Harper's Magazine, Jan 2002

Arms and the man: Saturday night in West Virginia. (Letter From Appalachia). (the Toughman Contest) Kathy Dobie.

I've heard some people call the Toughman Contest "redneck boxing," though not, of course, the rednecks themselves. If they called it anything other than its proper name, I believe they would call it a good time. The Toughman Contest is a truly amateur boxing contest, a competition for nonprofessionals: no one can enter who has won more than five amateur fights in five years, and most of the contestants have never fought anywhere besides a schoolyard or a bar.

The fighters wear protective head and groin gear and box with 16-ounce gloves, and each bout consists of three one-minute rounds. There are judges, ring girls (often from the local strip club), and a cash prize. The winner is declared "The Toughest Man in Town."

On any given month you can log on to the Toughman website and find at least three or four, and sometimes six or seven, contests being held in different parts of the country--places like Lubbock, Texas; and St. Clairsville, Ohio; Fort Pierce, Florida; Macon, Georgia; Enid, Oklahoma; and Fort Wayne, Indiana. The contests are held in coliseums and high school auditoriums, fairgrounds, casinos, and racetracks. And every winter, the world championship, a glitzy affair, is broadcast on cable television with as much hammy acting as a World Wrestling Federation extravaganza.

The bold red-and-black posters advertising the event always ask the same thing: "HOW TOUGH ARE YOU? If You're TOUGH ENOUGH, Sign Up Now!" And then they give the same warning: "WIMPS NEED NOT APPLY!"

I first heard of Toughman when a friend, who had photographed one of the smaller contests in Detroit, told me that the crowd had hated an Arab-American fighter, calling out "camel jockey" and "sand nigger," and that one of the ring girls was so skinny she was booed every time she took the stage. The cruelty drew me in, the potential for humiliation--the risk every fighter and every skinny girl takes in the ring.

West Virginia seemed a perfect place to watch a Toughman Contest: it's very white and deeply working-class. Winters here are hard and long, the mountains and forests reduced to shades of black and white; they make you long for something bright and loud and warm--half-naked smiling girls, cheering crowds, and blood. Almost everyone I talked to had done time in the military or had a father or brother who did or all three. The sons of coal miners and army sergeants, they had become construction workers, truckdrivers, and lumberjacks; some had ended up, unhappily it seemed to me, as hospital aides or steakhouse waiters.

The Clarksburg contest, held every January, draws participants from the surrounding counties, from as far north as Morgantown, a university town, and as far south as Buckhannon, where I met one fighter in her trailer--a girl who worked at Hardees--and another fighter--a lumberjack--in his log cabin up in the hills. It's a beautiful part of the country, a good home for deer hunters and daredevils, a place where men in their thirties say casually that they don't expect to live long enough to grow old, where no one gets through life without broken bones and scars. Clarksburg itself is an old, handsome town, built on hills and next to a river, crisscrossed with railroad tracks; a stoic town, hale and hearty during the day, but at night, when all the shops and offices close down, it seems to slip into itself, and one imagines that, with all that daytime stoicism, its dreams are always slightly sad.

Seventy-six fighters registered for the twenty-first annual Clarksburg Toughman Contest, eight of them women. So many people wanted to fight that the contest lasted for two days--Friday and Saturday nights at the National Guard Armory. Half of those seventy-six men and women won their fights on Friday night and were supposed to return on Saturday to fight for the championship. Some didn't. They'd had more than enough on Friday. They had fought and won, but they never thought it was going to be that hard.

On Friday the fighters picked their ring names. They lined up at the registration table next to the ring, ordinary men signing up to fight each other, almost every one of them looking glum. Maybe the sullen masks protected them from their fear, or from the fact that they were about to engage in something intimate with one of the strangers standing near them--trade blows, draw blood, bleed, stumble and fall onto their knees, or make the other man go down.

At the registration table they sat on folding chairs, three at a time, opposite three women who asked them to fill out forms. The men leaned into the table and listened closely, their faces screwed up as if they suddenly had gone a little deaf. They were asked if they had picked a ring name, and if they hadn't thought of one they were given a sheet of paper with a long list of names to choose from.

