By Warren Bates
Review-Journal

There are no signs telling visitors how to get to Sierra Bonita.
But the faithful know the route -- a winding dirt road off old U.S. Highway 91 in Beaver Dam, Ariz., past scattershot ranches and mobile homes to a M*A*S*H*like compound with a large corrugated metal building as its centerpiece.
Here, in a rugged basin in the shadow of the Virgin Mountains, lies a curious cultural phenomenon, one minute perceived as a dirty little secret, the next as a Norman Rockwell painting.
It's where hundreds of people, Las Vegans among them, gather every other weekend, put roosters in a pit and fight them to the death.

Click for a larger image. Illustration by Mike Johnson. The entrance sign to the Sierra Bonita Game Club sits against a rusted, broken wagon axle. Photos by Ralph Fountain. Jaime Massey, president of Tucson-based Citizens Against Cockfighting, displays a rooster blade. At Sierra Bonita, similar nail-like gaffs are attached to the legs of combating roosters. The Sierra Bonita compound, abandoned during the week, fills up every other weekend for derbies. About 150 people gather to either fight their roosters or watch the spectacle inside the large metal building, left rear. The smaller huts are where breeders keep gamecocks.

Good ol' boys with families in tow, small-town farmers and breeders, poor people reaching back to their family traditions. They attach weapons to the legs of gamecocks, which then defend their turf as vigorously as their breeders defend their blood sport.
"We're good Mormons, we're good people, and we're tired of people telling us what to wear, what to eat and what to think," Lamar J. Olsen said recently as he made repairs to the roof of his cockhouse -- one of some 20 pens on the Sierra Bonita compound.
"When a small group of people get together and try to throw you out of town based on your religion, the color of your skin or your hobby ... it's just not right."
Cockfighting, illegal in Nevada since 1919, has been part of Arizona's heritage since statehood. There have been 23 failed attempts to defeat it in the Legislature.
The battle is occasionally nasty, sometimes downright paranoid. Rumors abound in this piece of land in the northwest corner of the Arizona Strip, 10 miles from Mesquite and 90 miles from Las Vegas. Tales include drug running and kids being kidnapped and sold in Mexico.
"When I came here, there had never been a murder. I think there's been two or three now," area resident Howard Ziegler speculated at a December town hall meeting in nearby Littlefield. Inevitably, he hedges: "Now, I don't know who committed them ..."
At the same meeting, frustrated resident Lee Jolley said the last few months "have turned into a real sewer."
"Former friends have turned into enemies, and I'd like to see it stopped," he said in a voice quavering with emotion. "I can't turn against my neighbors. These are the people who I live with, who I associate with, who I go to church with."
In a small mobile home a quarter-mile from Sierra Bonita, Bob French maintains a more level head.
"They're not my sport, football's my sport," he says, offering a visitor an afternoon toddy. "But you know, I'm not the type to build my house on the runway and then complain about the airplanes."
His wife asks nervously if their names can be kept out of the newspaper.
"We have to live here," she pleads.
"What does that mean?" he counters. "Nothing is gonna happen."

