Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Ultimate fighting at the State House?

In the course of my habitual channel-surfing, N4N moves on when I find ultimate fighting, rather than Roadhouse, on Spike TV. However, Paul Wachter's recent New York Times Magazine profile of ultimate fighter Shad Smith was nothing less than fascinating.

Shortly after he was released from California’s Avenal State Prison in early 2005, Shad Smith got a call from the organizers of an underground fight club called Felony Fights. Was he available? they asked. “I was just out of prison and out of money,” Smith told me recently. He was incarcerated for failing to comply with the probation terms of an earlier D.U.I. conviction, a relatively minor offense in his long criminal résumé. “They said they’d give me 800 bucks to show up and double that if I won.”

Most fighters who appear in Felony Fights are ex-convicts, but few are professionals. Smith was: he fought in sanctioned bouts for King of the Cage and several other second-tier mixed-martial-arts organizations that have sprung up in the past few years. For Smith, taking on an untrained, would-be tough guy seemed like easy money. ....

Smith is gay, and I know of no other professional fighter who is openly so. “I was always scared that my mom and dad would find out and wouldn’t like me, and my brothers wouldn’t like me,” he said. “I was petrified, because I didn’t want anyone to find out. And I would try to be the toughest person around. That way, no one would suspect, no one would ever say it, no one would think it.”

Anyway, BeloBlog reports that RI is moving closer to embracing ultimate fighting.

A modest proposal might involve installing the octagon under the State House dome.

Budget | General Assembly