The latest fads have turned violence into entertainment, with the risk pf permanent injury or death no deterrent. Aside from the lure of prize money, what’s driving people to compete?
Standing by the deck in Dan “Hangman” Hooker’s Auckland backyard, the referee laid out the rules: no hammer fists, slaps, eye pokes or tackling. No excessive clinching. Fights would last a maximum of one minute. “Basically,” he said, “just stand and bang in the circle.”
He said the judges’ decision would be final: “There’s no fuckin’ arguing about the decision. What the judges say goes. I don’t think many of the fights are going to go to decision.”
Hooker, who has become internationally famous as a fighter in the multibillion-dollar mixed martial arts (MMA) organisation UFC, added, “Don’t tackle them into my bushes; don’t tackle them into my bricks. We’re all here for the same reason, to stand here and trade punches. Toe the line … We’re here cause we want to fight. We want to throw down.”
The scraps are brutal, lots of money is on the line and there is the threat, real or perceived, of the cops ruining everything.
Hooker’s backyard scraps are a cousin of new phenomenon “run it straight”. Seeded and promoted via social media, run it straight is a one-on-one tackle game that’s bubbled up from yards and school grounds. The phenomenon has spawned multiple professional leagues with different names but the same basic idea: two men running directly at each other at full speed, each hoping to smash the other over in order to win cash prizes.
Run it straight’s popularity has renewed attention to the sport of men concussing each other for cash, although, of course, the genre is nothing new. From boxing and MMA fights, there’s long been money in pain – and an audience for it.
In Depression-era America, people would compete in dance marathons that could last weeks or sometimes even months, hoping to win cash prizes as high as the equivalent of a year’s wages. Richard Elliott, a promoter of such events, noted that although audiences didn’t turn up to “see ’em die”, they did come “to see ’em suffer”, and to watch them fall down.
The lure of the prize pot is just as relevant today. Times are tough and getting tougher. Last year marked New Zealand’s biggest annual decline in employment since the Global Financial Crisis.
According to Kiwibank, of the 32,000 New Zealanders who lost their jobs in 2024, 85% were men and the jobs were concentrated in male-dominated occupations: technicians, trades workers, machinery operators and drivers.
Champ Betham, the winner of one of the first run it straight events, billed as the Runit Championship League and held at Trusts Arena, Henderson, in May, took home $20,000. He told RNZ, “I think that’s what the public don’t really see ‒ it’s hard these days working long shifts and your pay cheque still doesn’t really cut it. So, this is a massive blessing to a whole heap of us to pretty much try and win $20K or whatever for a couple hours’ work.
“I’m feeling blessed. I think run it has opened up a couple of doors for a lot of us, especially Pasifika people.”
Scraps are brutal
In Hooker’s backyard, the contestants are getting ready and phones are poised to record the event. But first, a blessing. A man in a black hoodie bearing the word “Jesus” brings the fighters together in a circle, the gloved hands with which they’d soon smash each other in the face resting gently on each other’s backs. The man says, “Let us pray.” Everyone bows their heads.
“Heavenly Father, thank you for bringing us all together for this event. I ask you to bless every one of us here today, Father, and ensure no one gets seriously injured. Bless the organisers of this event, Father God, and that it can continue to produce opportunities for other young men out there – young warriors. We ask all these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.”
The first two men step into the circle and begin to throw down. It lasts five seconds and the same number of punches to the head, the last of which sends the loser face first into Hooker’s lawn.
The vibe among the spectators is upbeat but also on edge. The scraps are brutal, lots of money is on the line and there is the threat, real or perceived, of the cops ruining everything.
The police chopper hovers overhead for a while. Hooker later makes a joke about his taxpayer dollars at work.
As the referee predicts, not many of the fights go the distance. One ends when someone hurts his arm punching someone too hard. The final is won by former pro boxer Panuve “Wild Boy” Helu, who dropped his opponent in the final and took home $50,000.
Once all the fighting is done, a man and a woman perform a haka, then the man shakes Hooker’s hand, and says, “Thank you for the opportunity again. Too much.”
“Too much, Dan,” someone else adds.
Hooker says, “There’s plenty more. I wanna get the boys paid. There’s a lot of money on the line. I wanna give it to the boys.”
He thanks everyone for coming. He says the cops had been around, “but they don’t understand that it’s the knuckle game and there’s nothing but respect here”.
He says he wants to do this regularly and tells everyone that if they put on a good show, he’ll bring them back next time.
Then he tells everyone to get the fuck out of his house. Everyone laughs.
Face of the tournament
Hooker, who has 865,000 followers on Instagram, was the face of the tournament, but the money behind it was an Australian influencer called TheDoctor, aka Ashtin Slots, aka Ashtin James, whose social media presence is mostly him playing slot machines.
