(Shit happens when Brett Rogers is your sponsor.)
It seems that we’ve had to deal with the issue of child abuse more and more over the past few weeks here at CagePotato. You may recall the woman in St. Louis who videotaped her infant daughter’s decaweight debut and provided such insightful ringside commentary as “Ball up some fists!” as one instance of this. But today, Potato Nation, we’ve come across the classiest child abuse video of them all. We’re talking a top of the line, Armani-suited business moguls shrouded in darkness and purchasing sex slaves that were kidnapped at the airport level of class on display here. This is the Rolls-Royce of child abuse videos, if you will. In fact, the level of class in this child abuse video is so high, that it might not be considered child abuse at all.
It’s disorienting, we know, because typically, when treated to a video of a 6 year old and a 7 year old throwing down in a cage, your first reaction would probably be that of outrage. Toss in the fact that it took place in Armenia, at a bar surrounded by drunken patrons huffing cigars and cheering them on, your anger would likely jump up a few notches. But then you take a look at the awesome production value (yes, those are *actual* flames in the beginning), the adorable weigh-ins/staredown, and the scaled down ring, and you almost forget that you’re about to watch two kids beat the piss out of each other for entertainment. Or that a promotion exists out there that will allow this to happen.
So goes the story of ArmFC, an upstart and soon to be shut down promotion that recently forayed into the art of child fighting. And although the promotion insists that we are actually watching a “demonstration of the fight” on the Youtube page in which they posted this video, the fact that the first four words of the video’s description are “death 6 years fighter” leads us to believe that those running this promotion have a tenuous grasp on the English language in general. So by “demonstration”, they likely mean “we didn’t allow them to dip their gloves in candle wax and broken glass beforehand this time.”
(The fight doesn’t start until about halfway through the video, but you NEED to watch all of this.)
Pairing Minas Avagyan against Hayk Tashchyan, the scrap is both a quick and technical affair. I hate to say it, but I was actually rather entertained by the fight itself, leading me to the moral conundrum I placed before you in this article’s second paragraph.
On one hand, this seems incredibly unsafe and abusive. I mean, the kids aren’t even wearing helmets for Christ’s sake. Hitting some pads in a Tapout commercial is one thing, but allowing two softheaded pre-adolescents to swing for the fences with reckless abandon seems a bit irresponsible to say the least. On the other hand, did you even see that guillotine? Effin’ A Cotton, was that sweet. And that Tito Ortiz gravedigger tribute/cage climb? Let’s just say that if I ever have kids, they will learn to do both of those things before they enter preschool, where intimidation and pizzazz is the name of the game.
What I’m saying is, I don’t know whether to be outraged or enthralled, so help me decide, Potato Nation. For once I might just listen to you.