2023 #MetLifeTakeover – 11.24.23

Last week the NFL played its first ever Black Friday game. The game just so happened to be the annual Miami Dolphins at “New York” Jets game, which happens to be played in New Jersey. Fortunately New Jersey is close enough to NYC that the NYC based Miami Dolphins fan club that I founded can charter a ton of busses and meet up with thousands of Dolphins fans from around the world who come to our yearly event called the #MetLifeTakeover. 

I write about Dolfans NYC a few times a year, but I always feel like I need to do a quick rundown, here’s the quickest possible explanation. My business partner Michelle and I were looking for more Dolphins fans to watch with every week so in the offseason between 2008/2009 we founded a fan club called Dolfans NYC. That club has grown to the biggest Miami Dolphins fan club in world and we became a non-profit and have donated over $100k to charity over the last 15 years. Our biggest fundraising event of the year is the #MetLifeTakeover a huge tailgate and group ticket purchase when the Dolphins come up to play the Jets. Okay, now you have context.

Anyway, this year wasn’t our biggest year from a number of tickets sold standpoint, but only because the Jets thought they were going to have a successful season so we could only buy about 950 seats together. However, as the Jets lost more and more games and the Dolphins won more and more games, we got thousands of requests for tickets. We had sold out before the season even started so we started telling people how they could sit with us, and all four sections of the stadium seemed absolutely jam packed with Dolphins fans. 

The tailgate was incredible, thanks to our partners at Urban Tailgate. We had music from DJ Drell and Solo D and had appearances from all sorts of well known people that are only well known if you are a Dolphins fan. The whole thing went over perfectly (except for a tiny frustrating incident I am not allowed to talk about for legal reasons) and everyone seemed to have an incredible time. The Dolphins did their part and kicked the shit of of the Jets and we even ended up on Hard Knocks! 

If you aren’t familiar, Hard Knocks is an HBO docuseries that follows NFL teams. Originally it was just during training camp but for the last few years they have been following teams in season. NFL teams seem to hate it, but NFL owners like money, and the fans love it. It’s been awesome for more as a Dolphins fan and it was even cooler that they came to our tailgate and did quick 45 second clip about our event. They interviewed Michelle and I, but only used a second of the dialogue, but it was cool that they focused on how Dolphins fans filled the stands and the parking lot. You can watch the whole clip here.

Anyway, it was a great event and we raised thousand and thousands of dollars for charity in the process. Hopefully I will be back in a few weeks with the recap video, but I should be back even sooner with some party pictures as I am shooting an event tonight and headed to Miami Art Basel (and another Dolphins game) in about a week. 

These photos from the Takeover aren’t great because frankly I was way too busy and way too stressed out to do a good job taking photos, but hopefully you can get a sense of the event anyway.

Click here to see all my photos from the 2023 Dolfans NYC #MetLifeTakeover at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. 

2023 #MetLifeTakeover

2023 #MetLifeTakeover

2023 #MetLifeTakeover

2023 #MetLifeTakeover

2023 #MetLifeTakeover

 

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2023 NFL Draft

Another year, another NFL Draft. If you don’t know by now, I run Dolfans NYC a nonprofit that raises money for charity through watch parties and events surrounding the Miami Dolphins. It started out with about 30 of us and has grown to thousands. It’s probably most successful thing I have done with my life and the whole thing is honestly surreal. Through the club I have been able to do some very cool things, like get really, really good tickets to the NFL Draft.

Dolfans NYC started doing group NFL Draft trips in 2008 when we had the first pick. The Draft was in NYC every year back then and we continued going until the Draft moved and started going from city to city. In 2018 the NFL came up with the “Inner Circle”, small groups of die hard fans that would be grouped by team in front of the stage, essentially making it easy for the NFL Network and ESPN camera crews to film sections of excited groups of fans for every team. I am usually not the kinda person who wants to be in any sort of spotlight, but getting on TV during the NYC Drafts got so many local Dolphins fans to google us that we sort of made it our mission to continue using the Draft as a marketing tool and have tried to make it to as many of these as possible. So far I have been to Dallas, Cleveland and Las Vegas for the Draft, and this year I made it to Kansas City.