TheDoctor has 348,000 followers on Instagram, where his top pinned post is a video of him and a friend in a casino hitting a jackpot of $267,385. The audio on that clip, that captured the win, goes as follows: “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my fucking god, holy shit, oh my god, let’s go, let’s go ...
TheDoctor ponied up $50 grand for the winner of Hooker’s tournament, along with $1000 for each competitor and presumably some extra for Hooker to promote and host it. According to Hooker, the fights got more than 300 million views across all platforms.
Violence as entertainment
Meanwhile, run it straight in New Zealand has so far racked up many concussions, some convulsions and one death. Ryan Satterthwaite, 19, died of a head injury after taking part in an impromptu game with friends in Palmerston North.
It’s also racked up a growing pile of money for competitors, organisers and sponsors. It has been condemned by everyone from health professionals to former Kiwi league players to Act Party leader David Seymour.
A group of academics, doctors and experts from universities in New Zealand, the US and the UK recently released the following statement about such events: “These businesses basing for-profit ‘sporting’ events off of a dangerous social media challenge epitomises the transformation of violence into entertainment, augmented by social media.
“These activities, like so-called ‘Dwarf Tossing’ before them, turn real human risk and harm into a spectacle. They represent what medical historian Stephen Casper calls ‘perfect brain injury delivery systems’ – efficient packages of harm that transform the risk of severe brain injury into viral entertainment.”
In the most recent run it tournament final (which shifted from Auckland to Dubai because the proposed venue, Trusts Arena, refused to host it), the winner received $200,000.
Ciara Cremin, head of gender studies at the University of Auckland, says rather than critiquing individuals taking part in dangerous activities, we should consider a critique of a society that doesn’t afford some people the same opportunities as others who are more privileged.
But she says, there is also a more general societal problem whereby status for men is acquired through being better and stronger than others, and the goal is – at all costs – not to be seen as weak or vulnerable.
“The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once said the worst thing that can happen to a man is to be turned into a woman,” says Cremin. “The psychoanalyst Robert Stoller said, ‘The first rule of being a man is don’t be a woman.’ And the late African-American philosopher, bell hooks, put it nicely: ‘To become a man, one has to undergo psychic mutilation: to mutilate or repress those qualities that are associated with femininity: tenderness, kindness, caring for others.’”
Historian Jock Phillips, whose 1987 book A Man’s Country? remains the seminal account of 20th-century Pākehā masculinity in New Zealand, says repressing and concealing pain has long been a characteristic of male culture, and not just locally.
“Some would say that it emerges out of the worship of the warrior tradition among males, both here and internationally; and of course, in New Zealand, it has particular expression in our worship of tough All Blacks forwards and heroic infantry.
“Charles Upham’s extraordinary repression of pain in World War II and Colin Meads’ contempt for showing pain (it was ‘sissy’) are good examples. In a game in South Africa in 1970, Colin Meads continued to play with a broken arm and at the end his only comment was, ‘At least we won.’”
In the 1950s and 60s, New Zealand masculinity was famously said to be defined by rugby, racing and beer. But Phillips says that’s no longer the case.
“I have not done any real thinking on this issue for a long time,” he says now. “But my impression is that we are now a much more diverse society than in the 50s and 60s when rugby and beer ruled.” He says the numbers playing and attending rugby games have fallen, and most of the good rugby players are now Polynesian, with the white middle class increasingly turning to soccer. Massive drinking is now part of a sub-culture, he says, rather than the norm.
Furthermore, we are becoming more urban, meaning our cultural idols are more frequently from the media (Peter Jackson, Lorde) rather than “the old Colin Meads/Edmund Hillary stereotype”.
When Phillips wrote A Man’s Country? widespread use of the internet was still years away. As a result, we are now far more open to influence than we were then from people we wouldn’t have heard from, or would at least have heard a lot less from – foreign leaders, for instance. It seems increasingly clear that their influence is not evenly distributed.
In March, The Spinoff reported the finding from Talbot Mills Research that only one demographic group in New Zealand had returned a positive net approval score for Donald Trump’s presidency and that group was men under 40. Their net approval score for Trump was +14. By comparison, for New Zealand women in the same age group, the net approval score was -39.
As political commentator Max Rashbrooke observed, if that suggests a drift to the political right among young men, that hasn’t translated to voting patterns in our own elections.
“Whereas, before 2004, young men were slightly more right-wing than the country at large, they have for the past two decades been slightly more left-leaning. The culture wars haven’t left Kiwi males untouched – the uber-misogynist Andrew Tate, for instance, has a following here – but the impact on voting appears negligible,” Rashbrooke noted in the Spinoff in June.
Cremin says what’s happening at run it straight events is “very, very different” from what’s happening in the “manosphere” – a collection of online communities and voices, of which Tate is arguably the most prominent. They promote misogynistic, regressive and harmful masculinist attitudes to an audience that she says is “very white, very semi-educated”.