And so Friday night, "Crazy" Chris Spencer, a bricklayer from Rosemont, fought "Pondering" Phil Propst, an equipment operator from Bartow. Chip Streets, a twenty-five-year-old carpenter, took on twenty-four-year-old Travis "the Tyrant" Ferrel, a program aide at a home for mentally retarded adults. A nineteen-year-old construction worker fought a twenty-year-old UPS loader. A forty-two- year-old retired Marine sergeant knocked out a twenty-five-year-old, reversing the natural order of things. A turkey catcher fought a hardware-store employee; a C.P.A. fought a welder. A nineteen-year- old construction worker defeated a twenty-four-year-old student from West Virginia University, in Morgantown, and although the students who had come down from Morgantown suddenly got very quiet, most of the audience was grateful, for it hardly would've been bearable the other way around, hardly fair--a college education, better-paying job, better health, longer life ... and a winner in the ring too?

Every man, every woman, for that matter--college student, housewife, and welder--looked the same when he or she was hit: there was an expression of astonishment, head jerked back, skin seeming to fall sideways over the face, hair flying, and then a flash of something unbidden, something uncontrollable, a look of humiliation. After that, you could see a fighter's individual temperament: some got angry or defiant, others looked like they wanted to weep, some grinned.

On Saturday night, the armory is filled to the rafters and quickly warming up under the bright, hot ring lights. I've been told that there are more fights in the stands than in the ring, which may be why at the Clarksburg Toughman Contest all uniformed cops are let in for free.

The event is sponsored by Budweiser, and it's Budweiser they're drinking in plastic cups, high up in the balcony, pressed against the railing, four deep, scanning the people below with an eager, quick look, as if the entertainment could start anytime, anywhere, even in the milling crowd. The ring is swathed in lots of red and white and blue, the colors of America and Budweiser.

I have a ringside seat along with the judges and the local media and friends of the fight promoter, Jerry Thomas, the man who has owned the franchise to all of the Toughman contests in West Virginia since 1979. Disparate elements seem to come together in Thomas, so it's hard to focus on him. He's very talkative, and the stories he's fond of telling are of ringside brawls and unlikely knockouts, though he tells them in a soft voice. His posture is ramrod straight, a habit from his Army days, but he sports a long, silky, blue-black mustache, a dandy's touch, and his hair is parted far down the side and lies flat on his head like a cap at a slant.

At seven o'clock the fighters are beginning to warm up. I hear that a couple of them are smashing their heads against the locker-room walls trying to let the other fighters know how tough they are.

All of the Toughman bouts are fought to music, so there's a romantic and sometimes just plain antic atmosphere to them. The DJ plays the Rocky theme, the William Tell Overture, and Pearl Jam's "Alive." The entire crowd claps along to "Thank God I'm a Country Boy." The heavyweight female fighters are seen purely as entertainment. You can tell by the music the DJ picks: "I Could've Danced All Night," "Yankee Doodle Dandy," and, most often, Barney the dinosaur's song, "I Love You."

As the bleachers fill up, women in pastel-colored bikinis and fanny packs, athletic socks, and sneakers walk up and down the steep stairs selling raffle tickets. One of the women, who's wearing a sky-blue two-piece bathing suit, has gigantic breasts, and the older men in the crowd are drawn to her. When they buy tickets from her, they stand close so that their arms brush hers while they take the money out of their wallets.

They're big men, taller than she, men with beer guts and crew cuts going gray, and, standing next to her like that, they look both protective and grateful, like it's been a while since someone got naked or even pretty for them and made them feel like men. The woman has long straight Barbie-doll hair, a tired face, and the practical manner of someone who understands the exact value of large breasts, not a bit more or less.

She climbs the bleachers collecting money, her face blank, a shield against the leers and the frowns, but she smiles at the older men who treat her nicely. It's a sad smile.

