Earlier this year, Lisa Sanaye Dring’s play Sumo opened at New York City’s Public Theater to positive reviews. The play was set in the world of students learning the craft of sumo wrestling in Tokyo, and gave audiences a sense of what the process of training to compete in the sport in question was like. But fictionalized depictions aren’t the only way New Yorkers are getting to see what sumo wrestling is like; a real-life school dedicated to the sport is also making headlines.
Aimee Ortiz recently covered the first tournament held by the New York Sumo Club for The New York Times. All told, Ortiz writes, 56 wrestlers took part in the tournament, which was also the first amateur event of its kind held in New York. The club’s founder, Oscar Dolan, established the organization in 2022 to fill what he percieved to be a void — in other words, the lack of an existing sumo club in the city.
“[S]tarting my own made me get so much more into it,” Dolan told the Times.
New York Sumo Club isn’t the only way sumo enthusiasts in the city have been able to take in the sport recently. Last year, the Times‘ Victor Mather reported on a World Championship Sumo event held at The Theater at Madison Square Garden. That event was unconventional in some ways, with Mather writing that “[r]ingside interviews included a healthy dose of braggadocio more associated with mixed martial arts or pro wrestling than sumo.”
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How the Mongolian Hakuho is giving an ancient Japanese sport a very modern moment.It isn’t hard to see the appeal of sumo, though — the recent Times report notes that New York Sumo Club has a welcoming ethos and accepts a variety of body types, skill levels and genders. New York isn’t the only big city in the U.S. where sumo is gaining a foothold, either — Seattle’s Rain City Sumo held the first Rain City Open in April. It’s not hard to imagine a world in which more tournaments in this vein continue to spread across the nation.
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