Sunday, March 19, 2006

Skating, Fighting, Writing

My brother picked me up Friday around 1 pm and we headed south to Lemoore California for the World Extreme Cagefighting event at the Indian Casino there. My brother snapped some photos, I'll add them to this post later, after he sends them to me.

Mixed Martial Arts is legal in California now, in fact there we'll be fights this spring at the Memorial Auditorium right here in Sacramento. It'll be interesting to see how this affects the
Indian Gaming MMA events. For tonight though enough people were willing to make the commute, and it was mostly commuters, as NOTHING is close to Lemoore.

The fights were in a big tent that held 2,000 plus people. The tent was surrounded by mud and there were leaks in the tent including one leaking into the cage, which was pretty lame. Other than that they put on a good show and the fighters were amazing. We saw some great bouts. I got press seats since I was covering the event for the News and Review. Our seats were incredible. We just feet from the action. My article will come out this thursday and I'll link it from here. For now I don't want to say too much about the fights themselves out loyalty to the paper. They get first dibs.

I'm hoping to write for some other publications so that I can cover every fight in our area, and beyond, as there is nothing as exciting as Mixed Martial Arts live and in person.

Walking back to the car I had to stop and stretch. My legs hurt from skating hard two days in a row after being a lazy but for so long while my broken bones worked on healing. I stretched a-lot on Saturday and then I did some more skating today. A friend built a short half pipe in her werehouse and it's awesome. She built it with learning tricks in mind. A low platform to practice dropping in, small coping wich she'll switch to more severe coping as we all get better. All in all a really great place to skate. I'll be bugging her to let me skate there all the time.

The coolest thing is how different she goes about learning. We spot each other and give each other advice. I've never skated with anyone that would put that much effort into helping me learn a trick or try something new. I love it. She's nervous about the idea of letting Antonio skate there as she'd be liable if he got hurt, since he's only 9. Too bad, he'd love it. And yes, I know I'm not mentioning my friends name. She wants to keep her ramp low key and doesn't need my millions of readers banging on her door.

Now I'm working on fine tuning the fight story for the News and Review and working on the rewrite of my book. It's nice to have a day free to work on this, though I keep itching to go to the parking lot across the street and skate some more.

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