Cage Fight

Showtime and the EliteXC came to town over the weekend, bringing all the class and family entertainment you would expect from a cage fighting event.

I was actually really excited about shooting this event. I'm not sure why. Going in I knew almost nothing about mixed martial arts fighting, and until this past week I had never heard of the "big" names like Kimbo Slice or Nick Diaz. But for some reason the allure of shooting caged fighting at a live televised event made me giddy. It was the first time I've been really excited about an assignment in a while.

When I arrived, I was under the assumption that the Showtime people weren't going to let me near the cage. That turned out to not exactly be the case. I did sit right in front. The only thing between me and the cage was about a two-foot wide platform used by the Showtime cameramen to walk around and film the action. It wasn't a bad seat, but not being able to get right up against the cage or shoot over it did not make my auto focus happy. So I shot the entire event on manual focus. It's been an extremely long time since I've shot a sporting event like that.

The big draw of the evening was the professional debut of Kimbo Slice, a fighter who has built a huge fan base with his videos of street fights and backyard brawls posted on YouTube.
Unfortunately the fight didn't last long. After a few second of dancing around the ring, Kimbo cornered his opponent and beat him into submission. The match lasted 19 seconds.

That was another thing I wasn't prepared for. They advertised three rounds at five minutes each, but a fighter can tap out at anytime and the whole thing is over. Only one of the fights actually made it to the third round. Most of the fights were over within a couple of minutes in the first round. For some reason I thought it would be an all out brawl until someone was knocked out. I also thought there would be more cool martial arts action. Mostly, though, the fighters danced around, took some jabs, then inevitably got balled up together on the floor trying to wrestle/punch each other. It was very odd.




It got kind of bloody sometimes, which of course was super cool. A couple of the fights were stopped by officials because a fighter was bleeding so bad. At one point one of the fighters spit out his bloody mouthpiece on the mat, splattering blood on the platform right by me and another photographer. When that fight was over I checked to see if I had any blood on me or my camera, half hoping I did. Sadly, I did not.

Between bloody rounds, this guy came out to wipe the cage clean. Talk about your bad jobs. Overall, though, a good time was had by all.