A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (38 page)

They were all dog lovers and students of history. The members of the “fancy” knew their dog history—they could rattle off stats and names, breeds and bitches like a baseball fan could talk about ERAs and RBIs. Escorrega even had breeding cards with pictures and statistics, just like big baseball cards, and he could name famous dogs like you can name movie stars. Tim and John were also students of breeding and genetics. There are massive books of breeding, going back to the 1800s.

A champion is a dog that has won three fights, and a grand champion is a dog that has won five—these are the distinctions that owners of game-bred dogs want to breed to. John told me of Banjo, a famous biter that was a grand champion at three years old, which is young; so that means he probably wasn’t getting challenged with tough fights. “Banjo would run in and destroy the whole front end, but maybe a good wrassler could have handled him, and popular belief is Banjo was secretly a cur—he’s never reproduced.” In the end, though, winning is still winning.

Fighters, whether dog or man, have to win to matter. You can say what you want about Mike Tyson or Muhammad Ali, but if they hadn’t been winning, no one would have paid attention. Tim even said to me once, “I don’t care about gameness—I just want to win.”

My only previous experience with dogfights had been the film
Amores Perros,
and this got a big snort of derision from Escorrega. “It’s very Hollywood. The owners are not shooting dogs and all crazy like that, and you would never fight a rottweiler against a pit bull, not at any kind of weight similarity.”

The American pit is the standard for fighting dogs. Pound for pound, the pit, with its lower pain sensitivity, thicker skin, higher bone density and muscle thickness, and, above all, greater gameness, will destroy any other dog. Rottweilers are bred to be guard dogs—they are big, heavy, and slow, but intimidating, and they are people-aggressive, unlike pits. Pit bulls don’t make good guard dogs, because if they are finally trained to become people-aggressive, they will go for the throat, not the arm or leg. Any dog will fight for a few minutes, but only a pit will go on and on.

Dogfighting is legal in Japan, and there they have a thousand-year-old tradition of fighting the big dogs, the tozas. Those dogs are all over a hundred pounds, big and slow-moving compared to the explosive pit. A really big pit, even one at seventy or eighty pounds, would tear a toza up.

Pits are wonderful pets, and are not inherently dangerous, but their gameness and toughness make them animals that need to be understood, or there can be tragic results. They have been bred specifically to fight other dogs for hundreds of years, like a greyhound has been bred to run. Pit bulls make great pets as long as you know what you’ve got, and you know what you are doing. They’re almost more of a farm animal, an outside animal, and they are very sensitive and intelligent but need a lot of stimulation and attention—especially a “game-bred” pit, in which these characteristics are most defined. The problems happen when pits get left alone too much, or when they are tortured or mistreated. If a pit has been “turned on” to fighting, meaning it has been fought a little, it will want to fight and kill basically any dog it comes into contact with. Ike X said that dogs so aggressive are a fairly recent breeding phenomenon, only since the seventies, as before that puppies used to be allowed to wander the yard. John said, “I had a bitch once named Renegade who would kill a puppy, anything walking, she would jump it—basset hound, Chihuahua, anything.” His dog was a fighting dog, game-bred; and that was how it interacted with the world. I thought of boxers and pro fighters who end up beating their wives. The fighting dog has learned that interaction with the world is through its teeth, and the fighter, sometimes, has learned it is through his fists.

Pit bulls are responsible for so many dog attacks against people mostly because so many dogs are pits; they are in some areas the most popular breed in the United States. The various pounds in the Los Angeles area were killing eight hundred stray pits a week in 1996. They have been bred to fight—and to forget that is foolish—but they are great dogs. I lived with two in Oakland and loved them. They don’t have a “locking jaw,” as some people think, but they do have a powerful bite and, of course, tremendous will to hang on. With an adult pit, you use a “breaking bar” or “stick” to get it to release its bite, by working the bar in and levering its jaw just a little, and then when it lets go to readjust its bite, you pull the dogs apart. John had a young pit bite another dog, and luckily the pit was young enough that when John took the hose and sprayed water right in its eyes, it let go. “He never would have done that if he was a year or two older—he never would have let go,” John said. You have to know what you are doing if you own a pit.

