Modest Mouse’s new album, Strangers to Ourselves, debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 in March. The band’s first record in eight years, it’s full of dark themes offset by the group’s trademark energetic tempos and inimitable vocal delivery. Rolling Stone magazine called it “perfect,” and the New York Post deemed it “wonderfully bizarre.”
Monday 10/26. $43, 7 pm. nTelos Wireless Pavilion, 700 E. Main St. 877-CPAV-TIX.
City Council candidate Mike Signer stood before the skeletal Landmark Hotel, an unwelcome landmark on the Downtown Mall since 2009, and quoted the graffiti scrawled on its boarded up side: “We’re fed up.” And he promised to explore all legal actions for resolving the situation, including eminent domain.
Flanked by fellow Dem candidates Kathy Galvin and Wes Bellamy, Signer denounced the structure owned by Atlanta developer John Dewberry as an “eyesore,” and said, “The status quo is unacceptable. Having a derelict, dangerous and ugly abandoned building looming in the heart of our major commercial and civic area sector impacts our community’s quality of life and is an embarrassing symbol of inaction in the city.”
Dewberry did not return a call for comment. The Waynesboro-born former football star bought the Landmark for $6.25 million in 2012 after CNET founder Halsey Minor’s plans for a luxury hotel derailed. Dewberry said he would begin work on what will become the Hotel Dewberry when he finished the development of a Hurricane Floyd-damaged federal post office building he bought in downtown Charleston in 2008. Work on that project began last November, according to the Post and Courier in Charleston.
Signer has run out of patience with Dewberry’s timetable, and says the developer “has already broken several deadlines and promises” and there has been “silence” on the Dewberry front. “That’s unacceptable,” said the candidate, who added that citizen complaints about the would-be hotel are a frequent refrain on the campaign trail.
He proposes a six-point project resolution framework to avoid such messes in the future and outlines its application to the Landmark. That would include working with Dewberry Capital, assessing the state of the exposed infrastructure and whether it’s even buildable at this point, exploring all practical and legal options, and within a year, executing a plan that either completes the hotel or uses the property for something else.
In the past, the city has accepted Dewberry’s timetable for completion of the mall property, contingent on finishing the Charleston hotel, a “vague” scenario, said Signer. “I think the consideration of legal action is part of the plan.” Even eminent domain? Said Signer, “That’s one of the tools I want to examine.”
Julienne Dweck
Black Licorice/self-released
Four-plus years after her delightful debut album, On Paper, Dweck is finally back with a new release, and it was worth the wait. Fans will note that much of what they loved about her relationship-focused songs, occasional bits of whimsy and adventurous musical choices are still here. “If Only” has a surprising trip-hop vibe, while “Your Way to Me” is a bit of jangly, not-quite-’80s-era synth pop, complete with heavy tambourine and keys. “Under the Sea” is fun, with its jazz-tinged pop and the dreamy lyrical references that evoke Ariel. The insecurity-themed country rocker “Uncomfortable” is vintage Dweck, and she proves her prowess in creating a thought- provoking narrative in “Nearly,” a subdued track that contemplates one who got away and lingers on what might have been. The album occasionally veers into a lighter version of Regina Spektor, but Dweck’s winning way with words makes that a minor complaint.
Silversun Pickups
Better Nature/New Machine
The lines “This is not connection/It’s only an impression” from the song “Connection” are a perfect representation of Better Nature’s narrative sensibility. “Pins and Needles” and “Friendly Fires” dive into variations on the same theme, with their titles hinting at the need to feel and the danger of vulnerability. “Latchkey Kids” champions the notion of commonality, and the feeling of freedom on the album’s closing track, “The Wild Kind,” is downright palpable. Better plays in part like a kissing cousin to the Swoon record, with raw, raucous tunes filling much of the album. Fuzzy guitars are offset by Brian Aubert’s nasally vocals, and several tracks change time or tone at a moment’s notice. This is Silversun Pickups, pulling off its best rock experience.
