At six foot seven about 360 pounds and with size 18 EEEEE wide shoes, Brodi Henderson was built to be a sumo wrestler.
The 20-year-old Belmont Secondary School graduate, also known as Bull, is the first Canadian in almost 30 years to be accepted into the Japanese Professional Sumo Association.
He earned his shot in Japan by winning the open-weight class at the U.S. Sumo Open in September, the first Canadian to take a title in the annual competition.
Most professional sumos are Japanese, so Brodi’s February arrival in Tokyo was big news. He is the lone North American in the Japanese sumo system.
Of the almost 700 sumo wrestlers in Japan, only about 25 are foreigners, said Henderson’s father, Lee. Most are from Mongolia, where a similar form of wrestling is widely practised.
“When we showed up at the airport, there were TV cameras waiting to see Brodi,” Lee Henderson said. “He was on the front page of the Tokyo paper the day before, saying that he was coming.”
About 15 reporters showed up for his first training session and he has even been featured in a comic strip.
Brodi — the name is short for Brodik — was a multi-sport athlete growing up, competing in hockey, lacrosse, judo and football. He left a couple of football scholarships on the table when he chose sumo, said his father, so deciding to go with wrestling wasn’t automatic.
“He thought about it long and hard,” said Lee, noting that Brodi was sought by both the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University football programs after starring at high school and with the junior Westshore Rebels.
He was also offered “walk-on” tryouts with such football powerhouses as Nebraska and Penn State.
Lee said Brodi’s size worked against him at times playing sports, since he was so much bigger than other kids and couldn’t always go full-out.
As he got older, he began to concentrate on football, but also wanted another activity away from the field — and happened across sumo on the Internet.
Brodi’s emergence in Japan is a real feat, said Andrew Freund, founder of the U.S. Sumo Open.
It’s a historic achievement for a North American wrestler, Freund said. “It’s very rare for foreigners to get into pro sumo.”
He said Brodi benefited from his trips to California for the U.S. tournament.
“He got progressively better every year,” Freund said. “It should be interesting to see how he develops over there.”
Life as a sumo can be intense, Lee said, and getting in touch with Brodi takes time — his access to phones and computers is controlled during this stage of his training, and he can send only one letter home each month. His daily schedule includes a 5 a.m. start and six hours of workouts, fuelled by a special high-calorie diet. “He said it’s the tiredest he’s ever been,” Lee said. “It’s tough. It’s grueling.”
Brodi has already had a broken toe, and the nose he broke twice at the U.S. Open has been broken again.
For now, Brodi gets his expenses covered and a bit of spending money, but things will change as he moves through sumo’s six divisions. He is still below even the bottom rung of the ladder, where he is adapting to a very regimented, disciplined way of life.
Sumo is a deep tradition in Japan, and involves forcing an opponent out of a ring or getting any body part other than the soles of the feet to touch the ground. Size and strength are crucial, and a few wrestlers have even tipped the scales at more than 700 pounds.
Not long after discovering sumo, Brodi entered his first U.S. Sumo Open. He was 15, already six-foot-five and close to his current weight.
“He started training here at home, practising in the backyard,” Lee said.
The yard has two sumo rings, one made with packed-down sand and the other set up where the above-ground swimming pool left a circle on the grass.
Brodi had some unconventional exercise routines in his homemade space, manoeuvring 45-gallon, water-filled drums, and grappling with a boxing heavy bag soaked in water to increase its weight.
When Brodi was just getting started out in the yard — and wearing a mawashi, or sumo belt, over his shorts — he didn’t let ribbing from neighbourhood kids deter him, Lee said. “He’d go out at night, and he’d train at night in the backyard under the spotlights.”
Lee said he sees similarities between sumo and football. “There’s a three-point stance in football, sumo’s a four-point stance,” Lee said.
“Coming off the line, hitting the opposite lineman, a lot of that’s quite similar to sumo.”
Brodi made the comparison himself a few years ago, saying football helps with “keeping it low.”
His bloodlines give a good indication of why he’s as big as he is.
Dad is six-foot-four and 240 pounds, mom is six feet tall, and brothers Kodiak and Kolton — who have both tried their hands at sumo — are six-foot-two and have each weighed up to 260 pounds. One grandfather was six-foot-five and the other was close to six-foot-eight.
Brodi’s family ties are strong, Lee said, but there is also a family-like atmosphere at his sumo club.
“It’s almost like you’re adopted,” he said. “They all live together, work together, train together.”
His club has picked his shikona, or wrestling name, but it has not yet been announced.
Seeing his son gain a foothold in the sumo world has been a great experience, Lee said.
“It’s pretty neat,” he said. “Something different, that’s for sure.”
