dominated sumo to the point where he almost never lost a tournament, was injured, leaving the Emperor’s Cup up for grabs for the first time in four years. [3.137.171.121] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 19:24...

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