Brooke Annibale
The Simple Fear/self-released
Annibale’s first new material since the 2013 Words in Your Eyes EP is a strong release. Centered on the power we give to the unknown, The Simple Fear examines that universal mindset with unapologetic frankness. In “Like the Dream of it,” Annibale admits that reality is often murkier than the dreams we dream. She knowingly sings about the difficulty of finding the good things that come from pain in “The Good Hurt.” But she systematically breaks down fear’s power in “Go,” with lines such as “Keeping me safe/Will only keep me from growing,” and on “Patience” she croons, “If I’ve learned anything in this life/It’s that the things that scare you the most/Are always worth the time.” A hybrid of familiar folk-pop leanings with some of the electric, borderline qualities that first appeared on Words, The Simple Fear has a warm ring to it that finds Annibale as captivating as ever.
Lawyers for fourth-year UVA student Martese Johnson, whose bloody arrest splashed across national media in March, filed suit for $3 million against the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, an agency that’s no stranger to being sued by UVA students in high-profile cases.
Named in the suit along with the agency are the three agents who arrested Johnson early March 18, Jared Miller, Thomas Custer and John Cielakie, and ABC Director Shawn Walker.
The issue, says C-VILLE legal expert David Heilberg, is how sovereign immunity, which typically protects law enforcement, will be applied in the case. Johnson will have to prove “intentional misconduct or malice or grossly negligent conduct,” says Heilberg.
The complaint, filed in federal court October 20 in Charlottesville, claims Johnson’s civil rights were violated when the agents “brutally assaulted, seized, arrested and jailed Martese without probable cause and in violation of the United States Constitution” when they believed he presented a fake ID to get into Trinity’s Irish Pub on the Corner.
The driver’s license of Johnson, then 20, was valid, but when Trinity owner Kevin Badke asked for the ZIP code, Johnson gave the wrong number and was not allowed entry. ABC agents, on the lookout for underage UVA students boozing it up on St. Patrick’s Day, were on the Corner that night and Miller spotted the exchange.
Johnson claims in the suit that without identifying himself as law enforcement, Special Agent Miller grabbed his arm.
Startled from being accosted from behind by someone he did not know, according to the suit, Johnson pulled his arm away and tried to continue walking. Miller grabbed his arm again and demanded to see the alleged fake ID while “aggressively twisting [Johnson’s] arm behind his back, still not identifying himself as an officer,” says the suit, which alleges Miller escalated the encounter and used unnecessary force.
Custer then grabbed Johnson’s left arm, preventing him from producing his ID, and “all of a sudden, and without provocation, Custer and Miller slammed Martese into the brick walkway, face first, causing Martese to suffer a severe laceration to his forehead and scalp,” says the lawsuit. Johnson had 10 stitches before he was arrested, and the bloody incident left him “permanently disfigured,” according to the suit, and unable to grow hair on his scalp where there is scar tissue.
The suit notes that Johnson did not receive Miranda instructions that anything he said could be used against him, and claims that his charge of public intoxication was based on illegally obtained statements. That charge, along with obstruction of justice, were dropped in June when Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman declined to pursue charges against Johnson or the agents following a Virginia State Police investigation.
Director Walker is accused of a “systemic” failure to train ABC agents after the April 2013 incident when plainclothes agents, including Cielakie, suspected that UVA student Elizabeth Daly’s sparkling water was beer and swarmed her car in the dark Harris Teeter parking lot. A terrified Daly fled, with an agent banging on her car windows with a flashlight and another pulling a gun.
She was arrested and her charges were later dropped. Daly sued the agency for $40 million, and settled the case for $212,500.
Walker, says the suit, had knowledge of the “widespread practice of ABC officers’ use of unreasonable, disproportionate and wrongful force and tactics in approaching suspects believed to have committed minor infractions or regulatory offenses.”
And that’s the point a judge will have to decide, says Heilberg: whether the agency was performing a “proprietary” function as a business that sells alcohol or were its agents performing as law enforcement with sovereign immunity.
“It’s an uphill battle when police officers have immunity,” says Heilberg. But he also points out that Williams Mullen, the law firm representing Johnson, “is a reputable firm that would have researched sovereign immunity.” Manatt, Phelps & Phillips out of D.C. is also representing Johnson.
Heilberg says in the Daly case, there was some indication the ABC agents were “grossly negligent.”
He also says that what a plaintiff sues for is irrelevant, that it’s the damages that count. Daly, while traumatized, was not physically injured. “Martese had physical injuries,” says Heilberg.
And if Johnson was drinking that night while underage, a crime in Virginia, “That’s a defense consideration,” says Heilberg.
The Virginia ABC declined to comment, and has three weeks to respond to the complaint.
