Rupert Cintron, a 51-year-old Chicago truck driver, makes his unlikely pro sumo wrestling debut
If ever there was an underdog Chicago could get behind, Rupert Cintron is it.
Cintron, a 51-year-old Chicago-area truck driver, made his debut as a pro sumo wrestler in a new league that swung through Chicago over the weekend.
"It's just an opportunity at my age to be able to do something like this," Cintron told the Sun-Times before his first pro match. "I'm 51 years old, and I'm about to get out there with these kids, and, you know, it's just cool ... It's like life never ends if you don't let the dream end. Just keep going."
With little sumo experience to his name, Cintron is very much just a dude in the right place and time who was given a shot.
He hasn't worked out — in a gym, at least — in seven years.
But he moves about 11,000 pounds of flour, beef and other raw materials on a daily basis from his truck into the basements of Chicago restaurants. Before that he worked as a mover.
"People tell me I have that dad strength. That old strength," said Cintron, who also played 11 years of semi-pro football in the Chicago area.
His nickname: The Chicago Silverback.
"My wife and family always say 'You're like a big gorilla.' Plus I'm getting old, got the gray hair going, got a little silver on the back," he said.
Cintron, at 5 feet 10 inches and 260 pounds , is also very green when it comes to sumo. He only began wrestling two years ago and is still learning all the Japanese words that go hand in hand with the sport, which Americans tend to pick up as adults.
Professional Japanese sumo wrestlers typically start learning the sport at a young age and rise the ranks by living together in "stables" and dedicating much of their lives to training, which includes a regimen of high-calorie nutrition to pack on pounds.
Only a few Americans, most from Hawaii, have broken into the upper echelons of sumo in Japan.
Cintron (whose legal name is Ruperto but goes by Rupert) lives in Elgin with his wife and high-school sweetheart, Lela Cintron, and they have four kids. His father was a Chicago police officer.
A nascent American league
The Sumo Championship League that just launched is not affiliated with professional sumo in Japan. It is the brainchild of founder Stuart Snyder, the former president of the Cartoon Network and World Wrestling Entertainment. Snyder puts an American spin on the packaging of the live event with attention to music, lighting, presentation and crowd reaction.
"But the sumo is pure sumo," said Snyder.
The event Saturday night at Credit Union 1 Arena (previously known as UIC Pavilion) was the second stop on the league's inaugural tour across North America. Its next stops are in Canada, Arizona and Texas.
The Sumo Championship League’s wrestlers circle up on the dohyo during the leagues second-ever event, at Credit Union 1 Arena at UIC, Saturday, Nov. 7, 2026. The American spin on the sport packages the live event with attention to music, lighting, presentation and crowd reaction.
Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times
The majority of the league's wrestlers are American, but there are a few international competitors, too, including ones from Mongolia and Ukraine and one amateur wrestler from Japan.
A $10,000 prize goes to the top wrestler at each event, and wrestlers accrue points throughout the season, with some getting cut if they under perform, culminating in a final event in late 2027.
Cintron was the sole wrestler from the Chicago area to compete Saturday.
Sam Rodriguez III, a 40-year-old military veteran from Calumet City, would liked to have joined him, but he was injured in the league's first event in October in Austin, Texas, which drew about 3,500 people. He broke a finger and tore tendons in his hand.
Sumo wrestler Sam Rodriguez, who was unable to fight due to an injury, attended the Sumo Championship League’s second ever event at Credit Union 1 Arena. The military veteran from Calumet City said of the atmosphere at these events: “Once that initial charge happens in the ring, the crowd just goes wild.”
Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times
"Yea, I got injured, but the event was lit," said Rodriguez. "Once that initial charge happens in the ring, the crowd just goes wild."
Unlike sumo in Japan, where the top ranks are occupied by massive humans averaging more than 350 pounds, wrestlers in the new league have a variety of builds, with weights ranging from 200 pounds to the 450 pounds that the league's top-ranked wrestler, Dominus Davis-Williams, brings into the ring.
It's not uncommon for a much smaller wrestler to beat a larger opponent.
