Whenever the subject comes up, the first thing anyone says is: It was a clean fight. From there, it varies. Next comes: They knew what they were doing. Or: It was the only way they could solve it. Or even: I didn't see it but my husband/wife/ boyfriend/girlfriend/roomate did. I'm paraphrasing, of course, because most people in the neighbourhood don't generally express themselves in exactly the same way, even when they're basically saying the same thing. There's a lot of languages being spoken around here, and everyone's English is particular. I was there. And yes, it was a clean fight. It had to be; they had been planning this thing for months. A day didn't go by where something new wasn't added, some new rule about what they could and couldn't do. At first I thought this was a ploy. I thought: the longer it takes for this thing to happen, the more likely they will get over their squabble and move on. But this was not the case. In fact, the opposite was true: the longer they waited, the more they wanted a go at each other. And the more they wanted a go at each other, the more people talked about it. Naturally, all this talk got back to the fighters, which fired them up even more. Nobody wanted to disappoint; there was way too much at stake; people were stoked. One woman came all the way from Portugal. (Rumour had it the event took so long to get going because she was waiting for a decent fare.) On the afternoon of the fight, just before the fighters arrived, the woman stood up and gave a speech, thanking the organizers for accomodating her. Nobody knew who this woman was, or how she was related to the guys in the ring, or how she came to hear about the fight in the first place -- but what a speech! Her story circulated; the response was huge. By the time the fight was over, she was famous. Somebody offered her a job, because she loved the neighbourhood and wanted to stay. I see her around. I think her name's Amelia. Come to think of it, there were a lot of speeches that day. Five in total. The first guy -- I don't know who he was, but he's been in the neighbourhood for as long as I can remember; a senior, maybe Portugese or Italian -- he talked about how, back in the good old days, this was how people solved their problems -- by fighting. He said there was nothing wrong with it. He said we could do this once a week for all he cared. His speech was well-received. After him was a restauranteur. He and his wife had just moved from the west side to open a bistro, and they were very keen on letting everyone know just how much they belonged. He announced that after the fight all of us were welcome back at their place, and that anyone mentioning the fight would get a free glass of beer. He got a very big response. But the biggest response went to the host. He was the guy who supplied the back yard after some of the locals threatened to call the cops if the fight was held in the park. This guy's speech was the shortest. All he said was how impressed he was that people could rally around an event like this, and how much he felt like Max Yasgar. Many of the spectators were either too young or too old to remember Max Yasgar, but I heard one woman tell her girlfriend that Max Yasgar was the guy who invented WWF. I heard another guy tell his kid how Max Yasgar was this Nazi who ran a death camp in Poland. I thought about correcting him, but decided to keep it to myself. Nobody knew how this was going to turn out, and some of these people had guns. The organizers were an interesting group. Let me qualify that: there were two groups organizing the fight, and it was really the second group who were the most interesting. The first group -- the original group -- they lived on either side of the fighters. They were aware of how they came to be fighters in the first place. This was the group who suggested the park. They were also the ones responsible for chatting it up to the point where the people who lived beside the park threatened to call the cops if the fight were held anywhere near them. It was this group -- the park group -- who said that one of them was a journalist, and they would see to it that charges were laid if anything was visible from their windows. Also in this group was somebody whose boyfriend made a living promoting fights, and she wanted in. There was a lot of talk that the journalist scare was a ruse, and that the promoter's girlfriend wanted to take the fight over so she could make some dough. But at that point it didn't matter: everybody was hungry for blood. There was no stopping it. So that's how the second group became involved. The woman who headed the second group was Irene, a single parent mom with five kids; two from the first father, two from a second, and then this kid she fostered who was hydrocephalic and got around in an electric wheelchair -- Francis Xavier, or FX as he was known. How FX figured into this was weird. After each round, some of Irene's friends would lift FX into the ring, where he would do a couple of rotations with the round number pasted onto this top hat one of his sisters had made for him. After the fight, people lined up to have their picture taken with FX. At first it was free, but then Irene insisted everybody make a donation. She said it was her dream to start a hospital scholarship in FX's name. A couple of people I talked to thought this was sick, but they thought the fight was sick too. When I asked them why they showed up in the first place, one of them gave me a dirty look and walked off; but the other said something about bearing witness, which was bullshit, because at the first sign of a blood this guy was in heaven. And there was a lot of blood. But like I said, it was a clean fight. No knives, no brassknuckles, no low blows -- just two guys in short pants, runners, and A-shirts. Real old time stuff, like you'd see in photos. I was suprised it lasted fifteen rounds. When the bell went, the fighters collapsed. Now, I'm not a professional or anything, but in my opinion nobody won this fight. Some people say Irene probably flipped a coin, but I'm not stupid, I know she had a book going. Nobody gets involved in stuff like this without knowing who the winner is. So I guess you could say that the winner was ultimately Irene. A week after the fight I saw her drive by in a brand-new SUV, FX's big head bobbing in the window. She looked like she was doing okay. FX had this big goofy grin going, and he seemed totally happy. But then again, he always looked like that, even though he was obviously in a great deal of pain.