A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (39 page)

Jo, his best friend in the Philippines, was a battered-looking chain-smoker with long hair and the features of an American Indian. He was a good dogman, and like all good dogmen he was honest, loyal, and friendly (which still didn’t make him a Boy Scout). He worked as a designer, specializing in Web sites, but when Tim asked him a technical question about software, Jo shook his head. “I’m an artist, man,” he said.

The bars reeked of cigarettes—everyone was smoking, and it became harder and harder to bear just drinking water and Coke. Although I wasn’t in training, I wasn’t out of it, either. I didn’t have a fight set but thought I might fight in Myanmar, or MMA again, back in the States.

Eventually, we headed back to the hotel. We watched a dogfight on Tim’s laptop, and at twenty minutes one dog was overpowering and mauling the other, and the losing handler let his dog lie there inert. He was letting his dog get killed—it was the first distasteful thing I’d really seen in dogfighting, the first time the spectacle made me uneasy. “The guy’s an idiot,” Tim said. “He should have picked up long ago.”

Tim confided to me that here in the Philippines, sometimes they kill the dogs in fights; they want to see the dog die. When dogs are dying, it means the people don’t know what they are doing. The exception is when both dogs are very good and well matched and the fight runs long.

Tim told me about one of the great fights in history, between grand champion Buck, a six-time winner from STP (a kennel in New Jersey with some of the world’s greatest dogs) and grand champion Sandman, a five-time winner from Rebel (another famous kennel). The dogs were both getting old, but their owners decided they had to fight to determine who had the greatest dog of the era, and they fought at forty-seven or forty-eight pounds. After three hours and seventeen minutes, Buck won; and amazingly, he lived. Sandman died, of course, but for either dog to have survived a battle like that was extraordinary.

The next day, Tim, Jo, and I climbed into a hired van with another friend of Tim’s and headed up into the hills. The seventy-kilometer drive took almost three hours because of traffic, but we were in no rush. “They won’t fight the dogs until five or six, when it starts to cool off,” Tim explained.

Tim had also worked with and around Thai fighters for many years, but he preferred the dogs. The dogs wouldn’t betray you and throw fights for money, or not train properly; human fighters were too much trouble. The dogs were simpler, purer, and you could put your heart into a dog and get its heart in return.

There was a hazy sunset reddening the sky as we climbed into the lush glowing hills, the night sweltering down with the gentle whispering kiss of a thousand mosquitoes. We arrived and met with the Southern Men, Jo’s group of dogmen. The Philippines is now one of the centers of dogfighting in Asia (along with Korea), and there was a “convention” every weekend this month. Tim had been there one night when they had thirty-one fights in two pits that worked simultaneously. “There’s nothing like this in Thailand,” Tim complained, where there are sometimes private matches of just one fight, but few conventions. He had beaten everyone in Thailand so badly that only Art would still fight him—and Tim usually beat him.

That night there would be eight fights. Someone handed me a program:

Tim wasn’t too impressed by the card, but fight number five, with Southern Men’s Kilo, should be good, he thought. He explained to me that the Ws in parentheses were wins (so Kilo had two wins) and the numbers were the weight. We checked out some of the dogs, their tails thumping desperately in their cages, and to the untrained eye they all looked starved, with the ribs and muscles standing from their skin; but they were really at peak condition, at weight.

The pit was a high raised platform under a massive roof, surrounded by seats and concrete. When it was full, there were nearly five hundred people around it. The pit itself, about five feet off the ground, was walled in by clear Plexiglas for viewing and had seats for the timekeeper, the seconds, and the cameraman (someone was always taping the fights). Over in the corner was a food stall with numerous braziers and meat on sticks. “Filipino fast food,” Jo said.

Tim and I met Tim’s good friend Ito, who was putting us up at his nearby resort. He was a barrel-chested man of about fifty, with a broad Filipino face and a quick smile. Ito and his friend Joedic were already pretty drunk by the time we sat down at their table, and they proceeded to get a lot drunker. Their hospitality and friendliness were profound, as was their deep respect for Tim. They had a kind of old-world hospitality, and they wouldn’t let us pay for anything.

