"sumo" and "rigged" in the same sentence can cause a national furor. People tend to get defensive when the integrity of their national sport is impugned. Still, allegations of match rigging do occasionally find their way into the Japanese media. These occasional media storms offer one more chance to measure possible corruption in sumo. Media scrutiny, after all, creates a powerful incentive: if two sumo wrestlers or their stables have been rigging matches, they might be leery to con- tinue when a swarm of journalists and TV cameras descend upon them.   So what happens in such cases? The data show that in the sumo tournaments held immediately after allegations of match rigging, 7-7 wrestlers win only 50 percent of their final-day matches against 8-6 opponents instead of the typical 80 percent. No matter how the data are sliced, they inevitably suggest one thing: it is hard to argue that sumo wrestling isnt rigged. Several years ago, two former sumo wrestlers came forward with extensive allegations of match rigging-and more. Aside from the crooked matches, they said, sumo was rife with drug use and sexca- pades, bribes and tax evasion, and close ties to the yakuza, the Japa- nese mafia. The two men began to receive threatening phone calls; one of them told friends he was afraid he would be killed by the yakuza. Still, they went forward with plans to hold a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo. But shortly before- hand, the two men died-hours apart, in the same hospital, of a sim- ilar respiratory ailment. The police declared there had been no foul play but did not conduct an investigation. "It seems very strange for these two people to die on the same day at the same hospital," said Mitsuru Miyake, the editor of a sumo magazine. "But no one has seen them poisoned, so you cant prove the skepticism." Whether or not their deaths were intentional, these two men had