As much as anyone, Dudley is frustrated with the sport's quasi-outlaw status and the way state officials have tried to rein it in. "I've seen thousands of fights, and in my opinion, the more you water this sport down and try to make it less violent, the more you prolong the fight and actually make it more dangerous. Fatigue becomes a factor. A guy gets a little woggy, and that's when he gets hurt--after it goes round after round."
While not a pro, Dudley speaks from some experience. For the thrill of it, he fought a pro fight in Killeen last June. He won, but only after his opponent chinned him and blackened his eye. "I was completely gassed," he says.
Mark Graham
Fighter's House lawyer Gary Warren working out at the gym
Mark Graham
Joe Garcia (on mat) trains with Warren.
Mark Graham
Ritch, who plans to return to Japan, does some sit-ups on a heavy bag.
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As a business built on students who pay $100 a month to train, Fighter's House has been a rough proposition, Dudley says. "I hear on TV we have 60 or 70 students. We've had 30. It's been a long, hard ride to push this over the top."
Younger guys recruited out of the bars think it's simply a show of macho, he says. They either brag and don't show up, or drop away fast when they learn it's demanding and complex. Older students pull muscles or sprain shoulders and take time to heal. "There are a lot of injuries," he says.
As for aspiring pros, Dudley says he would like the gym to be part of a growing farm league, which every sport needs. "I want an active gym. But you see guys get chumped out of their money, which is this sport's dirty little secret."
Dudley says the gym tested the state's boxing authorities at least partly out of frustration. Like most people in no-holds-barred, he thinks boxing people have no business regulating it. They don't know or understand it, he says, and its potential popularity and young audience could put boxing out for the count.
Once the state issued its injunction last month and threatened possible criminal penalties for violations, though, Dudley and everyone else at Fighter's House backed off.
That included Gary Warren, their lawyer, who trains at Fighter's House most nights and happens to have been one of the fighters in Back Yard Brawl III. "Since I've been working out here, I've lost 40 pounds," says Warren, a 36-year-old who wrestled in high school in Garland and boxed in frat tournaments at Texas Tech. At the fight gym he's broken his nose, sprained an ankle, and hurt his shoulder--"just minor things...You just have to want to do it really badly. There are guys who can bend you up."
Warren, who usually practices as a corporate counsel and in white-collar criminal law, says the gym wants to put together an amateur program under the state's guidelines and stage fights as a nonprofit. He hopes they can "tweak the rules a bit and see if we can get something that still maintains the integrity of the sport. The problem is, you can't be tough and comply."
At a meeting in Austin last week between Cole and the principals at the gym, Cole said he made it clear that the state plans to enforce all of its rules.
"The biggest problems are the gloves and the ring," Handel said after the meeting. Without being able to throw punches using the sport's light, open-finger gloves, "the fights end up being a lot of slapping...it winds up being boring. You can't please a crowd with fights like that." Without the closed-fist shots, it becomes something called pancration, a grappling match with kickboxing and open-hand slapping thrown in.
Guy Mezger, the most successful no-holds-barred fighter in Dallas and winner of the UFC middleweight title in 1997, has been working with a promoter and staging pancration events at the Bronco Bowl for the past two years. He calls the Fighter's House "a bunch of morons" for thinking they could face down the state.
"They don't even understand how much trouble they're in," says Mezger, who runs his own training gym. "They thumbed their nose at the state and got their 15 minutes of fame. Now they're gonna learn how much power these state regulatory commissions have. You can't piss off the powers that be."
One day, no-holds-barred will supplant boxing, he says, but it will take small, careful steps and a show that the sport can be safe. "You have to spoon-feed it to them," Mezger says. "You can't shove it down their throat."
Carlos Muchado, a cousin to the famed Gracie brothers who runs a well-regarded jujitsu studio in Dallas, says he, too, thinks the sport has a big future. He respects Handel and Ritch, both former students, for "their great skill" if not for their judgment, he says. "It's hard to upset the status quo."
Handel says Fighter's House bucked the rules and is "taking a beating for it. I hope five, seven years down the line, people will say this was where someone took a stand. Not to sound trite, but this is our little Alamo."