The Dolphins didn’t have a first round pick this year so I almost didn’t go, but I had never been to KC and it was sort of a bucket list city for me. Dolfans NYC had airline miles and I told my friend Ivan that if he got the hotel room I’d bring him with me. He was down and off we went.

The Kansas City Draft was the biggest one yet. It was absolutely packed with people and over a huge space. Fortunately my back has been doing great recently and while I was in a ton of pain, it was bearable which wouldn’t have been the case a couple months ago. We eventually made our way to the Inner Circle area and joined up with all the other crazy fans. I am as diehard as a Dolphins fan as they come, but I don’t compare to some of these guys. So many of the Inner Circle crew are the costumed lunatics that are always on TV during NFL broadcasts and there’s nothing I love photographing more than passionate fans of anything, especially when they look so photogenic. 

Aside from the fans I also got to photograph some of the draft picks themselves. I didn’t have a press credential (maybe I should actually apply for one next year), so I couldn’t really shoot on stage, but I did get a few shots of the Draft picks coming out before security started cracking down on people near the front. I probably could have gotten away with a lot more if I wasn’t in all Dolphins gear, but what are you gonna do? I also got decent shots of Christian Gonzalez and Jaxon Smith-Njigba when they came out to the crowd because our section was near the Patriots and Seahawks sections. I also got photos of famous YouTubers Ryan Trahan and Donald De La Haye aka Deestroying which you can ask your kids about. 

As far as the Dolphins picks? Well we only had four because we traded a bunch away for some very good players and our owner tried to sign Tom Brady while he was still under contract with the Bucs so we got a pick stolen from us which honestly I didn’t appreciate for a bunch of different reasons. But I think we got a couple exciting players anyway. Oh, and we did make it on TV.

Anyway, let’s look at some photos. These are uploaded to the Dolfans NYC Flickr because why upload them twice and I already did a post over there so let me live. At least this one is way longer because I am fully caffeinated and I don’t have to explain the concept of Dolfans NYC to them. 

Click here to see all my photos from the 2023 NFL Draft in Kansas City, MO. 

Bryce Young & Devon Witherspoon At The 2023 NFL Draft

2023 NFL Draft

2023 NFL Draft

Jaxon Smith-Njigba At The 2023 NFL Draft

2023 NFL Draft

Ryan Trahan At The 2023 NFL Draft

2023 NFL Draft

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2022 #MetLifeTakeover – 10.9.22

I realize that two Miami Dolphins themed updates in a row is not what you are looking for from me, but it’s just a coincidence. Our video from our event last year came out like 10 months late and now I have new photos from you from last weekend so here we are with back to back posts about Dolfans NYC, the charity I helped found around watching football games. 

The main event of the year is the #MetLifeTakeover, a gathering of Dolphins fans centered around the Dolphins annual trip to MetLife Stadium in New Jersey to play the Jets. We do a party the night before the game and then we throw a huge tailgate party and we organize big blocks of seats so everyone can watch the game together. This year we had our biggest year yet with over 1400 people sitting together. 

During the two day event we did a series of raffles and fundraisers and ended up raising close to $7000 for charity and that doesn’t include the money we make off the event and the merch we sell. This year we have already donated over $10,000 to different causes. It’s honestly one of my favorite things I do if life, even if the Dolphins cause me so much pain. 

I don’t need to go on an on about this but you can look at some photos if you want. I still haven’t fixed my site because I don’t know how to fix it so we are stuck with Flickr, and since I already put these on the Dolfans NYC Flickr I am just gonna link to that gallery. 

These pictures aren’t my finest work because I was throwing a massive event while I was taking them, and just shot some stuff here and there, but it’s still pretty exciting to see how many people showed up to a tailgate in New Jersey.

