The Ringleaders: North Texas Wrestlers Unite To Fight With the Dallas Sumo Club

時間です、実践してください/ It’s time, put hands down

At the beginning of a sumo match, a referee announces this to the two competitors, before they crouch opposite each other and touch both their fists to the mat. The sumo match does not begin until all four fists are down.

Corey Morrison learned this while toiling away at what he describes as a “boring government job” in 2020. Surfing YouTube for an escape from virtual city council meetings, he stumbled upon The Way of The Wolf, a 1991 documentary about Chiyonofuji Mitsugu, a Japanese sumo wrestler who became popular for his energetic style of wrestling.

In sumo, two wrestlers step into a dohyo, a slightly elevated ring with a 4.55-meter circle made of rice straw bales. When a referee calls for the match to begin, the opponents charge at each other and wrestle upright until one is forced out of the ring, or a part of their body other than the soles of their feet touches the ground inside the ring.

Mitsugu won 1,045 times in his illustrious professional career, a record number at the time of his retirement in 1991. He was considered small by sumo standards, standing at 6 feet tall and weighing about 270 lbs. The New York Times labeled him “Little big man of sumo.”

“He kind of broke my Western brain that thought of sumo wrestlers as fat guys in diapers,” Morrison, 35, says. “He was handsome and looked like the Japanese Arnold Schwarzenegger. With that documentary, I was just immediately sucked in.”

Drawn to Mitsugu, Morrison researched the professional sumo circuits in Japan. The Japan Sumo Association is the leading governing body for professional sumo, approaching its 100-year anniversary after being founded in 1925. Morrison dug through the internet to find underground Twitch live streams of the league’s monthly tournaments.

Japan Standard Time is 15 hours ahead of Central Standard Time, so watching matches live required a major commitment. As soon as Morrison knew he was going to be making the film, he involved his girlfriend of nine years, Siggy Sauer.

“I was all in,” she says. “We started staying up till 4 in the morning so we could avoid spoilers online.”

Morrison and Sauer’s obsession became mutual. Their four fists were down.

Before this they never watched sports. Morrison played baseball and lacrosse in high school but came to be turned off by the trash-talking bravado of modern sports culture, and he focused on photography and filmmaking as an adult. With sumo, Japanese culture heavily imposes a nature of respect and tradition that eliminates the brashness of combat sports.

“That’s one of the huge things that attracted us,” Morrison says. “It is very different from other combat sports or just sports in general. The community is really tight, there’s not a lot of shit-talking during matches and stuff.”

The couple took their newfound obsession to their respective social media, posting clips and reactions to professional matches as they happened. They received a message from Justin Kizzart, who runs Dark Circle Sumo in Austin, inviting them to drive down to his space and participate in a full sumo practice.

Upon arrival, Sauer opted to watch from the sidelines as Morrison suited up for the first time.

“I went up there and they beat me up so bad, broke my ribs and made me throw up,” Morrison says. “I was like, ‘You know what? I’m gonna watch too. I don’t want to do this at all.’”

click to enlarge

Jared Tadlock (left) prepares to fight Bubba Garza while Rick Garza starts the match at the Japanese Spring Festival in the Fort Worth Botanical Gardens.

Jason Janik

立合い, tachiai/ Stand and meet

In a sumo match, the two wrestlers have “tachiai,” which is the first collision of their bodies to open a bout. Wrestlers are told to embrace the tachiai despite its brutality, as it’s the first and usually the most impactful way to move your opponent.

One bite from the apple wouldn’t be enough though, as Kizzart invited the couple to see a tournament that Dark Circle Sumo planned to host and informed them that there was an untapped market for sumo in Dallas. Kizzart offered to help them launch a makeshift club and show them how to run a practice.

After studying the practices up close, Morrison launched the Dallas Sumo Club in January 2021, sending cold emails to wrestlers and Dallasites who might be interested in sumo. Thirteen people showed up for the first practice before Morrison took to the streets to invite more people in.

