Avenue

Urban Brawl

Lacking those great trials — war, desperate poverty — that test a man’s masculinity and mettle, modern men struggle with the surety of their existence. Hemmed in by urban walls, the stress builds until it plays out in gyms, basements, backyards, with men beating each other to a pulp, asserting their physical dominance, embracing suffering. It’s only natural. Or is it?

By Craig Davidson

Photography by Jared Sych

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"The punch was an overhand right — though it could have been an overhand left. Or my opponent could have bounced a Toast-R-Oven off my skull. Punch-drunk, I staggered back less from the force of the blow than from its unremitting menace. You’ll hear coaches exhort their boxers with the saying: “Let your hands go!” It means to beat your opponent to the punch. But to me it’s always meant: “Stop caring about him as a human being, if only in the hothouse of the ring.”

Spectators drunk on hipster-ironic Labatt’s 50 bellowed, heckled and shrieked at the sight of two men in a sweat-oiled ring smashing away at each other. My mouth guard was lined with cinnamon Dentyne: my muscles pumped out so much lactic acid the gum turned to mush in my mouth. The next punch fitted neat as a pin into the fleshy cube of my face compressed by headgear. Blood temporarily knocked out of them, my features must’ve been as pale as an actor in a Japanese No play.

This was a few years back at Florida Jacks boxing club — Yonge Street, Toronto. A PR stunt that got out of hand. You see, I wrote a boxing novel. My publicist’s thinking: promote it with a boxing match! Made sense on paper. Ill-starred plans often do. An opponent was found — a poet; I had no idea poets came so big! — and we duked it out. I got shellacked. Nadir of my so-called career. Afterward, I swore: no more fighting. Until my U.S. publicist piggybacked the promo. I found myself at Brooklyn’s Gleason’s Gym last year, fighting author Jonathan Ames.

I didn’t fare much better.

Despite being an atrocious pugilist, why did I insist upon fighting? My own masochistic predisposition? A genetically preconditioned drive, extinction-minded as it may be? A fuzzy tumor, gray-edged like rotting fruit, tethered to my DNA helix with only my intermittently functioning self preservation instincts staving off metastasization? So, why?

“Men have evolved through competition,” says Dr. Augustine Brannigan, sociology professor at the University of Calgary.

“Male and female humans evolved toward differing specifics. It’s called sexual dimorphism. Men evolved around competition. Fighting is one permutation. Men who come out ahead attain the most beautiful women, more possessions, heightened social dominance. Status; that’s the evolutionary payoff.

“Fighting can be a way to amass social capital. Prestige. Proof you’re king of the castle. A force to be reckoned with who is willing to be physical to establish who’s in charge.”

But Brannigan says physical dominance holds less sway in modern society.

“There’s now an inclination to meet peacefully, establish civilized relat-ionships, mediate conflict intelligently. We’re more liable to practice reciprocal altruism — basically, ‘You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ — than to settle matters by force.”

Certainly our paragons of commerce, science and the arts are not often the most physically outstand-ing of the species. The list of bodybuilder CEOs is a short one. So what type of people are drawn to fighting nowadays?

“Young,” says Brannigan. “Male. Unemployed. Poor. Seeking status. Possessing a high-risk tolerance. They don’t have other sources of pride to draw upon — a good job, a family — so fighting fills that gap. It earns them respect within their status group.”

Brannigan’s assertions were fresh in my head when I entered Calgary Fight Club, a Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) academy located in the basement of a medical health center off 16th Avenue N.W., it is reminiscent of boxing clubs I’ve trained in — below ground, punching bags, teardrop bags, extruded concrete walls.

“BLEED IN THE DUNGEON, LAUGH IN THE BATTLEFIELD” is written on one wall.

Co-owner Keegan “Kegs” Hanning is a broad-shouldered boxer whose cherubic features stand incongruously amidst his fighters. Scar tissue, calcified knuckles, cauliflower ears.

There’s a saying: Never trust a man whose body isn’t a little bit ruined. If that’s true, you could probably trust a few of these guys with your life.

