Great Outdoor Fight 1968

From The Great Outdoor Fight

[edit] The Fight

[edit] The Protest

The 1968 Great Outdoor Fight was the first one to see any kind of an organized negative reaction from the public at large. Going with the worldwide student rebellions and protests, students from University of California Santa Barbara organized a few buses of people to travel to the Fight to protest its existence. According to the group of young hippies, the Fight showed human nature at its worst, and in their opinion gave credence to the kind of atrocities happening in Vietnam.

The Ruling Body only learned of this protest a few days in advance of the fight. They realized they didn't have a sufficient outside force to protect the Acres should the protestors become hostile. They also expected the number of hippies to show up to be upwards of 100, so just mowing them down with the Jeeps was ruled out as ineffective. The day before the fight, an emergency plan for getting rid of the noisy and irritating hippies was devised.

A large group of fighters, many of whom were Vietnam vets who had a score to settle with them, stood quietly facing the students outside of the fence. When the announcement came that the gates were opening, they rushed the protestors, each one grabbing one and dragging them into the arena. They being tiny, burned-out peaceniks, the fighters had little trouble pulling them inside. Once inside, they were savagely beaten by the angry fighters. All of the protestors, save one, were brutally maimed, crippled, or killed within minutes.

The only one who did not fall right away was named Warren Pansire. He delivered concussions to two vets who had tried to take him down. This led to a beating of Berserker-like proportions on the young Pansire - the likes of which other fighters in the past have not survived. A few breaths way from death, however, Pansire was ejected from the Acres.

[edit] Aftermath

Several investigations by the local, state and federal authorities were carried out. While the violence took place inside The Acres, the protesters hadn't signed any of the releases which protect the fight from litigation. While the fight itself was being sued by the families of the protesters, the contestants of the fight were being charged with their deaths. Ultimately, the fight narrowly dodged the bullet, thanks to two things. First, intimidation campaigns on the part of the Ruling Body caused the families to be unwilling to testify or bring forth evidence in both the civil and criminal cases. Secondly, then-governor Ronald Reagan, a noted long-time fan of the Fight, was influenced to exonerate the Ruling Body and fighters from all charges. However, it was one of the closest times that the fight ever came to cancellation.

For the next two years, protest threats continued. The Ruling Body did not want the fight to be interrupted in the same way that the 1968 one was, and they didn't want to have to resort to the same bending of the rules of the fight to have to deal with it, as there was considerable complaint about it in hindsight. So they established a contingency plan. 500 of the toughest individuals from the qualifying rounds that didn't get into the Fight would be invited - not as fighters, however, but as guards. 1969 saw what would have been a large protest disperse peacefully, in the face of these individuals.

After 1970 though, The Acres were never again harangued by protestors, fearing a similar fate. In the corner where the students parked their buses and assembled, there is a hand-painted sign on the outside of the fence with the words REMEMBER '68 as a warning to any other idealists who wish to challenge the Fight's right to exist.

Warren Pansire spent almost 2 years recovering from his injuries. Once fully healed, he began training for his eventual revenge inside the Acres, where he would come back to in 1971. Pansire eventually became just as brutal and as ruthless as his tormentors were for a number of fights to come.

[edit] Addendum

Many scholars have argued for years whether as to these protestors were competitors or just cannon fodder for the fighters. Most of the official historical records, however, do not include any of the protestors as fighters, and even Pansire's 1968 takedowns were not considered his doing.

Several eyewitnesses to the 1968 Fight maintain that the protest was ended by the unexpected arrival of parasitic space leeches, but as these eyewitnesses were hippies, their reports can be safely discounted.