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Outside, a white stucco facade, a small marquee and a large black-and-white painting of the star of Casablanca help drinkers and dancers home in on Bogart’s discothèque, set amid glittering car dealerships, fast-food joints and furniture shops full of Oriental rugs and Naugahyde “suites” on Tucson’s East Speedway Boulevard. Inside, a hand-printed sign exhorts visitors: PLEASE, PLEASE. NO HATS OR HEADGEAR. NO MOTORCYCLE JACKETS, NO T SHIRTS, NO BARE FEET.

Still, Bogart’s is a disco with a difference. Like a growing number of bars and dance halls in Arizona and elsewhere in the Southwest, it invites the evening customers to mix their pleasure with a certain amount of pain on “boxing night.” At 8:30 on any Tuesday, the M.C. at Bogart’s can be found, microphone in hand, asking for help. What he needs are more volunteer boxers. “O.K., folks. We’ve got six fighters signed up. If you’ve got any friends, give them a call and get them down here.” Seated just inside the door, a young woman asks all comers, “Are you going to box?” Spectators have to pay a $2 cover charge. Fighters who go three rounds get in free. And that rule about no T shirts or bare feet is waived for them.

By 9 o’clock, a couple of hundred customers are seated on red vinyl chairs around small, black cocktail tables, while at long bars on opposite sides of the room, shots and beers are dispensed to small clusters of men. The room is dim despite red, orange, green and blue lights. Over one end of the wooden parquet dance floor, though, the ceiling is raised a few feet to accommodate spotlights of various hues, a mirrored revolving ball and two suspended slide projectors. On Tuesdays, four floodlights shine down on a 14-ft. by 14-ft. boxing ring, complete with cushioned corners and a taut canvas mat. After a few more boxers weigh in on the thigh-high Detecto scale off to the side of the ring, the M.C. and three judges take their seats at a long table on the bandstand. A bell rings, and the casual visitor is startled to see the first contestants. Five-year-old Shawn Serface and five-year-old Dan Casarez are in their corners having their faces smeared with Vaseline to reduce the chance of cuts. Their hands are wrapped in gauze and placed inside huge (16 oz.) boxing gloves. Shawn tries to spit out the rubber mouthpiece. “I don’t want it,” he tells his cornerman-father, who shoves it back in. As the two boxers get their instructions from the referee, Dan interrupts with his own bit of advice. “No kicking,” he blurts out to his opponent.

The bell sounds. Dan and Shawn, all 90 Ibs. of them, start flailing at each other’s heads. Dan lands a roundhouse right, and Shawn is dazed; his blank blue-eyed stare suddenly brings a hush over the audience. But after a second the boy regains his senses and goes on the attack. He lands a right jab squarely on Dan’s nose; Dan reels and then stands perfectly still. In a moment, his face contorts in pain, fear, shock or whatever else a child feels when he’s clunked hard. As the tears begin pouring, his father Dan Sr. grabs him out of the ring and holds him. “Barbaric,” mutters Craig Smith, 23, sitting at ringside. Not so, say the two boys’ parents, sitting together after the fight. “They’re good friends and fighting all the time anyway,” grins Shawn’s father, Victor, 28, a carpenter. “I think it will help them mature.” Adds Dan Casarez Sr., 27, a Tucson truck driver: “It’ll toughen them up. I’m learning to box here too, so I can teach this guy. He’ll be my champion.”

Champions are what many of the grown fighters at Bogart’s want to be, if only for a few glorious minutes. Between bouts, the theme from Rocky comes up on the sound system. But there seem to be as many Martys fighting—folks at loose ends just looking for something to do. Randy McDoniels, 32, an unemployed construction worker, and Steve Slaymaker, 31, a heavy-equipment operator, are fighting, according to Randy, “just for the good times.” Others stepping onto the scale express similar reasons: “Hell, my friends are doing it,” or “We’re out for some laughs.”

