Just Bleed: The enduring appeal of violence as entertainment

MADRID, Spain — Courage, according to the nose of Ernest Hemingway, smells like smoked leather or a frozen road or the sea when the wind rips the top from a wave.

Fear, on the other hand, carries a smell best sampled from my barrera seat inside Madrid's Las Ventas bullring at six o’clock on a Sunday. “Close enough to smell it,” said the tout preparing my ticket. “My guarantee.”

As this sales pitch concluded, he looked me in the eye, though, by virtue of us having only just met, he would have had no idea what my eyes had seen. He assumed, perhaps, that I would be impressed by his claim, or shaken, or convinced now that €63 was a fair price for a scent exclusive to a bullring in Madrid. But on all counts, he was wrong. Listening to him, I thought only of the times I had been ringside and had witnessed fear in the eyes of human beings, as well as the times I had watched human beings rendered unconscious, whether in a ring or cage, and then tried to describe the scene rather than condemn it.

For some people, the tout said, it is too much, being so close and able to smell it. When the Gate of Fear opens, he said, tourists close their eyes, look away. They blame the Spanish sun. A lack of shade. A lack of shades. Some of them even escape. They escape the heat and they escape the stench; first of fear, then of death. In the world of violence, they remain tourists.

“I’m sure I’ll be OK,” I said in the ticket office, a separate building 200 yards from the bullring. By “OK,” of course, what I really meant was seasoned, desensitized, just the right amount of sick. If, after all, the sight of human beings getting knocked out, and sometimes seriously injured, could not send me running from ringside, or keep me away for good, I struggled to imagine how the sight of bulls being felled, or the smell of fearful matadors, would move me so much as an inch. If you ask me, we are all the Just Bleed Guy when the first bell rings. The only difference is that some of us wear clothes to conceal our written request, while others are more exposed. You might say honest.

In fact, on the subject of honesty, the decision to visit the bullring that day was an effort on my part to confront what I do for a living in an arena in which violence is the goal and we, the audience, demand it. Long overdue, it was about proximity again. I had, at the age of 16, been too shortsighted to do more than hit pads or spar, so had spent the following two decades as an observer, squinting, trying to get as close to the action as possible without getting hurt. I then, inevitably, got too close. I saw too much, as both a journalist and publicist, and began to see fight sports through different eyes. They were tired eyes, narrowing eyes, and yet through them, and despite my reservations, still I continued to watch, each time consoled by the addict’s mantra: “I can stop whenever I want.”

Not quite aversion therapy, the trip to the bullring was nevertheless an attempt to shock the system into a reboot and both understand what it means to see violence as entertainment and not become inured to it. If boxing and mixed martial arts had been my gateway drugs, I considered a bullfight the next step, or maybe rock bottom. Whichever it was, denial as always came first. That was my sole accomplice in Madrid, and to indulge it I would recall that old Dana White line, the one about a field and there being four sports in each corner. White’s view, an oft-repeated one, was that a gathering of people on this imaginary field would naturally gravitate toward the fight, eschewing the more conventional activities going on elsewhere, and that the inherent danger and simplicity of a fight would forever attract the wandering eye of human beings. Whether this school of thought still applies today, when the supposed nobility of fighting is undermined by professional slapping, is up for debate, but as I recalled those words, I was reminded that a proclivity for violence was perfectly normal. Human nature even.

“Enjoy,” said the tout, as though I had just checked out a library book.

The Gate of Fear opens

Once inside Las Ventas, I found my numbered concrete pillar and watched the paseíllo, the opening ceremony, from a barrera seat. It was now six o’clock and soon the Gate of Fear would open, at which point all eyes would be trained on the hurtling bull, one of six to come. Its name was Perecito, its number 19, and with a tongue too big for its mouth it stumbled out of the bullring’s toril bleeding and discombobulated to greet six Spaniards in suits of lights, each possessing gold and magenta capes and not a modicum of shame. Per the itinerary, it would shortly perish, of course, but for as long as it was upright I secretly rooted for Perecito, denying the inevitability of its fate until, alas, it was no longer possible.

