NEW YORK
Eric D’Arce climbs into the cage with his daughter before the show. When the preschooler throws punches, the ex-Marine goes down, smiling, laughing. Two and a half hours later Eric is breaking the arm of a kid named Nathanial in that very spot. But the celebratory cries of victory are muted, confined to only Eric’s nearest and dearest. In the dimly-lit recreation center, the crowd of a few hundred is conflicted, and waffles between excitement and stunned silence. It’s easy to cheer for a knockout. Not so easy for an arm snapped like a tree branch.
This is mixed martial arts, a.k.a. cagefighting, and this combative sport colored in shades of Clockwork Orange-esque ultra-violence could be Saturday night entertainment almost anywhere in the world. But it’s not just anywhere, it’s Corona, a neighborhood in Queens, in a state as conflicted about the sport as the crowd is about cheering when Eric bends Nathanial’s arm in ways God never intended it to go.
“Is MMA legal or not? Should it be? Why not? What’s holding it back?” Those are the big-picture questions, much harder for New York as a whole to answer than the question the Corona crowd is faced with, and at least their question is answered when a doctor rushes into the cage and stabilizes Nathanial’s arm, and Eric signals through the fence that he wants a little more love for getting the win.
