An average everyday sumo
If anyone ever wanted to see what a sumo gig was like, last Saturday would have been the day to come and watch. Completely typical in every way.
It’s in Marion. It’s always in Marion or Glenelg or Kensington. Places where people feel the pressure of needing to ‘do things’ for their children’s birthday parties and have the money to do it. They always have large station wagons and at least one sparkling clean 4WD. The parties often have theme rooms (think ‘jungle room’ with lots of plants and leopard print or ‘haunted house room’ with black cut out plastic and fake spiders web) and the houses often have a nice extension out the back with a quiet, sunny area that will be both quiet [I]and[/I] sunny once the kids leave home and take all their toys with them.
I arrive, clad in a Hawaiian shirt that says ‘No one would voluntarily wear this, therefore the entertainment has arrived’. I knock on the door and it’s answered by an appropriately hearty dad who likes weekends because he doesn’t have to shave. If it’s summer he’s wearing shorts with a belt and sandals. In winter he wears the same jacket he wears to Saturday morning school sport. As he greets me, the tide of children at a party washes around us. Something new is happening. The Playstation 2 has been turned off, the theme room has become boring. The sumo man has arrived.
Dad directs me towards the area picked out as the wrestling arena. According to the contract it is supposed to be 5 x 5, but that can often mean 5 x 5 metres on bricks, surrounded by expensive pot plants, posts or simply out in the impending rain. Mum usually turns up around about now, wiping her hands from preparing the latest round of treats, and introduces herself as the woman who reluctantly made the booking with my agent. She obviously isn’t too keen on the idea of ten dirty little boys and girls running through the house fuelled by sugar and the idea that wrestling and maybe breaking things is okay. She is about half an hour away from a glass of Riesling. Dad has already started on the Heineken.
As a general rule, the richer the kids are, the less likely they are to be excited about helping me lug my four bags full of sumo suits and wrestling mats from my car. These kids were your run of the mill ‘good kids’.
‘Do you need a hand with your stuff?’ asks Dean (Dad). ‘That’d be great.’ I reply and immediately the entire party has migrated outside and across the road (without looking) to gather around my car and to vie for the honour of humping what amounts to a heavy beanbag sized thing to the back garden.
I follow them out and unpack everything. I move slowly so that I can keep an eye on the ten pairs of sugar-fuelled hands, all willing to help by grabbing, tearing and claiming primacy over a favourite coloured waistband. I unroll the mat and only girls ever help me to get it straight in the middle of the grass.
For those who are still in the dark about what sumo suits [I]are[/I], here’s a quick course:
The sumo suits are large foam bodysuits made to look like sumo wrestlers. People hire them (and me) for parties, functions, fairs, anything that has a 5 x 5 metre area and people willing enough to don the suits and wrestle each other to the ground. Think alcohol. Think hormones (mostly testosterone). Think test of strength and think expensive. Three hours will relieve you of $440, two are around $300. This is divided between my agent, the suit manufacturer and myself, but one still needs a healthy wodge of disposable income to have me in attendance, umpiring the contestants and making sure no one gets injured.
So I’ve unfolded the mat, shown the kids the suits and made everyone sit down and take their shoes and socks off. The birthday boy (or girl, but mostly boy) gets to go first along with his best mate and the two kids wriggle into their suits while the various parents stand around thinking everything from ‘I wonder if I could have a shot’ to ‘This doesn’t look very safe’.
My favourite type of parents are the mothers who stand right by the ring desperately trying to convince their flock of hyperventilating twelve-year-olds to ‘be gentle, take it easy, be careful’. This is almost as good as the Dad who decides that I’m not dressing the kids fast enough and that he’ll come and help. Inevitably, he will always take twice as long as your handsome veteran and I’ll end having to strap the kid’s helmet on the right way anyway. Yet still he persists…
The parents were perfect. They stood out of my way, they told off any kids that needed it and Mum even remembered to offer me a drink.
The kids, unusually, were also great. They organised themselves fairly. No one got hurt and, most shocking of all, when I talked – they listened. Incredible.
