Darnell Stiffey

From The Great Outdoor Fight

Darnell Stiffey (October 24th 1930 - March 5th 1998) was the Champion of the 1955 Great Outdoor Fight. Stiffey was the captain of an infamous rugby squad based in Manchester, NH. His team, the Manchester Moonshiners, were known as one of the dirtiest, and most effective, teams of their era. They dominated local and regional play, and in most tournaments with teams from around the country, and a few instances, the world, the Moonshiners nearly always came out on top. Disciplined, tough, big, fast, and well-led, they were a force to be reckoned with.

After competing in a rugby tournament where they brutally dispatched a team from Buffalo, NY, they were told by a passing fan that they should try out for the Great Outdoor Fight. Intrigued, Stiffey got more information about the fight and appealed to the Ruling Body to have his team admitted as a block. Luckily for the team, 1955 saw an anomalous drop in applicants wishing to fight, and so spots needed to be filled to reach the 3,000 number. With no precedent of admitting a large group together, the Ruling Body went by the Moonshiners' reputation and admitted all 21 of them to the fight, allowing them to bypass their qualifiers because it would have been too cumbersome.

The team trained hard, learning from boxing coaches, martial arts teachers, and experiential teaching by starting more fights than usual in bars and anywhere else. They studied tandem moves where two or three people would instantly descend on a single fighter, ruining him with little effort on the parts of each of the three participants. Stiffey was elected to be their army leader, as he was the captain of the team and a natural born leader, as well as a hell of a fighter.

[edit] The Fight

Stiffey and the team showed up to the fight wearing brand new uniforms they had made for the fight itself. Utilizing the team colors of maroon and gold, the large bunch of men wearing matching clothes first drew chuckles from the crowd, as people laughed and murmured at what an easy target they would make. But when the other fighters saw a few last-minute drills run by the Moonshiners outside the fences, the rumblings quickly turned to a more concerned nature.

Once inside, the team behaved like a well-oiled machine. Accustomed to working together as well as dismantling opponents, the large men of the Moonshiners team worked in perfect harmony to tear through the competition. They had practiced their techniques for weeks and were like a large steel ball rolling through the field, crushing anything in their way. They made especially good use of the Berserker Festival, a move perfected by Oren Turzanski, the 1914 champion.

On the second day, the de facto leader of the team/army, Darnell Stiffey, shared the turkey feast with his whole team. He even broke tradition and ate with the team, and nobody on the Moonshiners' roster went hungry that day. They were left completely alone, the rest of the fighters knowing what would happen to any one man who dared interfere with that hornets' nest. The team had yet to lose a single member, and most were still in good spirits when the second days' fighting ended.

The third day saw mainly a continuation of the first days' slaughter. The Moonshiners continued to decimate the competition, and only suffered their first loss when the prop Joe "Tank" Vacanti broke his leg tripping over a pipe that had been left on the field. The last army to stand up to the Moonshiners juggernaut was that of third-time fight vet Wilford Buchanan, who had assembled a hastily thrown together posse on the second day made up of bits from armies dismantled largely by the Moonshiners. The two armies collided in the field in a massive scrum, a mistake on the part of Buchanan's army, as this time of close, dirty fighting was what the 'shiners had the most experience with.

The crisp teamwork and brutality of the Moonshiners led to their overtaking of the Buchanan army with relative ease, losing only 3 more fighters, thinning their ranks to 17. These 17 members of the Moonshiners rugby club were the final ones standing at the fight that year. The action stopped briefly, as the team looked around and shook eachothers' hands and laughed amongst themselves.

This action caused the Ruling Body to get nervous that the team would try to claim a mass joint victory, something they had feared from the start. Stiffey noticed that this consternation was going on amongst the judges. He jogged over to the tower and shouted up to them that the team had every intention of fighting to the last man, but were just enjoying a few moments of camraderie until they opened up against their long-time friends and teammates.

After a brief rest of about an hour, the team congregated near the center and stood in a circle facing eachother. They stretched and prepared themselves, smiling and leering at one another. Stiffey said a few more final words of encouragement, and then shouted for them to have at it.

The circle collapsed in a whirlwind of fists and legs. The team fought each for themselves, using the same brutal force against eachother that they had against their other opponents {but stopping short of breaking legs or arms, as the team needed their players to be able to play again someday). The fighters took eachother out until the last two left were Stiffey, whose jaw was bruised and was walking with a limp, and Victor Perkins, a fairly recent add to the team. Stiffey, using his experience, was able to outwit the younger and unleash a savage beating in the end, coming out the victor and Last Man Standing.

The Manchester Moonshiners returned to New Hampshire and took a few months off to heal from any injuries they sustained from the fight. When they appeared in their first game after their well-publicized fight, other teams thought they would have been beaten too badly to properly play anymore. The first opponent of that day, the Lowell Lumberjacks from Massachusetts, learned that this was not the case, and forfeited from injury. They were the only team to make that mistake that day.