"And now here to sing our national anthem--two lovely young ladies from Liberty High School!" announces promoter Jerry Thomas, standing in the ring in his suit and holding a microphone. The girls keep their eyes glued to the floor of the ring, their hands clasped in front of them. They look scared to death. One is wearing a long black skirt. The other girl, who has honey-colored hair and wears black pants and flats, licks her lips nervously.

They have no reason to be afraid. They have the voices of angels. The crowd listens so quietly that everyone hears the one person who starts talking and the five who shush him. When the girls are done, the crowd erupts in whistles and hollers. These are THEIR girls--I can feel their pride that they have bred such sweetness and talent. And this is THEIR national anthem.

The patriotism I hear, just in that silence during the singing, every cap off every head, and then in the hard applause afterward, is unlike anything I've heard before, neither sentimental nor calculated. It's not the patriotism of politicians or even the patriotism of a recent immigrant who has been able to send money home and his kids to college. It isn't the patriotism of people who love a country because it has given them so much. More intimate than that, and confident, it's the emotion of people who love this country because THEY have given to IT, through hard work and generations of military service.

"It's time to say hello to our lovely ringgg girrrrls!" The men in the audience are back on their feet again, hollering.

Every Toughman fight begins with the fighters' parade around the arena. They're led by the three ring girls in their bikinis and spike heels. These three, Chastity, Nicole, and Shanna, were chosen a few weeks ago at a separate contest at a local bar. Tonight, the audience will pick their favorite ring girl, and she'll be given a vacation for two to sunny Miami.

Two of the girls, Chastity and Nicole, both dark-haired, smooth-skinned, and petite, are dancers at a local strip club. They're wearing black bikinis with the name of the club, Silk Stockings, printed in pink on the bottoms of their suits and campaign buttons for the local prosecuting attorney pinned to their tops. Their red-and-silver five-inch spike heels are as shiny as a little boy's fire engine. They have perfect teeth and seem very comfortable with the crowd, used to being adored and that adoration…

Chastity and Nicole look like little huggable dolls--they're that cute--but it's obvious that they know how to control the crowd. The third girl, Shanna, isn't polished and petitely pretty but very game. She's just any girl, not a professional girl, so to speak. She has dark eyes, a ruddy face, large thighs, and an aggressive way of walking with her belly pushed forward and her legs far apart. She's wearing a silvery white bikini. She never stops smiling and searching the crowd for its approval.

With the houselights still on, the fighters parade around the ring behind the ring girls, who are holding the round cards up over their heads, leaving their bodies entirely exposed. The men hoot and holler, raising their plastic cups of beer in a salute to the ring girls. Some of the women in the audience go grim, their lips pulled in and suddenly aged, as if the girls in bikinis are not girls in bikinis but Time itself passing. Several of the fighters are bunched so closely together that they seem in danger of stepping on each other's heels. They're not used to being on display, and they look like they're hurrying and hiding at the same time.

Whenever a fighter spots some of his buddies or his family members in the audience, he raises his fist in the air or steps through seats to slap hands. Men in the crowd lean over the seats to yell at the fighters. They seem to be cursing them, but they're only yelling words of encouragement: "Kick some ass, Danny!"…

There are men of every shape and size, men stumbling quickly around the armory wearing baggy sweatpants and old T-shirts, looking like hapless husbands called in from mowing the lawn and forced to defend or attack something, men who look like they might be in a lot of trouble once they're in the ring. There are big bruisers, I mean giants, who wear their muscle and their fat with equal pride, one as good as the other for stomping on someone--men ready to brawl, not box. There are bare-chested boys in silky boxing shorts, summery in their confidence; they have clean sharp faces and taut muscles. There are fat men and skinny men. One black fighter. One Puerto Rican. The youngest fighter is eighteen.

I see John Hawkinberry, at forty-seven the oldest fighter here, making his way around the ring, his chin jutting forward, his face pinkish, wire-rimmed eyeglasses turning opaque under the bright lights. He's wearing a stars-and-stripes baseball cap and a nylon jacket, and he's carrying his gym bag and moving fast. He looks like he's ready to leave.