The first dog was brought in, carried high in the handler’s arms like a baby, and gently deposited in the pit. This was his first fight, and he walked around nervously, trembling with energy, his nose glued to the floor. He must have smelled the blood, the old fear and emotion of dogs before him struggling and dying, and I wondered if he suddenly began to realize the gravity of the situation. He was paraded around to give the audience a look so as to inform their bets; betting was the fuel of dogfighting, as in cockfighting,.

The atmosphere was laid-back and festive, relaxed and chatty like at a bar, but attention invariably wandered back to the center, with a thrum of anticipation. There were plenty of women and even girls in the audience, and a few kids running around, and a drunken, picnic mood.

The first fight started without barking as the dogs darted together, leapt up, and came down in a spinning tangle. People were paying attention but not unduly. The fights would all run past twenty or thirty minutes—everyone knew that—and there were going to be eight fights, so we would be here for a while. Conversations sometimes lulled and got caught up in cheering, but there was a steady buzz of laughing and talking, and traffic to the food stall and beer counter never slowed. The dogs twisted wildly up in the pit, snatching and crunching, looking for advantages, two dense whirls of muscle and teeth. The handlers hovered, shouting encouragement,
“Good boy, good boy,”
and getting right in there, inches from the dogs, pointing to where their dog should bite next, admonishing and uplifting.

“That dog is finished,” Tim murmured as he glanced around, uninterested in these early, poor-quality dogs.

“How can you tell?”

“Look at his tail,” he said shortly. The losing dog, desperately biting ears and face to hold off the stronger dog, had his tail sunk and curled around between his legs. The stronger dog’s tail was still straight and wagging as he powered into the weaker dog. Eventually, the dogs tired, and the dominant one stood over the other with his tongue lolling, and the timekeeper began his count; the dogs were out of holds and, after thirty seconds of inaction, were whisked by their handlers into the corners, and from there they started scratching. The losing dog was obviously in trouble, and when it was his turn to scratch, he just sat there between the handler’s legs, as the handler yelled and screamed and pointed and jerked his body in an attempt to get his dog to scratch. But it came to naught. The dog was through, and he sat there, tongue lolling in overtime, gazing around. He had “curred out,” and the fight was over. The winning handler sometimes will make a courtesy scratch, and sometimes has to scratch to win, and the winning dog came out like a shot toward his shirking opponent. The fight was over, the dogs were separated, and the winner was far richer than he was before the fight began.

I sat pitside for one fight, right up against the glass, and the sights and smells were powerful that close, the smell of blood and raw dog emotion, the crunching and cracking of jaws. The dogs twisted and leapt up, snapping together, and came down with one on top, and then the other. They looked like lionesses when their muscles leapt into stark relief through tawny skin. The crowd fed off the emotions of the dogs, and the handlers, a way to feel vicariously the sheer desperate thrill of the struggle: This was man’s best friend and proxy—you can fight and die for me. Real dogmen love their dogs—but we are merciless to what we love, as A. L. Kennedy wrote. There is some horrible truth to that, evident in one common factor in boxing deaths: in the father as a cornerman, sending his son in again and again, unable to throw in the towel.

The crowd had grown, and grown loud. The women shrieked at a particularly rough move, and the men ululated when they wanted their dog to shake. Suppose your dog (the dog you’ve just bet ten thousand pesos on) gets ahold of the other dog’s foreleg, you want him to shake in that powerful twisting move (the shake that every dog does, the instinct to break the neck of a small animal that they’ve caught), to try to break something, to tear it loose, to do damage. The crowd picked favorites, the odds shifted, and sometimes the crowd even heckled the dogs and the handlers, and made jokes and catcalls. The handlers shouted too,
get-get-get
and
shake-shake-shake,
willing their dogs to win, to find good holds.

