This tournament was the first one I’ve been to where fighters fought outside of the ring… yeah like in the crowd with all of their friends jumping in… it was your classic bar brawl. The culprit who started the fight was disqualified from the tournament for excessive force. I could see it coming, before his fight began, he had this look on his face like he wanted to kill his opponent. Nostrils flaring, fists clenched, eyes not blinking, and the guy was breathing like a mule in heat.
His opponent punched him square in the nose which is an illegal target in our sport. Naturally, this hooligan blew up and just started lacing into this poor guy who was scared shitless with a flurry of full contact punches. The referee was disgusted (also hosting the tournament) and disqualified him from the tournament and banned him from the World Kobudo Federation tournaments.
As if that wasn’t enough… this nut started mouthing off to the referee at which point the victim’s friend shouted out “get the fuck out of here”. Judging by this guy’s reaction… I wouldn’t be surprised if he was on steroids… in fact everyone from his school looked like killers. What did he do?? He said “Whachu gonna do bout it bitch?” he then throws his gloves off and chargers for his opponent’s friend with the big mouth. What a riot!!! All the coaches jumped in to split them up and kindly asked them to leave. But sure enough, on their way out, before they made it to the door, they broke out into a bare knuckle fight in the midst of the crowd that was watching the other fights… the ones in the ring.
I wasn’t very excited for this tournament. As of late, I have been lucky to get 1 or 2 hours in a week to train because it’s high season in my line of work having Canadian Music Week right around the corner. Fact of the matter is, my first fight was against one of my very own training partners from the dojo and I had a feeling we’d be fighting for the finals but not the qualifier. Generally speaking organizers try not to make students of the same martial arts school fight each other. He was 18 years old, pursuing this professionally and training up to 4 hours a day for it. That’s not even the worst of it, the list goes on.
What went wrong?
Check the video above for my vlog and the list of related posts below for the fight footage.