Warriors in cages

On Saturday night, April 21, I joined a capacity crowd of more than 1,100 fans who turned out at Gold Country Casino in Oroville to watch 20 young men and women as they attempted to kick the shit out of one another.

We had come to view the so-called “King of the Cage” mixed-martial-arts event, three hours of fast-paced action, with some of the bouts over almost even before I could see what had happened. And, the lighter the weight class, the faster and more furious the action seemed to be.

Going in, I knew almost nothing about mixed martial arts, a hybrid fusion of boxing, jujitsu, wrestling and street brawling that is staged in cages, where there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

I’d pitched this story to the CN&R with a full array of prejudices lined up, ready to write an atmospheric piece filled with sneer and snark about the decline and fall of a great nation now turning these modern gladiatorial combats into the fastest-growing sport on the planet.

I was ready to lament the limited number of options for working-class young people in a bleak economy, youths driven to shed their blood for chump change in pursuit of a distant dream of money and fame earned in wire mesh cages for the amusement of yahoos chummed into casinos to be fleeced at the tables after the fights.

Al Joslin, the matchmaker for these bouts, had attempted to persuade me to a more benign view of cage fighting in a pre-fight phone interview (see sidebar), but I dismissed much of what he said as self-serving insider hype. I was not yet ready to jettison my view that there was something atavistic, culturally bankrupt, and even barbaric going on whenever large numbers of people turned out to see other people commit acts of violence on one another.

Oroville is one of the poorest towns in one of the state’s poorest counties, and some of its citizens wear that poverty where it can be seen—in poor dental health, in sallow complexions, and in barely suppressed anger at the circumstances of their lives.

Poverty breeds frustration, and frustration can breed violence, but the crowd I joined in Oroville was exceedingly well behaved, displaying more civility than is sometimes found among parents at a Little League game, and way more civilized than what you’re likely to see in the parking lot after a home team has lost an NFL game.

Some of those who congregate at Indian casinos, or in front of pay-per-view events on television, do come for blood, gathering to watch fighters go at each other with fists, feet, elbows and knees, minimally protected men and women intent on forcing their opponents to surrender to their superior speed, strength and skill.

And blood was spilled in Oroville during those three hours of fighting. Taken all together, maybe a half-pint of blood was shed by the five or six fighters who sustained cuts. There were guys hired for the specific purpose of mopping up the blood between rounds.

The 10 three-round bouts were divided between amateurs and pros. Samantha Quinn Hester was among the amateur fighters in the early evening prelims. She’d made the four-hour trip from Eureka with her boyfriend and her coach only to lose her fight to Jeana Pinelli in just under two minutes of the first round.

Samantha, who prefers to be called “Quinn,” tapped out after being forced into a hold that put her at risk of having her arm broken. One of the most common ways of losing a mixed-martial-arts contest is by “tapping out,” the act of submission that lets an opponent and the referee know you’re conceding the bout. No one I talked with shows the slightest disrespect for fighters who know when they’ve had enough.

Quinn has a smile that could charm the birds out of the trees. Dazzled by that smile, I ask her the vapid question writers always seem to ask when they’re completely out of ideas: How did she feel about her loss?

“Shit happens,” she said, “but you learn and you move on. Besides, she was the one bleedin’, not me.” Quinn pointed with pride to some dried blood on her T-shirt, indicating that the blood there had come from her opponent. “I know when to quit, and I wasn’t about to let my arm get broken,” she said.

What did she like about a sport many people don’t consider appropriate for women? “I like boxing,” she replied, “but this is more exciting. Maybe it’s my fiery Filipina blood, but who doesn’t like a brawl now and then?”

Later, in one of the first of the pro fights, Andre “The Fury” Fili beat Matt “The Kamikaze Kid” Muramoto in a minute and 59 seconds of the first round, forcing Muramoto to tap out after getting locked in a choke hold. It was an intelligent and stylish match in which the strategic elements were apparent even to someone like me, ignorant of the finer points of the game.

In the penultimate fight of the evening, Zak Bucia defeated Aaron Hedrick in one of the night’s bloodier matches. Hedrick, a Maidu Indian born in Paradise and reared in Oroville, is a local hero. He now lives in Norman, Okla., so if things had followed the arc of triumphal stories, this night would have turned out to be the return of the conquering hero.

But Hedrick, a fierce welterweight, sustained deep cuts under both eyes. The cut under his left eye was especially deep. Cecil Peoples, the ref, monitored the cut with eagle-eyed intensity. By the time the fight ended, both fighters’ trunks were pink with blood.

