The last people you would want to stiff are cage fighters

**PizDoff** · Posted On: 9/18/2006 11:09pm

Fight Snub
The last people you would want to stiff are cage fighters, but it appears that’s what one promoter did
By A.C. THOMPSON
Article Published Sep 6, 2006

Lying on his back, Dan Marks took a bunch of crushingly hard punches to the face — wham! wham! wham! — before trying to wrap his sweaty, muscular legs around his attacker's neck in hopes of throttling the guy into submission. Yeah, it was a pretty brutal scene, but these are the sort of things one does while competing in a professional cage fight. And Marks, a mohawk-sporting 24-year-old San Franciscan, is a dedicated professional.

he dude practically lives at the gym, working out four to five hours a day, six days a week. Punching. Kicking. Weights. Running. Stretching. Dieting. Studying and practicing jiujitsu moves, including a panoply of chokes and joint-wrenching submission holds.

He failed to choke out his opponent, which would've meant an automatic victory. At the conclusion of the bout, after a total of 15 minutes of human combat, the judges scored the match in favor of his foe, a hard-ass brawler from Norman, Okla., named Matt Grice, who'd definitely put in the dominant performance. Marks left the arena disappointed and banged up, with nasty bruising around each eye.

"This is a legitimate sport," Marks says. "A lot of people see it on TV and they think it's easy to get in there and fight. It's not. These people are athletes. They're not guys at the bar."

In the days that followed, Marks got a painful look at the less-than-legitimate side of the sport: The $1,000 check he'd received for fighting bounced, and today, three months later, he still hasn't been paid.

He wasn't the only one who got stiffed by the promoter of the event — billed as the "Bay Area Brawl" and held in a near-empty Oakland Arena, a 19,200-seat venue — in fact, the whole thing has proven to be such a debacle that state officials are considering opening a criminal investigation. It wouldn't be the first time the man behind the event, a Hawaiian named Chad Tsuneyoshi, found himself in trouble with the law.

http://www.sfweekly.com/issues/2006-...rc=default_rss

Pretty good article. Goes over in detail some of the sport's history, what is wrong with it, and ends off in on a positive note.