Total kombat, continued

by Michelle Chihara

FIGHT CLUB: Frank Black lost his vale tudo match in 34 seconds, but he didn't take the beating handed to some competitors (center). For Kevin MacDonald (bottom), these legal tournaments are a little tame. "The underground fights are never going to go away," he says.

But as this kind of fighting becomes legitimized as mixed martial arts -- a sport with governing bodies, commissions, and rules -- those drawn to its darker side are heading deeper underground. There are certain people, for instance, who do not consider the vale tudo in Rhode Island to be "true" no-holds-barred fighting.

"You'll hear guys talk, like on the Internet boards, about how much it's split into two groups," says Kevin MacDonald, a 25-year-old Watertown native who works as a funeral director in Boston. On one side are mixed martial artists in favor of legitimacy. On the other side, "You've got guys that are more like myself, in the sense of being in it for the pure form -- the `anything goes' sense."

An experienced fighter, MacDonald is a compact Irish guy with a crew cut and a puckish sense of humor. Ask him why he fights, and he'll say, "Because it's fun," with a devilish raise of his eyebrows. Then he'll laugh.

He's leery of promoters and money men and the other trappings of professional sports. "A lot of guys are saying we should just take the elbow out, work with the commissions," he says. "All that's going to happen is it'll get like boxing. It'll get watered down. You'll have complete professional fighters, where this is all they do. The promoters start making more money. Then you get your Don King, with no connection to the sport, throwing a fight, demanding all this money."

MacDonald isn't sure the sport he loves is destined for legitimacy: "The public is never going to accept things where there's a lot of blood."

With a background in Muay Thai kickboxing, jujitsu, and what he calls "freestyle grappling," MacDonald has a professional record of five wins, three losses, and one tie. He says he'll fight anywhere, anytime, any rules. He's also run with the bulls in Pamplona, twice. "This time I touched one of them on the ass," he says, laughing. "I'll do anything with adrenaline."

Including fight underground. The UFC may have trouble getting fully licensed, but the underground "no eye-gouging, no biting, end of rules" fights are outright illegal. MacDonald remembers being sent downstairs at an underground fight in Los Angeles because he and his opponent were "quite bloody" and the promoter needed to "make things look respectable" for the police, who had just arrived.

In another underground fight, in Houston, MacDonald's training partner Eve Edwards caught an opponent in a head clench. "[Edwards] was throwing knees into the kid's face," he recalls. "They stopped and checked to see if he was okay. He was bleeding a little, but they let him go back. And my buddy gets him in another clench, he's bombing knees. And then the kid just opened his mouth. It looked like he had taken a quart of blood in his mouth. And then three things fell out. I stared at 'em.

"Turns out he had split the kid's upper palate in half, and three of his teeth, it wasn't just the teeth that we were seeing. It was the entire root, everything. The promoter picked 'em up and put 'em in an empty cup and said, `Here, kid.' "

None of this deters MacDonald. "There are always going to be flukes," he says. "Look at how many guys will never walk again because of football. And this is one of the most intense exercises of the mind. `Where am I? Where is he? If I try this, will he try this?' "

For MacDonald, the fewer the rules, the truer the test. "I've done boxing, kickboxing, judo. Some guy'll win on something stupid, some point or whatever, and then he's jumping around like he's a badass. With this, you know when you won, you know when you lost. It's exciting."

Ultimate Fighters take on challenges the way other people climb Mount Everest: for the searing purity of the challenge; as a way to reach the irreducible conflict of man and obstacle. People watch ultimate fighting the way people watch movies about Everest expeditions. Half the motivation is the possibility of redemption, reversal, human victory against all odds. Half is the possibility of . . . cannibalism.

Ultimate fighters, in this light, are a fringe group who take society's logic -- that it's manly and good to be able to defend yourself in a fight -- to its logical extreme. And for the most part, society doesn't want to recognize the violence inherent in being "manly." Extreme sports are one thing. But society frowns upon true extremists.

"Anything truly exciting in this society is suppressed," MacDonald says.

Ultimate fighters seem not to be people whom society has handed a golden ticket. They're not like the protagonists in the movie Fight Club -- white-collar yuppies who are fed up with the emptiness of an Ikea-as-identity culture. They seem, primarily, to be people searching for something -- validation, sense of self -- who have found it only in the cage.

Luciano DeOlivera, 22, is a fighter who trains with Joao Amaral in Everett. Amaral fought, and won, his first American professional fight at the World Extreme Fighting tournament in June in Atlanta (his academy is called New England Brazilian Jiu Jitsu). DeOlivera is a Brazilian immigrant who works, sometimes, refilling vending machines. A talented jujitsu grappler, he lost his vale tudo match at the Pawtucket tournament out of pure exhaustion: he spent everything he had in the first few minutes of the match, a common mistake for first-time fighters.

DeOlivera's heel is swollen and distended, with a dark spot at the center. He's limping. But Amaral tells me, "Luciano will fight again. He'll be a good fighter." They're hoping he'll compete in September's tournament.

This comes as a surprise to DeOlivera's girlfriend, who's sitting next to him in the studio. Watching Luciano fight in Pawtucket, she says, was "awful."

"I was crying," she says. "I couldn't stay in my chair."

I tell DeOlivera she doesn't want him to fight.

"I know," he says. "But I have to do it for her. She doesn't respect me."

His girlfriend rolls her eyes. He laughs and squeezes her shoulders. "I have to prove myself," he says softly.

"Can't you prove yourself here?" she says, jutting her chin at the jujitsu students rolling around on the mats. "You can prove yourself here."

Luciano touches her hair, tenderly, and doesn't answer.

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Michelle Chihara can be reached at mchihara[a]phx.com.