The Tale of Two Fight Leagues

There is absolutely no doubt that WWE and UFC are the best and biggest fight leagues right now. But what do you do if you don’t subscribe to ten sports? FHM finds two new diametrically opposite fight clubs.

The Freak Fighters: India’s own WWE...

In a world where everyone from chaiwalah Ramu to Ram Jethmalani and Arvind Kejriwal to Rahul Gandhi are struggling in one way or the other, underdog stories don’t really make the heart melt anymore. So instead of just writing about it, team FHM decided to spend half a day with these Delhi based wrestlers at their gym. There’s no limos that are being gotten out of, no Rolexes being used as weapons, and no plastic enhanced hot girls holding apart the ropes for our prize fighter to make an entry into the ring. At a lot of levels, the Freak Fighter league is the complete antithesis of the sort of wrestling we all grew up watching and aping. There is one other thing that’s missing too — the Trump Cards!

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How does it work?

Freak Fighter League is currently two fights and five years old. At first sight, you might even dismiss it as a random bunch of bodybuilders hanging out and indulging in histrionics, till the time you see the fights. This still struggling version of WWE might not have Stacey Keibler’s fighting it out in a Nighty Match, but its right up there when it comes to bodyslams, right hooks, elbows from the top of the ropes or the plain and simple choke hold. The fights themselves are arranged into four categories — Heavyweight, Cruiserweight, Tag-Team and Show Stopper — exactly like its richer cousin in America. Their next fight is scheduled for.

“I grew up loving WWE, but I always wanted to create a league that’s International in style but is Indian at heart, so I came up with Freak Fighter. We will soon have a television show and one of our fighters Rocky has already won two Super Fight League fights, so we have a star in the making.” Manish Kumar the brains of the operation explains. Manish has handpicked each of the guys and even chucked a lot of them from time to time because they just couldn’t keep up with the training. “There are lot of injuries and unbearable pain, and not everyone can keep up with it, so those people had to be filtered out.”

The wrestlers

With eight Active Wrestlers, Freak Fighters is now getting set to debut its own 7 ft 1 inch tall wrestler — Khan — as an answer to Undertaker and have just launched a hunt for female wrestlers so you might just have an Indian answer to Chyna pretty soon. Its current big stars are called Rocky, Prince, Big Bully and Veer. We met Jeetu or big bully, who at 6 ft or so, weighs in at 150 kgs and takes approximately two minutes getting in and out of a car. Referring to one of his injuries – a three-inch stitch mark he sustained during his last bout at Thyagraj Stadium in New Delhi, he says, “It’s a gift. Like makeup.”

Manish chips in, “When these guys had started out they were really raw. They had no idea how to channelise their energy, would slap anyone, get into random fights and didn’t know how to behave in public and talk to the media, they are better now. You are meeting them at a gym so they are still very casual in conduct, but if you meet them at a fight or at a press conference, they are so composed. For fights, they transform into their stage avatars. For example, Jeetu’s stage name is Big Bully, so during fights he pokes other fighters unnecessarily, irritates them and does everything possible to get on the nerves of other wrestlers. All these guys had to be worked upon massively. It was like modifying a car for a race.”

The last wrestler we had a quick chat with was Rocky – the guy who has won two SFL fights — the league helmed by Sanjay Dutt and Raj Kundra. You look at him and he gives you that feeling of being a you-mess-with-me-I-mess-with-you type of vibe, but he is the one who has seen success the most. “Injuries ka kya hai. Chalta rehta hai.” he says.

The diet

Jeetu wasn’t always this big. He was of a regular size (not regular by our standards, but regular by body builder standards) but it was only after he became associated with this league that he gained all the muscle and fat. Now he eats every two hours, but the manner in which he went about following his diet isn’t exactly a foodies tale, “I would buy rotten tomatoes because they come cheap, go back home, cut out the parts of the tomatoes that are still edible and eat it. Similarly, I would buy bones from meat sellers and strip off whatever meat was there and make a dish out of it. I would then boil the bones to make a soup. It’s high on protein.” He doesn’t eat that much anymore though, “For dinner, it’s just 250 gms of boneless chicken, 5-6 eggs and some vegetables.”

The political assignments

Money isnt too much just yet though, which is why one of the most common employers of the Freak Fighters when they are not fighting are politicians, “We once took Jeetu for a political rally from New Delhi to Meerut. There were at least 2,000 cars in that rally and we were driving in a straight-line formation. He would feel hungry every two hours, but we couldn’t stop that frequently, so that must have been his toughest drive till date. “Some politicians are miserly. They want us to be with them when they host rallies, but they won’t take care of our food,” Jeetu laughs.

Manish is not very keen on sending these guys for irrelevant assignments like attending a political rally or accompanying someone for an event. “What will they do at the political rallies? Stand like a clown? Are they some sort of joke that people can laugh about?”

FHM came back quite impressed. Jeetu is a tough guy, but he is a sweetheart (we hate to use this word, but he actually is) and he knows how to put it to good use. “Recently, I confronted a group of pissed drunk guys who were misbehaving with a girl. I very politely asked them to let the girl go, but one of them hit me, and that pissed me off BIG TIME. Within the next few minutes, they were all running for their lives. They hit me too, but as a Freak Fighter wrestler, I am used to of being hit. Mujhe kya farak padta hai, maaro jitna maaroge.”

Full Contact Championship

Didn’t like Raj Kundra’s Super Fight League? Well, it’s time to switch your loyalties to Mumbai based freestyle fight-league Full Contact Championship We at FHM are always looking for some jaw-breaking and bloodspitting fun, so imagine our good fortune when we got to attend a FCC (Full Contact Championship) show in Goa and also managed a quick chat with its founder Prashant Kumar – a qualified lawyer, ad man and professional martial artist for 25 years.

FHM: It must have been tough finding people who were ready to fight in such a pain-inducing league?

PK: Yes, 90% of the martial artists I spoke with refused to do free style fighting. Then I travelled across the country to find fighters. If 50 guys attended the trials, only two would agree to try freestyle fighting, so then I started holding weekend camps where I would get these guys to Mumbai, pay for their travel, stay, food, and personally cross train them.

FHM: Great, so what’s next for FCC?

PK: I want to take FCC pan India, get it on TV, scale up the shows and produce international level fighters.

FHM: How lucrative has it been, monetarily?

PK: Initially, I invested my own money in this. There are times I lose money and times when I break even, but 10 shows down, things are certainly looking up for us. TOP MMA 1993-Current Ultimate Fighting Championships 1997- 2007 Pride Fighting Championships break even, but 10 shows down, things are certainly looking up for us. Today, we have a committed sponsor on board, 100 credible fighters, a dedicated audience, an annual show in Goa at India Bike Week and even an international network partner – One Fighting Championship – where we take our top performers to participate.

The rule book

• No elbow and knee strikes to the face of a grounded opponent
• No head butts and groin strikes
• No strikes to the spinal column or back of the head
• No scratching, eye gouging, biting or fish hooking
• No soccer kicks to the head of a grounded opponent
• No stomping the head of a grounded opponent
• The fighters can kick, punch,throw, choke, lock, ground ‘n’ pound their opponents
• No fights will be done without the presence of a ringside doctor, a first aid box and an ambulance at the venue.

From the March 2014 issue of FHM India.