Billy Hull: Just 1 bare knuckle bout was all it took to get me hooked

I’m still not sure it was something I should be watching, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the broadcast for the first Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship event in Hawaii on Saturday night at the Blaisdell Arena.

It’s been more than 20 years since my then-boss at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, sports editor Paul Arnett, walked into the office, took one look at a 21-year-old, part-time sports clerk, and said, “I don’t know who this Niko Vitale person is, but we need to start covering him, bubba.”

Just because I happened to be working on a Sunday as I was busy trying to get my college degree after moving back home from Seattle, I became the “mixed martial arts beat writer” for the newspaper after Vitale’s superman punch knockout of Masanori Suda was covered by all of the TV stations the next day.

The first event I covered was a Rumble on the Rock card that ended with an impression of Tank Abbott’s knuckles in the forehead of Wesley “Cabbage” Correira.

The knockout was my first “WTF” moment in mixed martial arts, and while it was obviously brutal and left me stunned in watching the sheer brutality from mere feet away, I never felt like it was over the top.

I still can’t figure out if what I watched on my laptop while simultaneously covering the Hawaii men’s volleyball match at UC San Diego on Saturday is just too much.

I never once watched a MMA fight and thought to myself, “this is too safe, you know what they should do, take off the gloves completely.”

After watching the first two fights barely last a combined two minutes, I had already signed up for a BKFC subscription to watch the entire card.

I was trying to write a volleyball story, but I imagine my editors were wondering where the heck that story is, because I sent it so late.

I simply couldn’t take my eyes off of the fights.

It wasn’t the blood that poured from the eyes from multiple fighters. It wasn’t the basketball-sized hematoma that formed on the head on the head of a fighter, and it certainly wasn’t the videos posted to social media from fighters who ended the night in the hospital.

All of that is what made me feel guilty watching.

But in terms of a spectator sport, this certainly isn’t boxing or MMA. It’s actually better.

Hitting someone with your bare hands doesn’t give a whole lot of room for fights to be drawn out.

Sure, there were bouts that went the full five rounds, but those rounds last only two minutes in bare knuckle fighting, not the five in MMA or three in boxing.

The sport doesn’t give you a whole lot of time to process what you’re watching. It’s quick. It’s to the point, and you can’t blink.

In today’s age of social media and Tik Tok videos that keep us engaged for hours on end because we can swipe from one video to the next whenever we want, bare knuckle fighting is the perfect sport to keep our short attention spans.

I knew a couple of the fighters from their past, and I got to know the stories of a couple more heading into Saturday’s event, but in the end, it didn’t matter who I was watching.

The sport is so crazy that it makes getting to know and learn the fighters not as big of a deal. It wasn’t the fighters that made me tune in, like it is in the UFC, but it was simply the sport itself.

Promoter TJay Thompson, who was largely responsible for bringing BKFC to Hawaii, reminded me that when he first started promoting MMA events in Hawaii, lawmakers were against him.

Senator John McCain called it “human cockfighting.”

I kept thinking about that as I watched Saturday. Is this the forefront of the next big thing in combat sports or is this going over the line?

I still don’t have an answer to that question, but I do know the answer to whether or not I will try to be in the stands or at media row for the next BKFC fight in Hawaii.

Hell yes.

Nobody ever feels good about straining your neck out the window every time you pass a car accident wondering how bad it is, yet we do it anyway, every time.

Fighters weren’t made available for interviews after their bouts, which seemed extremely frustrating at first, but after watching a few fights, I quickly understood. Win or lose, a lot of them need to be on their way to the hospital.

There are so many reasons to think bare knuckle fighting is too barbaric, and maybe it is, but before I’ll ever know which side of that debate I should be on, I’ll be the first in line to get tickets to the next show.

One fight and I was hooked, just like when Tank put Cabbage to sleep.

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Reach Billy Hull at bhull@staradvertiser.com.