Blood, cuts and more

If you have a weak stomach, are against violent sports, and are squeamish when you see blood and gore, I apologize for hurting your feelings. I’m sure we will have a lot of calls and letters to the editor about the photos that we published in our sports section today from last night’s Friday Night Fights at the Androscogin Bank Colisee in Lewiston. It is about as brutal a sport as there is, and there is no shortage of fans. There were more people at that event than most others at the Colisee, so it is not without a following, and certainly deserves coverage. I decided to submit an overall from above for the front page as I know photos like the one that led the back section of our sports page, right, would not pass the “Cheerios test.” It’s something we refer to when considering the reaction of people when they are opening up their newspaper having breakfast. If we feel some of them will throw up in their Cheerios after seeing the photo, we will consider not running it. Compassion is part of our mission statement, and it is not our intention to shock people or throw something out front just for the “gratuitous violence” factor. For that reason, and also that it was pretty cool and the average spectator never gets to see the venue from this high angle, I submitted the photo below. It was a really long night for me. The card started at 7:00, but I arrived a little before 6 as I needed to turn on the lights we have in the rafters at the Colisee and make sure the miles of our extension cords have not been compromised. With all the events taking place at the Colisee between events we cover, promoters often use our power strips and take our extension cords and reuse them for their equipment. Such was the case last night where I had to go searching for my cords. I only needed three lights for this event, not needing the other four we have set up for lighting the entire hockey surface. It was a good thing as some of our other cords were being used by the fight lights. I decided not to make a big deal of it. However, the amount of electricity being drawn from the one power strip caused so much of a drain when my lights flashed and recycled, it tripped the fuse on the power strip every few minutes, causing me to need to reset it, and limit me to staying in the rafters to keep on top of that, so I didn’t get much variety of photos. I also needed to arrive early to test the new MacBook Pro we got in the photo dept. I have always used a PC, so I wanted to make sure I could make it work. I had one question, but a quick call to Amber, a Mac user, and it was working like a charm. The event seemed to drag on forever. I didn’t leave the Colisee until 1:15 AM. I wanted to stay for the two championship fights as one of them included a local guy from our circulation area, and one from the other since we were not staffing the event with a staff reporter and the Ernie Clark from the Bangor Daily News was giving us his story, and the other championship bout had a fighter from their coverage area, so I wanted to help them out. When I was done, I only had to drive two blocks to get home, he had a 2 hour drive, and I thought my day was long. Since I started the day at 1:00 PM with a football game in Lisbon, it WAS another long day for me, but no real stressful. With the 400mm lens, sunshine and plenty of time, I got some great photos from the football game. I have a honey do list a mile long that I need to go take care of, but I am hoping I might be able to sneak a quarter or two of the Patriots game in this afternoon. Sunday’s are supposed to be a day of rest, but usually they are a day like all the rest.