Local cage fighters bring it.
There is a sweatshop on the south side of town. The air inside the narrow, windowless room is choked with the smell of stale perspiration and the persistent whimpers of tortured
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teenagers.
The agonizing groans-coming from boys as young as 13-are mostly drowned out by 50 Cent's "Candy Shop," which thumps from a stereo in the corner of the room. There is a torso-sized indent on the far wall where some unfortunate soul met previously its acquaintance. On another wall, the message "No Mercy!" is scrawled in permanent marker.
And James Martinez has no mercy right now. When one young worker complains that he can't perform any more fingertip push-ups because of an injured foot, Martinez offers a sneering smile in retort.
"That's not my problem," Martinez says. "Do it on one foot…You may have 95 percent of you not working, but you still have 5 percent that does."
Within minutes, the first casualty of the evening falls to the ground. A stocky teenager with a shaved head is on the floor, grimacing in pain. The boy-who wears two knee braces and a white "Glass Connexion" T-Shirt-clutches his knee as Martinez surveys the damage. After the injured boy is carried off to the side, he becomes a learning opportunity.
"If you're him and you're in a street fight what are you going to have to do?" Martinez asks his charges. "You have to condition another part of your body. You have to compensate, otherwise the other guy will take advantage of your weakness."
The dozen or so teenagers look on attentively. They aren't here to knit sweaters for Kathie Lee Gifford or sew basketball shoes for Nike. This is the sweatshop for the Martinez Inc. fight team. They're here to kick ass.
"We're not making cupcakes, guys," Martinez shouts. "
Sweep
the leg…You're not walking him across the threshold, pick him up and
slam
him."
Martinez runs the Chinese Kenpo Karate studio that sits in this small stifling training facility next to Beto's Auto Repair on Sixth Street. He is also one of the driving forces behind the "Hell in the Cell" slugfest coming to the Sweeney Convention Center on April 30. Right now his fighters only have three weeks of training left before they enter the ring.
"Chokes are legal," Martinez instructs his fighters. "You can take him down however you want…Remember you gotta be checkers players, not chess players."
Martinez and his father Lorenzo Martinez, Jr.-the coach of Team Bonecrusher out of Las Cruces-are the primary instigators of Hell in the Cell, purported to be one of the largest events of its kind in Santa Fe history. Fighters from across New Mexico will flock to Sweeney with some 20 matches and eight individual titles on the line.
"You guys want to see the belts?" Martinez asks his panting fighters before digging out a pair of shiny oversized belts. "Yes, it's just cloth. Yes, it's just plastic, but it's a legitimate title."
Well, sort of. Hell in the Cell will feature a variety of disciplines-including boxing, kickboxing and karate-but the featured event is no-holds-barred cage fighting. It's a brutal sport that has largely survived as a self-regulated sub-genre in the insular underground fighting world. But with no governing body to sanction the matches, it's left to individual coaches and promoters to regulate the sport.
"It can be a dirty business," Martinez says. "But we're doing our best to make it legit."
Legitimizing cage-fighting is almost exclusively a do-it-yourself enterprise. The Martinezes built the cage for Hell in the Cell and it took nearly a year to organize the all-amateur event with most of the fighters culled from five clubs: Martinez Inc., Bonecrusher, Team Chingaso, Team Rising and Team Beatdown. But since word of the event began to spread, Lorenzo Martinez, Jr. says the response has been solid.
"This is up-and-coming," he says. "We've had a really good response. We want to expand. We want to make Hell in the Cell a regular event."
But while many of the coaches-including the Martinezes and Team Chingaso's Gabe "Bam Bam" Merendon-are seasoned fighters, many Hell in the Cell competitors have only a few bouts under their belts.
Mario Saiz-a 28-year-old truck driver from Albuquerque who competes for Team Chingaso-has all of one fight and five months of training on his resumé. But for someone like Saiz -who has spent years analyzing fights on television-the opportunity to step inside the cage was hard to resist.
"When you hear that bell it opens your eyes," Saiz says. "It's exciting. It's crazy. You see all those people in the stands and you step in that ring and it's like 'OK, here we go.'"
Many burgeoning fighters are teens looking for a disciplined outlet for their aggression outside run-of-the-mill high school athletics. The Martinez family, for one, features four generations of ring experience ranging from 83-year-old great-grandfather Lorenzo Martinez down to grandsons Nate (age 5), Gabriel (6) and Nick (7). The latter three boys will open the Hell in the Cell competition with a little pint-sized pugilism.
"My dad taught us to be warriors," Lorenzo Martinez, Jr. says. "Swimmers swim, bikers bike and fighters fight. We're competitors."
But that extends beyond the Martinez family. Five teenagers from Martinez Inc will be competing for titles at Hell in the Cell, as well as 13-year-old Josh Castillo and 14-year-old Paul Castillo, Jr., whose father Paul Castillo is a trainer for the Rio Rancho Boxing Club.
"It's good for the kids," says Castillo, who is also a K-9 handler for the Santa Fe Police Department. "It keeps them off the street and keeps them out of trouble."
The coaches try to limit the amount of trouble the kids can get into in the ring through the kind of rigorous training Martinez subjects his pupils to. And despite the violent nature of the sport, Lorenzo Martinez, Jr. insists that even the youngest fighters who enter the cage to beat each other to a pulp are learning some important life lessons.
"The biggest thing I teach them is pride, respect and discipline," he says. "When you strive to win, when you do your best-even if you don't always come out on top-that's when you become a champion. Not just in the ring, but outside of it as well."