Nate Brenner, aka Naytronix, has spent the past four years on the road as the bassist for tUnE-yArDs and views the touring life almost like living in a dream. As a solo act, the talented multi-instrumentalist delivers a blend of indie electronic and poignant experimental pop that glides like a hovercraft over the intense sonic foundation typical of his tunes.
Friday 10/23. $7, 9pm. Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, 414 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 293-9947.
As tempting as it is to call the ghostly gothic romance Crimson Peak a return to form for writer-director Guillermo del Toro, let’s take a moment to truly appreciate his role in shaping the movie-going experience as we know it today. It’s been nine years since Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro’s dark fantasy that got surprising, yet refreshing, traction with audiences for a subtitled, magical realist, metaphor-heavy, R-rated fairy tale set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War.
With one film, del Toro—who was primarily known stateside for the comic book adaptations Hellboy and Blade II, but celebrated internationally for supernatural films such as Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone—introduced a level of sophistication and intimacy to the fantasy genre, which too often defaults to tediously epic battle sequences at the expense of genuine emotional turmoil on a smaller scale.
Del Toro spent the bulk of the decade following Pan’s Labyrinth developing projects audiences wanted but Hollywood never got right: the English-language kaiju epic Pacific Rim, Middle Earth expansion pack The Hobbit trilogy (only as co-writer, so the good part). Viewed this way, del Toro is as much a technical trailblazer and fearless auteur as he is a sentimentalist seeking to reconnect cinephiles with styles that Hollywood has long abandoned.
Such is the case with the unerringly engaging Crimson Peak, which has as much in common with Poltergeist as it does with Wuthering Heights. The film tells the story of Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska), the daughter of an American industrialist and self-made man in the late 19th century. Edith shares her father’s resilience and work ethic, but focuses most of her attention on reading and attempting to craft her own fiction. Enter Baronet Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), an intriguing and charming English aristocrat who hopes Edith’s father will invest in his potentially revolutionary digging machine. Though there is unmistakable attraction between Thomas and Edith, the Baronet and his sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain), seem to have ulterior motives for their association with the Cushing family, a mystery which only thickens when Edith marries Thomas and moves into a dilapidated manor in Cumbria with a great many secrets to tell.
Like a magician, del Toro displays all of the narrative and stylistic tools right away without revealing what they mean until the proper time for maximum effect. Edith’s work is written off as a ghost story, leaving her to constantly defend it as a story “with ghosts in it” (much like the film itself). She explains that ghosts are metaphors for the past, a concept that is introduced in the opening scene of Edith’s deceased mother visiting her with a cautionary message, “Beware of Crimson Peak.” We are also shown early on that Thomas is indeed hiding something possibly embarrassing, possibly nefarious, and is willing to work against his self-interest to keep his secret hidden.
Crimson Peak is not a horror film; del Toro’s ghosts do not serve to terrorize us, but remind us of something. Edith is not an audience surrogate but a fully formed character in her own right. This film is about the characters first and foremost, and though it shares some tropes with well-known horror films, it is a creature all its own.
Gorgeous and emotional, nostalgic yet forward-looking, Crimson Peak may not find the same immediate connection with audiences that Pan’s Labyrinth did, but it is without a doubt its stylistic equal.
Playing this week
Back to the Future Trilogy: 30th Anniversary
Big Stone Gap
Bridge of Spies
Goosebumps
He Named Me Malala
Hotel Transylvania 2
The Intern
The Martian
Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
Pan
Sicario
The Walk
Woodlawn
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX
244-3213
The Greene County Board of Supervisors denied on October 13 Big Iron Outdoors’ special use permit, which would have allowed owners of the gun shop to build a 20-lane open-air firing range right outside its headquarters.
At the end of September, the Planning Commission recommended denial of the permit because of safety—about 160 homes are located within a half-mile of the proposed site. A group heavily opposed to the range, Greene County Neighbors, cited safety, noise, home values and impact on lifestyle as key reasons for nixing the plan.
Carolyn Politis, a local resident and member of Greene County Neighbors, says she’s pleased the Board of Supervisors put aside popular support to make a decision on what she believes is best for the Ruckersville area. She still hopes to see a new gun range in Greene, but one that isn’t in her backyard.
“We are hoping that someone can take on this challenge, but in a way that families are protected,” she says. “Quite simply, it should not be anywhere near homes.”
