Cockfighter - Charles Ray Willeford [24]
I studied the mimeographed schedule, but I wasn't too happy about it. There wasn't a whole lot of time to obtain and keep gamecocks for the tourney.
SCHEDULE
SOUTHERN CONFERENCE
Oct. 15 —Greenville, Mississippi
Nov. 10 —Tifton, Georgia
Nov 30 —Plant City, Florida
Dec. 15 —Chattanooga, Tennessee
Jan. 10 —Biloxi, Mississippi
Jan. 28 —Auburn, Alabama
Feb. 24 —Ocala, Florida
Mar. 15-16 —S.C.T.—Milledgeville, Georgia
I was already too late for Greenville, Mississippi. The S.C.I was unlike other invitational mains and derbies, both in rules and gamecock standards. When Senator Foxhall had organized the S.C.T. back in the early thirties, his primary purpose had been to improve the breeds and gameness in southern cockfighting. The hardest rule of the tourney was that all the cocks entered in the final round at Milledgeville had to be four-time winners. A cock can win one or sometimes two fights with flashy flies in the first pitting, and some good luck. But any cock that wins four in a row is dead game. Luck simply doesn't stretch through four wins. This single S.C.T. rule, more than any other, had certainly raised breeding standards in the South, and it kept out undesirables and fly-by-night cockers looking for a fast dollar. All the pit operators on the S.C.T. circuit were checked from time to time by members of the committee, and if their standards of operation dropped, they were dropped, in turn, by the senator.
Like the other big-time chicken men, I had fought cocks in the highly competitive six-day International Tournament in both Orlando and Saint Pete, and I intended to enter it again someday, but I preferred the more rigid policies of the S.C.T. It was possible to enter the annual International Tournament by posting a preliminary two-hundred-dollar forfeit, which was lost if you didn't show up and pay the three-hundred-dollar balance. The winning entries made big money at the International, but I could make just as much at S.C.T. pits and at the final Milledgeville meet. And the wins on the S.C.T. circuit really meant something to me.
At that moment, however, I didn't feel like a big-time cockfighter. I was at rock bottom and it was ironical to even think about fighting any cocks that season. All I had in my wallet was eighteen dollars, plus some loose change in my pockets. I owned a thirty-dollar guitar, a gaff case, a few clothes in a battered suitcase, and a lease on a farm.
Of course, the contents of my gaff case were worth a few hundred dollars, but I needed everything I had to fight cocks. I sat down on the edge of my bed, and opened my gaff case to search for the last letter Doc Riordan had sent me. I opened the letter, but before reading it again, I made a quick inventory of the gaff case to see if there was anything I could do without. There wasn't. I needed every item.
There were sixteen sets of gaffs, ranging from the short one-and-one-quarter-inch heels I preferred, up to a pair of three-inch Texas Twisters. I even had a set of slashers a Puerto Rican breeder had given me one afternoon in San Juan. With slashers, the bird is armed on one leg only. I don't believe in fighting slashers for one simple reason. When you fight slashers, the element of chance is too great, and the best cock doesn't always win. With a wicked sharp blade on a cock's left leg, the poorest cock can sometimes get in a lucky hit. Pointed gaffs, round from socket to point, are legitimate. Once a cock's natural spur points have been sawed off, the hand-forged heels fitted over the half-inch stumps are a clean substitute for his God-given spurs, and they make for humane fighting. Two cocks meeting anywhere in their natural state will fight to the death or until one of them runs away. Steel spurs merely speed up the killing process, and a cock doesn't have