Click here to see the photos from the 2022 #MetLifeTakeover.

2022 #MetLifeTakeover

2022 #MetLifeTakeover

Nat Moore Signs Autographs At The 2022 #MetLifeTakeover

 

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2021 Metlife Takeover Video & Random Updates

I haven’t updated this site in a minute and I figured it was time to do that. I don’t know how much I have talked about my girlfriend moving in and me moving to a new studio but it’s consumed my whole life and when you add into that my back injury and physical therapy and a few trips to visit my family, I don’t have a lot of content to give you guys. Good news is that once this office is up and running I hope to get a lot more done and be way more productive. 

That’s not to say I haven’t been shooting and planning. I am working on a project that is going to span 15 years of my career and include a ton of new work as well. I have shot about 10 rolls of film for it and I have a lot more planned. The project will be released as a web3/NFT situation, but it isn’t about using that to make money, it’s about using the technology to organize and preserve work in an interesting way. I don’t want to say too much about it, but you won’t have to care anything about web3 to enjoy it. The blockchain is just the medium. But yeah, not really important because it’s a long way away but I just wanted you to know that I am working on something significant.  I am also have a new zine in the works, but it’s been in the works since like 2019 and still isn’t out so it’s probably not worth mentioning. 

If you do want to get a sneak peak at the new project you can sponsor a roll of film and see one of the rolls I have shot recently before anyone else and get a print of your favorite shot on the roll. 

Lastly I gotta mention the thing that’s taking up a ton of my time right now and that’s the Miami Dolphins. I know, I know. But seriously they are actually maybe good this year?  As you may know, I co-run Dolfans NYC the NYC Dolphins fan club and we throw this massive event every year when the Jets play the Dolphins in New Jersey and we raise thousands for charity in the process. It’s pretty amazing. This year we have sold nearly 1300 tickets to the game, all sitting together, surpassing our record for most people ever. 

We finally put together a recap video from last year, and I always share them with you guys, so I figured I would do the same for this one, but I just wanted to update you guys a little on everything that was going on since most of you don’t care about the Dolphins. Still, I think the video is worth a watch. Enjoy!

 

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2022 NFL Draft

I have no idea why I go to the NFL Draft nearly every year. It’s a complete mystery. I don’t watch college football so I don’t know who any of the players are and yet I have gone to 10 out of the last 15 Drafts. One of those Drafts was a virtual Draft and I actually was shown on TV via Zoom for that one so I think that actually makes it 11 out of 15.

It all started as a marketing decision. As you may know I run the world’s largest Miami Dolphins fan club, but it didn’t start out that way. Back in 2008 we didn’t even exist yet, we had a small group of Dolphins fans that watched together but we were hoping to find more. The Dolphins had the first pick in the NFL Draft and back then the Draft was in New York every year so we figured it would be a fun experience and maybe we could find some new local Dolphins fans. By 2009 our crew had grown bigger and just before the Draft my business partner Michelle and I set up social media accounts for a new “official” NYC Dolphins fan club called Dolfans NYC. We hadn’t watched a game as Dolfans NYC yet, but we were building. We made flyers and brought them to the Draft to hand out to every Dolphins fan we could find. It was great outreach. 

After that we went to every NFL Draft in NYC using it to try and get on TV, not for the “fame” but so that Dolphins fans at home watching might realize that there was a club of Dolphins fans in NYC and maybe they should type Dolfans NYC into google and try and find us. Our group got bigger and bigger every year. One year a cop stopped me at the Draft and I thought I had done something wrong. Turns out he just wanted to know where he could get a new Dolfans NYC shirt because his old one got damaged in the wash.  

