Kuhaulua enjoys the fruit of a lifetime given to sumo

TOKYO >> The waiter bows reverently to his famous guest and then pulls out a notepad to jot down the lunch order.

But after the guest orders a small bowl of vegetables and chicken the waiter remains poised for more.

Even when Jesse Kuhaulua says that will be all and nods toward the next guest at the table, the waiter seems unconvinced and continues to hover.

Once sumo’s largest competitor at 6 feet, 4 inches and more than 430 pounds — with a prodigious appetite to match — the legendary Takamiyama now draws double-takes for his eating habits and leaner look.

From the 413 pounds he weighed as recently as a little more than two years ago, Kuhaulua now claims a svelte 286 pounds.

Less, he proudly notes, than he played at during his senior season (1962) of football as an All-Maui Interscholastic League selection at Baldwin High.

Hawaii’s patriarch of professional sumo has embraced a healthy lifestyle with the vigor with which he once dove into large containers of ice cream. 

“I feel so much better and the diabetes is gone,” Kuhaulua said. 

At an age when health issues have claimed the lives of many of his ring contemporaries from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, Kuhaulua is around to celebrate his 71st birthday this month. And also observe milestones such as July’s 43rd anniversary of winning the Nagoya Basho, when he became the first foreigner to hoist the Emperor’s Cup symbolic of a tournament championship in Japan’s national sport.

A framed, life-size portrait commemorating the 1972 triumph dominates the entryway to the Azumazeki stable building he owns in the Honjo Azumabashi neighborhood. The lower floors and basement are leased to a former protege, ex-maegashira Ushinomaru, who operates the stable, while Kuhaulua lives on the third and fourth floors. 

Behind its shoji panels are a trove of sumo history, reminders of a trailblazing nearly half-century in the sport in which he opened the door for dozens of others from Hawaii who would follow, including top division performers Konishiki, Akebono, Musashimaru and Yamato.

After retirement from an ironman career in the earthen ring in 1984, less than a month shy of his 40th birthday, Kuhaulua became the first foreigner to become a sumo elder and stable owner. He coached Akebono, the first foreign-born yokozuna in the centuries-old sport, and others until the mandatory retirement age of 65 in 2009.

These days he occasionally works with sumotori and volunteers at charity events, but usually spends his mornings at a gym. “I swim, walk in the pool and ride a stationary bike,” Kuhaulua said. “And I’m careful what I eat now. Mostly it is vegetables and some chicken. Rice, maybe, once a week now.”

Old-timers do a double-take when they pass him on the street or hear his trademark raspy voice, the result of a series of hand thrusts to the throat early in his career. But youngsters look at his white beard with puzzlement. 

“At Christmas they ask if I’m Santa Claus,” Kuhaulua said. “Sometimes they think I’m Col. Sanders. I like to think I look more like (Ernest) Hemingway.”

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.