Past Sports from the past week.

Past sports article for the week of 3/17/07

Sumo Tipping!
By, Cozmic

Just when you thought two fat guys (in this day of political correctness I am amazed I can get away with saying things like that, by the way) trying to bowl one another over could not possibly get any more fun (or, to be honest, dull), a new fad with its roots in sumo has suddenly sweeped the streets of Japan. Sumo tipping! The origin of this is as weird as the original sport of sumo wrestling.
Yes, it would appear that somehow there is Japanese youth that is still not happy with the nation's giant array of videogames, comics, TV and bands dressed in drag, not to mention enough giant robot toys to conquer the milky way and cellphones with new Final Fantasy titles, who instead deemed it necessary to mimic the great American farmcountry tradition of tipping cows. However, it was soon discovered that there were not nearly enough cows around for tipping, and that it was also far too easy to hurt the cows, and thus it would be much more effective to find a substitute.

The answer was found in the ancient and time-honored tradition of the Japanese sumo-wrestlers. Being almost perfectly spherical, not only can you tip a wrestler and watch him bounce back up, you can then tip him and roll him for hours of fun. Since everyone who is big and fat in Japan is probably either a tourist or a sumo wrestler, finding someone to tip also proved tons easier than trying to find cows, especially since cows and Japanese cowboys look uncannily similar.

However, not everyone is a fan of this new fad. Most vocal among these are the American tourists (being tipped for looking like wrestlers with better hair), the wrestlers themselves, but only the proud ones with no sense of humour, and finally the people who have been rolled over by an out of control wrestler going down the street and sometimes their next-of-kin.

Despite this, sumo tipping is getting increasingly popular, and a show all about tipping fat men in diapers or using them to bowl down pins for bizarre prizes is apparently in the works. Whether sumo tipping is here to stay and become yet another classi Japanese passtime or not it is too early to say, but the bounce when they hit the ground sure looks promising.