John has suffered four concussions from Toughman contests. He's a crowd favorite because of his age and because he keeps coming back not only every year but from every punch thrown at his tired old head. He's known as "the Hawk" and admired simply for his capacity to endure pain.

Friday night, when John's turn to fight came, Jerry Thomas introduced him by shouting, "Forty-seven years young!" and the crowd yelled back, "Go Hawk!" John looked small in the ring--at five feet seven, he was a good head shorter than his opponent, John "the Landlord" Raber--but he had a solid stance and was tucked in hard behind his gloves.

After the first round, John refused to sit down. "The Landlord" was gulping water and nodding rapidly to the two corner men, who were giving him a pep talk while they wiped him down. John prowled his corner of the ring, impatient for the second round. It was all bravado, and the audience loved him for it.

When the bell for the third round rang, John walked over to his opponent, entering the fight as casually as if he were entering a conversation. John got "the Landlord" on the ropes and punched him until the ref broke it up. John chased him around the ring. By unanimous decision, "the Hawk," the oldest fighter there, veteran of ten Toughman contests and four concussions, won.

On Saturday night I'm seated ringside between one of the judges, a big affable guy in a turtleneck sweater named Gary Walden, a housing contractor, and the fight doctor, Allen Saoud, who used to work emergency medicine but is now a dermatologist with several offices in the area. He's also the county coroner.

Saoud has dark hair, faintly protruding eyes, and a busy manner. He's a big man, wide and tall, and wearing a dark suit. Immediately, he finds a soft chair with arms and pulls it next to our metal folding chairs. Saoud's been a fight fan since Rocky Marciano, he says, so this is the perfect job for him. Besides Toughman, he's the fight doctor for all of the amateur and proboxing bouts in the county. He's got an eye for the fighters, a truly clinical eye--not necessarily callous but not overly sensitive either. Throughout the night, he keeps up a steady, instructive narration: "This boy is as tough as nails. Good right hand. He's a barroom brawler. Helluva right hand. Helluva right hand."

"Don't quit your day job, buddy," he says of a stumbling fighter, tattooed everywhere, with so much blood pouring from his nose that some of the faces at ringside look disgusted.

A fighter with the ring name "The Professor" battles the only black fighter here, Tony "the Tiger" Evans. Actually Tony the Tiger has to chase the Professor all over the ring. The Professor gets knocked down and asks for the fight to stop.

"That's why they call him the Professor--he knew he was getting his ass kicked," the Judge pipes in merrily.

Now up there in the ring two huge, blubbery men are fighting each other in the ugliest manner possible. One is 6'8", 280 pounds. His smaller opponent, at 6'2", 210, breaks away and dances around the ring; the crowd boos. His black T-shirt reads STRESSED OUT.

In the third round, the big guy falls into the ropes, causing everyone seated on that side of the ring to jump up, knocking their chairs back in alarm.

"I bet that little old heart is beating like a tom-tom in that big old boy's body," the Doc says calmly.

A "domestic engineer" fights a housecleaner--two very large women wearing sweats and T-shirts as big as dresses. There's no finesse to the fight; no running away either. The women just stand there and punch away at each other, big, sloppy, windmill punches--soft but endless--to the head, the belly, the breasts. When the ref separates the women, they circle each other warily, their chests heaving, hair dark with sweat. The DJ plays, "You've lost that loving feeling ..."

When the forty-year-old housecleaner wins the prize she's so excited and happy you want to put your arms around her. She tells me she'll use the $750 to pay the bills first, then buy something for her kids. She's raising her two young sons alone after her second husband took off. One night after he had left, her husband came back, broke into the house, and beat her up. That was the year she entered Toughman.

So does she fight to express her rage? Her face looks so alive, cheeks flushed a schoolgirl pink, that it's easy to believe her when she says simply, "I like fighting." And, like anyone else, the forty-year-old housecleaner likes winning.

