To a lot of athletes dying young

, footballTUESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2014
The Weekly Screed (#693)

To a lot of athletes dying young

by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — Just about every year in Japan, the tabloid press reports the death of a young man, in his late teens or early twenties, in a sumo stable somewhere in Tokyo. The story typically lists his age, his sumo name — something like Futoteyama, his real name and the grubby little village where he grew up and quit school at age 15 to seek fame and fortune in the grubby little sumo world.

Not usually cited in the obituary, because this is the sort of news the old farts of the Sumo Association (Sumo Kyokai) prefer to suppress (just as they don’t like it bandied about that they subcontract their ticket sales to the yakuza, the Japanese mob) is cause-of-death. Once, however, I interviewed sumo’s only honest doctor. He said that the usual killer in these cases is congestive heart failure. Futoteyama got so fat that he crushed his own heart before he was old enough to vote.

Nobody in Japan keeps track of these travesties. But for a while, I did. I figured out that sumo’s per-capital fatality rate makes it just about the deadliest professional sport on earth, far worse than the National Football League — which hasn’t recorded an on-field death since Chuck Hughes in 1971. Sumo actually kills more daring young men than NASCAR, which hasn’t lost a single driver since Dale Earnhardt kicked the fender in 2001.

I thought of this recently when the NFL issued a reluctant report. The League’s own actuaries admit that as many as a third of its players will suffer some sort of brain dysfunction because of blows to the head incurred on the field.

The long-term impact of these findings is more dire than the NFL seems to appreciate. Before the danger of concussions was so clearly confirmed, millions of helicopter moms were already making a lifestyle choice, for their kids, away from football. How else to explain the ascension of soccer — humanity’s dullest game — as the most popular youth sport in white suburbia?

I’ve seen what can happen when a trend like this builds momentum. In Japan today, sumo is moribund because mothers — from Kyushu to Hokkaido — don’t want their boys to grow up to be rikishi. Tournaments occur in stadiums often barely half-filled — with fans too old to attract sponsors. A snapshot of the crowd at the Ryogoku Kokugikan in Tokyo looks like a hootenanny at the Senior Center.

More significantly, sumo’s elite athletes are no longer Japanese. Since 2006, foreign rikishi, from Third World nations in eastern Europe and Asia — especially Mongolia — have ruled sumo, winning 51 straight tournaments. Without native-born heroes climbing the dohyo and hoisting the Emperor’s Cup, Japanese fans have little reason to pay the Sumo Kyokai’s exorbitant admission prices.

Even more than deflated nationalism, sumo’s decline is driven by fear. Japan’s parents know the dangers and deprivations of sumo life. Teenagers recruited by a sumobeya enter a degrading and unwholesome internship that could go on, without reward or advancement, for 20 years. Except for 60 rikishi who occupy sumo’s top two ranks, hundreds of rank-and-filers work, practice, scrub and nursemaid their fellow whales for room and board. As a bonus, sumo affords them the opportunity to ruin their health and shorten their lives by a decade or more.

Sumo’s startling mortality rate is inevitable. The primitive training and dietary methods perpetuated by the dinosaurs of the Sumo Kyokai defy everything we know about “getting in shape.” Without breakfast, sumo’s rikishi train for 4-5 hours every morning — strenuously but inefficiently — forcing their bodies to metabolize energy without fuel. Then, a colossal 5,000-calorie lunch is followed by a nap, promoting the synthesis of fat, followed by an evening of fried food and beer, followed by eight hours of sleep and the synthesis of lots more fat.

And the pay? Much is made in Japan of the salaries and prize money bestowed on sumo’s grand champions by a grateful nation. But on the gravy train of big-time pro sports, rikishi are the bums in the boxcars. Today, the best-paid yokozuna in Japan earns less than the rookie minimum in Major League Baseball.

Sumo life is nasty, brutish and short. No mother in her right mind lets her boy grow up to be a rikishi. The Sumo Kyokai knows this but won’t admit it — or change. Instead, the old farts beat the bushes of hillbilly Japan for dumpling-shaped kids who are flunking out of junior high, to be fattened as sacrificial hogs for lean, hungry Mongols who’ve been bulldogging yaks and wrestling all their lives.

Japan, of course, still loves sports — just not sumo. For years, the nation’s best young athletes have been opting for safer games that don’t require indentured servitude. Soccer is booming. Baseball is the national pastime. Rugby, tennis, running, figure skating, even professional wrestling — they’re all thriving.

But this kind of decline can’t happen here, right? Not to football.

It’s happening already. Kids who have choices — they’re from places like Lake Forest and they all have SAT coaches — are eschewing en masse the grunge of the gridiron. America’s “Third World” — blacks, Hispanics, Polynesians — are perhaps a fifth of the U.S. population, but they represent 60 percent of NFL rosters. Typically, they’ve grown up in a world that’s poorer, riskier and more violent than Lake Forest. Like Mongolians in sumo, they see a brutal and unhealthy sport as less dangerous than hanging any longer in the ‘hood.

But football’s reliance on ghetto-bred talent can’t last forever. Unless NFL owners pull their heads out of their hip-pads, the exodus of young athletes — guided by fearful parents — will continue. As less concussive opportunities in other sports emerge for kids from all backgrounds, the NFL faces the real prospect of gradually slipping from its pinnacle as America’s No. 1 TV show.

Not even a world-class impresario like NFL commissar Roger Goodell can go on indefinitely staging a spectacle in which the odds of little kids getting brain damage aren’t much better than the Christians faced, against the lions.