My Dad Is A Funny Guy.

My dad and I used to watch Sumo wrestling all the time when I lived in Hawai'i. I remember riding to school in the morning with him and listening to the radio talk about Takamiyama, the first person from Hawai'i to wrestle in the top ranks of Sumo in Japan. We would even catch a few matches, although a day or two late, on the Japanese television channel in Hawai'i.

As time went on, more and more foreigners entered into ranks of Sumo wrestling, the national sport of Japan. Many Japanese nationals were not happy, and many were. And Hawai'i became a very popular place to recruit wrestlers.

In the mid to late 80's when I was in junior high and high school, Konishiki was the next Hawai'i boy to achieve notoriety. He was the largest, topping out at 612 pounds. He was my favorite. It was fun to watch all that meat smack into smaller guys. I think the only time my dad and I ever saw him loose was when he got all the weight moving to quickly and fell over.

Akebono was the next Hawai'i boy to get up in the Sumo ranks. He was also a big guy, but not as big as Konishiki was.

With all these Hawai'i boys, every sumo tournament was broadcast in Hawai'i, only hours later instead of days. So my dad and I would watch every night.

Here's a clip of Akebono vs. Konishiki:


If you fast forward to about 2:20 in the video, you'll see the winner of the bout squat down and the "Referee" come over and hand the winner something off his fan. It happened after many of the higher ranked bouts, so I asked my dad, "Hey Dad, what does the referee guy hand the winner of the bout?"

Without missing a beat, my dad answered,

"He gets his parking validated".

...