Charlottesville is like the Bermuda Triangle for writers: You come here, get sucked in and never leave. You can’t help it, really; the literary community is huge. The arts are vibrant. The opportunities for engagement immense.
But in a town so bookish that you can’t throw a rock without hitting a writer, it’s still a struggle to rise into your greatness, to claim your literary prowess and feel fantastic about it.
“The thing about Charlottesville is no matter what your talent is, someone else here already has a MacArthur Genius Grant for it,” says Jennifer Niesslein, editor of the online literary journal Full Grown People. “We’re going to talk about writing issues and what it’s like being a fish in this kind of pond.”
Niesslein is referring to her role as the host author at the debut of Inside the Writer’s Studio, a literary-inspired series at WriterHouse. Like James Lipton’s “Inside the Actor’s Studio,” the series aims to bring writers into one room for stimulating conversation with established authors, audience Q&A and, in this case, bagels and bubbly.
Niesslein brings with her Browning Porter, a poet, singer and storyteller, whose work appears in Niesslein’s just-published collection of essays, Soul Mate 101 and Other Essays on Love and Sex. Miller Murray Susen, a writer, actor and contributor to Full Grown People, will take on Lipton’s role.
“Because the book is about love, we’re going to talk about the ethics of writing about the people you love,” Niesslein says. “What you portray and what you don’t, how it feels—all stuff writers think about anyway, no matter what genre they’re writing in.”
For Porter, that genre is poetry (though he’s published as a storyteller in Soul Mate 101).
“I loved Shel Silverstein, and I used to write my own poems basically from the time I could write my name,” he says. “I had Where the Sidewalk Ends, books by Roald Dahl where the insects and the giant peach had their own songs, and I loved the joy and the cleverness of the rhymes and the jokes.”
As writers, we dedicate ourselves to the pursuit of this magic wherever we can find it. Long before Porter thought to publish an essay, he followed this thread. (See story on page 33.)
“I got into music because I started writing songs for musicians I knew and one thing led to another,” he says. “I think of poetry more as a certain mode of discourse, something that you can do inside of fiction or nonfiction. It’s really connected to the physicality and sensuousness of language.”
Writing true stories, he says, came out of his penchant for performance and storytelling on stage. “I feel like I’m able to use what I’ve learned about poetry and songwriting as kind of scaffolding to write stories.”
His essay, “The Perfect Song,” tells how one song has turned up at various points in his life. Potential profundity abounds.
He wrote the piece intending to read it out loud. “On stage I can tell a story where I have a coughing fit or mimic someone’s voice,” he says.
With some careful translation, the essay now works on paper, so well that Niesslein plucked it, along with 21 others, for inclusion in her newest anthology.
Choosing the right pieces for a book like Soul Mate can be as difficult to balance as rhythm and other language considerations. The editor says she needed to weigh factors such as tone and length, author age and diversity.
“I’m with the same guy I met when I was 19. You don’t want to have just a whole bunch of women like me, long-married, straight, white women, talking about their long hetero marriages,” she says. “I’m not saying all white women are the same, but, you know, you want to mix it up. I think there’s something to be gained from reading about people whose lives are very different from yours.”
What these essays have in common is the baseline of Full Grown People: They’re tales from, as the journal tells it, the other awkward age.
“These aren’t new love stories, not puppy love stories,” Niesslein says. “It’s about the real adult stuff you face that might surprise you when you’re in your 30s or 40s or 50s. You didn’t know that for better or for worse could include some unimaginable shit. And some unimaginably great stuff, too.”
That stuff might include, as in Louise Sloan’s case, breaking up with your girlfriend, getting a snowboarding injury and reaching out to your ex for help. It might be falling in love with “the d” instead of the entire man when you’re a single mother. Or having a lifelong attraction to redheads when you happen to be black, wondering if this is a sort of self-loathing.
“The title [of the anthology] comes from the second essay I ever published on Full Grown People,” Niesslein says. “It’s by Susan Kushner Resnick, and it’s called ‘Soul Mate 101: Don’t Marry Him.’”
It’s a catchy title, she goes on to say, though the concept of soul mates is less compelling. “From my perspective, you want somebody—whoever you call your soul mate—to be someone you feel close with and somebody you can trust. There will always be more than one person who can fill that for you.”
In short, romantic love is kind of like writing: Everyone experiences it differently. It just takes a community to find the place where your particular style lands.
