Bullfighting for Them Is Deadly Serious Avocation : Amateurs Set Aside Regular Careers for Dangers of the Ring

By day, Coronado resident Bruce Hutton artfully stripes cars for San Diego automobile dealers. By night, he spins records for company parties and weddings.

Several Sundays a year, though, Hutton practices a darker art before an audience that demands not the latest dance tune, but a dance with death. He becomes a bullfighter.

Hutton, 41, counts himself among a handful of active amateur bullfighters in Southern California. As often as five times a year, these middle-age men don tight pants and a haughty stance as they prepare to be humbled by a creature they love and respect. A creature they will kill to preserve its dignity.

Called aficionados practicos, or practicing fans, they fight primarily in Tijuana and Tecate, and occasionally in major Mexican towns on the Texas border. Some, like San Diego restaurateur Paul Dobson, have loyal followings of their own. All share a fervent addiction to the centuries-old pageant of controlled violence.

Eager to Fight Again

Lyn Sherwood, 51, who runs a public-relations firm in San Juan Capistrano and publishes the world’s only English-language bullfighting magazine, said, “The passion to want to go out and do it is like withdrawal. It gnaws at you. I’m very anxious right now to fight again.”

Pepe Canales, 40 and the owner of a transmission repair shop in El Cajon, adds, “Once you get a taste of it, you’re poisoned forever. No matter how old--even if we’re on crutches--we’re still going to go out and do it.”

Amateur bullfighting can be a pricey passion. These days, aficionados practicos may pay $1,000 or more for a bull to fight. If the corrida de toros is a charity benefit, they pay less or sometimes nothing.

Like most amateur toreros, Sherwood, Hutton and Canales were teens when first bitten by the gusano, the mythical worm said to infect one with a lifelong craving for bullfighting. Sherwood’s first fight was at age 18, Hutton’s and Canales’ at 14.

Never mind that their bodies aren’t quite what they used to be. In the ring, pot bellies become less noticeable, and receding hairlines appear insignificant. When they put on the matador’s suit of lights-- traje de luces-- their bodies seem to literally inflate with all the pride and valor and strutting machismo that matadors wear like a crown.

“I actually become a different person,” Hutton said.

Just what attracts these men to the bullring to face nearly half a ton of furious flesh isn’t easy to define. For some, it’s the high drama and living art.

“I feel that I am an artist, and I feel that I can still create something, so I don’t want to let it go,” said 48-year-old Bill Torres of Pico Rivera, one of the Los Angeles area’s few practicing amateurs.

“You see, you hate to see anything go,” said Torres, a gas company supervisor whom many consider the best aficionado practico in Southern California.” It’s like you’re getting older, and you don’t attract the young girls any more. It’s the same thing with bullfighting, almost the exact same thing.”

Center of Grand Ritual

Being the center of attention in such a grand ritual and colorful tradition also is a definite ego stroke.

“You feel like cock-of-the-walk when you’re doing that, you really do,” Hutton admits. “Be honest. Girls are looking up to you, you got tight pants on. That can pump up your juices a little bit.”

But the crowd’s stroke has a double edge. Although audiences will wildly reward the matador for a brave, artful fight, a sloppy, cowardly performance draws derision and humiliation.

“The bull can only kill you,” Sherwood said. “The crowd can castrate you.”

Confronting and conquering his fears is a practico’s greatest challenge--and, some will say, the biggest attraction.

Serious gorings are rare in amateur bullfighting, in part because they usually fight 2-year-old bulls rather than the full-grown 4-year-olds that professionals fight. “The greatest enemy that we got is not the bull, but ourselves,” said Canales, who fights more often in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Tex. “The bull doesn’t make mistakes. He’s there to capitalize on our mistakes.”

Raw fear bested Sherwood for nearly 10 years after he was ordered out of a ring for his own safety. During that period, he says he couldn’t fight a cow the size of a German shepherd dog. He finally learned self-hypnosis to rid himself of the trepidation that gripped him.

“It’s a rush,” he said. “To be able to be as terrified as I am and to step into the ring with a bull and to hold your feet steady in the sand. . . . It’s the second greatest feeling in the world when it goes well. It’s the worst when it doesn’t.”

Still, to this day, Sherwood vomits and gets chills in a hot shower during the weeks preceding a fight. Hutton withdraws into isolation. “It used to be that I couldn’t even talk or whatever . . . the fear was so incredible,” he said.

