Friday Night Dating....the Harris Way

     After a long week of triplet doody duty, I was ready to be wined and dined Friday night. I was looking forward to a large popcorn at the movie and maybe, if I was lucky, a smoothie with my man. That is why I was a bit disappointed when he told me he had been asked to be the doctor at an amateur MMA fight at the Hilton. Do you know how desperate I must have been for any activity outside of these four walls to agree to watch grown men beat each other? But, I will tell you how a change of heart occurs.
     First, I met Mike at the Hilton where we had a nice sushi dinner before the fight. I love me some raw fish and was immediately in a good mood. When it was time to go inside, there was a huge line to get in....except for us. We had VIP passes around our necks and glided past the masses into the arena which consisted of a bunch of tables around a ring like we were seated around a dance floor at a wedding reception.If there was fighting at a reception, maybe a Kardashian wedding. In the very back there was a partition for the standing room only crowd ( or poor suckers as I lovingly called them). But we had really great seats. We were literally sat at the ring. I could lean in and touch the cage, and I mean cage, this is not an exaggeration. If you don't watch MMA, the fighting is in a circular arena that is fenced in just in case the fighters...oh, I don't know, slam each other against the fence. When I attend ballets and musicals, I like to be up close to see the footwork and appreciate the costumes. Here I was probably going to get a front row whiff of their BO and splashes of their sweat and blood. Then I met Travis, the fight promotor in charge, who asked me if I was ready to step in as the doctor if Mike was not able to. I laughed and, with a false bravado, said, "Yeah, I am more prepared than he is." The rules are that the doc has to examine each fighter immediately after a fight while they are still in the ring, before any further fighting can occur. Tonight there were ten fights scheduled.
     From the very first match, I was captivated. Really. My husband does Jiu-Jitsu and I have a rudimentary appreciation for the art of it but here, in the ring, it was a combination of a bar brawl and ballet, if both opponents had just enough knowledge of wrestling, Jiu-Jitsu,  and hand to hand combat to make the fighting seem.....beautiful.  The fighters were mostly young, zero body fat specimens with 50 % testosterone and 50% adrenaline fueling them on. It wasn't just a fight of braun. Eventually, the guy who had the actual technique of Jiu-Jitsu down and applied it, won. Simple as that. And at the end, Mike would go in and check them out. No problem! Wrong.
     During the third match, a fighter was pulverized by his much younger ( 19 yo) , first time at the show, opponent. The day before, at weigh in, Mike said that the 19 yo didn't make weight and that the opponent said if he ran around for an hour he would fight him if he lost two pounds to make it. The youth went out on the beach and ran his heart out while the veteran laughed with Mike about how he was psyching him out, getting him tired for the fight. The newbie did in fact, lose the 2 lbs and was allowed to fight. I don't think the veteran will make that mistake again. I guess you forget that teenagers are just a mystery of self reproducing energy. Mike and I both went back to the lockers to treat the veteran who developed intractable nausea and vomiting from the numerous blows to the kidneys and abdomen he received. I think he must have lacerated his spleen or kidney and was sent to the ER.
     The rest of the matches were intense and Mike had to go back to attend to a fighter with a broken jaw. Travis asked if he could proceed with the fight with me there. I figured Mike could bag and tag the guy to the ER pretty quick and said, "Sure." A minute and a half into the fight. The winner submitted his much stronger and faster opponent in an Americana arm bar. "SHUT THE FRONT DOOR!" I thought to myself over and over. I was wearing stiletto sling backs and a peasant blouse. Did I really belong in the ring with these men I would have purposely have crossed the road to avoid? The answer was yes. I grabbed my gloves and checked out both fighters. A nice man with a braided goatee helped me into the cage and another brick wall of a man helped me out.
     When the next fight began, Travis came and sat next to me. "I want to stay close for this one. These two have been going at it all night and I almost had to call the police back there. There is a lot of bad blood." I scanned the room for Mike and only found a crowd of spectators. To make my nerves go to high alert even more, these two fighters were the ones Mike had said impressed him the most in the physicals. They were in the super heavyweight category and Mike needed to tape the blood pressure cuff around the fighter with the braided mohawk. "I could wear his watch on my bicep."is how he described the smaller one. The other guy looked like Magilla Gorilla and Fat Albert had a baby. It was almost comical to see this guy in the ring after all of the other fighters. He must have supplemented his diet with yoohoo and ding dongs to get his shape. I thought I knew how this fight was going to end. I was wrong.
     The bell rang and mohawk ran like a freight train straight at FA and both of them flew into the cage right in front of me causing me to do the really cool move of lifting my hands up and screaming like a little girl. Travis found this hilarious. Next, FA pushed mohawk around the ring until he stumbled and FA simply fell on him. If I wasn't worried about mohawk's actual ability to breath, this scene was really funny. All you saw was FA splayed over mohawk, not moving at all, while poor mohawk's little legs scissored back and forth. Travis said that this was FA one and only move. That by simply crushing his opponents he would win. So much for training. But just when you thought this was the stupidest fight you could ever see, FA actually pulled his leg over mohawk and put his arm in an arm bar causing him to tap out. I couldn't believe Mike had missed this. It was amazing. But wait, oh crap, I have to go in there, don't I?
     I girded up my loins and made the walk into that arena where FA was screaming into the camera and mohawk laid motionless on the floor. The MC, in typical fighting voice said, "In the ring is DRRRR. Sylvia Harris." I walked over to mohawk and felt like this is the feeling people must get when they come across a beached whale in the ocean. He was huge. Unlike a whale, he was all muscle. A whiny, muscular whale. He said he couldn't feel his right arm. "No lie! Hagrid over there just ripped your arm off, dude! What do you expect?" As I crouched there in the ring, Mike showed up and said I couldn't have looked cuter in my heels and capris leaning over, examining the guy. Thanks hon.
     What I did come away with was a new respect for cage fighting and like every activity in life I had to find a lesson in it. The fighting was very much a representation of the kinds of people in life. There are the people who fight and fight and fight, expending all their energy and never doing much with their lives. And then there are the ones who take the time to educate themselves and realize life is not always kind to the hard worker but the educated one. They win using the muscle between their ears.
     Mike thinks he would like to try his hand at a fight. In all honesty, knowing his knowledge of Jiu-Jitsu, I know he could win but the difference is that all of those fighters last night had nothing to lose. That makes them dangerous....to me at least. But I wouldn't mind being the doc at another fight.  I think all the girls there need a better role model than The Girls Next Door. So at the next fight I will parade around the ring in my bikini, holding my doctor bag over my head instead of a ring sign. I will have to really do some self examination of why I loved it so much. But that is for another day.