After a semi-regular group started to build, Morrison would book them to present live sumo demonstrations at anime conventions and bars. In early 2022, they were hosted by Rollertown Beer Works in Celina, where they got the crowd involved.

“They were these two guys who were drinking in the audience,” Morrison says. “They looked rough and tough, and they got in with us at the demo. It was fantastic.”

As it turns out, the Garza brothers both had years of high-school wrestling experience, but hadn’t competed in years.

“I felt very stagnant competition- and exercise-wise for a long time,” Bubba Garza, 29, says. “I didn't really have a physical outlet for most of the stress I felt. I guess we were just in the right place at the right time.”

After one fateful day at the brewery, the Garza brothers became some of the club’s most loyal members.

“They’ve never stopped,” Morrison says. “And they roped their sister into doing it too.”

In March 2023, the Garzas’ younger sister Luce, 27, joined the club.

“The three of us have wrestling backgrounds so we were familiar with fighting and training before sumo,” she says. “Learning a new fighting style and competing with them is familiar. Growing up together, they were my first opponents, sparring partners and coaches.”

Most sports are male-dominated as it is, but female sumo wrestlers aren’t even allowed in Japan. It’s one of the club’s few deviations from Japanese tradition.

“Being a woman in a male-dominated sport is not a new experience for me,” Luce says. “I started wrestling at 13 and was part of the small population of girls participating in full-contact sports in Texas. Then and now, I’m here to fight just like everyone else in the room.”

Luce isn’t the only woman in the club, nor the only one recruited by her brothers.

“I hear someone get slammed on the ground, so I look and see people fighting. This is cool,” says Etan Perez. She was attending an anime convention in Dallas where the club booked a demonstration. Rick Garza walked through the crowd of onlookers and asked for a volunteer, just as he once was. Perez volunteered, removed her jewelry, and entered the ring against another woman.

“She beat my ass. I’m not gonna lie to you, my pride took a hit because she was a lot smaller than I am,” Perez says. “I was like, ‘How are y’all going to put me up with this girl that’s a foot shorter than me?’ Then she threw me to the ground three times. My ego, my pride, my everything ... I gotta come back.”

At the very next practice, Perez showed up for revenge.

“I only planned to go to the practice to get my lick back,” she says. “I just wanted to beat her, and that never happened, so I stayed.”

Two years later, Perez has built a trophy case of nine gold medals won at tournaments in Texas, Poland and Japan.

As of this fall, the Dallas Sumo Club moved its practices from the Arlington School of Defense to Malicious Grounds in Oak Cliff. Weekly practices are on Sunday afternoons, and anyone who shows up is treated to three hours of exertion.

Inside Malicious Grounds, soft black mats coat the floor, but not all of the walls. A particularly aggressive match could send its loser careening toward exposed concrete about 2 feet from the roped circle. Morrison urges members to stand along the edges of the rope to catch these falls, but it doesn’t always work.

This time, it really hasn’t. Rick Garza was just shoved out of the ring, back first, into the wall, which prompts a grimace, a grunt and then a fist-bump to the victor.

It’s Edobor Konyeha, who looks to be a foot and a half shorter than Garza and maybe 200 pounds lighter. He’s chiseled like a Greek statue, using his own explosive brand of sumo that’s more about speed and velocity than overpowering strength. When there’s a height deficit, he launches his forehead into the chest of his opponent, throwing off their equilibrium before he spears them out of the ring.

“The response I always get is that I don’t look like a sumo wrestler or that you have to be big to be a sumo wrestler,” he says. “I’ve always been the kind of person that struggled to put on weight.”

He weighs 185 lbs. now, 25 pounds heavier than when he started. He’s a veteran of all forms of mixed martial arts, but sumo is unlike any other.

“The stakes are a lot higher in sumo than other sports because you don’t get another chance,” he says. “Don’t touch the ground. Don’t leave the ring. It’s more thrilling than other combat sports.”

For Sunday practices, he commutes from Jacksonville to train with the club. He’s one of its most devoted members, something that’s especially impressive to Morrison.