In 2015 the NFL Draft left New York and for the next three years there was no Dolfans NYC representative at the Draft, but in 2018 the NFL introduced something called the “Inner Circle” where a handful of die hard fans from each team would be sat in special seats near the stage where cameras could film them whenever that team would draft a player. The idea was that it would give the team’s biggest fans a great experience while also giving the NFL great footage to use on TV. The Draft was in Dallas that year and half my family lives there so I had a place to stay and Dolfans NYC had a bunch of airline miles so I flew to Dallas, put on as much Dolfans NYC merch as possible and did whatever I could do get Dolfans NYC on TV. I missed the 2019 Draft, but I got on TV for the 2020 virtual Draft. In 2021 I got a chance to go to Cleveland for the Draft. Everyone had to be vaccinated and wear a mask and there were only 12 people allowed per team, but it was still a great experience and I ended up getting interviewed by Slate which was very weird. 

In 2022 the Dolphins managed to trade almost all of their picks to Kansas City and only had one pick during the first two days of the Draft. I probably wouldn’t have gone but unfortunately I booked my ticket to Vegas about a week before the trade so I was kinda stuck. When the Dolphins traded their first round pick I decided not to go to the first day of the Draft and spend it with my girlfriend who had never been to Vegas.

On Day 2 I went down to the Draft a bit early to check out the NFL Experience which features a bunch of different NFL related activations. There are some autograph signings and games where you do football skills and you could see the Vince Lombardi trophy and all the Super Bowl rings. I feel like it would be really fun for a family, but maybe not so much for a middle aged punk rock dude with a herniated disc and torn hip. It’s also pretty much the same stuff as was in Cleveland last year. 

The Draft itself was very Vegas with a bunch of celebrities and Raiders cheerleaders and for some reason Criss Angel.  The famous faces were a good mix of old and new, plus a lot of legendary players. Barry Sanders was a crowd favorite. The older crowd around me were pumped about Donny Osmond but had no idea who MERO (shout out PPP) or Sean Evans were and I am sure the kids there were really happy to see FaZe Rug, Dr. DisRespect and the TikTok duo who I didn’t even recognize. The Dolphins Draft choice was called out by the legendary Larry Csonka who I didn’t photograph because I was too busy cheering for him.  It worked, and once again Dolfans NYC got on the broadcast.

Okay this post is almost 1000 words already and most of you don’t care at all about this so let’s get to the photos, but I do want to mention that I was mostly hanging out and I didn’t have a press pass or anything so I couldn’t bring a long lens so obviously these photos aren’t of the quality they would be if I was actually covering this for work. Still, I hope you enjoy them.

Click here to see all my photos from the 2022 NFL Draft in Las Vegas!

2022 NFL Draft

Keegan-Michael Key @ 2022 NFL Draft

2022 NFL Draft

2022 NFL Draft

2022 NFL Draft

2022 NFL Draft

Criss Angel @ 2022 NFL Draft

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2019 #MetLifeTakeover Video

Since there is no sports going on right now and you have nothing to do but consume content, it seems like a good time to post the video from the 2019 #MetLifeTakeover. Honestly you probably don’t care about this, but you know what? I can’t just post nudity all day long. I might run out. I do have a new girl update coming soon, but you can see it now if you sign up for my pay site. Just saying… Now let’s get into this football tailgate video thing.

Every time I post about Dolfans NYC I have to do a recap explaining it to people who have no idea I run the largest Miami Dolphins fan club in the world. In 2008 my friend Michelle and I started a Facebook group and Twitter account to organize Miami Dolphins fans who live in NYC so that we could watch games together. That turned into this massive club that is actually a non-profit group that donates tons of money to charity including over $10,000 last year. We do weekly watch parties at our bar Slattery’s Midtown Pub but our main event every year is the #MetLifeTakeover a huge group trip to the Dolphins @ Jets game where we charter busses and buy hundreds (sometimes over 1000) seats to the game. We throw a massive tailgate party and have a blast. 