Many game-bred dogs don’t have the big bulkiness and intimidating silhouette of a show pit bull, and it isn’t until they yawn, and you see the massive jaws and huge fangs (sometimes called tusks), like a small lion, that you realize that these aren’t ordinary dogs.

Just like human fighters, dogs have to be conditioned properly before a fight. The program is called “the keep” and runs anywhere from six to thirteen weeks. The keep is strict isolation and a workout program with nutrition and mental conditioning thrown in. It strikes me that the isolation is the real torment for a pack animal; it is part of what makes the dogs so aggressive and must feel like a form of madness. Certainly, human fighters need the isolation and go into camps for weeks or months before a fight, separated from families and women and anything not to do with the fight. I think the isolation must change your brain chemistry, just like a dog’s, and make you more focused, more aggressive. I had heard no sex for three weeks before a fight from a hundred different sources.

This is where the true barbarism of dogfighting lies, in the life on the chain—not in the fight. These dogs are never allowed to be with other dogs, and for so keen a pack animal it must be torture. Especially once they’ve been fought, the dogs can never be allowed in contact with one another, because they’d tear one another to shreds.

The owners put the dogs on an electric treadmill for stamina and a manual treadmill for bursts and strength, and then do all kinds of other exercise, such as bite work, dragging chains, pulling tires. Nutrition is monitored—precisely. As with humans, the goal is to get the biggest possible athlete into the fight at weight. John used to do long sessions, sometimes eight hours a day (just to “peak” a dog), and Tim shook his head when he heard that. “It’s overtraining a dog, just like an athlete. Is the dog going to fight for eight hours? No. At most, he’ll end up fighting three, so why would you train him more than that?” Tim favors shorter, more intense workouts.

In the distant past, cats were used as bait on the treadmill and then given to the dog to kill right before the fight, so the dog would learn that all that work finally paid off. But that isn’t done anymore, and isn’t considered necessary. There are guys who fight their dogs against stray mutts, but that’s “just ignorant,” said Escorrega. “It doesn’t do anything for your dog but get him used to easy fights.”

The fight takes place in a pit, under what’s called “Cajun rules,” which have become the standard all over the world, reflecting the dominance of American-bred dogs. The pit is supposed to be sixteen by sixteen feet square, with a two-and-a-half-foot wall running around it and scratch lines fourteen feet apart. Before the fight, the dogs are washed by either the opposing handler or his second, to make sure that no one has used poison or any chemicals to confuse the other, such as a “bitch in heat” smell, for example. They are even washed in milk, occasionally.

As in boxing or jiu-jitsu, when the dogs fight, anything can happen. Some dogs bite the legs, some switch from back to front, some dogs bite the nose, some the kidneys, others the chest. Chest biters can keep the opponent off, can keep him from walking, but that is considered boring—it’s ugly to watch. Some dogs make a career biting ears. They will sweep each other, and take each other’s back, just like grappling.

The main thing is that if the dog doesn’t want to fight anymore, he can leap out of the ring, or just refuse to continue. The dogs should never die in the pit. The one thing they do die from, if the fight goes very long, is shock and stress, from either a burst heart or failed kidneys.

“Pride is the whole damn thing,” Escorrega said. “Vanity can blind you—your dog is dying, but you won’t let him quit, hoping that he can win.” John said that “a dog should never die of kidney failure—those guys don’t know what they’re doing.” It’s a little like chess: Good players don’t need to get to mate; once someone realizes that his position is untenable, he’ll resign. In this way, if your dog is losing badly but still game, you should pick him up, because you can breed him on. If he hasn’t quit, pick him up. Real dogmen don’t need to see a dog die. “If you’ve got a decent dog, you would never let him die—it ain’t about winning, it’s about not quitting,” John said. “If I got five generations of something that won’t quit, I might get something.” When dogs fight past an hour and a half, which isn’t uncommon, you need experienced dogmen to keep them alive after the fight. They need IVs to rehydrate, and their systems are very fragile, on the edge of shock. It’s in the “deep waters,” where a lot of money is at stake, that dogs die.