As he climbs into the ring, McDoniels is cheered on by his buddies. “I got 250 on you, Randy!” yells someone in the crowd. But Slaymaker takes the bout more seriously. Recently released from Arizona State Prison, where he served five years for manslaughter—he killed a man in an unscheduled barroom brawl over a pool game—Slaymaker kisses his friend McDoniels on the cheek before helping him into the ring. To no avail. A minute into the first round, the wild-swinging, grabbing McDoniels is in trouble. His opponent, Tom Salas, 30, steadily moves in, jabbing, and connects with a left cross; McDoniels is down, and out for the count.

In the next bout, 182-lb. Slaymaker, fighting in blue-denim overalls and bare feet, faces Gerard Ranare, a younger (20) fighter of the same weight. Slaymaker, like McDoniels before him, is slowed by his prefight drinking; Ranare is pure concentration. He bloodies Slaymaker’s nose with a right uppercut, and the fight is stopped by the referee. Slaymaker is helped to his feet, congratulates Ranare with a hug, and a forced smile.

Both Salas and Ranare seem to be out for more than a lark—or the winner-take-all $10 prize money (losers get a couple of free drinks). Salas, a railway shipping worker, comes to fight “to get the fears inside of me out.” Ranare, who grew up in the South Bronx, came to Arizona a year ago to beat a heroin habit, which, happily, he did. “My idea,” he says, “is to work out my frustrations from work and from the old lady.” Though the club tries to match fighters evenly, any two people who want to fight each other, no matter what their experience or size, are allowed to go at it.

Club Manager Joe Kacha, 49, a boxer with the Albanian national team before he defected in 1957, says, “We do get some mismatches when two guys want to have a grudge fight. It’s good, though, because grudge fighters usually end up friends.”

Barroom brawling began to catch on in Arizona about a year ago, and Kacha finds it brings Bogart’s an extra $ 1,000 each Tuesday night. The ring and additional help cost $200. Referee Paco Flores gets $35. Says Kacha, “We’d do lousy without it.”

Kacha and other operators of barroom fights in Arizona have an ongoing grudge match with the state athletic commission, newspaper editorial writers who do not share the view that violence is as American as cherry pie, and others who would like to see the matches banned. Last year the athletic commission went to court to get the fights stopped but failed to get an injunction, since the prize money was too little for the fights to be classified pro bouts (the minimum is $30).

Critics argue that the chances for injury are great and the absence of doctors or prefight physicals makes the threat even graver. Thus far, however, the large gloves and the fast work of Referee Flores, once a high-ranked junior middleweight, have prevented anything more than split lips, black eyes and minor cuts.

Says Flores: “I look for their eyes getting glassy. After the eight count, I usually give them 15 or 20 seconds. It’s more than a year now and no one has gotten hurt.”

In truth, if there is any bloodthirstiness in the crowd, it is hard to discern. Bogart’s patrons usually have to be prompted by the M.C. to cheer the fighters. Attracted by local advertising, many customers .seem to come out of sheer curiosity, which critics might regard as a sign of callousness or decadence.

Paul Humphrey, a young Englishman who teaches philosophy of science at the University of Arizona, does not think so. The fights remind him of traveling circuses back home, where pros challenge “local yokels” in boxing booths. After watching a dozen matches at Bogart’s, Humphrey says, “When one of the guys is losing, you really do feel like you’d like to get in there and do better than he is. That’s part of the interest.”

Insurance Investigator Chuck Poole and his wife Donna are “pretty much hooked” on disco fights. “It’s a cross between comedy and some damn good boxing. Any man can look at it and say, ‘If I had the nerve. . .’ You can sit here and with some imagination watch your self and get drunk — that’s the idea. It’s great entertainment.”

But for those who choose to fight, vicarious pleasure is not enough. As the fight card ends after three hours of boxing, dancers take over the ring. The room resounds with disco song lyrics: “Macho, macho man, I want to be a macho man.” An anthem of the boxers? Maybe so. But at least one of them at Bogart’s doesn’t need the fighting to assert his manhood to friends or strangers. “I like fighting here,” says Gerard Ranare. “You know you’re not going to die. Back in the streets in New York, you’re not so sure.”

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