“We get guys from different walks of life,” Hanning says.

“Lawyers, guys going after medical degrees. Guys going to court or trying to improve their lives.”

When I ask what brings them in, he says: “They see it on TV. Or some guys got that ‘rage-switch’ — it’s on all the time. Here they learn to control that rage. Channel it into effective aggression. For others it’s this idea of, ‘I need to test myself. How do I measure up?’”

So they come in search of an understanding of themselves?

“Yes. Self-betterment,” says Hanning.

“Also, I have a lot of guys come down here who .  . . depression is amazingly big as a factor. Depression issues. This club has turned lives around. Guys find confidence in themselves. Apply that determination to their lives. It’s not this barbaric, let-me-smash-someone’s-head-in-because-I’ll-feel-good-about-it-when-I’m-done sort of thing.”  

The Ultimate Fighting Championship — UFC — was the venue through which mixed martial arts entered the national consciousness.

Its first broadcast, in 1993, was a single elimination tournament pitting various combat stylists against each other. Boxers against wrestlers, judoists against jiu-jitsu specialists — a real-lifeincarnation of the 1988 Jean Claude Van Damme movie, Bloodsport.

Those early contests had few rules: no fish-hooking (jamming your fingers in an opponent’s mouth) or groin strikes. Combatants fought in an octagonal ring hemmed by chain-link fence: an easy talking point for critics who saw it as less sport than dogfight.

It has since refined via a broad rule system with weight classes and timed rounds.

Combatants mix “stand-up” skills — boxing; Muay Thai kicks and knees — with “ground game” techniques: joint-lock or oxygen/blood flow-restriction manoeuvres.

Hanning’s fighters compete professionally, but they work day jobs and train evenings. Many of them are married and in comfortable financial situations. Not the sort of men you’d find hereabouts, according to Brannigan.

“Here’s the distinction,” Brannigan says.

“Clubs like the one you describe are supervised. Instructed. A controlled environment where men improve their skills. A pro-social activity, unlike the deviant version: men fighting without rules and with no sporting aims in basements or outside bars. Different environments attract different sorts of men.”

I take part in a grappling class. My partner is Tony Stiles. Early 20s, densely muscled and copiously tattooed. Coin-sized mat burns dot his frame. He shows me a “kimura”: a Brazilian jiu-jitsu joint-lock. From a side position your hips will immobilize your opponent beneath you and force air from his lungs. Rake one forearm across his face and dig three fingers of your opposite hand into his elbow. Force that arm onto the mat while retaining your leverage position. Grab your opponent’s wrist and slide your opposite forearm under his arm and grab a hold of your own wrist. Drag his arm toward his torso, while bringing it up off the mat, placing so much pressure on the shoulder socket he must submit or have the joint reduced to cartilage shrapnel.

Injury is part of any sport. Stiles tells me his last fight was cancelled after a freak accident.

“Got hit here.” Finger-tracing his right eye. “What’s called an orbital fracture. My eyeball went like a piston: back into my socket, then pushed out again.”

This put pressure on the horseshoe-shaped nerve running from the corner of his eye. The right side of his face went numb. Hanning says it’s an injury common in boxing; hockey, too.

I ask Hanning about the club name. Why Fight Club?

“We don’t have any [boxing or MMA championship] belts,” he says. “We don’t have any black belts training here. This is where people train hard, and yeah, fight.”   

But Calgary Fight Club hosts amateur sportsmen who approach their calling with high seriousness. Put Stiles in a basement with some unskilled yahoo screaming,
“I want you to punch me as hard as you can!” — if Stiles chose to oblige, it would be a hideous bloodbath.

Calgary Fight Club bears scant resemblance to the cinematic version.

Begging the question: are there such things as fight clubs like we saw in the movie?

In the Chuck Palahniuk novel, Fight Club, disaffected office drones pulp each other in pursuit of bodily catharsis. Its underlying aim is to recruit for Project Mayhem, whose mandate is the downfall of civilization.