“When I started, it was all about gameness, and the dogs, and I was the only black dude there. It was mostly hicks.” John had been into dogs in the eighties, with his partner; they called themselves CMB, for “Cash-Money Brothers.” He and his partner got ahold of some dogs from a famous stud dog, Jeep, and they started beating everybody, because they had good dogs. They would go way out into the countryside, and there would be a picnic, and then later the dogs would come out, sometimes a couple of fights, sometimes just one. The game has changed, and the dog scene has devolved in the United States and moved into Mexico. The great breeders are all old men now, and a lot of the legendary kennels have been broken up.

One of the reasons dogfighting is so demonized, especially in the United States, is that it has become linked to the drug world and to criminals. A lot of these guys don’t know what they’re doing, don’t love their animals, and have weak dogs but fight them to kill one another. These aren’t real dogmen and would never be admitted into the tight world of big money and international dogs. It’s a secret world of reputation, of personal knowledge. Real dogmen love dogs. However, love is not always simple, and we can be cruel to what we love. The dogmen love dogs, but they, like fighters, are often damaged themselves and have little pity; their love of dogs is a cruel, desperate kind. Dogs that lose are culled; dogs that cur out are killed directly after the fight, or at best given away (although that is problematic). When John talked of the dog that had jumped out of the pit, he laughed and said, “You got to cull him right there in front of everyone, to show you’re serious.” These dogs are not pets, but more like farm animals, and sentimentality has no place on a farm.

Escorrega had gotten out of dogs. He still loved the fight, but he loved his dogs more; pit bulls feel no pain when they fight, but they are flesh and blood. “I devote my life to the church,” he said. “I know gambling is a sin, but I love to watch the fight. I like to fight myself. I’ve been hit before, I had my ass kicked before: I know what it looks like, what it feels like.” It was the days after the fight, nursing his dogs back to health, and their pain and slow recovery, that put him off dogfighting. In the end, he loved his dogs too much to see them suffer.

Even Tim CEK, as professional a dogman as I’d ever met, had a soft spot for his good dogs. He and Monty had a dog that was a four-time winner, and one more win would make him a grand champion, which was worth a lot more money in terms of breeding, but Tim wouldn’t fight him; he was five and a half years old and “it wouldn’t be fair to him.”

“Filipinos are the black people of Asia,” said Tim CEK. He had to yell it in my ear over the din at Bedrock Bar in the Malate district of Manila. Tim and I had come to the Philippines to see a big dogfight show, a “convention,” on the following night. Tim was drunk on gin and tonics and had his arm around me in the easy Thai familiarity. The band was about three feet away and covering R. Kelly with tremendous enthusiasm.

“They are the most musical, and every bar and fancy hotel in Asia—in Japan or Thailand or anywhere—has always got Filipino singers. They’re the best,” he said. “They love black culture. In the U.S. the Filipinos don’t hang out with other Asians; they hang out with black people.”

He was right about the singing; we’d been to a couple of different music bars and I had already heard at least five singers who would have been in the top ten on
American Idol.
Tremendous voices, rich and deep and incongruous coming from these sweet round Asian faces. Their taste was mainstream pop. At the Hobbit House, a
Lord of the Rings–
themed bar staffed entirely by midgets (brilliant!), I heard a tall Filipino girl with a sad face and a bitter air do the best Led Zeppelin cover I’d heard—she was better than Robert Plant.

Manila was big and dirty, and full of seedy fun. The streets were crowded, and everyone was out for a good time, though there were not many foreigners. Manila used to be a big tourist destination (especially when the U.S. military bases were there) but had been eclipsed by Thailand and the rest of Southeast Asia. My dad had been stationed in Manila for a time, which he remembered fondly.

Tim was something of a wunderkind in the dog world; he had only been matching dogs for five years, but through a combination of meticulous research, intelligent planning, luck, and having good dogs, he was nearly undefeated in that time. He had the science, and the discipline; he had earned respect, particularly in the Philippines, where he had matched five times and never lost. Tim had the quiet, watchful air of a careful judge who is reserving his opinion, impenetrable and inscrutable. Even with ten gin and tonics in him, it was hard to know what he was thinking.