Late Eighties

Late Eighties is the time frame Hodges associates with the city’s “bum fighting” craze: an underground business built on paying homeless men to fight for paying spectators. His recollection becomes a measure of the distance between illegal street violence and the legal television spectacle he watches after retirement, while also recalling the police work he once shared with Pete Huntley.

The City’s Brief “Infection”

Hodges remembers the fad as brief and baleful, like a transient fever that seemed to infect the city. The three local newspapers all published editorials about it one summer; in the present, he notes that two are gone and the third is barely surviving. The contrast makes the episode feel both vivid in memory and remote from a changed civic landscape.

How the Fights Worked

The enterprise began when someone realized that spectators would pay to watch men fight, and several other entrepreneurs copied and refined the scheme once it proved profitable. Organizers paid two homeless men thirty dollars apiece to fight at a designated time and place, then spread word of the event and charged spectators twenty dollars each. Before widespread Internet use, promotion depended on word of mouth.

The venue Hodges remembers most clearly was the service area behind Bam Ba Lam, a strip club on the East Side. At one fight he and Pete Huntley broke up, the crowd numbered more than two hundred. Spectators made bets and watched the two men flail, kick, fall, get back up, and shout incoherently; the crowd laughed, cheered, and urged them on. Women in evening dress and wearing heavy jewelry were among those watching, a detail that sharpens the gulf between the audience’s polished appearance and the degrading spectacle it had come to enjoy.

From Street Violence to Television

Hodges recalls the fights while watching a daytime show whose contestants are set against one another for an audience. To him, the television format resembles the old underground bouts, but with diet pills and insurance companies financing the spectacle and contestants likely earning more than thirty dollars and a bottle of Night Train. The crucial difference is not the audience’s appetite for conflict but the law: the street fights required police intervention, while the television show is legal, as legal as lottery tickets. The remembered era thus supplies Hodges with a bleak comparison between violence openly staged on the margins and conflict packaged as respectable entertainment.