It captured the Zeitgeist.

Fight Club was rebellion against consumerism. Fight Club was anarchy. And Brad Pitt made a movie about it.

But often cultural touchstones are misapplied to organizations or pursuits having a flimsy association to the source.

I’ve seen regional MMA tournaments referred to as Fight Clubs: as absurd as calling Junior A hockey tournaments Skate Clubs.

Then there’s Kimbo Slice. A former body-guard, Slice rose to YouTube fame through a series of underground fights. Slice’s challenge: put up $10,000 and he would show up to fight you.

Despite Slice resembling an ambulatory chunk of masonry with matching cinderblock fists, a few fools accepted.

Slice arrived — in backyards, basements, once a boatyard — in a Hummer, removed his bling and beat his hapless opponents silly.

Is this a Fight Club? No, it’s a fight ring, same as dog or cockfight rings: a loose consortium of combatants and financial backers who engage in or bet upon blood sport.

And does Kimbo Slice represent the tip of a huge network of brawlers-for-hire or the opposite—a singular specimen of a dying breed? That his success has not led to a surge of YouTube copycats is evidence of the latter.

Truth is: nobody I spoke to — Brannigan, Hanning, Stiles or anyone at Calgary Fight Club — has ever heard of, been to or participated in a fight club. Never have they attended or participated in an underground fight event.

Fight clubs: an urban myth? If so, it’s one I’d wholeheartedly bought into. Scenes in my second novel, The Fighter, take place in “The Barn” on an isolated farm where desperate men engage in unlicensed fights. Fiction, yes, but I felt I was writing about places and people in a common situation.

Not common to my life, but other men’s.

I believed in the existence of venues like The Barn the same way I did Santa Claus as a kid: when you want so badly for something to be true, you fail to demand physical proof.

Plus there was the media saturation, the term “fight club” popping up everywhere — but when I studied closely, I saw lazy reporters misapplying it, misrepresenting and misconstruing, overblowing a phenomenon that never was.

You could be forgiven for thinking a massive movement is afoot: men congregating in underground clubs to whale on one another. They’re not. No more than before the book and movie.

You may think guys are flocking to Calgary Fight Club and boxing clubs to satisfy their fisticuff fetish. No. Hanning had trouble covering rent in the early days. Every boxing club I’ve trained in operated on the brink of insolvency. They’re always in basements: underground space is cheapest to rent.

Why did I believe for so long in something that has no strong basis in reality? I always saw a need for men to express themselves in that manner. The main idea in Fight Club is that men of later generations lack that great trial which tests their mettle and manhood. It’s a lack I, myself, have felt.

I once went to the Legion with my grandfather. Saw the hard miles carved into the faces of old doughboys. Compared to them, my face was as soft and featureless as a peeled hardboiled egg. It terrified me that I could die with a face so unmolested.

My grandfather fought in the Second World War.

Tested on a grand scale with the biggest stakes — his life, the lives of others — he prevailed.

Not spectacularly or even nobly; scratching and clawing and simply surviving. He returned home with critical elements of himself known.

My dad grew up in bone-break poverty which is its own sort of war. The keenest strife facing us End-of-the-Alphabet generations — Xers, Ys, Zeds — is dealing with the
unearned surety of our existence.

We grew up middle class. Work in cubicles. Hands so soft. Our fights take place in boardrooms with PowerPoint presentations. But we realize there are situations we cannot outwit or leverage ourselves clear of. Places where our degrees mean nothing. The equity we’ve built. Our flawless golf swing. Every high-minded thought in our heads.

We lack that generational or circumstantial impetus to create a legitimate need for suffering.

Many feel the sheer luck of being born during a frictionless lull in world history, at least in this part of the world, has let us off some metaphysical hook. Fight Club puts us back on the hook.

You absorb abuse for no other reason than to test your capability to withstand it.

So if the need exists, why aren’t we embracing it? Partially because it’s a hassle.  

Organizing 10 guys to meet at the same bar or the gym for a game of pickup basketball is tough enough — imagine getting them to meet up to kick the shit out of each other.

