Putting It All On The Line

While social media is 100% rotting all our brains and potentially doing irrevocable harm to society, I have to give the algorithms a shoutout. They worked sumo wrestling into our Youtube feed, and now, seemingly inexplicably, I am a huge fan of sumo.

I've dabbled in all sorts of athletics throughout my life. For a while I was very into Jiu Jitsu. I've done American boxing, Muay Thai, Aikido, and I've drilled on various self defense techniques. While I've never competed in any boxing/martial arts, I do find the techniques fascinating. Yet, because I'd never stopped to consider it, I never gave much thought to sumo wrestling.

But once Youtube polluted our algorithm, I realized, sumo wrestling is a sport of intense technique and athleticism. I always assumed it was just big, round guys bouncing off of each other, but that was probably because I grew up in an American rectangle state in the 1990's, going to kids' birthday parties where they would rent those sumo suits and let you just crash into each other. (Looking back at it, the messaging of that is terrible in a lot of ways.) I just absorbed what I was given, I suppose.

But, nearly four decades into my life, the internet opened my eyes to my mistake. (I know, not an activity the internet is often used for.) And now, I have to say, sumo is crazy interesting and crazy impressive. I've become a huge fan of Aonishiki Arata, the Ukrainian phenom who is taking the sumo world by storm. As a teen, Aonishki fled from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, made it to Japan, learned the language, and is now one of the best sumo wrestlers in the world, and he's just twenty-one.

Of course, I didn't know any of this when I started to watch sumo. Not remotely good at Japanese, it took me a while to learn how to say the various wrestlers' names, let alone recognize each rikishi's (wrestler's) so called "brand of sumo". But after a while, I caught on, and I noticed something about the Blue Whirlwind, Aonishiki. Aoniskhi isn't afraid to win by risking it all.

Aonishiki is super fun to watch. Yes, he is incredibly technical, and small for the top ranks (he's only 310 pounds) but what really captivated me is his commitment to pushing the match as far as he can in order to win. And I don't mean this in the terms of injuring people or skirting the edge of unsportsmanlike conduct. He will literally be backed up to the edge of the dohyo (ring) and will commit to a take down which could lose him the bout, or it could win it for him, and when you watch him do this, time slows. For a moment, everything is possible. He could win. He could lose. And then the rikishi are out of the ring, and the judge's have to decide.

In watching Aonishki, I've realized, I often play it safe. Committing to something so that the only two options are, winning big or losing it all, is not something that I naturally do. In some ways, this helps me do good things, like not lose my house in Vegas, but in other ways, it keeps me from having a chance at something spectacular.

When Lindsey Vonn caught that gate in the recent Olympics, the backlash was swift and harsh. The internet trolls made it clear their opinions of Vonn's "choice" to return to the Olympics as an aged forty-plus-year-old woman. I say "choice" because it's highly hilarious to me that we act like she isn't a true pinnacle of physical and mental toughness to QUALIFY for the Olympics when she is competing against people over twenty years younger than her. I'm sure the internet trolls have this problem all the time. Having to choose between putting on clean sweat pants or representing their country in an athletic endeavor which the elite of the elite can only compete in for a few years of their lives.

But I digress. The point is, Vonn risked not only her physical and mental safety in her choice to compete, but she also became vulnerable to the entire toxic world remarking on her bodily sovereignty and autonomy. And yet, she did it anyway. And she crashed spectacularly! Risk big, lose big. But maybe, win big.

Years and years ago, I was in Cody Wyoming at the Buffalo Bill Museum. I wandered into a wing with an exhibit on bull riding. If you didn't know, there is genre of photography which is just cowboys and bull riders looking tough and sexy in their fringed chaps. And DON'T WORRY there were plenty of said photos in this exhibit. But there was also a tiny photo of a woman riding a bull in a packed arena.

I don't remember her name, funny how our brains work like that, but the picture was accompanied by a quote of hers. And it basically boiled down to this:

You can't fail as a woman bull rider. If you get hurt, the arena goes quiet. There is no getting the crowd back as a woman.

And I think about that all the time. When I was nineteen, I was a river guide. We ran these thirty-three foot long sweep boats, and to land them, you had to steer the boat to shore, rub it against the shore, and then jump off the boat with a rope and belay the boat to a stop.

This was a dynamic, highly technical maneuver, and the boats carried over twenty people in addition to the weight of the boat and frame, so there were hundreds of pounds being pulled by the river. When I was nineteen, I probably weighed 120 pounds, and even though by the end of those summers I was basically just muscle and bone, if Aonishiki is a small sumo wrestler at 310 pounds, I was nothing but a speedbump when it came to disrupting the momentum of that boat.

And, you know where I'm going with this. One evening, I biffed the landing super bad. I had a full boat of people. I made it off the boat, but I messed something up, and got yanked off the boat and into the water. I got pulled behind the boat, getting totally destroyed in the process, before I was able to stand up and belay the boat to a stop in the river.

The boat was dead silent. All twenty-five people just stared at me like they had just seen something so transgressive, simply speaking of it would cause them to burst into flames. I felt pretty victorious when I finally got that boat stopped. There I was, covered in blood, mud, and soaking wet, breathing super hard, standing shin deep in the water, holding the rope that held probably a thousand pounds of people and rubber, and yet, no one tipped me. In fact, they couldn't look at me. They were embarrassed for me. Embarrassed of me.

And yet, my male coworkers messed stuff up all the time, and people just laughed it off.

So when I see athletes risking it all, it causes something inside of me to awaken. Something vulnerable and powerful, and so full life, I feel transcendent. Because I know, Aonishiki can't crawl home to his parents' house if his dream of making it big in sumo goes belly up. Russia is actively bombing his home. He and his parents are refugees. And so he wrestles like his life depends on it. And it is beautiful, even when he fails.

When I watched Vonn get short hauled off that course, I wanted to cry, and yet, I was so, so, so proud of her. They filmed the crowd. They were silent. But inside, I was screaming. Screaming angry and screaming in joyous solidarity because she an OLD (41) WOMAN dared to fail, and it means, I can too. We are talking about it. We are making room for women to fail on global stages, and it makes me so hopeful. It makes me hopeful that sometime soon, when a nineteen-year-old girl completely fucks up something physically hard and scary but keeps fighting and finishes what she started, even if she is bedraggled and covered in blood, people don't stare at her like she's a pariah. No, in this hopeful future, they explode into applause because she went big and fought through to the end, no matter how ugly the process.

So this is my ode to all those who dare to fail, even when the consequences are extreme. You never know who is watching, and what strength they pull from your bravery. Accepting success is easy. Accepting failure though, that's how we move the needle forward as a society.