A thirty-nine-year-old-fighter with a killer right hand has picked "Old Man" as his ring name. Every time he takes a hit, the young men in the audience cry out with glee, "Take THAT, Old Man!"

The lean young men fight like tigers, leaping toward their opponents at the ring of the bell and never letting them go. They prance all over the ring and never stop jabbing, never stop trying to destroy each other. The crowd loves these fights. When the bell rings, the fighters are parted, but their blood is still high. Even at the third round, they come back full force.

When I'd asked two of the young men, Travis "the Tyrant" Ferrel and Jonah "Whitey" Cogar, why they'd entered Toughman, they replied the same way: "I had nothing better to do." They sat hunched over their chairs in the gym where I had interviewed them, looking both uncomfortable and eager, like they were wishing they had something to say.

"If you weren't spending your nights in the gym training for Toughman, what would you be doing?" I asked.

"Sitting home and watching TV probably," Jonah said, sounding disgusted.

Jonah doesn't work. Travis is an aide at a home for mentally retarded adults. They teach the adults how to survive in the real world, he told me: "We take them shopping in the mall." He sounded slightly embarrassed by his job.

They were deeply self-effacing, almost scornful of their lives, like they knew their lives weren't worth shit and so they were going to throw themselves into the ring, into some trouble, and see what would happen. It was as if they were hoping that by pushing themselves into Toughman, they would become real. Couldn't life, furious, fast life, give you a definite self with plans for the future and plenty to say?

"Walk-on ring girls"--that is, eleven-, twelve-, and thirteen-year-olds from the audience wearing sweatshirts and bell-bottom jeans--jump up into the ring and prance around it like ponies, parodying the real ring girls. They turn and wiggle their bony, little-girl butts at the crowd. They put their hands behind their heads and thrust out their hard little-girl chests. They don't smile at the audience. Their faces have the hard sassiness of tomboys. They're mocking the ring girls (and the men in the audience), but they're also trying the seduction on for size.

"Only in West Virginia," the Doc says dryly.

Another doctor from the local emergency room leans over and says to me, "Be kind to our state."

As the night goes on, the competition heats up between the ring girls too. The two strippers are very confident, but the girl with the big thighs keeps changing her bathing suit and ups the ante by turning around and shaking her ass at us.

"Well, lookee here, another bathing suit," the Judge says when she comes out wearing a polka-dot bikini.

"She must be a rich kid," the Doc observes.

When the men applaud and shout for her, the other two girls look at each other in amazement. They take to pouting whenever the third ring girl is onstage. Now when they walk the ring, they too stop and give a little shake of their ass or their breasts, but a very restrained, very knowing shake, as if they know that the ordinary ring girl could take off all her clothes and still not be as attractive as they are. It's funny to see the professional strippers being more chaste than the everyday girl who is so determined to please.

Jerry Thomas introduces a "walk-on ring dude!" and the tiniest boy climbs up into the ring wearing cuffed blue jeans but no shirt. When he flexes his arm muscle, a bicep no bigger than a walnut pops into view. The crowd is quieter than they've been since the national anthem. Maybe they don't want their boys to be that cute.

When one fighter complains of a dislocated shoulder, the Doc climbs into the ring to examine him. After some discussion, the ref calls the fight. As the hurt fighter leaves the ring, the sound of a baby crying is played over the sound system.

"It's a trick shoulder," the Doc tells me bluntly when he comes back from examining the fighter. Apparently the man is able to pop his shoulder out at will, and he didn't want to fight anymore. He didn't fool anybody. Neither did one of the other fighters who dropped out of Toughman the day of the fights. He said he'd broken a rib sparring, but the trainers told me differently: they said that he'd come down with a case of the "Toughman flu"--and that it happens all the time. There are no saving lies here. No one ready to give you a good excuse. Either you're a good fighter or you're someone who'd better hold on to your day job. You're either tough as nails or you're a sissy.

