In the Cockpit

In this special guest appearance by Greg, your correspondent recalls his visit to the Pasay City Cockpit. If you read that name and saw the picture above, you might have an idea of what happens there.  Cockfighting, very much illegal in the States, is legal and extremely popular here in the Philippines.  The Mall of Asia, arbiter of all that is cool in Manila, even contains an entire store dedicated to the bloody pastime.  But the trappings surrounding the fights held no attraction to me.  Frankly, the fighting itself didn't appeal too much, either.  But it's clear from living here that cockfighting is a big deal, an accepted and beloved hobby for men (almost exclusively), especially outside the city.  (This hit a bit close to home one time when one of our security guards brought his pair of fighting cocks into Seafront for safe keeping.  The problem, of course, with fighting cocks, is that they are actually just roosters, which means lots of early morning cock-a-doodle-do-ing.  Not much of a problem for our house, where our boys are up early enough to wake the birds, this was understandably irritating to our neighbors.  The cocks were duly evicted.  But I digress.)

When a friend, also checking items off his Manila to-do list in the last months prior to departing post, invited a group to the cockpit, I accepted immediately (Pam's only caveat: I am sitting at the keyboard under threat of having my precious iPad confiscated if I don't write something about the experience for this blog soon).  I found it odd that Sunday was the day of choice for cockfighting, but it seems that Filipinos proceed directly from pew to pit.  After all, there's a rooster dinner in the offing at the end of the festivities.  Yes, the rooster does in fact die.  Always.  If not in the ring, then... we'll get to that later.

We arrived at the cockpit in a light drizzle.  I'm not sure what I expected, but I suppose I thought the place would be a dark, smoke-filled, booze-driven den of iniquity, where punters gamble away most of their day's wages and leave their sorrows at the bottom of a bottle, then toss the bottle onto the dank dirt floor.  I imagined a musty room where I was unlikely to emerge unscathed by the nimble fingers of a pickpocket going for my last pesos.  I saw in my mind's eye feathers flying over the blood-spattered denizens, hands at the ready to block a stray beak or claw escaping the confines of the ring.  I saw what I think a cockfighting ring would look like in America.  It was anything but.

The Pasay City Cockpit is one of the larger venues in Metro Manila.  It's clean, modern, brightly-lit, and very much above-board.  It was only a moment after I entered that it occurred to me that cockfighting is perfectly legal here - there's no reason to take it underground.  Still, we six Americans stood out like ostriches among, well, cocks.  We paid our 200 peso ($5) entry fee and took our places standing at the back of the lower level.  Yes, there were two levels.  The lower one had about five rows of seats (proper seats!) surrounding the glass-enclosed dirt ring.  The upper level was a bit deeper, so all in all I would guess something like 500 fans were in the arena.  It wasn't full - this was an ordinary Sunday, not one of the crazy derby days, when four or more birds enter the ring and the last cock standing wins.

The fights had already begun.  One on one, cockfights are simple, basic tests of speed, skill and perseverance.  It started with the baiting of the birds.  Each owner had another guy on his side with a tune-up rooster, just to get the competitors aroused.  I suppose when you put one cock in another's face, they don't like it much.  The idea here was to show your bird off and get more of the bettors on your side.  I was shocked to hear that the minimum bet was a hefty 500 pesos ($12).  These guys aren't messing around.

The betting was actually the most exciting part.  As uninitiated rookies, we had helpers.  We wanted the favorite ("meron", or "there is" in Tagalog) or the underdog ("wala", or "there isn't").  Gave the money to the matchmaker.  And let the free-for-all begin.  Wall Street style, the bookies and the more educated guests tried to find someone to take their bets.  In a flurry of shouting and wild gesticulation, bets were made, odds were agreed (usually 50-50, but sometimes slightly off), and slowly things calmed down.  Unfortunately, I never figured out how people decided which bird to bet on.  In many of the fights, I couldn't even tell which was which once they started mixing it up.

The fighting itself was the quietest time of the afternoon.  The cocks went at it on a dirt surface, in a ring about the size of a boxing ring, but with (immaculately clean) glass sides so the diminutive competitors were visible.  Some fights lasted barely 30 seconds, at the end of which one of the roosters was very much dead, sliced in just the right place by his counterpart's 2" ankle blade.  Some of them were more drawn out.  But none went more than about four minutes.  Surprisingly, most fights ended with no visible blood on the dirt, and at no time did blood, feathers, or cocks leave the ring.  I suspect that death came relatively quickly to the losers (a wounded winner, on the other hand, was a different story).

We watched about 15 fights, at the end of which most of us had had our fill.  On the way out, one of the bookies offered a tour of the arena.  We accepted, of course.  The "green room" was surprisingly quiet, considering the dozens of roosters in the small space.  Each owner had a metal briefcase with shiny razor blades waiting for an ankle to attach to.  There were a few snack stands, though they seemed to be aimed more at the cock owners than at the fans, who were very serious about their betting.  Our final stop was the slaughterhouse.  You can guess what happens here, but I'll post a picture anyway.

So.  Bloodsport?  Yes.  Cruel?  Probably.  Interesting?  Moderately.  I enjoyed my afternoon at the fights, but it was truly a once in a lifetime experience.