‘Build some calluses’
When he was announced, the crowd gave it up for their hometown competitor.
Cintron felt the love, but lost his three matches.
He slipped in the first one, was pushed out of the ring by a hand to the neck in the second and wrestled his opponent to the ground in the third, but Cintron hit the floor first.
The performance means he probably won't be invited to the new wrestling leagues next events.
Every time he looked at his family in the crowd he saw his daughter, Raven Cintron, 22, holding a sign that read "Build some calluses."
It was a nod to a line Cintron told his kids whenever they would do things like stub a toe or sip a too-hot soup: "You're building calluses to make yourself stronger."
"Just to feel sumo at that level and put on a show, it was awesome," Cintron said Sunday morning on his way to sumo practice.
"I'm OK, I've just got the regular aches and pains of a 51 year old," he said.
Sumo in Chicago
The majority of wrestlers for the new pro league were pulled from the ranks of the 50 or so amateur sumo clubs around the country that are home to several hundred wrestlers with a wide variety of backgrounds.
The current amateur sumo scene in Chicago can largely be traced back to Matt Shields, a project manager for a west suburban architecture firm who started the Chicago Sumo Club in 2022 through sheer force of will.
Shields, 40 and wiry thin, caught the sumo bug while visiting Japan and decided to do something about it upon returning to Chicago.
In search of members, he brought a thick braided rope to the beach in Humboldt Park to form his sumo ring and began drilling alone, hoping to persuade curious passersby to join him. No one joined.
Undeterred, he tried a few other spots.
Shirtless, and wearing compression shorts under his sumo belt, known as a mawashi, he walked up to people enjoying barbecues at 31st Street Beach and asked if anyone wanted to wrestle him.
"It was mostly African American gentlemen, and they kind of gave me the side eye, like 'Who is this white guy?'" recalled Shields.
Again, no one took him up on the offer.
"I understand their reluctance," said Shields in retrospect.
He used the same tactic at a picnic held by the Japanese American Service Committee of Chicago, where his earnestness drew several participants.
He eventually formed a group with about 12 core members, including female wrestlers.
They practice every Sunday at space provided by a local university. They glean instruction from YouTube and the occasional help Ryuichi Yamamoto, a retired Japanese pro sumo wrestler who lives in St. Louis.
Cintron is a mainstay of the club. So was Rodriguez until he left to help start a separate group, Illinois Sumo Association.
Small but growing sport
The sport is small but growing, according to Jake Poirier, who heads up the United States Sumo Federation. The federation organizes the annual national championships, which is notably different from the new pro sumo league in that the tournament includes weight classes and female wrestlers. There are many smaller tournaments held by local clubs, as well as exhibitions that may feature wrestlers from Japan.
But the sport is niche compared to its popularity in Japan, where it took root more than 1,500 years ago in Shinto religious traditions to entertain gods and pray for bountiful harvests.
Other professional sumo opportunities have come before the Sumo Championship League, but none were as well-funded, organized or brought to you by an entertainment executive with a penchant for showmanship.
"Most people have not seen sumo, they have a visual of it, but there's so much more to sumo than that," said Snyder.
While the sumo wrestling is the same, some of the tradition and pageantry customary to sumo in Japan are not part of the new league.
"We don't have the hard standard rule of following every single tradition that is done in Japan," said Snyder, noting that wrestlers don't throw salt before each match to purify the ring as wrestlers do in Japan.
"Because at the end of the day we're not Japanese, and I'm very sensitive co-opting something that inherently we are not," he said.
Not the end of the road
"I'll be back. Hopefully," said Cintron, adding that maybe he could serve as an alternate at future events and get called up to wrestle if someone is sick or injured.
He dreams of at least advancing to the semi-finals, at which point a song of each competitor's choosing would play before their bout.
"I'd go with 'Sweet Home Chicago' — the version sung by the Blues Brothers," he said.
"For now though, it's back to the drawing board," he said with a laugh.
Watch Saturday's event. Cintron's bouts start at :58, 1:06 and 1:12.
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