If you've read the book Freakonomics, you probably remember the section where the authors discuss a study about corruption and match fixing/throwing in Japanese sumo wrestling.  Well, sadly, that's got nothing on this incredibly disturbing story that's been building up over the past several months.

A young 17 year old wrestler named Takashi Saito (no relation, I'm assuming) died several months ago while training under sumo stable leader Junichi Yamamoto.  But it's not that he died; it's how he died.  Saito tried to leave Yamamoto's stable, which upset him, at least in part because stables are paid a stipend of sorts for each wrestler they train.  So Yamamoto did what any normal person would do in that situation; according to police reports:

"...Yamamoto hit [Saito] ten times with a beer bottle and then ordered three wrestlers to beat him.  Saito's body also showed signs of being hit by a baseball bat."

Quite an over-reaction to losing a fee for a wrestler that didn't want to be there.  But it gets weirder.  The Japanese Sumo Association (who only took almost eight months to ban the wrestlers involved in the beating from competition) decided they wanted to know more about how stables handled their students.  The results from a survey they sent to the 53 stables in Japan showed that "...more than 90 percent [of the stables] had used baseball bats or similar implements in training."

Holy crap!  I can totally understand now why foreign-born wrestlers are becoming more and more dominant in sumo.  Who would want to subject themselves to that sort of abuse?  It's bad enough that they probably have to eat eight bowls of rice a day and get force-fed like a goose being bred for foie gras, but then to know that the stable leader might go all Jose Offerman on you if you lose a couple matches?

Things like this make me very happy that I'm built like a string bean and took up basketball as a kid.  Oh, and I hereby apologize to any coach I ever had for making me run an additional line drill.  I'm sorry, it could have been a lot worse.