“I Shall Not Be Moved”: Inside a New York City Sumo Wrestling Club
As James Grammer , the president of the New York Sumo Beya , prepared for practice one recent Saturday afternoon, he sensed that something was amiss. He’d spent the better part of a year turning his one-bedroom apartment in Queens into a makeshift beya, or training quarters. He’d removed all the furniture from the living room, including his mustard-colored couch, its frame now almost entirely concave from the regular stress of supporting the weight of the beya’s rikishi—its sumo wrestlers. He’d retrieved the equipment necessary for practice, including the mawashi , or sumo belts, and his 200-pound sandbag, used primarily as additional weight for power squats. He tuned his TV to highlights of the most recent grand sumo tournament in Japan, both for technical reference and athletic inspiration. Soon, a motley crew of sumo enthusiasts would crowd into the space to school themselves in the ancient art of sumo wrestling. But when Grammer walked into his living room-turned-dohyo from the kitchen, water, and energy drink in his hands, he noticed a pungent aroma filling the room. The source: His three-foot snake, Gu, had defecated in its shelter beneath the television set.
I arrived moments later and walked into the apartment to see Grammer—six-foot-three and 340 pounds, a wholly imposing presence—delicately caressing his boa constrictor and lowering it gently back into its now-clean enclosure.
Practice was scarce today; a combination of injuries and a muggy, dense rain enveloping New York City kept the vast majority of its six members home for the weekend. Grammer quickly gave me a tour of his home—the bookshelves lined with thick texts on poetry, art, and existentialism, the kitchen stocked full of his sumo-training nutrients, and the dohyo itself, marked off in his living room by wedges of black electrical tape. And then we got to the matter at hand: it was time for Grammer and I to train.
Practice began with 100 shiko , an exercise that combines a deep squat with high leg raises, each motion ending with an emphatic stomp. Next came 100 teppo , or pillar strikes. We positioned ourselves on opposite sides of Grammer’s living room and began methodically hitting the supporting columns of his walls. (Grammer does 300 of these a week, and if you look closely enough at a patch near the living room window, you’ll see a long, lightning-bolt-shaped crack stretching from the top of the frame to the base of the wall: residual damage from the repeated blows). After five minutes of suriashi, a squatted walk around the dohyo, we partnered up and transitioned into butsukari —each of us taking turns, in a waltz-like rhythm, striking the other’s breast as we shuffled diagonally across the ring. By this point, only thirty minutes into the training, I was drenched in a coat of communal sweat, and my hips were screaming in pain. A wave of apprehension washed over me— primarily because the Beya’s technique coach had just walked through the door, and that meant it was time to spar.
Members Mike Saudino (back to camera) and James Grammer spar in Prospect Park.
To a novice viewer , sumo seems like a very simple sport. Two competitors enter a ring and push each other hard. One falls over, the other celebrates their victory, and then two new people come into the ring and do the same thing all over again. The whole thing takes about ten seconds. On the level of technique and strategy, of course, it’s more complicated than that: each sumo wrestler is different—from their size to their game plan—and merely trying to brute-force your opponent out of the ring will often lead to a swift defeat. Instead, sumo wrestlers, like those in the Beya, look for any micro-edge or advantage (from utilizing leg-holds to finding ways to heighten their spatial awareness) that might lead them to victory.
But in its home country of Japan, at least, sumo is also so steeped with ritual, history, honor, and glory that it becomes impossible to separate physical action from societal significance. In the centuries since the rumored first bout, in 23 B.C., sumo became a cultural phenomenon, regularly performed at festival celebrations, Shinto shrines, and eventually as entertainment at the Emperor’s courts. It was only during the Edo period in Japan that the modern form of the game took shape, and the wrestlers grew into large men with even larger celebrities.
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In America, however, sumo has mostly existed on the fringes of sport. According to Andrew Freund, the director of the US Sumo Open—the foremost sumo tournament in America—the sport has only really grown stateside in the last five or so years.
“There used to be maybe two or three tournaments in the whole country every year,” Freund told me. “And now, in recent years, there are 10, 12, 15, even 20.” Thanks to a combination of social media, the yearn for contact in a post-pandemic world, or a seemingly widespread desire desire for intense, physical combat, sumo is on the rise.
