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"You can have my cock when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers."
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Spectators cheer the decisive strike as the Toppie goes down. It is helpless to rise but nonetheless enraged, pecking from below, rapid-fire. The Butcher hops just out of range, waits for a lag in the Toppie's desperate defense, then pivots on its right foot, and drives the knife on its left in a shallow, flashing arc through the Gray Toppie's skull. The Butcher twists out the blade, jabs with its beak several times at the head of its crumpled, twitching foe, then prances in circles, raising its wings and crowing as the bleachers erupt with howls. A young Latina with Down's syndrome enters the fighting pit and mimics the black rooster, pumping her arms, coaxing more energy from the stands. The Butcher's owner comes in to scoop up and check over his bird, which is "clean," no wounds, a superior victory. The man shakes hands with the Toppie's dejected handler, holds the Butcher aloft, then carries him from the ring, stroking the rooster's back and murmuring accolades in its ear. The lifeless Toppie is unceremoniously dumped into an oil drum that, by night's end, will be half-filled with chicken corpses. More than 50 gamecocks will do battle here tonight, mostly to the death of one, or both. The 20-by-15-foot dirt pit where they spill one another's blood is enclosed with chicken wire, and framed by splintered wooden bleachers. The whole structure is covered with a corrugated tin roof and surrounded by chain-link topped with barbed wire. Bare bulbs strung along the perimeter fence and the fluorescent lights that illuminate the fighting pit are powered by a generator. It rattles noisily near a vending shack that spices the air with the cooking smoke of grilled tortillas and carne asada. This cockfighting pit, one of roughly 50 in Arizona, is medium-size, and, although perfectly legal, hard to find. Its unmarked entrance is a gravel turnoff that winds through a rock quarry to a sunken parking area. The pit is only a few hundred yards off a major road, but effectively hidden by the drop in terrain and heaps of broken stone. On this night, more than 250 cockfighting devotees, including dozens of families with children, have come to watch the feathers -- and blood and dust and guts -- fly.
There's also a smattering of Anglo faces, mostly retired working men and their wives, and about 30 Filipinos (including one anesthesiologist) who occupy one corner of the bleachers. They watch the action squatting on their haunches. Usually, admission to the rock-quarry fighting pit is three bucks or five. Tonight it's $10, as tonight is a fund raiser for the Arizona Game Fowl Breeders Association and Citizens Against Proposition 201 -- an initiative on the November 3 ballot that would make it a felony to breed or fight gamecocks in Arizona, one of five states where the blood sport is still legal. It will be the first time any state has held a plebiscite on cockfighting. Twenty minutes and a world away, a separate Proposition 201 fund raiser is simultaneously under way, this one sponsored by Citizens Against Cockfighting, and held in the five-star Ritz-Carlton hotel in North Phoenix. There's valet parking, and the evening's highlight is an auction of art donated by Arizona galleries, conducted by an auctioneer from Sotheby's of New York. The event title -- "The Awakening of Arizona" -- suggests that Proposition 201's backers believe their initiative can pull the state from a backwater slumber. "Come help the people of the Great State of Arizona put an end to the cruelty of cockfighting," the invitations read. "Black tie optional." Many of the suits and gowns inside the Ritz-Carlton ballroom cost more than most of the cockfighting fans at the quarry take home in a week. The predominantly white men and women who wear them sip $7.50 cocktails and snack on hors d'oeuvres, served by people who are almost all brown, as they preview the art, which includes a movie poster for The Horse Whisperer autographed by Robert Redford. Working the crowd is Citizens Against Cockfighting campaign manager Jamie Massey, who's worked for nine years to outlaw the sport in Arizona. Massey says he's been to one cockfight in his life. "The crowd was terrifying," he says. "Just the absolute glee and the expression on their faces when a bird scored a hit. That's what I despise about cockfighting: the mentality it represents. My idea of nice competition is a game of Scrabble. I don't understand people who like to gamble on a fight to the death, and I don't think they should be allowed to do it. "Cockfighting brings out the worst side of human nature, the barbaric side." Outside the Ritz-Carlton, about 40 pro-cockfighting protesters -- barbarians at the gate -- exercise their First Amendment rights, carrying placards with slogans such as, "You can have my cock when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers." The demonstrators disperse long before the auction begins, in time for several of them to race down the highway and get a few bets down at the quarry cockfight, most likely one of the last legal events of its kind in the Great State of Arizona. Like the Gray Toppie in the final seconds of its life, Arizona cockfighting devotees are down and fighting to the last breath for the sanctioned existence of their avocation. And from all angles, it looks like they're going to lose. Badly, and finally. Twenty-three times in the past 45 years, the cockfighting crowd and its conservative backers in the Arizona Legislature have spiked measures to outlaw the sport. This election season, however, anti-cockfighting activists -- backed with big bucks from animal rights organizations outside Arizona -- caught the cockfighters unaware.
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Photos by Doug Hoeschler
Above: Belton Hodges and Pretty Boy. Below: Husband-and-wife cockfighting team Eileen and Tom Curran. |