Hedrick’s sister, Shatawna Miller, was seated behind me. I asked her reaction to her brother’s loss.

“Well, it sucks,” she said, “especially for him. He trained so hard. It’s humbling for him, but he knows he’s not always going to come out on top.”

Jamie Lynne was one of the “card girls,” three scantily clad lovelies who paraded around the cage just before each round, eye candy for the crowd, the “sex” part of the sex-and-violence pageant being offered, her sexuality amped up with a thong-ish bikini, piercings in her pelvic dimples and high-heel pumps. I asked her if this was just a job for her, or if she also liked the spectacle of cage fighting.

“I love it,” she said.

“Doesn’t the blood bother you?”

“Not at all. I’m a lab tech. I’m around blood every day.”

If the blood, the booze and the sweat weren’t enough to jack up a crowd, the monster sound system boomed a bass line straight to and through the heart, rattling bones, shaking dental fillings, and spiking the adrenaline that rose even higher when the featured bout was announced.

The night’s biggest draw was Jaime Jara, and if there was a king of the cage in Oroville, Jara was surely that monarch, revered by all the aficionados of the sport, a seasoned heavyweight with dozens of fights under his belt, a figurehead to younger fighters who hope to equal his success one day.

But, though he may have been the presumptive “King of the Cage,” he lost the feature bout to Justin Baesman, a younger, less experienced fighter. It was an oddly lackluster performance from Jara, and fans grew impatient at the comparatively restrained action as the fight went on.

Someone behind me yelled, “Get a room!” as the fighters worked their way through the desultory third round, with Jara mostly defending himself and his opponent throwing fewer punches, restricting his attack to a series of kicks to Jara’s legs.

When the bell rang, Baesman raised Jara’s arm to signal that his opponent had won, though it looked to me that Jara had lost. Baesman then embraced Jara, lifting him off his feet in a gesture of respect. A moment later, he leaped to the top of the cage, yelling to the crowd, “Give it up for him.”

I didn’t properly understand what I’d seen until later, when I learned that Jara had suffered a broken left arm in the second round and a torn right bicep early in the first round, though neither I nor anyone near me had seen him react to that punishment. He’d gone on, fighting gamely for the full three rounds, losing in a close decision.

Few in the audience knew that Jara was hurt, but the guy who had hurt him knew, which was why he lifted Jara up as the sound of the bell faded.

And the kicks to Jara’s legs were, in fact, punishing blows. “Those kicks to the legs and shins are like getting hit with a baseball bat,” Al Joslin told me after the fight. “But fighters develop a kind of armor. The body’s an amazing thing. It adapts to whatever it has to endure, and fighters develop a tough sub-epidermal layer that offers them some protection other people don’t have.”

Baesman, the winner, lives and trains in Susanville. In the aftermath of the fight, it was apparent that he’d been confining his late-round attacks to Jara’s legs because he knew his much-admired opponent was badly injured, and he didn’t want to take advantage of that, nor did he want to inflict irreparable damage to those injured arms. After the fights, he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of his two daughters. Under that picture, a caption read: “Fighting For Their Future.”

When the amphitheater emptied, I made my way down the corridor that led back into the casino. I came upon Aaron Hedrick, surrounded by a gaggle of relatives, including his mother, Joannie Swanson.

“Aaron got married at 18,” she informed me. “He had his issues when he was young, and he spent his share of time in juvenile hall, but he’s got two kids now, and he’s a great dad and a good husband.”

Her son stood off to the side, still bloody but surely unbowed, soaking up the support of friends and relatives.

“He always fights with heart,” his proud mother said, amid the hubbub. “There’s a certain discipline that goes with mixed martial arts. We tried to joke him out of it when he first talked about going pro, but when we saw he had a passion for it, we urged him to give it his all.”

Though Richard Nixon is almost never my go-to guy for opinions about character, I remembered something Nixon had written as I milled around with Aaron Hedrick’s entourage. “You’ve got to learn to survive a defeat,” Nixon wrote. “That’s when you develop character.”

Nixon’s notion fits with what Swanson told me. “Right after the fight,” she said, “Aaron told me, ‘You know what, Mom, I’ll learn from this. I feel like I let people down who came to watch me, but I’ve got family and friends here and that means everything.’”

A few days later, I asked my friend, Dr. Richard Josiassen, if he had an opinion of cage fighting. Josiassen is a mental-health professional who left his hometown of Richvale for a shining psychiatric career in Philadelphia.

“I have been impressed with how deeply motivating a sense of personal honor can be,” he said, “especially for young-adult males. Look at the number who go off to wars they know are based on falsehoods, and yet they line up by the thousands for the sake of honor. I suppose winning a cage match confers a deep sense of honor for some folks.”