* * *

Jack Robertson began breeding and fighting birds when he was 12 years old. His uncle brought him a rooster from Mexico and he hasn't stopped since.
"I like the beauty of the fowl and the care that you have to give them every day," the 57-year-old said.
Robertson is easily the most controversial figure in Beaver Dam. He operates the Sierra Bonita Game Club.
He brought the venue there about seven years ago because it was the spot in Arizona most convenient to his home in Payson, Utah, an hour south of Salt Lake City.
Robertson, a former president of the Utah Gamefowl Breeders Association, is reluctant to talk about his business, which is illegal in his home state. The media, he said, have been hostile. Any publicity is seen as bad publicity, and Robertson makes sure his comments appease his opponents.
"It was away from everybody, away from the town. It was just isolated at the time," Robertson said of his decision to move in.
Some of the neighbors back him up on that point. French said he knew the purpose of Sierra Bonita when he built his home. Wayne Pace, who has lived in the area longer than most, credits Robertson with bringing some level of infrastructure to the underdeveloped community, which sits on a mesa near the compound.
"He (Robertson) put the road in here, he put the water in here," Pace says from his front porch on a chilly Friday afternoon. "A number of people in town think it's gonna degrade from the community, fetch in the undesirables. Everything the man does is legal ... and these people are as honest as the day is long. If it's cruelty to animals, then you have to stop all rodeos, all hunting."
Still, Pace admits, "It is brutal."
Robertson says his customer base is "family people and working people ... a lot of them have other hobbies. There's people who like to trap shoot, rodeo and golf. Our hobby just happens to be the chickens."
His business thrives on word of mouth. Most people are regulars, he said, but a few new faces show up at the biweekly derbies.
At a typical bout at the club, two-inch long nail-like attachments called gaffs are placed on both legs of the combatants. Handlers bring the birds into the small arena and thrust them toward each other before a referee yells "Pit," and the fight is on.
The rules are much like boxing. There are 10 counts, 20 counts, and handlers often are allowed to take an injured bird aside midmatch and care for it. The loser does not always die, but there are canisters outside the building labeled "Roosters Only" for those that do.
Cheap furniture sits on a dirt floor, serving as a lobby. A poster depicting a gamecock is inscribed with the slogan "Pride and Dignity."
While many of Sierra Bonita's patrons are women, most are men who bring their American-made four-wheel drives, replete with rooster feathers hanging from rear-view mirrors. They drink Bud Light and pay $11 at the door to watch the action.
Casual wagering is legal. The season generally runs from January to June. After that it's too hot to fight bantams and Rhode Island reds.
The latest event was held Saturday. Inside, some 150 cockfighting fans sat on bleachers or crowded the edge of the pits. Boys who appeared to be no older than 15 called out the bets.
"I got 10 on the red, 10 on the red," one shouted. "I'll take that," a man in a baseball cap responded. Many parents brought young children, even infants, who largely appeared uninterested in the goings-on in Sierra Bonita's main pit and four smaller "drag pits."
Sometimes, said former cockfighter Bob Burden, the winner will be in worse shape than the loser. If a badly injured bird is being more aggressive than a healthy yet unmotivated rooster, the wounded fowl prevails.
But that didn't happen Saturday afternoon. The roosters that appeared beaten stayed beaten, though their handlers went to extreme measures to keep them healthy. They often were seen breathing into a combatant's mouth as a form of resuscitation.
Handlers also lovingly stroked and tried to comfort roosters that appeared to be losing, occasionally placing their mouths on the backs of their necks and breathing. Then they'd put them back into the fight.
"It's really based on gameness. Sometimes it's really kind of inspirational to see the determination of these roosters," Burden said.
Once a year, Robertson said, the club puts on a bash for anyone who wants to come in.
"We invite all the police force; it's a big barbecue. We invite the townspeople, the casino people that take care of us during the years. The guys who park the cars, people who wait on us in the cafes.
"We've donated to young ladies' baseball and softball, the fire departments in both Mesquite and Littlefield, youth soccer, the Boy Scouts," he said, insisting: "We don't think it will help us politically, we just donate because we like to work for kids. We don't do it for publicity."
Clifton Bryant, a sociology professor at Virginia Tech University whose area of expertise is deviant behavior, said: "In many ways, from a demographic standpoint, they would resemble what America used to look like before we became as diverse as we are now. I call them a kind of poor Americans. They also hunt, fish, raise farm animals. Their lifestyle is certainly wholesome, yet they are labeled."
* * *

