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Henry Miller

Notes from the MMA jobber file, #39: Last November, I wrote an ode to Giant Silva, the 7'2" wrestler and fighter, in which I dubbed him the platonic ideal of the freakshow fighter--a fighter whose one and only skill was his stature. While that's still true, Giant Silva, for all his vulnerabilities, still had exactly one win during his time in Pride. Our subject today is Silva's victim, the once-upon-a-time sumo oddity Henry "Sentoryu" Miller.

Miller, despite the name, is actually half-Japanese and was in fact born in Tachikawa--his father was a US airman on reserve, and when Miller was six and his father's duty has ended, the family moved back to his home in St. Louis. Miller's birth in Japan informed the path of the rest of his life: As a child, he'd been a big fan of sumo wrestling, and took up amateur wrestling in America on account of it. When he graduated from high school, he took stock of his options and interests, packed up his belongings, moved back to Japan, and embarked on a 15-year mission to become the best sumo in the world.

He...never quite got there. Under the shikona Sentoryu (and, briefly, Kaishinzan) he competed voraciously, known for favoring brute force and grit over finesse, but he struggled to rise in the ranks, being repeatedly promoted and demoted between the middle tiers of sumo. Eventually, after twelve years of constant give and take, he achieved the beginning of his dream: He was promoted to makuuchi, the top division of sumo, and the start of every sumo's path to the top of the mountain. Unfortunately, makuuchi itself has five ranks, and he never broke out of the first. Equally unfortunately, he was demoted out of makuuchi altogether within a few months. This was the patch on Sentoryu's career: Everyone admired his grit--at just 5'9" he was one of the smallest sumo wrestlers, and was repeatedly injured from the strain both his competition and his weight put on his body, but he battled back every time and won fans simply for his refusal to quit--but he couldn't be consistently successful. He was the first person from the mainland US to ever reach makuuchi, but he was also the slowest foreigner ever to get there. Even though his career saw him score victories over numerous up-and-coming stars, including one of the greatest of all time in the future yokozuna Asashoryu, he simply couldn't climb the ladder. By 2003 he was 34, and injured, and ready for something new.

And there was, indeed, something new afoot. Just two years prior, the former yokozuna (and fellow American) Akebono had retired from sumo and made his way to kickboxing and mixed martial arts. Miller wasn't yet ready to leave the world of combat sports, and in 2004 announced he'd signed with Pride and wholly intended to be the best heavyweight fighter in the world.

He never quite got there, either. His first fight was the aforementioned Giant Silva battle, in which he gassed out and got submitted--once again, by *Giant Silva*--in four minutes. It wasn't a good sign, and it set the table for the rest of his career.

Henry Miller was a tough, powerful man. Unfortunately, he was also a 34 year-old man with more than a decade of injuries taking up an entirely new set of combat sports as a 5'9" heavyweight. He was operating at every conceivable disadvantage, and his record reflected it. In nine years of combat sports competition, including twenty-three mixed martial arts bouts and three kickboxing bouts, he won exactly seven times, and only two of those fights were against opponents with more wins than losses--and one of them was Mal Foki, who at 5'7" was the only fighter Miller ever outsized. His sole kickboxing win came was a battle of the boxing sumo against former rival Wakashoyo, who was himself 45, out of shape and 0-5-1. Only one single fight in Sentoryu's career went to a decision--which meant he was exciting, but also that he's been knocked out fifteen times.

Ten years after he'd hung up the mawashi, Sentoryu hung his gloves up beside them. He left a 6-16 (1) record in mixed martial arts, and a 1-2 record in kickboxing. He now runs a company that sells display boxes for jewelry. Its website is written in three clashing languages and still has lorem ipsum text in its footer. It is somehow fitting, to me--Miller's career, while intriguing, is best characterized by its goals all being left tragically incomplete.

Moveset, stats, logic and four attires (Pride 30 vs Zuluzinho / Cage Rage 17 vs Berry / K-1 WGP 2007 vs Kin / Sumo attire).