She also cautions against mapping phenomena from the US and Europe directly onto the New Zealand context.
‘Eat their words’
A few days after watching 32 men punch each other in the face at his house, Hooker gave an interview about the event on TheMacLife YouTube channel (1.6 million subscribers), belonging to Irish UFC legend Conor McGregor.
Hooker told the interviewer that “sensationalist journalists” and “a couple of boxing old heads” had jumped to conclusions about his event, without knowing what was actually going on.
“They have the same amount of information as everyone else, and they just make assumptions. And when you make assumptions, you make an ass out of you and an ass out of me.”
He went on, “Once you watch the whole thing, I think then people will really have to eat their own words and shut up, because they’ll see how cool it was. They’ll see how much respect was there.”
It’s not about angry people hurting each other. It’s about broken people rebuilding themselves.
On his Facebook account (805,000 followers), Hooker shared a post from a small MMA gym in East Auckland called Eagle DS (687 followers). Beneath it, he wrote: “My smart friend explaining what I did.”
Eagle DS’s post reads, in part, as follows: “Lately, events like King of the Streets – backed by none other than Dan Hooker – have been hitting the headlines, and not always in the way they deserve. The media seizes the optics: rough edges, raw personalities, hard lives. They try to paint these events as dangerous, chaotic, or glorified violence. But they’re missing the point.
“What’s happening in these events is real. It’s raw. But it’s not reckless. It’s healing. It’s growth. It’s discipline born from adversity. And it’s time the public understood the truth about MMA.
“Because here’s the truth: MMA isn’t what you think it is. It’s not about angry people hurting each other. It’s about broken people rebuilding themselves. It’s not about domination – it’s about control. It’s not about violence – it’s about peace through struggle.
“People don’t walk into gyms to become violent. They walk in to stop being victims. To channel their pain into purpose. To take their trauma and make it into strength.
“And Dan Hooker gets that. I know the kind of man he is. He’s not a thug. He’s not promoting gang culture. He’s not feeding chaos. He’s building a bridge – a pathway out. He’s giving the guys who live on the edge of society a new lens to see themselves through. One that says: ‘You are more than your past. Let’s show the world what you’re capable of when you’re in control.’”
Forging community
One of the competitors at Hooker’s event was wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet. The man’s name was Jon Paul Te Rito, but Hooker called him Fightdog, After stories about Fightdog appeared in traditional media outlets, he was referred to police for a possible breach of his bail conditions.
Hooker drove from Auckland to Tauranga for Fightdog’s hearing, but before doing so, he wrote a letter in the man’s defence.
In the letter, he called the one-minute scraps tournament a “transformational occasion” and “a vehicle for personal growth”. He wrote that combat sport “helps men heal, build self-esteem and confidence, regulate their emotions, and forge community”.
“As a professional MMA fighter, and a coach of my own gym, I have seen the benefits of combat sport firsthand, I have seen it change lives for the better. It’s why I care deeply about martial arts, the martial art community and these events. I believe it has the power to make better men.”
Appearing on The Rock radio station soon after the event, Hooker told his interviewers that Fightdog is not the type of person who’s going to sit around singing Kumbaya and holding hands.
He said he had asked Fightdog after the event if he felt better.
“He said, ‘Yeah, I felt incredible.’
“Well, that’s therapy.”
Something wrong?
What, if anything, does all this tell us about men? Are events like the one-minute scraps and run it straight evidence that something is wrong with men?
Raewyn Connell, a professor at the University of Sydney and an internationally renowned scholar of masculinities has written: “Can we blame ‘the male brain’, testosterone, or genetics?
“Are young men hangovers from a primitive world where males fight cave bears? Those are bedtime stories. More than a hundred years of research looking for broad psychological differences between men and women have found remarkably few. Studies involving millions of people show that men as a group, and women as a group, are psychologically very similar. This finding goes against many of our stereotypes; but the evidence is strong.
“We cannot explain men’s involvement in severe violence by generalised sex differences in mentalities.”
Three weeks after Hooker’s first one-minute scraps tournament, a new video appeared on his Instagram feed. It featured Hooker and New Zealand’s greatest MMA fighter, former UFC champion Israel Adesanya.
On the video, Hooker announced the one-minute scraps were coming back. This time, though, the competitors would be women.
He said, “We’re gonna find out who’s the baddest bitch in town.”
Adesanya holds up five fingers and says, “50k, one minute, just as long as it takes to finish your man, to finish these bitches …”
Two and a half weeks later, videos from the event began appearing on Hooker’s Instagram. The first showed two women, in an undisclosed indoor location, punching each other in the face. One landed a huge right hand on her opponent’s jaw. The woman’s neck twisted violently. She fell on her backside, her head rolling around on her neck.
Underneath the video Hooker wrote: “Let the girls play.”