As for the matador, the head of this bull-slaying Voltron, he had been earlier introduced by drums, trumpets, and a pasodoble during the paseíllo and was admired by those in the bullring content to hide behind the word “tradition.” As well as machismo, these men in pink suits were to soon teach us all about the merits of the power stance and footwork and how exaggerated hip thrusts could be used to tease a bull into thinking there is an opening before — whoosh — the matador vanishes into thin air. Yes, vanishes. They vanish rather than run because running is a strict no-no, just as it is in boxing or MMA, and because matadors in control — the ones who know displays of cowardice elicit sighs of discontent from aficionados — prefer to step, pivot and spin. Be there and not there. Vanish.

To see it up close, this vanishing act, it is hard not to respect the chutzpah, the pouting, the swagger. It is just as hard not to feel comfortable, even as a dilettante, with all that you are seeing. The language, that of bull versus matador, is of course one with which all fight fans are familiar. When we think of it as a style guide, we picture Conor McGregor against Eddie Alvarez or Floyd Mayweather against Saul “Canelo” Alvarez. We picture Lyoto Machida versus Tito Ortiz or Bernard Hopkins versus Felix “Tito” Trinidad. We remember what Anderson Silva did to Forrest Griffin and how Vernon Forrest got it both wrong and right with Ricardo Mayorga. We remember, too, how Miguel Cotto had to play the bull against Manny Pacquiao but the matador against Antonio Margarito. We know how it looks, in other words. We know how both parties must behave in these roles.

In the case of Perecito, a bull whose ignorance was equal to the size of its heart, he was finished that day not by a volapié — the climactic move whereby a matador raises his muleta with his left hand to invite the bull’s charge and then, with his right, thrusts the sword between the bull’s shoulders and penetrates its aorta as they meet — but instead by having its aorta severed by a puntillero’s dagger. It had, due to this last-resort strike, now collapsed in on itself, from half-mast to horizontal, and after convulsing in the sand, blood poured from its wounds, its open mouth, its nostrils, and from black, lifeless eyes. From this distance I had witnessed knockouts before, even the odd convulsion, but never had I seen something die in front of me to conclude what some, chiefly the ones applauding, see as competition, or sport. There was a smell to it, yes, but it was not fear. It was something else.

In an opposite stand, meanwhile, I could see a group of strangers holding selfie sticks and umbrellas, so oppressive was the September heat. At a glance, it didn’t look much fun for them either. The heat. The stench. The selfies. Nor did it look much fun for the cigar smokers behind us, who craved a cleaner finish, nor their leathery, long-suffering wives, nor the tourists, like me, who ended up at Spain’s largest bullring in the name of curiosity and the need to check something off a tasteless to-do list. Two Americans, in fact, naïve and queasy, their afflictions rather than names, left seconds after "Game Over" showed on Perecito’s screen. They were then followed by a young girl in a grey tank top, who had tears in her eyes.

The rest of us, with the body count still low, stayed put. We watched six men with rakes merge the blood and yellow albero sand until red was no longer the prominent color and waited for the next “fight.”

What are we rooting for?

Lominado, the second bull with 37 painted on its flesh, offered more than just a target. This one rippled with superhero muscle and hurtled toward the cuadrilla at half past six with an uncommon ferocity, fueled, it seemed, by the horrors of its predecessor and spitting a defiance which evoked Jake LaMotta the time he told Ray Robinson he never got him down on St. Valentine’s Day 1951. Yet whereas in that instance LaMotta’s obstinacy was all in vain, little more than after-the-fact dick-measuring, Lominado’s would signify the prologue to revenge. Narrow misses, misses narrow enough to be considered successes in a rigged game, teased the possibility of upgrading a moral victory to one more total.

The likelihood of this increased, too, the second Lominado found his querencia and it became clear the matador, this wide-eyed rookie, possessed neither the knowledge nor ability to bring him out of it. It is when in this comfort zone that a bull will be on the defensive, extra vigilant and extra sharp. Its horn strike will be a riposte rather than an attack and this counter strike, as in boxing or MMA, will become the sneakiest and cleverest of strikes. To avoid being caught by it, the matador must tempt the bull from its querencia and there are ways of doing this. One is to get close to entice a charge and some movement; another requires the matador, with short pulling jerks, lowering their cape before them on the sand. It hardly matters how it’s done. It just needs to be done. If not, disaster will surely follow.