In a world toppling with conformity, the internationally acclaimed performance troupe MarchFourth! makes its own rules. No less than 20 musicians, dancers and artisans combine jazz, salsa, hip-hop and rock to create a foot-stomping, hand-clapping, trailblazing musical spectacular. Enhancing the experience are the stilt walkers, hoopers and vaudeville dancers who successfully combine art forms for a colorful visual accompaniment to the show.
Friday 10/23. Free, 6:30 pm. Ix Art Park, 963 Second St. SE. ixartpark.com.
It’s 5:30pm and the gym of Charlottesville’s MMA Institute is alive with the leathery crackle of boxing gloves and the muffled, scuffle-thud rhythm and squeak of bare feet on padded flooring. There is the litany of sharp nasal inhalations and grunts as well as the barked instructions of a squadron of coaches. Housed in the back half of a warehouse on Greenbrier Drive, the gym consists of one large padded room—maybe half the size of a basketball court—that, but for a back wall equipped with a rubberized chain-link fence and another wall of torso-level mirrors, is reminiscent of a wrestling training facility. The institute features the largest team of both professional and amateur mixed martial arts fighters in the state (mixed martial arts is a full-contact combat sport that allows the use of both striking and grappling techniques).
And on this night, despite the fact that these men arrived less than half an hour before, already there is the reek of hard, physical exertion. Sweat.
The fighters—eight amateurs and three professionals—are each paired with a partner of the same weight class (e.g. bantamweights ranging between 125 to 135 pounds), while five coaches watch every move. The men circle one another with focused intensity, only their eyes are devoid of any lust for violence; theirs is the gaze of an artist immersed in the calm seizure of the moment. Rather than angry, these men come off more like collaborators, like muscle-bound tango partners engrossed in a rehearsal for a high-level competition.
“The biggest problem facing the mixed martial arts scene is one of perception,” says 46-year-old Jay Colligan, a longtime gym member and promoter/ringside announcer for Charlottesville’s Main Street Arena Fight Night Challenge events. “People have this notion of MMA events as some kind of seedy, barely legal form of human cockfighting, and it’s just not true.”
For the uninitiated observer, the combative nature of the sport can overshadow the deep mutual respect fighters on this level have for one another.
“Your opponent is like a mirror,” says Dave Morris, 45, owner of the Charlottesville MMA Institute and a former Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fighter. “He reveals the flaws in your form…which should be viewed as a gift.”
In the far corner of the room, Ginseng Dujour, 30, and Carlos Martinez, 21,—two of the gym’s most promising fighters—are sparring. With his grizzled beard, mane of shoulder-length dreadlocks, gleaming skin and chiseled figure, Dujour demands attention. He is the room’s visual anchor. Martinez—a bit taller, baby-faced, padded by the slightest vestige of adolescent pudge—unleashes what is an astonishingly swift flurry of jabs. Ducking behind a shield of forearms, Dujour dances a retreat. Just before the jabs stop coming, as if anticipating the first flagging instant of their climax, Morris barks a command: “Knee!” Dujour plants his feet and with the terrifying agility of a big cat launches himself upward into the air, hurling his right knee toward Martinez’s chin. Although the blow does not land, clearly it catches Martinez off guard. Jolted, he’s forced to make an unexpected defense—a sort of cringing sidestep as fists and forearms seek to ward off the knee.
Clapping and smiling broadly, Morris intercedes, congratulating Dujour on his listening ability and flying-knee technique. He steps between the men and begins instructing Martinez on the flaw in his punch combo that made this potentially devastating counterattack possible. Meanwhile, grappling coach Ray Cadell has left his position leaning cross-armed against the padded wall to instruct Dujour on another potential option—the flying-knee strike was a risky gamble that could have ended disastrously—for deflecting Martinez’s onslaught.
“What you saw happening there was two-fold,” Morris explains later. “On the one hand, you saw a fighter exhibiting the ability to listen. Both of those guys are great developing fighters. But while Carlos is on the verge of being ready to go pro, Ginseng’s already there.”
Listening, Morris says, is a major indicator of a fighter’s readiness to make the leap from the amateur to professional circuit (a jump he compares to playing JV basketball versus playing in the NBA).
“When you’re fighting, you’re totally focused on your opponent,” says Morris. “Your corner can use his experience and visual advantage to exploit weaknesses. When you hear him make a command, you have to react instantly. No hesitation at all. That trust can be the difference between winning and losing a fight.”
