This past weekend Jake and I put on some pants and left the confines of our comfy blog basement to hit up New York City. The reason: to check out the Battle of the Books, a dual book release party / underground MMA event. Those of you who are regulars on the site know Matthew Polly, who contributes posts from time to time and is about to release his latest book, Tapped Out. That bad boy comes out on November 17th.
Also regularly linked on Fightlinker is Jim Genia, most famous around here for his acid trip recaps of The Ultimate Fighter. His book Raw Combat: The Underground World of Mixed Martial Arts, just came out on November 1st. As it's name implies, Raw Combat is all about the sketchy New York fight scene so Jim had the connections to set their book release party up in a small basement gym in Manhattan that would also host several quasi-legal fights.
Since I hadn't gotten my copy of Jim's book yet I didn't know what to expect. I figured maybe dudes would fight in headgear or elbows would be disallowed. Two minutes into the first fight I realized how wrong I was. As the two fighters crashed to the ground, they started kneeing each other in the head, PRIDE style. We were all crowded around the cage so closely you could smell the sweat coming off the fighters. The building was full of book industry types who watched as quietly as the Japanese at Saitama. You could hear the knees bouncing off skulls with a dull tuk tuk tuk sound. It was pretty damn gritty and real.
The night featured four fights, although we almost got five. After the fight designated as main event finished in three minutes, the promoter announced they were going to find a second opponent for the winner. We'd joked earlier about people stepping out of the crowd to fight in the cage and all of a sudden it didn't seem like such an absurd possibility. Unfortunately, the only guy willing to fight on such short notice was an hour's subway ride away so things wrapped up without another match.
(The rest is after the jump!)
Source: http://www.fightlinker.com/battle-of-the-books
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