Fight Club
Posted on February 7, 2008
Warehouse 4773 at Industrial Park is as unassuming a building as one can find in Harrisonburg. Its gravel lot is vacant. It has no prominent signs.
Behind the warehouse there’s a “Valley Chute Boxe” sticker on a gray door indicating that it serves some purpose; it’s not abandoned.
At night, cars come at intervals into the gravel lot and about a dozen men in loose clothing make their way through the door.
The men walk through the faintly lit corridor, up the stairs to the attic and onto soft blue mats. The purpose of this warehouse is to train some of the toughest athletes in the Valley—Mixed Martial Arts fighters.
“There’s no air conditioning, no heat. It’s about as barren as you can get,” said junior Darius Houshiarnejad, one of four JMU students who has been training at the Chute Boxe for the past couple of months.
Houshiarnejad, along with sophomore Sean Hart and senior James “Drew” Loy, is making his MMA debut on Saturday at the Rockingham County Fairgrounds for MMA in the Valley VII. Seven amateur teams from around the East coast will be participating, according Lionell Royer, who established the event about a year ago.
MMA, commonly known as cage fighting, is an intense physical sport that combines a gamut of fighting styles ranging from boxing to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
There are three, three-minute rounds in amateur MMA, with a minute break in between each round. A winner is only announced if his opponent taps out, is knocked out or if he cannot intelligently defend himself.
“It’s really a safe sport in that respect,” Houshiarnejad said. “The refs are really conscious about that.”
Houshiarnejad has been training for the fight for five days a week and running two to three miles on his off days since mid-November. He got tendonitis in his left arm while training for a Jan. 26 match and is excited to finally get in the ring.
Many of the other fighters share this sentiment. Hart has been training for Saturday’s match six days a week, three to four hours a day for the past two months.
“I’m gonna win,” Hart said. “No matter where [the fight] goes, it’s not gonna matter. If he’s standing up I’ll knock him down, or if he goes to the ground, I’ll submit him. I’ve trained too hard.”
Loy has been training for about 12 to 20 hours a week since the beginning of Jan. He was prevented from what would have been his first match in Nov. by a shattered eye socket.
For senior Tyler Moyer, who had his first match at MMA in the Valley IV, Saturday will re-evaluate his skills. He won his first fight at the Rockingham County Fairgrounds on Nov. 17.
“I’m fairly confident,” he said. “Once you get to a certain level you’re relearning fighting techniques, so the main focus is on conditioning.”
The fighting backgrounds of these four students cover the spectrum of martial arts, ranging from military combatives, boxing, wrestling, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Muay Thai, commonly known as Thai boxing.
“You can be good at anything you want,” Moyer said. “And if you apply it well you can win. You’re not constrained to one strain of martial arts.”
Houshiarnejad likes the individual nature of the sport.
“There’re no teammates to hide behind,” he said. “There’s no coach to yell at you. You’re the only person who can receive a victory, and you’re the only one who can receive a loss.”
For many of these athletes, the fighting preference of their opponent is sometimes the only information they get before being locked in a cage with them.
“We don’t really know anything about the other fighters,” Moyer said.
He is among the rare few who actually know the name of their opponent.
Hart recently found out he is fighting a 30-year-old drag racer from the Carolinas, and Loy knows only that his opponent prefers striking, which involves punching, kicking, knee and elbow hits and head-butts.
