Fighting the Cocks

John Christopher Kehoe likes to rear back in his wheel chair and bellow: "Want to see my horns? I've got them. I fight chickens, you know. I'm proud of it--keeps me alive." Last week, he was wheeled into a pagoda-shaped, whitewashed building outside Orlando, Fla. and sat, grim and lordly (in a pit-side box built specially for him and his wheel chair). John Kehoe's hand trembled as one of his game cocks, a fierce looking grey muff, was brought into the pit, weighed and made ready for battle.

It was Orlando's 29th annual cockfighting tournament--though no word of it appeared in Florida newspapers last week. Florida is the only state in the union where cockfighting is legal (but the heavy betting that goes on at the pit is not, hence the secrecy).

The referee addressed the crowd: "Gentlemen, please clear the pit." The men began to drift off the dirt-floored circle; the chanting bets still continued. "I'll bet a hundred" or "A hundred to eighty." The usual bet was $100. The big ones--$1,000 and up--were made more quietly, by a whisper, a nod, a flick of a finger. On the wall was a sign saying "No Profanity Allowed." There was none. In the audience, one woman fed a baby from a bottle.

There were about 400 in the crowd. It included a Texas oil millionaire, a Philadelphia income-tax lawyer, and a professional gambler from Memphis. Fourteen cockfighters had each posted $1,000 to enter.

Staccato Flaps. When his handler released him, John Kehoe's grey tore across the pit, neck-feathers up. His onrushing enemy was a powerful red rooster equipped, like the grey, with needle-sharp, steel gaffs that man had added to his natural weapons. (U.S. cockfighters consider themselves more humane than Latin Americans, who use razor-edge "slashers.") The cocks hit each other almost two feet off the ground, in a staccato flap of wings. Every few minutes, handlers separated the cocks, sponged blood from their heads. Above the excited hubbub rose a woman's flat drawl: "Come on, red rooster, kill him." But it was the red rooster that got killed.

After the first two days, the halfway mark, Kehoe's greys had won seven fights without losing one. Their owner chortled gleefully from his wheel chair: "The way they're dropping you'd think I was using a shotgun on them." A man from Tennessee, allowing that Kehoe was right, said to a man from North Carolina: "There's something that old man's got onto."

Coal & Chicks. If there was, tough old John C. Kehoe wasn't saying. Son of a coal miner, he picked slate in Pennsylvania's hard-coal country for 45^ a day. As a boy, instead of shooting marbles, he was fighting game chicks-against other kids in Pittston, Pa. He became the hard-fisted political boss of Luzerne County and owner of half a dozen coal mines, but never gave up cockfighting. The big difference between Kehoe and the 150,000 other people who fight roosters in the U.S. is that he crows about it.

Pits & Hotel Rooms. Even though banned everywhere but in Florida, the "sport" goes on all over the U.S.--in hotel rooms and in portable pits in barns or pine groves. The sport supports four trade magazines, jammed with announcements of fights and advertisements of gaffs, sparring muffs, conditioning coops.

In the north, where law enforcement is stricter and the S.P.C.A. more vigilant, public pits do not advertise, but they operate at Wheeling, W.Va., Saratoga Springs, N.Y., Wilmington, Del., Wilkes-Barre, Pa. and Frederick, Md. (where a cockfight was hijacked and its patrons reportedly robbed of almost $500,000). Across the South, big illegal pits run wide open, from Pass Christian, Miss, to Clovis, N.Mex.

Texas has more big-time chicken men than any other state, headed by ex-Boxer Bobby Manziel, who struck it rich wildcatting for oil on $700 borrowed from his friend, Jack Dempsey. Manziel has a special plane to carry his chickens to & from fights. Not counting bets, the sport costs Manziel about $25,000 a year.

Chicken men can't understand why the world is against them. They argue that chickens are insensitive animals anyway, and that game roosters fare better than most common chickens, which end up in a fricassee without having a chance to defend themselves. Game cocks cannot be kept at large with another rooster, for a cock will fight to the death with any other male fowl he meets. Because no two cocks can be turned loose on the same walk (yard) without fighting, chicken men parcel their roosters out on as many as 40 neighboring farms, where they boss a small harem of hens until three weeks before a fight.

Then they are collected by their trainer, who runs them up & down to get them into fighting trim, tosses them in the air and catches them to toughen up their bodies. They are fed special diets, which chicken men usually try to keep secret from each other. John Kehoe feeds his cocks such highfalutin food as cakes with French brandy, oysters, apples, sprouted oats, plain oats, eggs and flint corn. On the third day of the Orlando tournament last week (the fights go on for six hours a day and cost $7 to see), Kehoe's grey muffs lost their first two fights.

Pittsburgh Competition. His "hard coal" greys were being threatened by a "soft coal" outfit from out Pittsburgh way. It was then that Kehoe brought out his ace, a grey-black-&-green veteran of two fights last year. It looked bad for the grey when a rival red rooster drove a spur into a lung. A few minutes later Kehoe's rooster suffered first a broken leg, then a broken wing.

He lay on the dirt coughing blood, unable to move, and shouts of "a hundred to ten" against his chances floated through the pit. His enemy, the red, picked and kicked at him. Then, with the kind of blind tenacity that seems to excel a human's, the grey came back. Almost 40 minutes later, he won over the red. Next morning, another of Kehoe's grey muffs came back from the dead to clinch first prize ($7,000) of the Orlando tournament for Kehoe. Glowed rough, tough old John Kehoe: "Cockfighting has added ten years to my life."

* To a game-chicken man, all other varieties are known as "dunghills," no matter how long their pedigrees, how good their egg-laying records, or how well they fry.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.