The second crucial thing the Martinez and Dujour vignette reveals is the institute’s—and Morris’—philosophy of instruction.
“We have a team of instructors with a range of backgrounds broad enough to cover the spectrum of martial arts useful for this kind of competition,” says Morris. “The idea is, while my training leads me to approach a situation one way, a guy with a different background may come at it quite different.”
Fighters and coaches often cite the chess match metaphor. What makes the game—and this sport—so interesting is there is no fixed, predesignated approach. Participants have the ability to exhibit an astonishing array of styles, with many having little, if anything, in common with one another.
“The thing is, with such a broad range of fighting techniques available,” says Colligan, “while great fighters tend to master one particular form, they then augment that style with others, hoping that, in doing so, they reduce its inherent vulnerabilities, as well as enhance its various strengths.”
With each fighter commanding an incredible repertoire of stylistic fluency, any given situation—in Martinez’s case, a boxer-like attack—becomes the inspiration for an infinite array of possible defenses and counter-offenses. At the MMA Institute, a team of about 20 in-house and visiting instructors hold black belts and/or championship wins in disciplines ranging from judo, American freestyle karate, Brazilian jiu jitsu, sambo, Greco Roman wrestling and muay Thai.
“Rather than one solution to a given problem,” says Morris, “our guys are presented with a variety of options that can open doors to new technical possibilities.”
In the past, each school featured a master trained in one particular discipline, but MMA (and UFC) fighters must draw from multiple styles and schools to be competitive in the cage. How this shift occurred is key to understanding the MMA art form.
Through cultural migration, the advent of television and the Internet, martial arts forms that were once isolated to particular regions and cultures were made available to audiences that otherwise would have had no access. This process was bolstered by the popularization of mixed martial arts combat as embodied by the Ultimate Fighting Championship tournaments in the early ’90s, and had much to do with the efforts and successes of three-time UFC champion and hall of famer Royce Gracie (who helped found UFC). With the fights offered on international pay-per-view and heavily marketed to combat/contact sport audiences and Gracie being both a wildly entertaining fighter and an avid practitioner of Brazilian jiu jitsu, when he won the first, second and fourth UFC competitions, this fueled increased interest in the form. Suddenly, would-be fighters all began studying the technique, and gyms popped up en masse. As new fighters and champions emerged, historically or geographically obscure techniques such as muay Thai (a centuries old, hybrid version of kickboxing from Thailand), capoeira (a dancing, acrobatic technique purportedly developed and practiced on the sly by 16th-century West Africans enslaved in South America) surfaced.
Mixed martial arts’ popularity increased steadily through the early 2000s, and when Fox Sports Media Group struck a deal to carry UFC and MMA fights in 2011 (on its FX, Fuel TV and Fox Sports Net networks), the sport exploded: In 2015, Fox Sports News reported an average viewership of 964,000 for its UFC preliminary fights, a 22 percent hike from the year before.
This newfound notoriety led to better conditions for up-and-coming amateurs (for instance, the widespread development and syndication of amateur fighting leagues with official rules—hence Charlottesville’s Fight Night Challenge), and better pay for professionals (for whom Morris says regional appearances pay around $500 for showing up plus $500 for a win; whereas, according to ESPN, UFC rates range from $10,000 for a beginning, entry-level fighter, to top-draws such as champion Georges St. Pierre’s $4-5 million per bout).
But, as Morris can testify, getting to this point was a long, hard climb.
“Back in the ’90s, fighting in a regional match meant you didn’t always know what you were getting yourself into,” says Morris. “It was kind of like the Wild West.”
Of the many horror stories, one details the time Morris showed up for a fight that turned out to have no rounds. While nowadays, an MMA main event or championship fight runs for a maximum of five, 5-minute rounds (with non-main events clocking in at three 3-minute rounds), when Morris arrived at one purportedly premium promotion, he discovered the championship bout was slated to run straight through.
“We fought for nearly 19 minutes straight!” he laughs, shaking his head. “It was insane. You talk about exhaustion!”
Elsewhere, similar discrepancies were occurring. This had much to do with the fact that, as the sport was still in its infancy and was just beginning to catch on, there was no officially sanctioned governing body to enforce a collective set of rules. As such, much like the early days of American football, a money-hungry promoter could easily lease a respectable-seeming venue, promise a classy event and put on what amounted to brawls.