Perhaps life itself has a hard face, and therein lie its beauty and truth. Perhaps that's where the joy lies, too, in facing the fact that there's really no fooling around with life, no whittling or cajoling it into some shape you like, no crying or talking it out of itself. Every man and woman here seems like someone put to the test, a hard test but one they can understand and at least have a shot at passing.

John Hawkinberry has returned to fight tonight. He just finished his eight-hour shift at Ruby Memorial Hospital up in Morgantown, where he works as a "support associate," sweeping patient rooms, bringing them their food trays, emptying the garbage.

Tonight he has to fight Tony "the Tiger" Evans. As soon as Tony is announced, the Doc leans over and says, "They don't like black people around here much."

Tony is a much faster, stronger, younger fighter than John. He bounces around the ring like he's on springs. Somehow, though, you know that he will win a few fights but never all of them. In this milky- white galaxy where he whirls alone, he won't risk it, if not for himself then for the two black men who are in the audience--friends? family?--the only black faces there.

Tony gets John up against the ropes and punches away at his head like he's reshaping it. When the ref pulls Tony off of him, John raises a gloved fist in the air to show he's not hurt, but he stumbles, almost falling forward.

In round three, John takes a hit, seems to get tangled in his own feet, whirls around, and falls face first into the ropes. When he gets himself off the ropes--he seems truly tangled in them--he's completely spent. He doesn't have a single punch left in him. He can barely stay on his feet, but he puts his gloves up in front, of his face and marches heavily across the ring and into Tony's fists, straight into them, as if that's the one thing he can do in his life--not to win, not to make things right, but to never run, to always face everything.

Saturday night ends with four champions, five if you count the ring girl. Clermont Gilbert, a deaf man who works for the FBI and goes by the ring name "Moose," has won the heavyweight title. He weeps as Jerry Thomas fastens the gold belt on his waist, weeps because, as he later explains, once you win you cannot come back and fight in Toughman again.

Tim "the Beaver" Carr wins the light heavyweight title. Jennifer "Everlast" Leister, a compact, ponytailed eighteen-year-old Marine who fought one of the best fights of the night, every punch connecting until the audience was on its feet roaring, wins the women's lightweight title. As the cameras flash, Debbie "Farm Girl" Shaffer, the forty-year-old housecleaner and winner of the women's heavyweight title, beams and raises her gloved fist in the air.

Chastity wins the two tickets to sunny Miami. As soon as it's announced, boys from the audience start shouting, "Take me with you!" The Doc, wise to the ways of the world, leans over to me and says, "She'll probably take her girlfriend."

Outside, the roads have become sheets of ice and snow is beginning to fall, but the crowd that's spilling out of the armory doors is in high spirits. Boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives, wrap their arms around each other as they tramp through the snow to their trucks. Small boys start play-boxing, and when they end up tussling on the ground their fathers laugh. Everyone seems warmed and satisfied, like we all just had a good meal inside. They can handle this ice, these slippery roads, the bitter cold; they've been handling it, and worse, for years.

Take a man, an ordinary man, living somewhere, a half hour south of Clarksburg, let's say, in lumberjack country. That man parks his pickup truck outside the Dairy Mart. Kicking snow from his boots, he walks into the brightly lit store to buy milk and Marlboros. He's worked hard all day and he'll do the same tomorrow and for the next thirty years, but he can't say he likes his job. Maybe he has kids and loves them, but he wishes he had time to go hunting. Maybe he and his wife aren't getting along too well anymore, or maybe they split up six or seven years ago and now he thinks he made a big mistake, and that man sees the red-and-black poster on the Dairy Mart door: "HOW TOUGH ARE YOU ?"

It's a taunt, but it's also a most seductive invitation. For what if every battle we ever fought, every spiritual or emotional struggle, took on a physical form, something we could get our hands on? What if we could race our trouble to a finish line or chop it down with an axe or woo it over to our side with a song or sex, calm it, cook it a good dinner, rub its back, and tuck it into bed?

Kathy Dobie's last article for Harper's Magazine, "The Only Girl in the Car," appeared in the August 1996 issue. A book based on that article will be published by Dial in June.