Plus our forefathers had no choice but to tolerate suffering. We do. Few organisms elect to place themselves in extremis.

Mainly, though, End-of-the-Alphabeters are most willing to embrace catharsis through pain on a conceptual rather than experiential level. All my friends have seen Fight Club. Few have ever been in a fight.

It works as an ethos, not anything they’d actually participate in.

I envision a group of 20-somethings in a root cellar. A few are shirtless but most too self-conscious to peel off whatever ironically sloganned T-shirt they’re wearing. Two square off. An inept punch lands. The punchee gazes at blood on his fingers.

“Let’s play X-Box instead.”

Roughly translated: “I’m okay with dying egg-faced.”

“They come in,” Hanning says of guys who show up looking for the Fight Club experience. “One of our guys might gear up and put him on it.” Put him on it = give him a chance to humble himself.

Hanning shrugs. “Reality check.”

Guys like Tony Stiles occupy the thin end of the beam; to crib from the Hell’s Angels, they’re the “one-per-centers” who stick with it.

The majority of End-of-the-Alphabeters are nothing like that. Take me. I wrote a novel about fighting based on a fascination with men who behaved in ways I never could. Guys like Stiles. Fiction met reality when I fought to promote it. Railroaded by circumstance, was all. Had my publicist suggested a less violent event, I would’ve gladly obliged.

What of evolution through competition, then? Is the North American male perched at the edge of an evolutionary cliff?

“Competition has many manifestations,” says Brannigan. “It doesn’t always mean men beating each other to a pulp.”

Undoubtedly true. Still, in more desperate moods I envision future generations as a Russian doll: one inside the next inside the next, smaller and smaller until you discover
a creature of utter uselessness and redundancy.

Something as soft and pink as the skin under a fresh-picked scab.

I’ve seen people claim fighting as a “spiritual experience.” Drivel. I’ve been punched in the face plenty. You don’t see St. Peter or hear bugling seraphim. There’s nothing remotely spiritual about ruptured eardrums, detached retinas, or picking your own chiclets out of a gutter. Quasi-mystical inanities of that ilk fuel fight club myths.

Yet I’ll admit there are a few odd side benefits.

Palahniuk wrote: “After a night in fight club, everything in the real world gets the volume turned down.”

My experience was the opposite: the world gets cranked to 11.

Everything’s the best the day after a fight. Wake up, sun streaming into your room: the most beautiful sunlight ever! Eat a bowl of oatmeal: best thing I ever ate! Look out the window see a butterfly: Mr. Butterfly, you’re the prettiest ole thing! Your body draws so close to a sense of its termination it over-appreciates the simplest stimuli. Tasted
so much sour now every damn thing tastes sweet. That day-after sweetness is highly addictive.

But you don’t need to go to a fight club to give or take a beating. Just go visit Hanning and Stiles. Or get soused and shoot your mouth off at Outlaws.

“Fight clubs only appeal to young men,” says Brannigan. “Once you’re older, seeking prestige in such manners seems nonsensical. Loses all appeal.”

And for all the concentrated effort it takes to fight, the day-to-day persistence required maintaining adult burdens — marriage, careers, kids — is far more difficult.

To enter the crucible of the ring is to adopt a short-term burden.

My bouts went three rounds. Nine minutes total. One third of a TV sitcom.

The consistent challenge of being a good husband and father is mammoth. To love someone, build a home and life together, work a job you may or may not loathe because you have others who depend on you and a safe environment you must foster, to make choices your children are too young to make and live with those decisions, day following day on down your mortal coil.

The real challenges run life long.

Dead honesty? I am capable of embracing dead-ended burdens. Life-long ones still vex me. I was not born to fight.

I did so under the assumption it may answer nagging personal doubts. It didn’t.

It couldn’t.

Like many men, I’ve lain outside a bar or inside the ring, blood coursing down my face, thinking: that didn’t answer a goddamn thing.

Live and learn, huh?