The Toughman Contest) Kathy Dobie

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.

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