For Roy Badillo, an Oceanside practico who no longer fights bulls but horned cows (which aren’t killed), “the shakes” come on suddenly and last for about a day as he dwells on past injuries and the danger soon to be faced.

Canales says he acts out an entire bullfight in his dreams the last few days before a fight. “My wife just can’t sleep with me then.”

Claims He’s Not Afraid

Dobson, the restaurateur and smallest built of the amateurs, is the only one who denies he’s afraid of the bull or the audience.

He says he must spend so much time in the restaurant business trying to please people that bullfighting is something he does to please only himself.

“I honestly go to have fun,” said Dobson, 45, who began fighting at the relatively late age of 33. “It’s the one thing I do that I just completely do not think about work.”

Not that the fun isn’t often painful. “I usually end up looking like I was in an automobile accident,” he said.

Every aficionado practico has suffered broken bones or separations. And some have brushed death a little too closely for comfort.

Badillo’s right eyelid was flayed and a chunk ripped from his cheek in one goring that required 32 stitches. Another time, the supermarket dairy manager broke several ribs but was saved from a chest goring when the tip of the horn snagged on his shirt and jacket.

Canales’ upper lip and nose needed reconstruction after one fight.

A bull once flung Dobson into the air, slashed a gash across his back on the way down, then proceeded to angrily thrash Dobson about--as he dangled by his jacket off a horn.

“I really thought I was dead,” Dobson said. “I’m up there thinking, how in hell did I ever get involved in this stupid activity.”

That the hugely powerful creature inflicting these injuries is the object of so much affection and admiration is a fact only bullfighters fully understand.

“I love them,” Hutton said without reservation. “I think they’re the most magnificent animal on the face of the earth.”

Dobson, describing the 20 or so years he has spent immersed in the world of bullfighting, said, “This has been a long, long love affair with the bulls.”

Yet, these men kill bulls, a practice none tries to defend on moral grounds.

“This is toro bravo, “ said Sherwood, who is also an accomplished bullfight photographer. “His death demands justification, and the only justification is the pursuit of art.”

Honorable Way to Die

Dying in a fight to the death also is more honorable and dignified than being shot in a slaughterhouse, says Torres, who began fighting when he was 23.

“If I had to be an animal someday, I would want to die like a bull, a brave bull.”

Still others make an argument paralleling that of bighorn sheep hunters: Were it not for bullfighting, the species would become extinct.

“They serve no other function,” Hutton said. “The only thing keeping them alive is the fact that there are bullfights.”

The men bristle at the all-too-frequent suggestion that they must be sadists and animal haters to kill bulls. Most of them say they do not hunt, and all profess to love animals. Hutton says he throws fish back after catching them.

“I couldn’t kill anything,” Dobson said. “I mean, I’m that way. But I kill bulls.” He shrugs at the obvious paradox.

No practico, however, takes the death of the bull lightly.

“I have such a feeling for these animals I want it over with as rapidly as possible,” Hutton said. “I can’t describe for you how terrible I feel if I take three or four or five swords (to kill the bull).”

Bullfight critics and animal-rights groups also have long claimed that bulls are mistreated before a fight--their testicles stuck with needles and their backs beaten with sledgehammers--to heighten their anger. They also maintain that cotton is stuffed in a bull’s ears and nose, and petroleum jelly rubbed in its eyes during the fight.

The claims infuriate los practicos.

“This is the biggest bunch of garbage I’ve ever heard,” Hutton said. “These bulls are absolutely pure when they come into the ring.”

And a bullfighter’s safety depends on the bull’s seeing well so that it charges the muleta, or cape, not the matador, he adds.

The only alteration to a bull in the ring with an amateur is to its horns, Hutton said. A quarter-inch is clipped off each horn and refiled to a point in hopes that a bull’s deadly accuracy with its horns may be thrown off.

Another concern of the practicos is that amateur fighting is a dying love in Southern California. Almost no aficionados are younger than 40. The practicos are trying to fight this through Los Muleteros, an amateur bullfighters’ club in San Diego.

Hutton finds it difficult to understand why it is proving such a tough task.

“This is something that has been with me for all my life,” he said. “It’s not going to go away. I’ll probably keep fighting until I’m 60 or 70 years old. It’s the most important thing in my life.”