Envy was the last thing I would have imagined I’d take away from an evening spent ringside at the cage fights. As I watched the fighters, their families, their trainers and their friends gather in the coffee shop after the fights, I witnessed a real sense of community, people who loved and respected one another, who took genuine delight at holding place in this distinct subculture.

Writing and teaching, the two professions I’ve known best, offered nothing like this, no supportive sense of esprit, no shared bond of common identity, little willingness to afford respect to colleagues. As much as anything else, the kinship the fight community displayed seemed tribal, in the best sense of that word.

I envied these young fighters for their sense of belonging, a feeling I’d known only in long-ago days when I was active in the peace movement. Perhaps the scorn we felt back then from people who didn’t share our view of things helped us bond more tightly, and perhaps the disdain that people like me so often evince for all these heavily tattooed young warriors enhances the sense of brotherhood they feel. Whatever the reason, that brotherhood is undeniable. And I envied them for it.

If I needed someone I could count on, someone to take my back, I’d choose one of these people long before I’d pick any of my former English-teacher colleagues or any current fellow scribbler in the writing trade.

The fighters crowded into booths, some of them wearing the oversized championship belts they’d won in earlier contests. Jamie Lynne, the lab tech/card girl I’d talked to earlier, took a table with an older man I immediately assumed was her date. Now, however, she was in flats and jeans and a demure top, and she looked like a middle-school kid, all the overt sexual cues toned down to invisibility.

Shelly Matlock, one of the “King of the Cage” promoters working the event, came over and gave her a hug. Jamie Lynne introduced the man she was with as her dad, wiping away all my initial impressions and giving her back her status as a complete human being, a working professional woman who’s also someone’s little girl.

Andre Fili,the stylish 21-year-old who’d beaten Matt “The Kamikaze Kid” Muramoto earlier in the evening, slid into my booth to answer a few questions. His favorite writer, he told me, is Chuck Palahniuk, the guy who wrote The Fight Club. I am caught off guard to hear a young fighter talk about his “favorite writer.” I’d spent a lifetime recommending books to community college students who far too often seemed bewildered by the idea that there were people who actually had favorite writers, so it surprised me that this young man with tattoos and earlobe plugs was a reader of real books by real writers.

He picked up on my surprise. “Cage fighting goes much deeper than two guys punching each other in the face,” he said. “It’s about being intelligent, using what you’ve got.”

The teacher bell in me started going off, and I rattled off some books I thought he’d like—Fat City, by Leonard Gardner, and the short story, “A Piece of Steak,” by Jack London. When I used to recommend books in class, I always doubted my students would actually seek them out, but I have a hunch that Fili might.

“The whole Northern California mixed-martial-arts scene is pretty cool,” he told me. “There’s something in the water, maybe. I partied hard when I was in high school, and I got in my share of trouble, but a guy like Jaime Jara is a figurehead to me, and this sport has taught me so much. You can’t know yourself until you’ve been in a fight, until you’ve trained six to eight weeks for one fight, with one specific opponent. It’s the purest form of conflict between two people, and win or lose there’s no animosity after the fight. You can see that every time. We respect each other. It’s a tight-knit community.”

I was surrounded in that coffee shop by kids, few of them much older than 21, all of them pretty sweet, from what I could see, with the same plainly visible vulnerability and desire to please I’d seen in the students I’d taught in hundreds of college classes. Despite the Maori tattoos and the piercings and the chest-pounding displays of fierceness, these were just kids, fumbling their way along in a society that doesn’t offer much direction or real support.

I fully expected to write a piece about my night at the cage fights drenched with disapproval, but I left that event unable to disapprove of what I’d seen. In a country as fucked up as this one currently is, with insane gun laws, out-of-control corporate power, foreign wars without end, millions of children living below the poverty line, a political system corrupted by big money, and a cultural life obsessed with people like the Kardashians, there are far more serious targets for disapproval than a bunch of young men and women chasing dreams of glory, and finding more freedom in cages than many of us find in the various cubicles we construct for ourselves, or in the round of days that now seem stripped of the hope the American Dream once promised.

This is a nation that puts a larger percentage of its young men in cages than are under lock and key in any other country on the planet, young men who are in prison because they have no idea of where to channel their youthful energies.

So, to be Andre Fili, happy and young, surrounded by friends, with a victory to sleep on and dreams of future nights like this to get him through ’til morning seemed a pretty fine way to be 21 years old on a Saturday night in America in the second decade of the 21st century.