Sitting with George “Lights Out” Sheppard in the locker room of the The Ted at about 6:45 last Saturday night,

George "Lights Out" Sheppard

you wouldn’t think that within a couple hours he would be flipping some poor sap to the ground and beating his face with calculated, pile driver right hooks. Lights Out sat back in his folding chair and talked easily, like he was waiting for the bus.

“I always wanted to go to Egypt, man,’” Lights Out said, apropos of nothing, as he cradled the Betty Boop backpack his mom got him at Universal Studios. “I like the mummies. I like the kings.”

The other fighters–who actually did seem like they were there to pound somebody’s face–sat tensely and either ignored Lights Out or chuckled at him. Talking about his favorite ancient civilization? Before a fight? This guy had to be crazy.

“I like Little Debbie snack cakes too,” Lights Out, 21, explained. “I used to spend my whole allowance on them.”

I had come to a mixed martial arts event called CageFest 9 to try to get a sense of what this bloody and controversial sport was all about. The promoter set me up with Lights Out, who agreed to let me tag along with him before the fight and then to stand ringside during it. “Yeah man,” Lights Out said when I called him. “That’s cool with me.”

It turned out that just about everything is cool with Lights Out. I watched as the fight doctor checked him out.

“Any loss of consciousness? Any open wounds? Any trouble with your neck, midsection, back?” the doctor asked as he pushed and prodded Lights Out’s sculpted body.

Lights Out just shrugged. “Nope,” he said to everything. “There’s a bruise on this knee, but it doesn’t hurt that much,” he said.

The doctor looked closer at the injury. “This doesn’t count as an open wound. You’re good to go.”

What struck me about this interaction was just how normal it all was, or at least how normal everyone pretended it was. A doctor was asking Lights Out if he ever blacks out or if he was bleeding somewhere unseen, and he just shrugged. Shouldn’t these questions send off warning bells in the mind? Shouldn’t they translate somewhere in our frontal cortex as a submarine siren? Watch it, body, your brain should be shouting at you, You’re about to do something totally fucked.

But these warnings don’t sound in the minds of the likes of George Sheppard, and there is no part of me that can relate to it. Though I am a man of decent size and probably above average strength, I am terribly afraid of fighting. I am equally afraid of getting hurt as I am of hurting someone else. Maybe it’s because of my dad, a brown belt in karate who ended up both in the hospital and in jail (depending on if he won or lost the fight) when I was growing up. I look at my fist and I see little bones that would shatter if hurled at something as hard as a skull.

“You get into enough fights in the neighborhood,” Lights Out told me, “and you get over that fear real quick.”

Sheppard believes the world made him a fighter. He moved to Hampton Roads from Brentwood, Long Island, when he was 13. All the neighborhood toughs in Courthouse Green in Newport News wanted to challenge the kid from New York.

“I was a big nerd. I’d play Gameboy or go to the park and play video games,” he said. “But eventually I’d get challenged and there’d be a fight.”

Talking to Lights Out you get the distinct sense it didn’t have to be this way. He talked with nostalgia about riding his bike all over Hampton Roads as a kid. There was the mummies, his love of Fall Out Boy, the Betty Boop, his favorite anime, Full Metal Alchemist, and the PSP he picked up when there was a gap in the conversation. He puts 35 sugars in his 7/11 coffee. He has a 6-year-old daughter and looks after his mother, who has MS. I met his stepfather, who used to take young George on roofing jobs with him.

“Everything was always ‘yes sir’ with George,” his stepfather Calvin said. “He loves everybody, he loves kids. But he will fuck you up if you mess with his family or him.”

***

A heavyweight undercard.

Lights Out’s fight was the main event, so when the undercards started I took a minute to take in the scene at The Ted. A cage sat at about half court surrounded by 48 nicely made tables. Waiters and waitresses in semi-formal wear moved in every direction taking orders, delivering rum and cokes.

“This is how they have it when the Virginia Symphony comes and Roberta Flack,” a security guard told me. “Dolly Parton too.”

The crowd was not full of rednecks or drunkards, as one might expect or even hope if you’re the kind to disparage mixed martial arts. The crowd could have been transported straight from Town Center, just with a higher percentage of men. Couples abounded. At football games you can often get the sense that fans think they might be called on next to be linebacker. There is a tension, an eagerness, a preparedness for violence that creates an air of menace in the concrete halls of the stadium.

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