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12 C H A P T E R 1 Homesick You gotta feel ’um, too, when you writing ’um, ’cause without you feeling ’um, nobody else going feel ’um. You can talk about how he made it, and how good his childhood was and what a good guy he was and alladis, and yet you can still show how this community— not how corrupt this community was, but how this community slipped and fell short, and how that yet until today, this place still has a chance because it’s still untouched, and still get mana. So you gotta word ’um to the point where everything’s still beautiful, it’s just . . . that we missed it somehow. But we going bring ’um back, because you going make us feel ’um, and make a success, and not a success for “Whooo! ’Cause of me!” ah? A success because of the good story that it was, that this story has a meaning and it has a purpose, and it was real life. Because t’ings can still grow up there. The watah still flowing. —Charles Kekahu of Waikāne, June 16, 2007 “ When Percy first started,” George Kalima told me, “he used to mouth off: ‘Yeah, I can do that!’ Us, we already seen it all, and we weren’t veterans yet, but we were a year or two ahead of him. He was thinking he was going dominate already and fly up the ranks. You look on the TV, it seems easy to you, until you go there and you think, ‘Whoa, what are all these odda ranks on the bottom?’ So we all just kind of snicker at him: ‘Okay bradda, you neva see everything yet. Going come your time. When you realize you starting at the bottom and you working your way up, it’s tough.’” George, who competed for eight years and eventually reached sumo’s coveted top division, was telling me that “tough” meant having to 13 Homesick acquire the famously complex language with the help of nothing but a dictionary and the threat of an eye-tearing smack to the head. He was talking about the maddening cultural adjustments that the Hawai‘i boys all had to make to compete in a sport that many Japanese viewed as a guardian of sacred national traditions. Then there was the brutal training. The hazing . The food. But above all, he was talking about simply being away from Hawai‘i. Percy’s senpai Akebono once told me how surprised he’d been early in his career to suddenly find himself missing the sweeping view of Waimānalo Bay from Makapu‘u Point, realizing that for years he hadn’t even known that the emerald ocean was supposed to be beautiful. George and Bumbo may have had each other at Magaki Beya, but that cold place quickly reminded them how far away they were from those Waimānalo backyard kanikapila jams where their sister would sing into the night, with Dad on the spoons and cousins taking turns on the washtub bass. Being away from that and more—calling it merely “tough” is the height of local boy understatement. Looking back, it’s a wonder that, thousands of miles from Hawai‘i, any of the boys were able to make it past the first year, let alone make a career of a sport that has no off season. In 1998 the call of home, of that beautiful green valley and his own ‘ohana images, finally became too strong for Percy and he moved back to Hawai‘i. A few months later I met him for the first time. The moment of our meeting sticks in my own memory like a photograph. Back then I rode a motorcycle, and I was driving through pouring rain to interview him for a book I was writing about Akebono—Chad Rowan. The big raindrops stung my arms, my legs, my face, pelting me as though the car ahead were spitting up a steady stream of pebbles and sand. I never thought to pull over and wait it out, or even turn back and reschedule the interview, obsessed as I was with tracking down sources for my book. Percy had just returned from nearly seven years living in the same sumo stable as Akebono , training with him, attending to his every need, watching him figure out how to deal with all of the pressure of a foreigner competing in Japan’s national sport. So I...

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