‘Keep it sumo’: Ancient sport gets a California reboot in Santa Cruz

On Saturday, Sept. 26, a 2,000-year-old Japanese sport will make its Santa Cruz debut – not on the beach but inside Kaiser Permanente Arena. “Pro Sumo: New Era IV” marks the first televised sumo event in California, and organizers say it’s just the beginning.

“They say ‘keep Santa Cruz weird,’ but we want to ‘keep it sumo,’” says Abdelrahman Shalan – also known as Ōsunaarashi Kintaro (Japanese for “Sandstorm”) – with a hefty laugh. “I got a few thoughts on the tradition of sumo: modernize it and present it to the people as a professional sumo league.” 

Shalan is the first professional sumo wrestler from the African continent, and one of the driving forces behind the World Elite Sumo (WES) league, which is bringing the tournament to town. 

“We want it to be accessible to everyone, everywhere,” Shalan says, comparing it to his memories of watching World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) in his small hometown village in Egypt with his father,  without satellite or cable television. 

Asked to picture a sumo wrestler, most people will think of a heavyset man in a diaperlike loincloth known as a mawashi – an image that doesn’t exactly play well with Western, or Gen Z, audiences. So Shalan says simply adding shorts takes away any shame the wrestlers or the audience might feel. 

“Americans have a lot of experience with big guys playing football,” he says. “But you mention sumo to them and they say, ‘I don’t want to show my ass, bro!’ So shorts will give the same presentation as any other professional sport.”

With the rise of mixed martial arts (MMA) as a mainstream, professional sport in the U.S. in the past 20 years, the people behind WES believe now is the perfect time for sumo to enter the ring. 

“Oh definitely,” says Mike Afromowitz when asked if sumo can be as big as MMA. “It’s simple to understand and people are always fascinated by big individuals. And these guys are big and athletic, so it’s sport and spectacle.” 

Afromowitz should know. 

He spent decades in the MMA world, first as a fighter and then as a promoter. He co-founded Combate Global (formerly Combate Américas) and was the director of communications of Strikeforce, the MMA and kickboxing promotion company based in San Jose. Strikeforce played a major role in legalizing MMA in California and bringing awareness to the sport with a series of televised bouts on Showtime and CBS. The series was bought by the leaders in sport, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), in 2011. 

Afromowitz is now the CEO of Fajador Media Group, a public-relations group working with WES to bring the sport to the U.S. audience.

“It took millions of dollars for people to become educated about the rules of jujitsu,” he says. “But this isn’t like that. It’s about who can get who out of the circle first. The action is fast and continuous, which makes it great for the newer, younger generation.” 

Saturday’s event will be a 12-man tournament divided into two chapters. The first will be six matches, with wrestlers going all-out to win the best-of-three rounds. The top eight from the first chapter will then go on to the second chapter until the winner is declared.

Among the fighters are champions from around the world such as Makini “Big Mak” Manu from Samoa (6-feet, 400 pounds), Iwasaki “Hidenoumi” Takuya from Japan (6-3, 413), Mexico’s Gilberto “El Coloso Aztec” De La Torre (6-3, 400) and Mathew Westwood (6-6, 600) from Lemoore, in Kings County. 

“He’s Mr. Six,” Shalan says with a laugh. 

Shalan will also be wrestling at the event, although the 6-3 athlete says that at 350 pounds, he is lighter than when he was in his prime in Japan at 400 pounds.

Shalan first became interested in sumo at age 14. His dad would take him to the gym every day from when he was 8, so by the time he was a teenager, Shalan was already huge for his age. While at the gym, he met the coach for the Egyptian national sumo team, who asked Shalan if he wanted to try. Shalan was mainly focused on bodybuilding, but decided to see what sumo was all about. 

“First time I went to training, I was big and powerful for 14,” Shalan says. “[The coach] saw the arrogant look in my eye.” 

The coach pitted Shalan against a kid half his size and weight. 

“I asked, ‘Should I fight him with one hand? Or no hands?’,” says Shalan with a laugh. “And this kid, he kicked my ass seven times!” 

After that, Shalan became obsessed with studying sumo wrestling. Within six months, he was the Egyptian champion, and the following year he won silver in the junior sumo world championships in Estonia. In 2009, he won the gold in Bulgaria and decided to train professionally in Japan in 2011. He was accepted by the Otake stable, and lived there for seven years. 

He says the life of a sumo wrestler is highly disciplined, with competitors training five to six hours a day. The lower ranks attend to the masters (known as sekitoris) for meals, clean the bathrooms and gyms and cannot leave the stable for the first two years. New recruits eat last, often getting only rice and broth, and they usually only make the equivalent of $50 a week in order to weed out anyone who only thought they might want to be sumo wrestlers. 

Even after all this, most sumo students will never make it. The number of sekitori spots in the Japan Sumo Association is extremely limited, which means usually only 10% make it to sekitori status. 

Two years after he joined the Otake stable, Shalan became a sekitori, making him the first African-born wrestler to hold the rank. 

“I was the fastest sumo to move from the lower ranks to the higher rank,” he says. 

With his experience and knowledge, Shalan hopes the Santa Cruz tournament will be the first of many; if it’s successful, he hopes to bring WES here two to three times a year. Last year, WES brought the sport to Newark, New Jersey, and Orlando, Florida, and after the Sept. 26 event in Santa Cruz, it is holding fights again in Orlando and then Seattle. 

“We are planning to do at least 10 events in 2027,” Shalan says. 

Fans can either purchase tickets on the WES website or watch the fights on TrillerTV. In addition to the tournament, there will be a weigh-in the night before, on Friday, Sept. 25, that will be free to the public. The location will be announced on the WES website.

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