A bunch of former Dolphins players showed up to our tailgate and the Dolphins presented us a framed jersey for our 10th annual group trip. We had a big party featuring Tropic 2.0 DJing, a live performance from Miami rapper Solo D, a massive all you can eat and drink tailgate from Urban Tailgate, a live taping of a Dolphins radio show, four different community service activations and a photobooth from my old friend Nicky Digital’s new company Out Snapped. We also were sponsored by my friends at Sailor Jerry. 

This video was directed and edited by RizeOptix and hosted by comedian Oscar Collazos. 

Lastly, I should mention that we are raising money for the staff of our bar Slattery’s Midtown Pub who are out of work because of the Coronavirus. If you have any interest in helping you can PayPal whatever you like to dolfansnyc@gmail.com. Thanks so much!

Now enjoy this video if you want to see slow motion videos of me walking and screaming! 

 

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2019 #MetLifeTakeover

After a rough few weeks I finally got back to life this weekend with the 10th annual #MetLifeTakeover. I post about this every year and I have to do a little explanation every time so please skip this paragraph if you know about my weird Miami Dolphins life. In 2008 my friend Michelle and I decided to try and organize a bunch of Miami Dolphins fans to watch football together. We started a Twitter and a Facebook and ran a few ads and by week one of the 2009 season we had a line out the door. We decided we didn’t want to keep any money we made and donating to charity eventually turned into a mission of the club and a few years ago we actually became a non profit. We have donated tens of thousands of dollars to charity over the last decade and have become the largest Miami Dolphins fan club on the planet. Our #MetLifeTakeover event happens every year when the Dolphins come to New Jersey to take on the Jets. We have had as many as 1250 people attend although this years our numbers were a little bit low because the Dolphins are very bad at football. Moving on…

Our 10th annual #MetLifeTakeover event was a huge success despite the lower than average attendance. We still had over 500 people sitting together and I would imagine a lot more at the tailgate. We had a fully catered event with really good food and all you can drink booze. Shout out to Sailor Jerry for sending us a case. We had a photo booth thanks to my pal Nicky Digital’s new company Outsnapped (Check out those photos here.) We had DJ Tropic spinning music and a live performance by a Miami rapper named Solo D. 

We worked with the Dolphins on the event and did a lot for their charity initiative Huddle For 100. We did a raffle that raised over $700 for the Dan Marino Foundation, collected three massive boxes of toys for Toys For Tots, had a table set up for people to write Christmas cards for soldiers stationed overseas and we presented the Miami Dolphins Foundation for a check for $5000. Our total giving on the year has been over $10,000 which was our goal for our 10th season. The Dolphins also brought out their pregame radio show, Cup of Joe and a bunch of Dolphins player alumni. They surprised us on the radio show by presenting us with a framed Dolphins jersey celebrating our 10th year. In two weeks they are honoring us at a game in Miami as well. It’s an accomplishment of which I am very proud. 

Now all that being said, I threw this event on almost no sleep. I was out in the cold for 8 straight hours and I didn’t eat all day because I was so busy. That is all to say, please excuse these photos from being really mediocre. I was just clicking and moving on to whatever thing I had to do next. It was complete chaos. Then again, I doubt you are going to look at this gallery so I guess it doesn’t really matter. 

We are doing this all again next Sunday (although on a much smaller scale and I am leaving the camera at home) and then I go to Miami the following week. All this is coming in a year where the Dolphins are historically bad and we managed to lose to the Jets after a terrible decision by the refs. Still, the charity aspect is enough to keep plugging on, even with the Dolphins being trash. 

I will be back with another Dolphins update towards the end of the season when we release our wrap up video and I will also drop the videos Hotels.com filmed about the event as well. But in the meantime I will keep my Dolphins updates to social media. I will get back to girls and fun stuff in a couple of days when I finally announce my next project.  See you guys soon.

Click here to see all of my photos from the 2019 #MetLifeTakeover.

