Everyone knows the rules of Fight Club. But fewer people know a related set of rules: how to run a fight club.
Follow my advice, gleaned from my time running a high school fight club, and soon enough you too will watch drunk people bareknuckle box, as what began as a joke between friends spirals ineluctably out of your control.
Name choice is critical. Go with Fight Club and you’re trite, but go with anything evocative of backyard wrestling and everyone will be too afraid of broken necks to attend your carnage society (which is itself not a bad name).
Stephen, a friend I met on the debate team, had a dream: that one day, his schoolmates could beat the crap out of one another on weekends. This dream was surprisingly common at my high school. Any same-sex Catholic school is going to have hormones desperate for an outlet. But boxing held a special place in the hearts of my schoolmates because of one faculty member, an aging street boxer-cum-Jesuit who had, according to legend, punched out a student for smoking.
I was skeptical at first of Stephen’s plan, hatched during our junior year, but his dream became mine when he told me and Chris, his other recruit, the club’s name: Fight Night. A good name can be that powerful.
Most of the rules from Fight Club are of no use to the aspiring fight club manager. For example, if no one talks about your fight club, how are you going to parlay your notoriety into a Homecoming date? The one rule that will help you is that newcomers must fight on their first night. Without it, all you’ve got are looky-loos and, worse, the same people fighting every night.
There was no way I was risking thousands of dollars of orthodontia work on fighting, so I became the hype man, volunteering “Oh shit!” when the action got heated. That left Stephen and Chris as our only reliable fighters for the first fight, held in the driveway of Stephen’s ex-girlfriend’s house. Stephen towered over Chris by seven inches, which suggested an uneven fight. Minutes after they strapped on their gloves, however, it was Stephen who was begging out, a little blood dripping from his lip.
The potential for fighter nicknames—Goliath, Furious Shrimp, etc.—created by the upset was thrilling from a hype man’s perspective. But at our second fight, no one in the substantial crowd would join in the rumble, and we had to feature another fight between Stephen and Chris. Even I, Fight Night’s Don King, had to admit that we needed more than the Iron Giant and Napoleon Jr.
A good fight location will project menace. A bad fight location indicates that you don’t have anywhere else to go. Stephen’s ex-girlfriend’s driveway fell into the latter category of fight locations.
The second Fight Night turned out disastrously, partly because of a lack of fighters, and partly because everyone was depressed when Chris brought his little brother. My fellow entrepreneurs and I knew we required a more sinister location to inspire violence and ward away siblings. And, in a dimly-lit parking garage frequented by the homeless, we had our Thunderdome.
We started by scouting the location. The garage was attached to some office buildings, and there were several roads we could use to escape if the police came. The homeless man who occupied the building was gone, but he had left his belongings behind, so the proceedings would be that much edgier—without an increase in actual danger.
Our scouting came to naught, however, when we returned in the evening with a dozen fighters and spectators to find the garage locked up. It was then that someone suggested what became Fight Night’s last location: a party hosted by someone we had never heard of.
I’m not down on attending house parties held by friends-of-friends-of-friends. While they are the premier place to have early encounters with sex and drugs because you’ll never see the guests again (which helps with the sex and drugs part), they just aren’t the best places for a fight club.
Chris started the festivities with a hook to Stephen’s face that left him swaying, then, incredibly, crumpling into a concrete patio. The gasps from the crowd and the bruise on Stephen’s head made clear that, although we were just a few minutes in, Fight Night was done for good.
While Chris dealt with Stephen’s flickering consciousness, two shirtless skinhead-looking guys emerged from the house and asked me if I would let them fight. Why not, I thought, figuring we should get as much use out of the boxing gloves before they were hung up for good. But when I offered the gloves, they refused, preferring to go bare-knuckle.
The crowd, including a newly-conscious Stephen, watched in horror and delight as two drunk guys landed bony, wet punches on each other’s cheeks. And at that moment I learned the most important rule of running a fight club: if you are running a fight club, stop.
Is this really the kind of stuff The Voice has come to publishing?
The first rule about fight club: IT’S NOT ACTUALLY ABOUT A FIGHT CLUB.
You’re cheapening the message of the book. Stop.
A good brawl.