The last effort to outlaw cockfighting in Arizona was made during the 1996 Legislature. House Bill 2519, which would have made the activity a misdemeanor, marked the state's 23rd attempt. The cockfighting lobby was out in force, its 150 supporters vastly outnumbering the bill's foes.
Jaime Massey, head of the Tucson group Citizens Against Cockfighting, showed up with rooster blades to show lawmakers. He and a Humane Society representative testified the sport promotes violence against people. After all, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer had a history of animal abuse.
But he was upstaged by Frank Celaya of Phoenix, who told lawmakers he served in Vietnam to preserve his freedoms.
Celaya then took off his artificial leg, waved it in front of the committee and demanded, "If this is not enough for my country, to be able to come and fight chickens whenever I want to fight chickens, then what is this country coming to?"
The bill was defeated. Massey is at a loss to understand why.
"It really seemed a done deal," he said recently. "They didn't ask me a single question, and I'm the guy who has been leading this charge for years."

* * *

In December, a similar feeling crept over some Mohave County residents who appeared at a Board of Supervisors meeting to discuss Sierra Bonita.
The previous August, Supervisors Carol Anderson and Jim Zaborsky had voted to shut down the facility. It had been cited for environmental health and zoning violations. Health inspectors had gone on the property and took photos of rooster carcasses overflowing from 55-gallon drums.
"There was a concern about drinking, underage drinkers," Anderson said. "And there was concern about a school that is going to be built in the area. Any traffic going into the cockfighting area must go by the school. There was concern about the condition of the road."
But shortly after the three-member board voted 2-1 to deny Robertson's permit, Anderson was approached by a Kingman City Council member who has a friend who fights roosters at Sierra Bonita.
"He asked me to reconsider the vote. I said no," Anderson said.
But Zaborsky said yes, and the matter was put up for reconsideration in a town hall meeting before the board in the fire station of Beaver Dam's sister town, Littlefield.
That Dec. 8 meeting drew a large number of Arizonans, Utahns and Nevadans, most of whom vouched for Robertson's character and his enterprise. What might have dismayed the venue's opponents -- had they known it at the time -- is that Zaborsky drove to the meeting accompanied by Robertson's attorney, Ken Sondgeroth.
"We have an adequate investment in this property. We have been operating for five or six years and we haven't had any trouble until just lately," Robertson said in a brief address to the supervisors. "We tried to be good citizens, we've tried to be good neighbors, and we hope this will go for us."
Sondgeroth argued that the economic impact of his client's business "is tremendous for this area. The motels fill up, the local gas station, the restaurants are in favor of this business."
Regarding rumors of drug pushers and kidnappers, Sondgeroth scoffed: "My client doesn't have to argue whether these things occur ... he has a history that they don't occur."
Speaker after speaker went to the microphone to say they supported Sierra Bonita.
A few dissenters spoke up.
"They all drink very heavily," said the compound's nearest neighbor, Bill Wall, in a short protest that focused on the increasing frequency and length of events.
"I'd like to give you guys a reality check," said Thomas Wood of Desert Springs, Ariz. "This is a dirty little secret. Toxic waste dumps are legal; how many of you would like to have a toxic waste dump in your neighborhood?"
Gabriel Nevarez, a Las Vegas real estate broker, responded that Robertson's group "is like my family ... I know a lot of people from Vegas who come here, too. We're really willing to cooperate."
From his office on Flamingo Road, Nevarez said he has been fighting birds since he was "a little kid in Mexico."
"Mostly they're people from Utah," he said of the Sierra Bonita group. "They're humble, honest, and we can take the kids there. It's part of my culture. My grandfather, my great-grandfather passed it down for generations."
Zaborsky ended the meeting by saying he had been misled at an earlier hearing in Kingman -- the county seat -- about the problems regarding the school's proximity. He asked residents not to argue with each other and to take their anger out on him. Then he reversed his earlier vote.
Robertson would make the season.

