Howley - Thrown

FOR WILL

2014 by Kerry Howley

FIRST EDITION

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Howley, Kerry.

Thrown / Kerry Howley.First edition.

pages cm

Summary: Acclaimed journalist Kerry Howley infiltrates the world of mixed martial arts and the lives of aspiring cage fighters. For three years, Howley follows these fighters as they tear ligaments and lose a third of their body mass to make weight, and is drawn deeply into this riveting culture of violenceProvided by publisher.

1. Mixed martial artsUnited States. 2. Martial artistsUnited States. I. Title.

GV1102.7.M59H68 2014

796.8dc23

2014010165

Cover by Kristen Radtke.

Interior by Kirkby Gann Tittle.

E-book ISBN: 978-1-936747-97-9

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.

The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Contents

SOMETIMES YOURE WATCHING LEGIT living legends of MMA lore and sometimes half-drunk cornfield-born farmboy brawlers, but there is always an octagon, always a fence, always a path down which only fighters may walk. There is music upon their entrance. There are hard-bodied fans and fat announcers, rolling cartfuls of cold beer, laser lights that shine from ceiling to canvas. Always ring girls. Lets talk about the ring girls, please, the way they never seem to get anywhere, the way they set off, gleaming teeth and quivering thighs, only to end up back in the same cageside seat from which they alight. Round one arrives. Round two arrives. The ring girl spins in place. I used to think a ring girls job was to be an idea of a ring girl, that is, to nest comfortably inside the memory of every other ring girl the spectators had seen, not to draw attention to herself but to the concept ring girl with which myriad personal qualities of her ownperhaps she has synesthetic tendencies, a deep appreciation for the late works of Schopenhauer, an engineering degree from Iowa Statewould doubtless conflict. But then I found myself at a big fight out East, and the fighters were really hot on this one particular ring girl, Britney, who, truth be told, was especially ogle-worthy as she strode across the cage. The spectators lusted for Britney by name, and this willingness to individuate forced me to reassess my position on the subject of ring girls, their function.

In the summer of 2010, when Sean was thirty pounds overweight and I was already his most persistent and devoted spacetaker, I was convinced that a successful fight had something to do not with the ring girl specificallythat would be absurdbut the chemical reaction made possible by a ring girl, an announcer, a beer cart, an audience, and who knows what else. That somehow the spectacle transformed the space; that we were watching, in action, a Theater of Cruelty, and just as Artaud would have predicted, the show sunk more often than it soared.

I myself am not a fighter, not a fan, not a shadow or a groupie or a worried wife. I am that species of fighterly accoutrement known as spacetaker, which is to say that when the fighters leave the cage, where they are self-sufficient, for the street, where they are not, I am that which separates your goodly fighter from the common thug. As hipsters have glasses, and priests collars, and cops mustaches, fighters have us. And just as the mustache does not at shifts end quit the cop, we belong to the fighter and not the fight. Most of what fighters do, after all, is not within the purview of the octagon, and they need their entourage as much if not more on a slow Sunday afternoon when the quiet is too much to face. There is in some of them the same want that keeps cargo-shorted frat boys traveling in packs the moment they leave home, that effortfully cheerful desperation to drown out mind-traffic with the shuffle and shout of other men.

The story is this: I showed up, a spectator, to a fight in Des Moines. Moments previous I had been at a conference on phenomenology, where a balding professor stunningly wrong about Husserlian intentionality dominated the postconference cocktail hour.

Does anyone have a cigarette? I asked a group of skirt-suited, fading, gray-complected women, not because I wanted one but because I longed for an excuse to exit. None of them moved. I am not myself a smoker but have always preferred the company of the nicotine-inclined, and I took the aggressive health of these academics to be unseemly dogmatism.

Having nothing to do in Des Moines beyond explore Husserl with nonsmokers who did not understand him, I walked the conference center hallways. I found myself at a hotel, and then a restaurant, and then ambling along a glass corridor, one story up from downtown Des Moines. A group of young men who had fragranced themselves such that I was sure their evening had some immediate purpose passed me, and upon following them through an ever more complicated labyrinth of hallways, I landed at their destination. A framed sign standing before two closed doors read Midwest Cage Championship. This interested me only in that it appeared to be the honest kind of butchery in which the theory-mangling, logic-maiming academics I had just abandoned would never partake.

Inside the room the lights were dim but for a great spotlight lofted above an octagonal dais, lined on all sides with a six-foot chain-link fence. A hundred male Iowans gathered in the dark on benches. Through the fence I saw that one man was beneath another like a mechanic under a truck, and the man on top had a full set of angels wings tattooed down the length of his back. Inked feathers rippled as he punched the face of the man lodged under his stomach. A red stream dribbled down the other mans forehead, onto the canvas, where their conjoined writhings smeared the blood like the stroke of a brush. Seconds later a single hand fluttered out from beneath the wing. His fingertips touched the canvas with extreme delicacy, as if to tap a bell and summon a concierge. There was no one to inform me that this meant he had given up, so I assumed some sort of grotesque exhibition had merely run its course.