The dogs left blood heavy and swirling in brilliant red trails on the Plexiglas walls of the pit. Tim had told me that there were no knockouts in dogfighting, at least not between two well-matched dogs, but rather a slow accumulation of damage, and it took time because the dogs were so durable. “There aren’t many surprises,” he said. “You can see it coming.” Packs of girls shrieked like it was a rock concert. Violence is entertainment: both sickening and thrilling, reactions that are surprisingly harmonious.

At some unknown hour, not long before dawn, we stumbled out of there. Ito and Joedic were long gone. They had lost money on every fight and left after the fifth or sixth, but we found Ito’s resort and clambered up into his tree house to sleep.

We woke up the next morning to blasting karaoke at about ten a.m. Ito and Joedic were drinking already; it was Sunday, after all. After breakfast, we went to look at Ito’s cock farm, with hundreds of cocks all tethered to individual lean-tos, with perches to stand on and crow. Cockfighting is the national sport of the Philippines, and it’s legal. In Manila, there are huge stadiums and hundreds of fights a day during big festivals. Ito ran his own small cockfighting pit out here in the country, next to his resort.

Here Tim was the novice, and Ito and Joedic were the experts. They “rolled” some cocks for us, had them fight without spurs on, just to let them clash a little bit, to get a sense of the birds. Ito had something like 150 birds, and the volume of use is very high in the Philippines. They fight the cocks with long blades strapped to one foot, and most of the fights don’t last a minute; the birds flare up, and when they come down, one is dead on his feet, bleeding out into the dirt.

It was hard for me to watch chickens fight, because I had no real idea what I was looking for. Ito explained that they wanted aggressive, hard-hitting cocks that strike first and strike hard. Because of the blades, they wanted cocks that kicked in a certain way, straight on, long and horizontal. Ito rolled some good birds for us, and though I still had no idea what was good, Tim seemed satisfied.

We went over to the pit to begin the real matches, and they had obviously been waiting for us—Ito the owner and his special foreign guests. The small stadium was half full with a hundred or so people, and a picnic atmosphere, a “Sunday afternoon with your kids” feel, although there were almost no women.

Tim took me to the “gaffing” room, where the gaffers were putting on the blades. They were professionals, hired out to each chicken individually, and they had brought cases of forty or fifty different blades, as each chicken had a slightly different foot. It was surprisingly elaborate, more complicated than taping a boxer’s hands: There were supports and underworks that molded to the foot, and aligning the blade along the bird’s natural spur was critical. When the bird struck, the blade had to be correctly positioned to be effective, or else the cock wouldn’t be lethal. The blades themselves were amazing, two or three inches long, tiny razor scimitars lashed securely to the strange foot and then carefully sheathed until the cocks were in the pit—otherwise, the handler might get sliced to ribbons.

The birds were brought into the pit, where they were first annoyed by two bait cocks that wouldn’t be fighting. The handlers then grabbed their cocks’ heads and pulled them back, exposing the necks, and they brought the cocks together and allowed them to take a little nip out of the bared neck, really pissing the cocks off.

The crowd din grew as the betting reached a crescendo, with yelling and gesticulating, hands fluttering like stockbrokers’ on the floor of the exchange. Tim bet with tiny nods to a man in the pit, and then the pit cleared out and the two handlers tossed their chickens gently down, about five feet apart. The crowd went dead silent as the cocks oriented on each other, and then darted forward and leapt up kicking. Often, that was it; one bird would be mortally wounded in that first exchange, and would stumble and then sit down. The referee sometimes picked them both up and reset them, to see which was still game. The longest fight of the day was shorter than three minutes.

After the fights, the gaffers were at work again, this time sitting in the corner with butchers’ smocks on, sewing up the winners in brutal instant surgery; the damaged winners were saved for breeding if they could be kept alive. The dead losers had their blades cut off and were hung in a shed, to be eaten later, the row of plucked dead birds growing as the day went on, with the tremendous wounds from the fight plain to see, like murder victims in a morgue.