* * *

Fred Hawley, a former criminal justice professor at Louisiana State University who has studied cockfighting societies for 15 years, says its fans value "machismo and its ritual reiteration."
Some roosters are seen as emblems of bravery, "protecting their turf and constellation." Others are derided. A dunghill rooster literally will chicken out of a fight and is more suitable for gumbo than the ring.
In one study, Hawley said the activity "has great symbolic significance to its practitioners and aficionados as an affirmation of masculinity in an increasingly complex and diverse era."
Over at Virginia Tech, Bryant has a more charitable view.
"My own studies show that cockers are no more corrupted or degenerate than the general public" one of his reports concluded. "Our literature is violent, our crimes are violent, our sports are violent, and even our daily activities and amusements are often violent."
He characterized cockfighting as the oldest and most durable spectator sport, one that has survived despite centuries of condemnation.
"I think it's probably very functional," he said in a recent telephone interview. "It allows people to let off steam. Where in the food chain do you say it's cruel? Is it cruel to put worms on a hook?"
Bryant agrees with Arizona's ban on dogfighting in 1979, saying dogs "are somewhat higher up the zoological chain.
"Chickens," he said. "are one of your stupider animals."

* * *

Massey is working overtime these days in the offices of Citizens Against Cockfighting, answering the phones and sending out volunteers to gather signatures. He is trying to get Arizona residents to do what lawmakers won't -- vote cockfighting down.
He needs 170,000 signatures by July 2 to get his organization's initiative on the November ballot. If he succeeds, cockfighting supporters have no illusions -- the voters will back him.
Massey says he is amazed that his state representatives in the 1990s can't muster enough common sense to do what Nevada did 70 years ago.
"You ask legislators and you'll get all sorts of reasons," he said. "But I think in order to get dogfighting outlawed, they had to make deals. One was to leave cockfighting alone."
Massey said his current initiative is stronger than the 1996 proposal: It makes organizing a cockfight a felony and spectating a misdemeanor.
The cockfighters, he said, don't show lawmakers the razors, don't tell them how birds are drugged to enhance performance, and don't reflect on the impact of a child seeing a bird mangled and torn.
He sighs when asked why his state clings to the activity.
"It's a mystery to us," he says, acknowledging there is probably a long and protracted answer but his five-word summation says it better.
So far, he said, about 107,000 signatures have been collected.
Twenty-five an hour. That's how many people must sign the petition, circulating since November 1996.
"We better step it up, that's what I keep telling people."

* * *

Mohave County is the fifth largest county in the country by land area, with a population of only 130,000. The largest municipality is Lake Havasu City with 42,000 residents, so it's not surprising that a level of familiarity exists.
After Zaborsky switched his vote, Anderson called for an investigation. She sent a letter to the county's attorney, Bill Eckstrom, asking whether Zaborsky had a conflict since his administrative assistant, Karon Sondgeroth, is Ken Sondgeroth's mother. And his father is the chairman of the county Planning and Zoning Commission, which recommended Robertson's permit be approved.
Zaborsky said he had nothing to gain with his vote. Eckstrom agreed, saying neither Zaborsky nor a relative received any financial benefit.
Zaborsky told the Review-Journal the issue of Robertson's permit wasn't discussed as he drove to the meeting with Ken Sondgeroth, and he denied a suggestion by Anderson that he had been "talked to."
"My mind was pretty well made up," he said, "not how I was going to vote, but that these people didn't get a fair hearing to begin with."
Zaborsky said he has signed Massey's initiative. It may be a backwater sport, he said, but Robertson is in compliance. The environmental concerns have been addressed. The condition of the road is being looked at. And Robertson created a handicapped parking access area, though no one can remember a disabled patron coming in.
In neighboring Clark County, neither the Metropolitan Police Department nor the district attorney's office can recall prosecuting an illegal cockfighting case in the past 10 years. Mohave County Animal Control chief Lane Plunkett and Sheriff's Department spokesman Steve Johnson said their agencies haven't had any problems worth remembering at Sierra Bonita.
"It's not to say we haven't received complaints, but we receive complaints for anything," Johnson said. "For the most part everybody is going along with the regulations."
Over at Mohave County's Division of Environmental Health, Norm Marrah said the bird-disposal complaint has been rectified.
"There was a lot of dead chickens coming out of the garbage cans," he said. "They were directed to get bigger cans."

