nd and up and down with a continuous snapping, snarling frenzy. They writhe furiously like snakes, twisting and spitting and slavering, growling like bears. Fury epitomized. Their tails are wagging, this is what they are meant to do, and they’re fulfilling their purpose, they’re becoming. There is blood, but the dogs don’t care, turning and pinning, fighting off their backs and then clawing their way to standing. They’re biting, and letting go, and biting again, searching for new holds, for a vulnerable spot. They feel no pain—or any pain they feel is overwhelmed by the desire to get the other dog. I know that feeling. The fight stretches to fifteen minutes, to twenty.
Tim said to me the day before, “It’s not the best dog that will win, it’s the best man. You are fighting the man, not the dog; the dog’s just a weight.” In a sense, he’s right, and the dogmen always talk about “when I fought him” as if they were doing the fighting themselves; but of course that comment was absolutely shimmering with irony. I was reminded of something Willie Pep, a great boxer, said: “I had the bravest manager in the world—he didn’t care who I fought.”
In this fight, the dogs were evenly matched, and neither one had a “hard mouth” (a big crushing bite that can break bones or rip off flesh), so the outcome would come down to conditioning. Which dogman had conditioned his animal better?
The dogs bite and bite, their mouths locking onto each other with a horrible clack and snap of fang on fang. The teeth sometimes grind together and sound as if they are breaking. Herbie is more active and a better wrestler; he often has the other dog pinned down. This isn’t necessarily bad for the other dog, as long as he’s getting good “holds,” or bites, but it isn’t really good, either (a little like jiu-jitsu). The dogs go silent, panting, and when they freeze “in holds,” their bellies work like bellows, desperately breathing to try to shed heat. Blood covers Herbie’s face and teeth, as the other dog has chewed up his jowls a little.
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