Alive and Thriving in the Midwest: Brawling in Cages

[LynneSin]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/28/national/28fights.html?ei=5094&en=52ff146d3c49c142&hp=&ex=1122609600&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print

Alive and Thriving in the Midwest: Brawling in Cages
By MICHAEL WILSON
SIOUX FALLS, S.D., July 23 - When they rewind the video of the fight in the cage, all the blood will spray back into Gervis Fool Bull's nose, all the screams will be sucked into the collective chest of the sweating crowd, and the fist will snap back toward the big truck driver from Iowa who threw it, a man with a mohawk haircut who grew up fighting his twin brother in the neighborhood junkyard.

But to find where this punch between strangers really began, the rewinding would have to go back almost three weeks, to the Fourth of July in the lakeside tourist town of Okoboji, Iowa, where the twin brothers were prowling around, drinking, not liking tourists.

"My goal that night was to beat up the biggest tourist I could find," said Nate Hawn, 20.

He picked a marine, he said, and beat him in the crowded streets. A stranger approached, and the Hawns wondered if he wanted some, too.

The man said that he worked with a promoter of cage fighting and that the guys should come to Sioux Falls in a few weeks. "He said, 'You guys are exactly what we're looking for,' " the brother with the mohawk, Ryan Hawn, recalled.

The brothers arrived on Saturday at "The Cage," a no-holds-barred night of one-on-one fights between men shut inside an outdoor chain-link cage here at the W. H. Lyon Fairgrounds. In a sport known by practically interchangeable names - extreme fighting, no-holds-barred fighting, cage fighting - fighters can use boxing, kickboxing, martial arts or wrestling moves, or any combination. Opponents have called it "human cockfighting," a brutish pseudo-sport.

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The most ironic thing in this article:
"It's like the hardest core," said Jarod Stevens, 25, a beefy, freckled redhead who works at a Hummer dealership, signing up for his first fight on Saturday in Sioux Falls. "It's proving something to yourself, that you're man enough to be a part of it and do well, hopefully."

[Wetzelbill]

1. my little brother has fought in hook n shoot stuff before

[Beware the Beast Man]

2. I was into the Ultimate Fighting thing for about 10 minutes back in 1995.

The novelty wore off.