“Generally, about 50% of people that do a full warm-up with us throw up after,” Morrison says.

When the members arrive at 11 a.m., Morrison leads the club in a series of traditional sumo exercises, each training for a specific sumo move. They include shiko (sumo squat), mata-wari (leg split) and suri-ashi (sliding).

“If somebody sees us at a demo,” he says, “they might think it’s just a lot of fighting.”

Perez was one of those people.

“I go in there fully intending to just fight,” she says. “It was three agonizing hours of exercises and getting the forms down. When we eventually did get into the matches, I got beat up again.”

The team transitions into another hour of open bouts, known as moshiai-geiko, in which two people compete in a match with the winner staying in the ring until a different challenger enters. It’s fast-paced, with nonstop action from nearly every member of the club.

It’s in these open bouts where the lack of bravado is most noticeable. In other combat sports, there’s a certain kind of beauty to the flow of outstretched arms and legs whirring at each other in tandem. Every action has a reaction happening at a fast pace. In sumo, those same things are technically true, but they’re happening after the audible slap of skin hitting skin, matched with rigid jockeying chest to chest, stomach to stomach.

In a practice without onlookers, the violence is dressed up with zero fanfare. There’s a certain primal element when you can hear every grunt, smell every odor and see every droplet of sweat. It’s fascinating.

Practice closes with butsukari-geiko, a depletion exercise where one member shoves a teammate back and forth in the ring for two minutes straight.

This tight structure is intentional, solidified after Morrison took a trip to Japan to train with the professionals up close.

“As a coach, you should be passionate about what you’re teaching, and Corey is,” Perez says. “I know when he went to Japan and learned from the pros he was having the time of his life. Then he brought it back and was like, ‘This is what we’re doing now.’”

“We try to be hardcore on tradition,” Morrison says. “I don't want to see sumo change. I would love to see it grow in America, but I don't think it needs to be Americanized.”

Sauer echoes this sentiment.

“A compliment that we've gotten several times from people who have experienced training in Japan is that this is as traditional as it gets,” she says. “We’re not into that macho man attitude.”

Morrison and Sauer’s reverence for the Japanese tradition is respected but not always shared.

“Corey is a stickler when it comes to how sumo is supposed to go,” Konyeha says. “In his mind, we have to do it the way the Japanese do it. It’s not what I’m used to.”

“Life wouldn’t be what it was without Corey,” Perez says. “But for me, I’m not gonna sit around and watch pro sumo for hours on end. I can take tips and do something different, but I don’t put them on a pedestal.”

The environment at the Dallas Sumo Club is unlike any other, and Morrison acknowledges that he’s curated it specifically to be unique.

“You’re gonna have to pry the club from Corey’s cold dead finger,” Sauer says.

“It’s a lot to deal with,” Morrison says. “There’s a lot of different personalities. There are people that will laugh, but it’s a nervous energy. You’re surrounded by mostly big dudes wearing only a loincloth, screaming and counting in Japanese numbers as loud as a military platoon. When you get in there for the first time and you see how it feels, you’re like ‘What have I done? What have I fucking done?’ And then you don’t want to feel emasculated, so you just keep doing it.”

That fear forms an irreplaceable bond between members of the club, and it keeps them coming back.

“Corey is there every Sunday, regardless of who shows up,” Konyeha says. “It’s very warm, very welcoming. There’s lots of camaraderie and acceptance regardless of who you are.”

“We usually hang out after tournaments and go to dinner and drinks,” Bubba says. “Everyone tries to make each other better despite the competition. I’ll be doing sumo as long as my body is physically capable.”

決まり手, kimarite/ Deciding technique

At the end of a sumo match, one wrestler is either forced out of the ring or has a part of their body, other than their feet, touch the mat. Once this happens, the referee announces the kimarite to the audience and signals the conclusion of the match.

“As the Cowboys are America’s team,” Morrison says, “we would love to be America’s sumo club.”