The Giant Bird

One of the highest-paid athletes in Japan looks like a candidate for a Vic Tanny reducing course. He weighs in at 303 lbs., and his stomach is roughly the size and shape of a medicine ball. Yet Koki Naya, known professionally as Taiho (loosely, "Giant Bird"), makes upward of $50,000 a year for practicing his specialty, and when he appears, clad in a loincloth, his long hair bundled in a topknot, he sends shivers of delight through the bobby-sox set. At 22, Taiho is the youngest grand champion in the history of sumo wrestling, one of the world's oldest sports.

Legend has it that the Japanese won their homeland in a sumo match between a Shinto god named Takemikazuchi and a local aborigine. In the good old days, 2,000 years ago, wrestlers fought to the death, cracking skulls and stomping ribs with ferocious abandon. Today's sumo heroes have a more limited objective--only to knock an opponent off his feet or force him outside a 15-ft. ring.

Look, No Weapons. Last week, as 12,000 fans jammed Tokyo's Kuramae Ko-kugikan arena to watch Taiho take on a 253-lb. challenger named Sadanoyama, the two contestants began girding themselves in ritualistic preparation for combat. They rinsed their mouths with water to cleanse their souls, wiped their bulging bellies with paper towels to purify their bodies, stamped their feet to drive away evil spirits, scattered salt to purify the ring, and stretched out their arms to show they had no concealed weapons. Then they squatted in the ring, knuckles on the ground, and glared malevolently at each other, not moving a well-larded muscle.

Sadanoyama lunged forward--and the great, grunting men locked in a spine-wrenching embrace. Faces scarlet from exertion, they stumbled toward the edge of the ring. Sadanoyama relentlessly bent Taiho backward. Just when he seemed beaten. Taiho twisted free, heaved Sada noyama bodily out of the ring, and collapsed, exhausted, on top of his conquered foe.

Love That Chanko. The victory earned Taiho the Emperor's Cup, a ticker-tape parade through Tokyo, countless gifts. and a new flood of marriage proposals from female admirers. Such blandishments still dazzle the bulky ex-lumberjack, son of a Russian father and a Japanese mother, who was recruited by a sumo scout when he was 16 and weighed a mere 155 lbs. Apprenticed to a sumo stable in Tokyo, Taiho built up his weight by devouring large quantities of chanko--chicken, cabbage, potatoes, potato peels, radishes, carrots, flour and soy sauce, all beaten into a glutinous mass and served with buckets of rice. To toughen his bulk, Taiho trained for four hours a day, doing kneebends and backbends, and slamming into a wooden pillar with his stomach, chest and head.

Filled out to a 6-ft. 2-in. mountain of fat and muscle, Taiho has only one apparent weakness--a slight slowness to react to a slapping, windmill attack. But he is so strong that he can usually outmuscle ! his opponents. "If he stays in shape and 'doesn't let fame go to his head." says a rival wrestler, "Taiho can be the greatest sumo champion of all time."

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