Accordingly, sumo clubs have started to pop up all across the country: in Dallas, Salt Lake City, Colorado Springs, Atlanta, and New York. Its arrival in the Big Apple, at least in a club setting, can be credited to 23-year-old Oscar Dolan. In 2021, Dolan, an Asian and Asian-American Studies major at Binghamton University in New York, was tasked during a sophomore-year Japanese course with an assignment focusing on a famous cultural figure in Japan. After some deliberation, Dolan—who, at 172 pounds, competes as a lightweight—settled on Enho, a Japanese sumo wrestler known to succeed in spite of his diminutive stature.
“I started looking into it myself, [and] dispelling some of the myths that they're all just big fat guys,” Dolan told me. “I was really intrigued to see that lighter people can be successful at it. It motivated me to want to do it myself.”
Dolan began regularly watching sumo tournaments in Japan, and, after unsuccessfully searching for a club in New York City, decided to create his own. And so, last March, after submitting an application to the United States Sumo Federation, Dolan posted advertisements for the New York Sumo Club on Instagram, Reddit, and Facebook. Eventually, as members slowly started to trickle in, Dolan started hosting practices on a homemade dohyo in Prospect Park.
“It took a little while to get acclimated to the high strangeness of having people see you do sumo in a pretty public place,” he said. “But once I did it for a few sessions, and became passionate about it, I didn't give it a second thought.”
Among the first to join was Grammer. Sumo was not Grammer’s first foray into combat sports; as a child, he gave wrestling a shot, transitioned to powerlifting in high school, and even dabbled in MMA post-college. But during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, when Grammer was working night shifts at a homeless shelter, he came across a sumo tournament being live-streamed on YouTube.
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“I was surprised by how athletic and insanely strong they are,” he said. “And then after a while, I just started thinking I could do it myself. I always had athletic aims. I just felt like I never found my sport.”
Mike Saudino, the club’s technique coach, was one of its first regular members. A personal trainer with decades of experience in the martial arts, he found sumo via a rather circuitous route: Saudino had recruited a group of strangers via the Nextdoor app to participate in a free personal training session, where he was testing out a high-intensity boxing exercise he was developing. However, Saudino found that the techniques he was teaching—namely striking the punch shield with one's forearm rather than punching it—were in fact similar to the practice of sumo. From there, he hopped onto Facebook, posted in a global sumo group asking if anyone in New York City wanted to practice, and received a message from Grammer inviting him to come to the park.
The club for that first summer mainly consisted of Grammer, Dolan, and Saudino, who honed their craft nearly every Saturday, regularly going for more than five hours a session. Nothing—not the sweltering heat, nor the frustration of being a beginner in a complicated sport, nor even being regularly gawked at, asked for photos, having passersby ask to participate, and even having their matches gambled on by spectators—could stop them.
In the months following, some things changed for the club. They participated in tournaments all across the country (and world), traveling to Atlantic City, Orlando, and Switzerland to compete and hone their skills. As is possible with any highly-competitive, testosterone-fueled unit, disagreements over club rules eventually led the organization to split, with Dolan staying on as president of the club, and Grammer becoming the president of the newly-formed New York Sumo Beya. However, practices for the Beya still continued weekly in the park through the winter, until, even for New York’s strongest sumo wrestlers, it became too cold to be half-naked in the park, and they transitioned into training in Grammer’s apartment. And Grammer, despite only a combined 4-10 in his three shaky tournament appearances, was training with one goal in mind: Nationals.
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Sumo is a brutal and unforgiving sport, and training even as an amateur sumo wrestler means a life of sacrifice and diligence. Maintaining one’s condition, alone, is an almost Sisyphean task: Grammer, in the weeks leading up to Nationals, drank half a gallon of milk daily to attempt to keep his weight at 340. “I went to bed every night, and my partner [would be] like, ‘Why are you doing this to yourself?’” he told me. “I was like, ‘I don't even know anymore.’”
There are other challenges, too. For the time being, sumo in the U.S. offers only small purses for victory, yields little media fanfare, and provides almost no institutional support. It’s not surprising that, according to Freund, athlete retention has remained a significant issue in the growth of the sport stateside.
“The attrition rate is quite high. For example, the club that we have in LA has one of the most solid groups of people who've stuck around, are dedicated, and do it week in and week out for years,” Freund said. “And even our club, if we have, let's say, 15 guys in practice, maybe one or two of them were there five years ago.”
Not to mention that while the Beya are dedicated to their craft, the fiscal burden of attending tournaments while working full-time jobs—and, in Grammer’s case, also being a an adjunct professor at City College—has proved taxing.