#MetLifeTakeover

#MetLifeTakeover

#MetLifeTakeover

 

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2019 Juggalo Fight Club

Every year  at the Gathering of the Juggalos the band Wolfpac hosts a radio show live during the day and every year they host a bare knuckle boxing event which seems to get more and more brutal every year. I ended up watching the last day of it which featured two preliminary rounds and a championship round. Plus they did a woman’s fight but no one would fight the one woman who volunteered so she offered to fight a dude. Someone agreed and she kicked his ass. Pretty great.

The guy who won the whole thing seemed very much like he knew what he was doing and I am pretty sure he broke someone’s nose in the final fight of the event. It was kinda great. 

The most important thing to know about these photos is that most of them are in black and white. I abhor digital black and white and I generally think that reason most people convert their color images to b&w is because they took bad color photos and they needed to fix it and that is exactly what is happening here. The fights happened in a red circus tent and it made everything red and horrible looking. It was much easier to make them black and white than to try to color balance them so here we are. At the end I took the final fighters outside for some photos that weren’t under the tent so they are still color. Deal with that.

Anyway, more juggalo photos coming soon, but enjoy these for now.

Click here to see all the fight photos from the 2019 Juggalo Fight Club. 

Juggalo Fight Club

Juggalo Fight Club

Juggalo Fight Club

Juggalo Fight Club

Juggalo Fight Club

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Cockfigthing In Puerto Rico

In 2012 I pitched a story to Vice about cockfighting in Puerto Rico that centered around the upcoming election, Puerto Rican sovereignty and how the US government receives federal tax dollars from legal cock fighting. My editor at Vice was into it and sent me and my friend Brendan Sullivan to Puerto Rico for a few days. Brendan was primarily a travel writer at the time and had a lot of contacts in Puerto Rico and fortunately speaks way better Spanish than I do so he was the perfect partner. We returned to with a ton of great stuff but my editor had mostly transitioned into working for the Vice HBO show and was dealing with some personal stuff in his life and stopped responding to emails. After months had passed I reached out to his boss and they offered to publish the story online at a rate of less than half of what we spent on the trip. I was heartbroken and we turned down the offer thinking we could find somewhere else to publish our story, but it never happened. 

Seven years later my friend, the Skid Row documentarian, Suitcase Joe reached out to me about being in a photography show he was doing. He wanted a bunch of my more edgy photos because the theme was “Outsiders” in photography. I think he wanted a mix of my stuff, but I told him I had all these cockfighitng photos that no one had ever seen and he was really into the idea. So on April 20th, in Los Angeles, I will be showing these cockfighing photos at House of Machines gallery. Suitcase Joe is an amazing photographer and there are a bunch of great artists in the show, so I am glad to be part of it. I am not actually going to be in LA for the show, but I really wish I could make it. 

So today, many, many years after I took these photos I wanted to show you all of these photos. Given that my gallery system is barely functional and there are nearly 500 photos in this edit, I doubt any of you will make a dent in looking at all of these photos, but I just needed to get them up and tell you a little about this amazing trip.

On the first day of our trip we went to Bayamon to a huge legal cockfighting arena called Gallera Las Palmas. We had heard stories of drug dealers shooting people there and some of the locals we met tried to freak us out about the place, but everyone was super nice and willing to talk to us. The actual cockfighting was pretty brutal and the smell of blood and chickenshit is something I will never forget. At one point we saw a guy who lost take his chicken and spin it around, breaking its neck and tossed it in a trashcan. 

From there we went into the center of the island to Coliseo Gallistico Don Alonso in Utuado. This was also a legal cockfighing arena, but very rural and a very different vibe than in the city. Once again everyone was super willing to talk to us and show off their prize birds. Because we came early in the season, the fights at Don Alonso weren’t to the death. The cocks were young and still training and wore little boxing gloves on their spurs called “botas”. The cocks can still peck at each other, but they don’t really hurt themselves and scoring is determined by how many hits the birds get, very much like boxing. No one gambles on these fights and the only money that exchanges hands are to the arena to enter the cocks in these training matches. 

