“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.
Escorrega had gotten out of dogs. He still loved the fight, but he loved his dogs more; pit bulls feel no pain when they fight, but they are flesh and blood. “I devote my life to the church,” he said. “I know gambling is a sin, but I love to watch the fight. I like to fight myself. I’ve been hit before, I had my ass kicked before: I know what it looks like, what it feels like.” It was the days after the fight, nursing his dogs back to health, and their pain and slow recovery, that put him off dogfighting. In the end, he loved his dogs too much to see them suffer.
Even Tim CEK, as professional a dogman as I’d ever met, had a soft spot for his good dogs. He and Monty had a dog that was a four-time winner, and one more win would make him a grand champion, which was worth a lot more money in terms of breeding, but Tim wouldn’t fight him; he was five and a half years old and “it wouldn’t be fair to him.”
“Filipinos are the black people of Asia,” said Tim CEK. He had to yell it in my ear over the din at Bedrock Bar in the Malate district of Manila. Tim and I had come to the Philippines to see a big dogfight show, a “convention,” on the following night. Tim was drunk on gin and tonics and had his arm around me in the easy Thai familiarity. The band was about three feet away and covering R. Kelly with tremendous enthusiasm.
“They are the most musical, and every bar and fancy hotel in Asia—in Japan or Thailand or anywhere—has always got Filipino singers. They’re the best,” he said. “They love black culture. In the U.S. the Filipinos don’t hang out with other Asians; they hang out with black people.”
He was right about the singing; we’d been to a couple of different music bars and I had already heard at least five singers who would have been in the top ten on American Idol. Tremendous voices, rich and deep and incongruous coming from these sweet round Asian faces. Their taste was mainstream pop. At the Hobbit House, a Lord of the Rings–themed bar staffed entirely by midgets (brilliant!), I heard a tall Filipino girl with a sad face and a bitter air do the best Led Zeppelin cover I’d heard—she was better than Robert Plant.
Manila was big and dirty, and full of seedy fun. The streets were crowded, and everyone was out for a good time, though there were not many foreigners. Manila used to be a big tourist destination (especially when the U.S. military bases were there) but had been eclipsed by Thailand and the rest of Southeast Asia. My dad had been stationed in Manila for a time, which he remembered fondly.
Tim was something of a wunderkind in the dog world; he had only been matching dogs for five years, but through a combination of meticulous research, intelligent planning, luck, and having good dogs, he was nearly undefeated in that time. He had the science, and the discipline; he had earned respect, particularly in the Philippines, where he had matched five times and never lost. Tim had the quiet, watchful air of a careful judge who is reserving his opinion, impenetrable and inscrutable. Even with ten gin and tonics in him, it was hard to know what he was thinking.
Jo, his best friend in the Philippines, was a battered-looking chain-smoker with long hair and the features of an American Indian. He was a good dogman, and like all good dogmen he was honest, loyal, and friendly (which still didn’t make him a Boy Scout). He worked as a designer, specializing in Web sites, but when Tim asked him a technical question about software, Jo shook his head. “I’m an artist, man,” he said.
The bars reeked of cigarettes—everyone was smoking, and it became harder and harder to bear just drinking water and Coke. Although I wasn’t in training, I wasn’t out of it, either. I didn’t have a fight set but thought I might fight in Myanmar, or MMA again, back in the States.
Eventually, we headed back to the hotel. We watched a dogfight on Tim’s laptop, and at twenty minutes one dog was overpowering and mauling the other, and the losing handler let his dog lie there inert. He was letting his dog get killed—it was the first distasteful thing I’d really seen in dogfighting, the first time the spectacle made me uneasy. “The guy’s an idiot,” Tim said. “He should have picked up long ago.”
Tim confided to me that here in the Philippines, sometimes they kill the dogs in fights; they want to see the dog die. When dogs are dying, it means the people don’t know what they are doing. The exception is when both dogs are very good and well matched and the fight runs long.
Tim told me about one of the great fights in history, between grand champion Buck, a six-time winner from STP (a kennel in New Jersey with some of the world’s greatest dogs) and grand champion Sandman, a five-time winner from Rebel (another famous kennel). The dogs were both getting old, but their owners decided they had to fight to determine who had the greatest dog of the era, and they fought at forty-seven or forty-eight pounds. After three hours and seventeen minutes, Buck won; and amazingly, he lived. Sandman died, of course, but for either dog to have survived a battle like that was extraordinary.
The next day, Tim, Jo, and I climbed into a hired van with another friend of Tim’s and headed up into the hills. The seventy-kilometer drive took almost three hours because of traffic, but we were in no rush. “They won’t fight the dogs until five or six, when it starts to cool off,” Tim explained.
Tim had also worked with and around Thai fighters for many years, but he preferred the dogs. The dogs wouldn’t betray you and throw fights for money, or not train properly; human fighters were too much trouble. The dogs were simpler, purer, and you could put your heart into a dog and get its heart in return.
There was a hazy sunset reddening the sky as we climbed into the lush glowing hills, the night sweltering down with the gentle whispering kiss of a thousand mosquitoes. We arrived and met with the Southern Men, Jo’s group of dogmen. The Philippines is now one of the centers of dogfighting in Asia (along with Korea), and there was a “convention” every weekend this month. Tim had been t