Fighter's Heart, A

by Sheridan, Sam

  The sun climbs up and strokes the pit, the players, and the dogs, and their shadows leap into being on the wall. Soon heat will be a major factor. Tim and Art pace warily around the dogs, looking and whispering, “tch-ing” and sometimes asking the dog to shake once he has a good bite, to shake and break something. It is eerily quiet—the Thais murmur occasionally, and the dogs pant.

  There is the first “turn” call. Art’s dog has “turned,” and they go to “scratch.” This means that Art’s dog, for a brief second, has turned from Herbie, has turned from the fight, has shown a little bit of cur. Art and Tim dive in and pluck up their dogs, “handling” them. Immediately, a voice from the crowd begins counting the seconds, and both handlers in their corners face their dogs away and work vigorously with a wet sponge, trying to cool them down. As the count nears thirty, the referee calls on them to face their dogs, and Art’s dog, having turned, has to “make scratch.” The scratch lines are fixed in the corners, and to make scratch means you let your dog go, and on his own accord he attacks the other dog (who is being held in his corner until your dog comes to get him). Art’s dog comes off the scratch line like a bullet—he scratches hard, and the Thais murmur an appreciative sound. They like that. It means nothing, really—a dog that scratches hard and a dog that scratches slowly are the same until one won’t scratch. The dog and Herbie come together in another whirling tussle.

  Now that they have scratched once, every time the dogs are “out of holds” (when neither has a bite), they have to be separated, to scratch again, alternating. The handlers stay close, and each has to seize the right moment to pick up his dog so that the other dog doesn’t get a chance to sink in a free bite. I could see why the dogs can’t be people-aggressive, because if they were, in the fury of the fight they would bite the handlers. I could also see that what was important, what was critical to the fight, wasn’t the battle itself—it was the scratch. Hairsplitting definitions and measurements of courage, that’s the dog game.

  At thirty minutes, the dogs are obviously tiring. Tim’s yard man, a Cambodian who’d been in the Khmer Rouge and scared all the other Cambodians senseless, is circling the pit, calling, “Goot boy, Herbie,” and the twenty or so people in the audience are trying to encourage their money.

  Each time they scratch, Art’s dog comes hard; but Herbie just trots out from the scratch line when it’s his turn, not in a blazing dash, but with no sign of stopping, either. Monty mutters, “The tide has turned,” and then Art’s dog cries out. I watch Herbie learning as the fight goes on. He figures out where to bite, and to bite harder and longer, going after the throat more. And finally, after thirty-five minutes, he starts to dominate.

  Art’s dog scratches slower, and then finally he sits down, right at Art’s feet, his tongue flapping, belly jerking. Art exhorts him, and even gives him a tiny jerk with his legs (which is illegal; you can’t touch a dog trying to make scratch), but it’s no good, and Art knows it; his efforts are half-hearted. His dog is through. Herbie is still twisting and turning in Tim’s arms to get back into the fray. Tim is utterly expressionless; you can’t tell whether he’s won or lost. Monty is thrilled—although he knew that Herbie wasn’t the greatest dog the world had ever seen, he’s still happy with him. Like a racehorse owner whose horse comes in, it doesn’t matter if it was a slow race, you have to be happy about it. Plus, he and Tim are a couple of grand richer.

  I had first become aware of the dogs in Brazil. Pit bulls were everywhere, as symbols for jiu-jitsu schools and academías, and tattooed on people—and not always the cartoons, sometimes photographs were rendered, like someone having his son’s picture tattooed on his arm. The first dogman I met, Escorrega, had his first dog tattooed on the inside of his arm, as did many of the other guys. As I talked to him at great length about the dogs, I started to realize why fighters prize these dogs so much.

  The key to understanding dogfighting is the concept of gameness. Gameness could be described as courage, but that’s simplistic. I’ve heard gameness described as “being willing to continue a fight in the face of death,” and that’s closer; it’s the eagerness to get into the fight, the beserker rage, and then the absolute commitment to the fight in the face of pain, and disfigurement, until death. It’s heart, as boxing writers sometimes describe it, with a dark edge, a self-destructive edge; because true gameness doesn’t play it smart, it just keeps coming and coming. No matter what.

  The important principle here is that dogfighting is not about dogs, or even dogs fighting, it’s about gameness. That’s why a dog turning is so critical, and that’s the whole point of the endless scratching: We almost don’t care how good the dog fights, the fight is just an elaborate test to check his gameness. John, a dogman in Oakland, told me, “Give me a game dog any day, a dog that bites as hard as tissue paper but keeps coming back, and I’ll take him.” Gameness was more important than fighting ability. He illustrated the idea with a story. “I was in Arkansas at a fight, and one dog was whipping the other for about fifty minutes, and at the hour mark, the dog who was winning jumped the pit wall.” John laughed uproariously. “He was mopping this dog up, and then he jumped the wall. I wish I still had that tape, you’d die laughing.”

  I met three real dogmen—Escorrega in Brazil, John in Oakland, and Tim CEK in Thailand—and with their help I started to see how dogs and men were linked in fighting for sport. The quest for gameness in dogs is more pure, more basic, and less encumbered by illusion than the quest for gameness in men.

  The capacity for violence has a direct correlation to entertainment value, which means money. Escorrega, my first dogman, had been involved with dogs for thirteen years, and he told me of prices and prizes that seemed absurd, fifty thousand dollars for certain dogs of truly spectacular proven bloodlines. A good prospect would run fifteen hundred to five thousand dollars, and good pups might fetch five to fifteen hundred. There was a dog in the United States that had generated total income of more than a million dollars, something my friends in Oakland didn’t believe but that Tim CEK confirmed, although that dog had since died. There were fights in Korea for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and tales of fights in Hawaii for a quarter million.

  “Now, if you say fighting dog, you mean from the U.S. or Mexico,” Escorrega said. A pit bull (not an exact breed, but something quite specific) is a cross between the bulldog and the distinguished terrier. “The bulldog supplies the strength, the appearance, the low pain sensitivity, the loose skin; while the terrier supplies the intelligence, heart, and gameness. Terriers are fast, strong, and smart—they can get a skunk out of a tree—and they are very, very game animals.”

  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.