* * *

For an outsider trying to discover the genesis of the recent controversy, many say the answers lie with two men: Robertson and Wall.
Robertson won't discuss Wall, whom he refers to as a former partner. Wall, too, is reluctant to be quoted, citing his proximity to the compound. So news articles are filled with vague references to a falling out.
Robertson's friend Pace, who refereed some of Saturday's matches, offers a theory. Wall owns land in the area and doesn't want to see it decline in value.
Wall says he was Robertson's partner in the land only, but his interest was sold off long ago. He recently said people would like to think he turned in Robertson for the environmental violations.
"But it isn't me, nobody knows who did it ... heck, I could sit here forever and it (Sierra Bonita) isn't gonna bother me."
Despite that declaration, Wall did speak out against Sierra Bonita at the Littlefield meeting, albeit for only a few minutes. Robertson, asked recently about his relationship with Wall, gave a terse response: "I've got nothing to say about him at all."
Some 400 miles away, Massey has been fighting the state's tolerance for cockfighting for nine years. Robertson has never heard of him.
Mardi Ray Burden, Bob's wife, takes Massey seriously. The former president of the Arizona Game Fowl Breeders Association has been to Sierra Bonita and worries about the two towns should the cockfighting initiative go before voters.
"I wonder if anybody knows the impact that pit has. There's no economy in Littlefield and Beaver Dam," she said. "If you make it illegal to fight roosters, is it going to change the quality of your life? Will you feel safer if the cops are chasing down chickens?"
She bristles at the notion that her father, who raised four children and dozens of roosters, will be labeled a criminal.
Burden can name the types of blades used by different cultures: Filipinos and Hawaiians used long knives on their birds. In Mexico, a shorter knife was preferred. What evolved through England and Ireland and the American South, she said, was the gaff.
She insists it isn't cruel.
"The reason we have been able to defeat this in the Legislature is we are not ax-murdering, drug-dealing prostitutes," she said. "This is a very culturally significant sport. The police departments don't say, `These are public nuisances, and my God, we have to shut it down.' "
Burden draws a distinction between dog and chicken fighting. Gamecocks instinctively kill each other. A dog must be trained to be mean.
"This is cultural imperialism," she said of her vanishing sport, now legal in only five states, "the taking over of a culture by another culture. It will become illegal because the majority of the population live in the cities -- the people who originally didn't live here -- and they control the vote."
She complains Massey is an animal-rights activist who likely will go after the rodeo once his current mission is accomplished.
Massey rejects both comments.
"I'm not going to get personal," he said. "We've got a file of news clippings regarding the criminal activities cockfighters have been involved with. My father-in-law said, `You know, you don't need it. Cockfighting is bad enough.'
"It's a real shame we have to go to these lengths," he said. "Arizona will go through some embarrassment, but Arizonans shouldn't be embarrassed, their politicians should."

* * *

As Olsen and his wife repair the roof of their cockhouse, readying it for the weekend event, Pace stands outside an aviary near his mobile home. Peacocks strut about. Hundreds of love birds, cockatiels and parrots feed from his troughs. Once in a while, a burnt-sienna rooster appears.
"I love birds." Pace says as a breeze blows across the valley. "I've raised thousands."
Though he no longer fights gamecocks, Pace isn't happy about the landscape of this wide-open valley. He knows the day will come when game fighting is illegal. His family of friends will be run out of state.
Pace recites a litany of complaints about how he, Robertson and other cockfighters get blamed for a host of maladies and crimes.
He sighs, rhetorically asking why anyone would move to Beaver Dam if not for a small slice of freedom.
"I may pack up and leave."

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