Photography by Jessica Turner.
It’s a cool fall morning in Kidd Springs Park.
Sleepyheads are walking their dogs. Ducks are quacking. And up on the dewy grass, four full-bodied men are counting in Japanese while vigorously stretching.
One of them is wearing a cowboy hat, a buttocks-baring loincloth and nothing else.
This is the Dallas Sumo Club.
The guy in the hat is 33-year-old Corey Morrison, who founded the club in January.
They meet here in the park’s Japanese garden every Wednesday.
Jared Tadlock drives from Fort Worth to attend practice. He’s a former amateur and professional wrestler who says the club helped him get into better shape and drop some pandemic weight.
He saw sumo wrestling for the first time in high school, the same way many Americans have been introduced to the sport, on ESPN at 3 a.m.
“You see this pageantry, and it’s so ornate, and then guys get in there and they’re just beating each other up,” Tadlock says. “It’s a whole other type of wrestling than what I was used to.”
Searching for a sumo club in the Dallas area back in 2015, he contacted Tom Zabel at Mighty Eagle Sumo in San Antonio, one of Texas’ three other sumo clubs, who put him on a mailing list in case of any other interest from Dallas/Fort Worth.
Fast forward to January 2019, when Morrison and his girlfriend, a burlesque performer named Siggy Sauer, watched their first livestream of a sumo tournament on Twitch. They haven’t missed one since.
Japanese pro tournaments are every other month for 15 days. There are hundreds of sumo wrestlers, and everyone fights once a day.
“We got sucked into the fandom of it,” Morrison says. “We would stay up drinking Japanese beer and sake, and we used to have watch parties.”
Morrison is a director of photography for musicals and films. The couple bonds over a mutual admiration of Japanese art and culture.
A deep dive on sumo brought him to a video of Chiyonofuji Mitsugu, who in 1981 was the 58th person to reach the sport’s highest rank, yokozuna.
Americans always think of sumo wrestlers as big, fat guys, Morrison says.
“But this guy was jacked. He was ripped,” he says. “He was handsome, he had muscles for days, and he was just tossing people left and right.”
Seeing that athleticism made him want to try it himself.
Dark Circle Sumo in Austin invited him to practice with its club, which has a few former collegiate and pro wrestlers.
Sumo is no joke. He wound up breaking a couple of ribs that day.
But he still came back for the club’s tournament in October last year, which attracted wrestlers from around the country.
That’s where he found out about the email list of people from Dallas interested in sumo.
Morrison, who lives in Turtle Creek, found the Japanese garden at Kidd Springs Park while on a photoshoot a few years ago.
“There’s all that Japanese flora in there,” he says. “How cool is it to be doing Japan’s national sport in Dallas but surrounded by both native Japanese and native Texas nature?”
The club now has about 15 members, and four or five people is a good showing for Wednesday morning practice. It also has an indoor practice in Carrollton on Sundays.
The sumo club doesn’t mind photos. Just tag them on social media. And Morrison always has an extra mawashi, the traditional loincloth, for anyone who wants to jump in the ring.
Members don’t take themselves too seriously, Morrison says.
But they do enter tournaments, and they want their club to keep growing.
That’s why they practice in a public place.
“People stop and ask us questions, like, ‘Y’all are half naked; what’s going on?’” Morrison says.
So far, only one of the club’s members, Khalil Collins, lives in Oak Cliff, and none are Japanese.
“We’re looking to do some outreach because we’d really like to have Japanese members in the club,” he says.
