MAN ON, MAN OFF.(Pivit: a sports board being used for conditioning by sumo wrestlers )

The vanguard of sumo wrestling these days is not in Osaka or Kyoto but in and around New York, where a few top sumotori have been honing their skills in anticipation of the World Sumo Championships, which are to be held this month in Poland. These Americans, who have come to sumo relatively late in life, from stalled careers elsewhere in the oversized-guys industry (football, pro wrestling, bar bouncing), have adopted a training regimen that bears little resemblance to the usual stomping of feet and tossing of salt. The new approach was on display recently at the South Street Seaport, where James Perry and Alex Vega, clad in loincloths, teetered back and forth on devices that resembled nineteen-fifties-era Bongo Boards. Perry, the reigning North American sumo champ, wore glasses and an un-sumolike goatee, and he seemed to carry much of his five hundred and twenty pounds in the form of three life preservers stackedbetween his hips and his armpits. Vega, who is tall and almost agile for four hundred and fifty pounds, wobbled from side to side, and looked a little like a bear stamping out a brushfire.

The device in question, an "extreme sports board product" called a Pivit, is a new children's toy invented by Rob Rosborough, a self-described "anyboarder" (surf, snow, skate, skim) from New Jersey. After developing a prototype, Rosborough felt he ought to put its durability to the test. "What's the biggest thing we can think of that can get on that?" he wondered. "Elephants? Can we get an animal on there? Maybe, but I don't think we could train one fast enough."

As it happens, Yoshisada Yonezuka had been training a dozen or so elephantine creatures in Cranford, New Jersey, where he is the president of the United States Sumo Federation. One of his charges, Emanuel Yarbrough, who is seven hundred and fifty pounds, won the sumo world championship in 1995. A few months ago, Rosborough showed up in Cranford, and persuaded Yoshisada's crew to give ...