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Just imagine paying more than £1,000 for one of the best seats in the house at a sporting event only to find that you don't actually have a seat.
And after an hour of sitting on the floor, a near-naked 29-stone man suddenly lands on top of you.
How do you feel? If you are Tom Jordan, you are thrilled to bits.
'That's made it all worth it!' he tells me at the end of an extraordinary evening at London's Royal Albert Hall. 'It means good luck.'
A 61-year-old energy worker from Houston, Texas, Mr Jordan is here with his wife, Bethany, because they are both huge fans of Sumo wrestling. When they learned that London was staging a full tournament of Japan's ancient national sport-cum-religion, they did not think twice before booking flights.
For top-tier Sumo has only ever taken place outside Japan once before in the sport's entire 1,500-year history – and that was also here in London, more than 30 years ago.
At first glance, this could be renamed A Game of Thongs, a lot of baffling bare-chested ritual followed by frantic bursts of action – a long fight is one that lasts a minute.
The rules are simple: push your opponent out of the 14ft ring or make him touch the floor with anything other than his feet. It has millions of fans around the world, all glued to it via the internet.
So when it was announced that the sport was moving abroad for this five-day Grand Sumo Tournament, it sold out immediately. The wrestlers seem equally thrilled, popping up at landmarks all over London in their robes and flip-flops.
Prefaced by a 40-minute nightly opening ceremony, there are ten fights either side of an interval. Each pair climb on to the 'dohyo', the raised platform, and begin with mind games behind two white lines. There is a lot of crouching, staring, tummy-slapping, clapping, leg-stretching and foot-stomping.
In between, the wrestlers chuck handfuls of salt around the ring (for purification). Finally, the fabulously robed referee, or 'gyoji', gives the signal and the warriors lunge forth like a two-man rugby scrum.
Despite their voluminous bellies, quivering thighs and bountiful man-boobs (several are also enthusiastic smokers), these are agile athletes. Some manage to trip or flip an opponent, others simply bulldoze them over the boundary line of clay-filled straw bales.
Some have a strong personal fan base. There are huge cheers when Tobizaru, a 21-stone lightweight known as 'Flying Monkey', lifts his opponent out of the ring by the back of his thong, a technique not unlike the schoolboy 'wedgie'.
The Sumo ring has no ropes or railings. Spectators in the first few rows, by tradition, sit cross-legged on a cushion on the floor (thankfully there is normal seating further back). Indeed, ringside cushions are so prized that in Japan only the Japanese may sit on them.
There is high excitement when a 29-stone man-mountain called Shonannoumi sends his rival crashing off the platform but has built up such momentum that he himself goes tumbling after him. At which point he lands on top of an elated Tom Jordan (who has paid £1,047 for the privilege).
The whole event is painstakingly authentic. When it comes to sticklers for tradition, the much-mocked 'blazers' of the Football Association have nothing on the 'kimonos' of Sumo's governing body. They have insisted that everything in the Albert Hall, including a Shinto temple roof hanging from the ceiling, matches a Sumo hall in Japan.
The straw for the bales, the clay and even the hairdressers who construct the wrestlers' topknots have been flown from Tokyo. Likewise, the wrestlers' hotel must replicate life in the 'stables' where they live at home.
Yet the audience is predominantly British. I am next to ardent fans Robert McGregor, 57, and his brother Thomas, 51, from Dundee. They managed to get some of the cheapest seats, at £71, for two nights running (black market tickets were reaching £3,500 last night).
'I watched this when I was a boy and they had Sumo on Channel 4,' says Thomas, a hospital porter. 'I said to myself: 'I'm going to see that one day'.'
The brothers talk me through the various tiers of this rigidly hierarchical sport. Fighters, or 'rikishi', work their way up to this top tier, the 40-strong 'makuuchi' division.
They are graded like tennis seeds but, every now and then, a wrestler is so prodigiously talented that he receives the exalted status of 'Yokozuna'. There have only been 75 in Sumo history but, right now, there are two, including the heftiest specimen at this event, a 30-stone 25-year-old called Onosato.
At home, they are A-list sporting celebrities – yet these gentle, modest men are happy to stop for a chat and a selfie with all-comers.
Theirs is a highly disciplined, almost monastic life where wrestlers must attain a certain level before they may receive money or even a room of their own, let alone marry.
All of which means that one thing is missing here in London this week. Sumo, it turns out, does not travel with a WAG army.