Boxing used to be called “the sweet science,” referring to a time when boxers would wear lab coats and hit each other with Erlenmeyer flasks until one of them died. Eventually, the lab coats were replaced by racist shorts and the flasks gave way to gloves and so we decided it was okay for elementary school students to do it. Seriously, the Silver Gloves tournament, the junior version of the Golden Gloves, is open to boxers aged 10 to 15.
Those age restrictions didn’t stop teachers at St. Louis’s Adventure Learning Center from giving 4-year-olds some Hulk Hands and telling them to beat the s**t out of each other. This happened two years ago and now mother Nicole Merseal is suing because, and I swear this is true, nothing happened to the daycare, though they did fire the two teachers in charge at the time. According to Fox 2 St. Louis, this is because the prosecutor’s office believed no laws were broken by the toddler fights.
The St Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office provided the following statement about declining to prosecute the teachers, “There was insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that any laws were violated. However, that does not diminish the incredibly poor judgment by these adults who had the responsibility to safely supervise these children.”
There’s 30 minutes of video of teachers egging kids on to beat each other up, but I have heard that toddler fight clubs are only illegal if you bet on them.
That one kid really beats the hell out of the other one, as you can in this video from CBS This Morning. I love how one of the anchors says how “disturbing” the video they’re playing on a loop is.
It’s really funny to me that this story broke the same week both Arrow and Riverdale have prison fight club storylines going. Of course, you can’t even throw a toddler with CTE and not hit a CW show doing a main character in prison arc, and most of those have fight clubs. To Supergirl’s credit, their illegal metahuman fight club episode wasn’t set in a prison, so that’s something. I have a feeling Greg Berlanti is already on the phone buying the rights to this story. The CW is going to have to put something on Saturday nights next season, after all.