Not to say that they didn’t have their fair share of kid’s party personalities. Here is a list of the different personas that pre-teens assign themselves at sumo parties (as far as I have been able to observe in my three years of encouraging children to attack each other):
The Big Kid. Everyone challenges him or her. No one ever wins. They eventually get bored and are cajoled into taking unconvincing dives.
The Little Kid. At the opposite end of the developmental bell curve to The Big Kid. Either shitscared or over confident. Always loses. Never cares as much as …
The Sulker. Future passive-aggressive. If and when they lose, it’s always because they had a ‘sore foot’.
‘What’s the sore foot from kid? Dragging your feet? Tripping over your bottom lip?’
The worst Sulker I’ve ever seen was a twelve-year-old boy who lost to a girl of the same age and then went and sat in the corner of the garden, face in hands, for half and hour. By that stage most of the party had tried to console him without success. The only thing that brought him out was the birthday cake.
The Competitor. Absolutely mad to test his skills and strength against everyone. Already organising a tally of wins and losses in his head for use in perpetuity. ‘Remember when I thumped you four to one in sumo suits!’
‘That was 16 years ago Chris.’
‘And the title still stands!’
The Screamer. Usually a girl, but not always. The scream is usually part of a very limited arsenal.
The Comedian. Knows what a funny voice sounds like from copying adults on TV, but doesn’t know any jokes to use the voice for. I can usually relate best to them because they remind me of me. Consequently they usually find themselves winning due to one-sided refereeing and some pushing and shoving from said ref.
The afternoon contains all of these delightful characters, plus a few normal ten-year-olds who don’t really fit into any category that I can be bothered naming. Good on them, defying definition like that and keeping everyone guessing.
The other thing I can’t fail to mention when talking about sumo-suiting ten-year-olds is the constant raping of the word ‘verse’. I can never help myself when I hear kids screaming at each other ‘I’m gonna verse you, then you verse him!’. I always have to cut in and ask ‘Gonna recite some poetry to him eh?’, which never fails to gain a round of blank stares.
At the conclusion of the afternoon, the clouds roll in right on time and I pack my gear into the car with a little extra help from the greatly reduced crowd of kiddy volunteers. I shake Mum’s hand and promise her that her particular bunch of kids are the best fun I’ve had for ages and I tootle off into the afternoon.
It’s in Marion. It’s always in Marion or Glenelg or Kensington. Places where people feel the pressure of needing to ‘do things’ for their children’s birthday parties and have the money to do it. They always have large station wagons and at least one sparkling clean 4WD. The parties often have theme rooms (think ‘jungle room’ with lots of plants and leopard print or ‘haunted house room’ with black cut out plastic and fake spiders web) and the houses often have a nice extension out the back with a quiet, sunny area that will be both quiet [I]and[/I] sunny once the kids leave home and take all their toys with them.
I arrive, clad in a Hawaiian shirt that says ‘No one would voluntarily wear this, therefore the entertainment has arrived’. I knock on the door and it’s answered by an appropriately hearty dad who likes weekends because he doesn’t have to shave. If it’s summer he’s wearing shorts with a belt and sandals. In winter he wears the same jacket he wears to Saturday morning school sport. As he greets me, the tide of children at a party washes around us. Something new is happening. The Playstation 2 has been turned off, the theme room has become boring. The sumo man has arrived.
Dad directs me towards the area picked out as the wrestling arena. According to the contract it is supposed to be 5 x 5, but that can often mean 5 x 5 metres on bricks, surrounded by expensive pot plants, posts or simply out in the impending rain. Mum usually turns up around about now, wiping her hands from preparing the latest round of treats, and introduces herself as the woman who reluctantly made the booking with my agent. She obviously isn’t too keen on the idea of ten dirty little boys and girls running through the house fuelled by sugar and the idea that wrestling and maybe breaking things is okay. She is about half an hour away from a glass of Riesling. Dad has already started on the Heineken.
As a general rule, the richer the kids are, the less likely they are to be excited about helping me lug my four bags full of sumo suits and wrestling mats from my car. These kids were your run of the mill ‘good kids’.
‘Do you need a hand with your stuff?’ asks Dean (Dad). ‘That’d be great.’ I reply and immediately the entire party has migrated outside and across the road (without looking) to gather around my car and to vie for the honour of humping what amounts to a heavy beanbag sized thing to the back garden.