“At the moment, there's just no way to set aside the extra money and travel time to go to every tournament,” Saudino said. “Real sumo, in Japan, they have one big tournament every other month. That's their whole career. For us, we’re gonna hit a point where there's one to two tournaments a month. Now, that just doesn't work. You can't pay for hotels, flights, time off, because everyone’s got to have a job.”
Which means that each wrestler has a different reason for continuing. For Saudino, sumo is simply his preferred means of exercise. For Dolan, the primal aggression—and tradition—inherent to sumo keeps him coming back. “It really lets me detach from who I am in everyday life and really get into the headspace of being a warrior and real honor,” he said. “I can just live my life 99% normally and then step into that ring and feel totally different. Almost like an Edo-period Samurai.”
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For Grammer, however, the love seems to run deeper. The physical practice, to start, seems to rhyme with his more right-brained ideals: when I asked the members of the Beya what went through their heads right before the start of the match, most responded with a tactical analysis of their opponent. Grammer, meanwhile, explained that as a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, he believes in a series of deities, including ones that are fierce and wrathful, and that as he’s staring his opponent directly in the eyes, he imagines he and his opponent as two forearm hairs on one of the evil deities, blowing against each other in the wind.
But sumo means something else to him, too. In our first meeting, I asked Grammer why combat sports appealed to him as opposed to sports like basketball or football.
Grammer, who is gay, explained that he grew up in a very conservative area in New Jersey, and attended an all-boys high school where homophobic slurs were routinely thrown around and violence was common. Just before the pandemic, a high school classmate appeared in the news for committing a hate crime against a gay couple in Brooklyn. “That's the kind of era and area I grew up in. [Being gay] was not accepted,” he said.
“I just had a tremendous anger that I didn’t want to let out,” he continued. “I saw weightlifting as a way to express yourself by not getting drunk at a bar and beating somebody up. And I think sumo is a good symbol for just not giving up, and embodying the struggle of standing up in front of the world and saying, ‘I shall not be moved.’ It's a place for people who don't fit in a lot of conventional spaces to find a space. There’s something very poetic about that.”
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Back at practice , I entered the dohyo to face off against Grammer in our first full-speed sparring match. I was reminded of a story Josh Glazer, the Beya’s vice president, told me about an earlier practice session. Glazer—at 400 pounds, the only member of the club bigger than Grammer—said that in 90 minutes of training, they got through 26 matches. Grammer won 25 of them. “I think it was Mike Tyson who said, ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face,’” Glazer said. “That's really how it is going up against James.”
I knew I was not going to win—not only because I was facing off against a man twice my size, but also because Grammer had by this point become a now top-15 ranked sumo wrestler in the United States.
Only a week earlier, Grammer had trekked down to Orlando for the US National Sumo Tournament. He got off to a slow start in the heavyweight division, losing two of his three matches. “I was almost asleep on my feet,” he said. “I basically needed to get slammed on the ground a couple of times to get the blood flowing through my body.”
Grammer rebounded in the open-weight section: after losing his first match to a popular martial arts YouTuber, Grammer strung together three wins in a row— two in totally dominant fashion, practically lifting his opponents up, off, and out of the mat. (In Grammer’s first match of the heavyweight division, he faced off against Jordan Sikes, an 18-year-old, 6’3, 325-pound wunderkind. Sikes defeated Grammer—throwing him out of the ring “like a dump truck”—but dislocated his shoulder on Grammer’s face in the process, forcing him to resign from the tournament.) Grammer finished with a 3-2 record, tied for 13th among all 84 competitors.
I looked across the dohyo at Grammer, both of us prepped for combat, two hairs blowing in the wind. I tried to savor the moment, knowing my next five were likely to be far less calm. And, as I heard Saudino call “ Hakkeyoi ” from the couch, time moved to a crawl. I watched—in slow, precise detail—as Grammer charged towards me, thrust his hands onto my chest, and launched me into the wall.
Two weeks later, I hopped on the phone with Saudino and Grammer to ask about their goals heading into their second full year of practicing sumo. Both echoed what everyone I spoke to had emphasized in our prior conversations: they were focused on growing the sport generally, and the Beya specifically. Recruiting was going well; they’d already picked up two promising prospects, including a former member of Cuba’s national sumo team. Saudino spoke about developing his own New York style of sumo, emphasizing hand-fighting right out the tachiai. Grammer wanted to improve his technical skills—and maybe put on twenty more pounds or so. As I asked Grammer to elaborate on how he planned to hit his new weight, he stopped me.
“One last thing,” he said. “I want to win Nationals. I want to win gold.”