At this point I should probably give you a little more info about cockfighting in general, I mean I probably should have done that two paragraphs ago, but here we are. Cockfighting is called “the gentleman’s game” because all bets are made during the matches from person to person. The arena just accepts entry fees and sells tickets and concessions, all the betting is person to person. The other thing we should talk about is the spurs. I think the standard thinking about cockfighting is that the tiny knives they strap to the legs of the birds are to make the fights more lethal, but that’s not the case. Spurs grow naturally on fighting cocks and they are used to kill any other cock that tries to go near their hens. These birds love to fight and they love to kill. It’s not like dog fighting where you have to train the dogs to attack. These birds are born for it. The attached spurs are actually just to make the fight fair. They don’t want people sharpening or adding poison to the spurs so if everyone files the spurs down and agrees to use the same plastic spurs the fights are more about the bird’s athleticism than their tiny daggers.

After watching a series of fights at Don Alonso we traveled deeper into the island to find an illegal or “clandestino” match. It was pouring rain and we were driving up these crazy winding roads in the mountains and there would just be wild animals around every turn. We ended up El Barrio la Pica, Jayuya, a town where most of the residents are either incarcerated in, or work at the prison there. While the fight was technically illegal, the mayor of the town actually let the organizers use a local basketball court for the fight as long as all the entry fees went to a charity. It was a pretty amazing scene with kids and dogs running around while the adults surrounded this tiny ring cheering on the young bota wearing cocks.

On our final day on the Island we went to a farm where they breed fighting cocks. The owner of the farm put a baby chick in Brendan’s hands and told us that he was “born to kill”. Given their nature is to fight, most of the training involves high perches where the cocks have to jump up to reach. Training them to jump is the biggest part of the training because they need to be able to out jump the other bird and land spurs first on their opponent. They also keep older cocks and there are two reasons for this, the first is that it keeps the birds agitated knowing that there is a threat around, but they also make for good sparring partners. They will but botas on the birds and tape their beaks shut and let them battle so that the young birds learn to fight against a much tougher opponent without getting hurt.

Cockfighing is honeslty a beautiful sport. The birds look so incredible while fighting and the sportsmanship around the betting is admirable. That being said, the death of the cocks seem completely needless. Male chicks are inedible killed anyway, but I am not sure our continental sensibility would allow cockfighing to thrive here, if it was somehow made illegal again. But I could see a lot more people coming around to it if they always fought with botas. But the brutality of a cockfight to the death is something I have no interest in seeing ever again. Even the guides we hired as translators/ security were revolted by the fights. They hated the sport and thought that even though it was a part of their culture they had no interest in having anything to do with it. 

Anyway, I hope you guys take a look at this gallery even though it’s over 450 images. I am really proud of this stuff and I hope someone actually looks at it. Plus if you make it to the end there are a bunch of adorable chicks. And if you are in LA, please check out the show on Saturday! There are some 35mm images from the trip that are in this show that aren’t in the gallery. 

Any money I make selling this work will be donated to Habitat for Humanity in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico isn’t close to rebuilt after Hurricane Maria and needs more help. Jayuya was badly damaged and in great need because of the same small roads we drove up making it much harder to get them the help they needed. You can donate to Habitat for Humanity PR here. 

Lastly, as you might expect there are some dead and bloody birds in this gallery, so if you are sensitive to any of that you probably don’t want to go through the photos, but then again if that’s the case you probably haven’t even read this far down so I guess we probably don’t need the warning.

Now click here to see the photos from our trip to Puerto Rico to document cockfighitng way back in 2012.

Cockfighting In Puerto Rico 

Cockfighting In Puerto Rico

Cockfighting In Puerto Rico

Cockfighting In Puerto Rico

Cockfighting In Puerto Rico

Cockfighting In Puerto Rico

Cockfighting In Puerto Rico

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