Category: martial arts

Back in the day, (July 24, 2002 to be exact) I posted this entry to Big Black Glasses about fighting in a semi-legal amateur fight night. At the time, BBG was a communal blog for Mike, Nate (not the one I’ve mentioned lately), Colin, Geever, and two or three other guys whom I may have only met while drunk, if at all. In its current incarnation, BBG is Mike’s personal blog.

I fought at the Raven Fight Club tonight, and got TKO’d. That was three hours ago. My nose is still bleeding. I’m going to do it again, until I win.

Sometime next month I’m going skydiving. Assuming I don’t end up liquefied in a field somewhere, that post will be volume 2.

I frequently wrote short, cryptic posts like this on BBG. They seldom, if ever, made sense to anyone who wasn’t a friend of mine or Mike’s. Here’s the explanation:

Raven Fight Club: There used to be a club where the interstate met the highway in a town that had developed solely for the purpose of drawing business from the interstate exit ramp. The town is called Newville, and the club was called Raven. It hosted small local bands, and it had an unwashed, grimy, dimly lit, unwholesome feel to it. On Tuesday nights during the brief summer it was open, they set up a boxing ring in front of the foot-high “stage.” Sometimes on Fridays and Saturdays, meager crowds would stand apathetically to listen to desperately hopeful young musicians. I went in with some friends from my martial arts club to check it out at Pedro’s suggestion, and signed up to fight sight unseen. I hadn’t checked out the competition, I’d never even seen the ring or the club yet–I packed a mouthguard, signed the waiver, and climbed into the ring as the first bout of the night.

…and got TKO’d: I don’t know the name of the guy I fought. I’m sure the announcer screamed it prior to the fight, but I was too nervous to concentrate on things like that. I don’t remember most of the fight, only brief flashes.
Apparently, it’s not uncommon for people to black out during fights. I had an instructor tell me that when his memory began again after a fight, his five attackers were gone (two or three of which were arrested later in the hospital) and he had a stab wound in his abdomen. I wish I could claim righteous fury or blazing intensity as the source of my memory loss. As it is, I attribute it to my skull being pummelled by a stranger’s fists.

I remember only a few flashes of the fight:

• My opponent throwing a very slow, very clumsy, back spin heel kick. He obviously didn’t know what he was doing and was trying to impress the crowd. I hopped just out of his reach, then back in to hammer him with a hard roundhouse kick to the chest. Had I been thinking more clearly, I would have gone for his unprotected face.
• Dazedly facing my corner in the ring and seeing blood on the cushioned post. I wondered disconnectedly if it was mine, and slowly realized that I was in the first fight of the night… that this was my corner… so yes, I must have somehow bled on the post between rounds. What round is this?
• Getting a hard right hook to the jaw and collapsing to one knee for the second time. I can stand up and fight, I know it… why are you calling the fight? I could have gotten back up and fought. If there was a ten count, I never heard it. I can fight…

My nose is still bleeding: It bled until well past midnight, and friends and club patrons told me several times that it was crooked. I did my best to set it by grabbing it hard between my thumb and the knuckle of my forefinger and yanking as hard as I could. I went to the doctor the next day, telling my parents that there had been a mishap at Tae Kwon Do practice. It wasn’t broken, but it was close. The doctor confirmed that I had broken some of the cartilage, but not enough to cause black eyes or require any medical treatment.

I’m going to do it again, until I win. I never fought there again.

Sometime next month I’m going skydiving. Assuming I don’t end up liquefied in a field somewhere, that post will be volume 2. The post was entitled “Confessions of an Adrenalin Junkie vol. 1.” I never went skydiving.

Now, why, you may ask, am I posting about something that I did almost three years ago? Because I’m planning on doing it again. Raven Fight Club is long dead–someone else bought out the place and replaced it with what appears to be a low-budget Cheeseburger In Paradise. However, Turner Hall has recently started hosting fight night every Wednesday. It’s still small enough that it hasn’t yet attracted the raging psychos that scared me off of fighting at Raven, so I’m going to check out the competition in a couple days. If it’s not too fierce, I’m getting in the ring the week after. It’s the week that Mike’s going to be in town, so I fully expect him to be screaming at me from ringside.

Win or lose, it’ll be a good story.