UFC Takes to the Streets
Posted on 09 April 2008 by Lisa Pawlowski
File this in the already weighty Disturbing New Trend file.
Every broadcast network from CNN, to Fox, to ABC’s Good Morning America, and every newspaper in between, has breathlessly reported on a children’s Ultimate Fighting club in Carthage, Missouri called the Garage Boys Fight Crew.
In case you missed it, this club, formed by Rudy Lindsey, the coach, has participants from the ages of six to 14 fighting each other street-style, much like in the adult Ultimate Fighting Championship.
However, the children also fight with head gear and light gloves and apparently there are some rules involved, such as no hitting in the groin or the neck. Participants also compete in weight classes. The footage shown on TV featured parents who compared the club to putting their kids in baseball, soccer or wrestling. They went on to praise the discipline their children were learning and how they could now defend themselves against schoolyard bullies.
Now whether you think it is a good idea for parents to enroll and support their kids in this endeavor is something I’ll let you decide.
The thing I find appalling is that in all of the reports, the media used the same verbiage. Disturbing. New. Trend. And yet all of the stories featured this one club which they found in Carthage, MO. I don’t know who the Garage Boys Fight Crew used as a publicist, but he or she should be congratulated. Only a sex scandal would have garnered more air time and column inches. Just because there is one club, in one state doing this, doesn’t mean it’s a trend.
But hyperbole is the tool of choice the media uses to thrive. To get the most eyeballs that it can, the news has to scream at parents to be vigilant against this potential danger to their children. Parents have enough to worry about without the news adding imaginary things to the list. Listening to the Garage Boys Fight Crew story, one would think that these kids, who really know how to fight, were enrolling in schools all across America, just waiting to pummel a viewer’s child.
I urge all of you to be vigilant. There is an insidious danger that is threatening each of you. And that danger is a media who is trying to invent trends that aren’t really there.
Popularity: 2% [?]
April 9th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
It is apparent that the Garage Boys Fight Crew has no direct affiliation to Fight Club. Otherwise no one would be talking about it. That is rule #1 AND rule #2. I may have to set up an offshoot in my apartment complex. I can think of a couple of neighborhood kids that could use a beating.