“There were a lot of bad promotions,” says Morris. “You had to be careful. A lot of companies would put together good, reputable-looking materials, then round up street-fighters and throw them together in the ring.”
Of course, when matched against a master, these unsophisticated fisticuffers didn’t stand a chance.
“It was really a turn-off to see that kind of thing going on,” says Morris, whose own record was 17–1 while competing mostly in UFC-sanctioned events. “For a long time we did what we could, but it really helped things when the sport became popular, which led to the adoption of rules, an educated viewership and the creation of sanctioning bodies that could vet the fights.”
Still, there remained much room for abuse. After years of seeing phony promoters putting on bogus (not to mention dangerous) events, when Morris was approached in 2010 by Mike Stanley, owner of Louisa’s MMA Institute gym, and offered the opportunity to develop an amateur-just-on-the-cusp-of-going-pro MMA fight series—the Fight Night Challenge—with the new owner of Charlottesville’s Main Street Arena, Mark Brown, Morris leapt at the opportunity.
“What really made me want to do this was, just before Mike got in touch with me, I’d brought three of my amateur fighters to an exhibition up in Staunton,” says Morris, “and it was bad.”
By bad he means the promoter had Morris’ guys matched with barroom brawlers, some of whom showed up reeking of booze. As the whole point of an amateur fight is, for serious practitioners, gaining experience—i.e. getting a feel for being in the cage with a well-trained combatant, honing one’s skills and preferably getting a win yielding video footage marketable to pro venues such as the UFC—Morris was offended. He refused to participate in such a spectacle, packed up his guys and went home.
“With the arena we had the opportunity to build an event series from the ground up,” says Morris. “I’d been fighting and training fighters for going on 20 years,” and running the MMA Institute for eight, “and finally had the opportunity to do things the right way. Like, if you were going to make the most respectable, fighter-friendly environment possible, what would that look like?”
The first thing Morris did was ask Stanley to handle the matchmaking.
“The thing about matching amateurs,” says Cadell, “is you have to be able to put guys together who are [size-wise] pretty equally matched and have complementary or [comparatively] interesting skill sets. That’s what makes a fight entertaining to watch.”
With Stanley’s integration into the state’s fighting community, Morris’ reputation for integrity and their mutual knowledge of MMA, this meant the two could easily convince upper-echelon developing fighters to perform at the new venue.
In the beginning the FNC was to feature solely amateur fights, with plans to expand the event schedule to include professional state championship matches, but Morris wanted to make sure fighters were treated as professionals from the get-go. His reasoning was that, although they were amateurs, the kind of guys he wanted to attract were those who—like Martinez—were on the verge of making the leap to the big leagues. (Here, it’s useful to think of the FNC as roughly the equivalent of an upper collegiate-level venue where athletes hoping to attract a pro contract go to compete, with the major difference being that MMA amateurs can get sponsorships—from, say, a local car dealer, nutrition supply store or sports equipment dealership—and trade teaching classes at gyms for memberships, training sessions and other various perks.)
“Fighters should feel respected,” says Morris. “A venue like ours gives fighters the opportunity to gain experience and practice their craft.”
In effect, the FNC was conceived of as an extension of the smaller gym communities, a place where enthusiasts could tap into the bigger regional and state community while putting their skills to the test and readying themselves to compete in larger, professional venues in Richmond, Northern Virginia and beyond.
“We worked hard to create an atmosphere more akin to an Olympic event than a prizefight,” says Colligan.
Which brings us to the venture’s other integral component: It had to be family-oriented.
“Dave’s wife runs the desk, and sometimes his daughter,” says Colligan. “We have classes for 4-year-olds on up. We have entire families that come in together to train. When he retires, Ginseng”—a first-generation immigrant from Haiti—“wants to return home and found his own gym and create an extension of this community there. Above all, our gym is based upon family values.”
Morris wanted this vibe, this sense of an inclusive group camaraderie to be extended to the Fight Night Challenge, which attracts about 1,000 spectators to each event.
“We made it kid-friendly,” says Morris. “We try our best to book the kind of fighters that, if a kid walks up to them after a fight and expresses interest, they’ll smile at them and let the youngster know what the mixed martial arts are all about.”
–Words by Eric J. Wallace, Photography by Studio 621