No Holds Barred With Eddie Goldman

On this edition of No Holds Barred, host Eddie Goldman spoke with sumotori, judoka, writer, and intellectual Kevin Carter. This is the first of a two-part interview.We spoke with him by phone Wednesday, April 14.For Kevin Carter, sumo has been a lifelong passion.While growing up, "I would come home after school, and the only thing I really watched on TV was sports," he said. "I watched a lot of baseball, football, basketball. I also played hockey, too. But I was watching every Saturday that I could, and very occasionally they'd put on sumo."I immediately fell in love with sumo. It was like, 'this is great, man!' These are guys who are obviously athletes."This was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and many of the greats of Japanese sumo at that time were sometimes featured on the sports highlight shows of that era."I just totally fell in love with sumo."He still had not competed in sumo, though. When he was at Harvard, he played football. He had developed an affinity for Japanese culture by the time he began