That Sunday, when Lominado pawed at the ground — known as desafiar, an act that resembles shoes being wiped on a welcome mat — it was obvious to all except the matador what was to happen next. Its engine had been revved, and it now charged, only this time, having learned from experience, Lominado managed to capitalize on the matador’s latest misstep to burst through his cape and gore with its horn a human left thigh. The upended matador was then carried through the air — up, up, and away — and dumped unceremoniously in the sand.

Watching this unfold, and seeing him land, it took real restraint not to throw up a fist, remembering only now that the matador was human. There was human blood on the sand and human fear in his eyes and now no outcome would truly satisfy. Wanting neither bull nor matador to lose, it was hard to know what we were all rooting for in that moment except violence itself. It was no different in that respect than a Saturday night at ringside. Typically there, unless emotionally invested in a fighter involved, one finds comfort in a neutrality which can border on a detached, callous indifference. “I just want to see a good fight,” we tend to say, yet it is hard sometimes to reckon with exactly what that means. Usually it means damage, as much as possible. After all, any good fight requires damage, ideally of the two-way variety, and better still if one of the two fighters ends the fight definitively beaten; that is, either knocked out or submitted. Good fights and safe fights are strangers and never the two shall meet. To invite one, you must reject the other. Those are the rules. This is the game.

Helped now by comrades, the wounded matador scrambled to his feet, scurried to safety, and when the coast was clear, retrieved his cape and sword. For all his grandstanding, the sequence unfolding was frantic and untidy and the worry on the faces of the cuadrilla, along with their readiness to take matters into their own hands, let it be known this was no everyday occurrence nor a situation under control. It was, however hollow or transient, instead a victory for the bull. A stay of execution had been granted. It was, for now, left alone, free to wander.

During the lull, those in the crowd surveyed the matador. They saw him limp like Aguirre, not quite the wrath of God but now fearing it. They also saw him use a sleeve to scrub blood from skin-tight pink pants and clutch a thigh and buttock before a hop and a skip returned him to the callejón, the alley separating audience and animal. There a sword handler, whose weather-beaten face was both reassuring and dishonest, offered him fresh toys — cape and sword — and water from a silver tumbler. The matador accepted everything with gratitude. He sipped from and kissed the tumbler, then crossed his chest not once but twice, just to be sure. It was Frank Bruno against Mike Tyson. It was Oleksandr Usyk against Tyson Fury. It even again brought to mind Cotto against Margarito and how, in particular, the frequency with which Cotto crossed his chest before each round correlated with the extent of his pain and his inability to understand why Margarito’s hands felt so heavy.

Cotto was the matador that night, of course, with Margarito the bull, yet the fight between them was for once rigged in favor of the bull. To remember it now, and remember how Cotto later rematched a man whose gloves were “loaded” in fight one, is to be reminded of why we, the audience, keep coming back. The appeal, I suppose, as proven by fights like Cotto vs. Margarito 2, is less about violence as sustenance or entertainment and more about witnessing incredible acts of courage, with any enjoyment the result of admiration rather than the violence itself. Indeed, so alien is this brand of courage to most of us, any demonstration of it becomes almost elevated to a realm of superficiality, or performance, and only the sight of blood, or a scary knockout, or the whiff of fear, grounds it once again in a kind of reality. Fear, after all, is an odor each of us carry. One need not travel to Madrid and pay €63 to sample it.

The tout was right, though. I paid the money and got the smell. I saw a matador enter the ring a heartless slayer of bulls and then saw the very same matador prepare to come back for more as neither hero nor villain but a victim; a victim of an old and bloody business. His eyes, glassy and unblinking, combined with a nervous gulp, were the telltale sign of a fighter gearing up for a battle he was not sure he could win, and suddenly never was he so relatable or human. On his face was a look I had both seen and worn before. It was not so much fear as discomfort, uncertainty. Do I belong here? his eyes seemed to say. Is this for me?