I follow them out and unpack everything. I move slowly so that I can keep an eye on the ten pairs of sugar-fuelled hands, all willing to help by grabbing, tearing and claiming primacy over a favourite coloured waistband. I unroll the mat and only girls ever help me to get it straight in the middle of the grass.
For those who are still in the dark about what sumo suits [I]are[/I], here’s a quick course:
The sumo suits are large foam bodysuits made to look like sumo wrestlers. People hire them (and me) for parties, functions, fairs, anything that has a 5 x 5 metre area and people willing enough to don the suits and wrestle each other to the ground. Think alcohol. Think hormones (mostly testosterone). Think test of strength and think expensive. Three hours will relieve you of $440, two are around $300. This is divided between my agent, the suit manufacturer and myself, but one still needs a healthy wodge of disposable income to have me in attendance, umpiring the contestants and making sure no one gets injured.
So I’ve unfolded the mat, shown the kids the suits and made everyone sit down and take their shoes and socks off. The birthday boy (or girl, but mostly boy) gets to go first along with his best mate and the two kids wriggle into their suits while the various parents stand around thinking everything from ‘I wonder if I could have a shot’ to ‘This doesn’t look very safe’.
My favourite type of parents are the mothers who stand right by the ring desperately trying to convince their flock of hyperventilating twelve-year-olds to ‘be gentle, take it easy, be careful’. This is almost as good as the Dad who decides that I’m not dressing the kids fast enough and that he’ll come and help. Inevitably, he will always take twice as long as your handsome veteran and I’ll end having to strap the kid’s helmet on the right way anyway. Yet still he persists…
The parents were perfect. They stood out of my way, they told off any kids that needed it and Mum even remembered to offer me a drink.
The kids, unusually, were also great. They organised themselves fairly. No one got hurt and, most shocking of all, when I talked – they listened. Incredible.
Not to say that they didn’t have their fair share of kid’s party personalities. Here is a list of the different personas that pre-teens assign themselves at sumo parties (as far as I have been able to observe in my three years of encouraging children to attack each other):
The Big Kid. Everyone challenges him or her. No one ever wins. They eventually get bored and are cajoled into taking unconvincing dives.
The Little Kid. At the opposite end of the developmental bell curve to The Big Kid. Either shitscared or over confident. Always loses. Never cares as much as …
The Sulker. Future passive-aggressive. If and when they lose, it’s always because they had a ‘sore foot’.
‘What’s the sore foot from kid? Dragging your feet? Tripping over your bottom lip?’
The worst Sulker I’ve ever seen was a twelve-year-old boy who lost to a girl of the same age and then went and sat in the corner of the garden, face in hands, for half and hour. By that stage most of the party had tried to console him without success. The only thing that brought him out was the birthday cake.
The Competitor. Absolutely mad to test his skills and strength against everyone. Already organising a tally of wins and losses in his head for use in perpetuity. ‘Remember when I thumped you four to one in sumo suits!’
‘That was 16 years ago Chris.’
‘And the title still stands!’
The Screamer. Usually a girl, but not always. The scream is usually part of a very limited arsenal.
The Comedian. Knows what a funny voice sounds like from copying adults on TV, but doesn’t know any jokes to use the voice for. I can usually relate best to them because they remind me of me. Consequently they usually find themselves winning due to one-sided refereeing and some pushing and shoving from said ref.
The afternoon contains all of these delightful characters, plus a few normal ten-year-olds who don’t really fit into any category that I can be bothered naming. Good on them, defying definition like that and keeping everyone guessing.
The other thing I can’t fail to mention when talking about sumo-suiting ten-year-olds is the constant raping of the word ‘verse’. I can never help myself when I hear kids screaming at each other ‘I’m gonna verse you, then you verse him!’. I always have to cut in and ask ‘Gonna recite some poetry to him eh?’, which never fails to gain a round of blank stares.
At the conclusion of the afternoon, the clouds roll in right on time and I pack my gear into the car with a little extra help from the greatly reduced crowd of kiddy volunteers. I shake Mum’s hand and promise her that her particular bunch of kids are the best fun I’ve had for ages and I tootle off into the afternoon.