Against the Clock: Immigrant welfare recipients face looming time limit (in National News) District 3 Dollars: Supervisor unveils allocations in new S.F. city budget (in Bay Area News) H-1B Workers Face Uncertain Future (in Business) The Vertical Ray of the Sun Reaches for New Heigts (in A&E) Lead Editorial: Do you know where Visitacion Valley is? (in Opinion)

Retired Sumo Wrestler Pursues Gridiron Dream

Sumo Grand Champion Masaru Hanada leads the pack while running during a workout Tuesday, June 19, in Phoenix. Photo by AP.

By FOSTER KLUG/AP

Sumo grand champion Masaru Hanada squats on the edge of a grassy field. Instead of a mawashi, the silk loin cloth of the sumo wrestler, he wears football pads and a helmet. The ceremonial topknot, or oicho-mage, that two attendants coifed into the shape of a ginko leaf before each sumo match has been replaced with a high and tight buzz-cut.

As members of the Arizona Rattlers arena football team scramble around him, Hanada, who’s trying out as a defensive lineman, asks a question in Japanese.

“He wants to know if it’s legal to grab an opponent’s throat,” his interpreter tells a group of coaches and trainers.

One of only 67 men in sumo’s 1,500 year history to rise through the sport’s rigid hierarchy to the rank of Yokozuna, or Grand Champion, Hanada is now trying to live out his dream of playing American pro football.

Hanada, who won five sumo tournament championships and retired last year with 426 wins and 212 losses, is already a celebrity in Japan, his smiling face plastered on billboards and bus stops.

Sumo is a wildly popular sport in Japan. Many Japanese boys have wrestled, and nearly everyone knows the legend that ownership of Japan was settled in a sumo match between two gods.

Within that culture, Hanada was a superstar.

Hanada ( far right) as a boy with his parents and brother Koji. Photo courtesy of Bandey's Sumo Page, www.szumo.hu.

But throughout his 12-year sumo career, Hanada nurtured a childhood fantasy.

“When I graduated from high school at 17, I had a dream to come to America and play pro football,” said Hanada, 30. “I’ve been waiting until now, until I could have a chance to pursue this dream. I want to be able to tell my children that their father is going after his dream.”

Hanada wasn’t surprised that the Rattlers didn’t sign him at the end of his two-day tryout in June. He knows his age and limited knowledge of English and football’s rules make him a long-shot. Despite these limitations, Hanada’s supporters think the athletic talents that made him one of Japan’s greatest sumo wrestlers will one day make him a pro football player.

“Listen, this is not a joke,” said Warren Anderson, president of Rehab Plus, the Phoenix training facility where Hanada is preparing for an upcoming series of tryouts with NFL teams. “This guy’s got a legitimate chance.

“If you’d have taken Michael Jordan and put him on a cricket field, you’d have a joke,” Anderson said. “But Hanada-san’s used his hands to heave 600-pounders around, and there’s a pretty good correlation to football.”

Hanada left a life of ease and celebrity in Japan to slog through harsh two-a-day workouts in 110-degree desert heat.

“I’m here to learn everything I can about American football,” Hanada said. “Things I’ve only seen before, I’m now actually experiencing with my own body and my own mind.”

Hanada has always been comfortable as an underdog. It was the role that made him famous in sumo.

When he wrestled under the name Wakanohana, which means Young Flower, the six-foot tall Hanada weighed 288 pounds. Undersized among sumo wrestlers, who average 340 pounds, he used his lower body strength, agility and leverage to routinely maneuver men even twice his size out of the dohyo, or sumo ring. At 27, after winning back-to-back tournament championships, he joined his younger brother, Takanohana, as a grand champion.

“He was the ultimate underdog who made good,” said Ken Coller, who writes about sumo wrestling for sumo magazines. “He would be on the edge of defeat and pull a rabbit out of his hat to win.

“He and his brother were popular, in their prime, like rock stars are here in America.”

To market Hanada as an NFL prospect, the people at Rehab Plus are shopping around a tape of Hanada’s sumo highlights.

Hanada has already had some workouts with arena and NFL football teams — most recently with the Atlanta Falcons — but Anderson calls the process a work in progress.

When Hanada came to Rehab Plus in April, he weighed 245 pounds and knew very little about football. Since then, he has put on 25 pounds and improved his strength and football skills, said Tim McClellan, Rehab’s director of performance training. Hanada has run 4.9 seconds for the 40-yard dash, bench-pressed 315 pounds for five repetitions, and vertical-jumped 33 inches.

Jeremy Staat, a nose guard with the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks, does one-on-one defensive lineman drills with Hanada at Rehab Plus.

“He’s built like a typical NFL nose guard: solid, low to the ground and hard to move from a spot,” said Staat. “It’s just a matter of taking the skills he has as a sumo wrestler and transferring them to football.”

To get his body in football shape, Hanada does NFL combine-style drills every morning. He and other Rehab Plus athletes stand on a football field, waiting their turn to run sprints and agility drills.

In the 108-degree heat, Hanada takes his shirt off, showing a stomach-heavy sumo physique that’s slowly turning into the body of a defensive lineman: broad through the shoulders, chest and back.

Hanada reaches low for a tennis ball lobbed at his ankles, tosses it back to the trainer and begins his sprint. As he closes in on the other athletes, he high-steps the last 20 yards, his 270 pounds moving with surprising grace.

“He looks like Deion Sanders!” McClellan yells with delight from the sidelines. “Hanada-san’s Prime-Timing!”