Chas Bowling isn't just a fight promoter, as his business card says. Bowling, a 1999 Ball State graduate with a degree in political science, isn't just a boxing trainer, as he was at Golden Gloves April 8 to Ben Shockley, Billy Kidd and Jeffrey Gonsales. Chas Bowling is a promoter, trainer, manager and avid fan of Mixed Martial Arts.
Mixed Martial Arts, or MMA, is a combination of just about every kind of fighting.
"What it is is a mixture of every art of marital arts. Boxing is a martial art, karate is a martial art, wrestling is a martial art," Bowling said. "Everything you've heard that has physical pugilism, which is any kind of fighting, any type of contact that is man on man. And that's where the name MMA came from. You take every martial art, you're mixing them up and trying to become dominant at each aspect of the martial arts and use it in a controlled atmosphere."
Bowling began fighting at the young age of 8 when he learned to box. Bowling continued boxing until he was 12, when he took up karate and eventually became state, national and world champ in his class.
"I continued with the karate and that form of martial arts until I came to Ball State," he said. "My karate school's in Anderson, and being in college it was pretty tough to drive three or four nights a week to go to Anderson to train. So I found the PAL club, which is the Police Athletic League here in Muncie, and found they had a boxing coach, and myself and my roommate came in four nights a week and we learned how to box. Well, I was a natural kicker from my karate, so they started doing kick boxing."
Bowling, now well trained in boxing, kick boxing and karate, saw a Pay-Per-View event in 1995 called "The Ultimate Fighting Championship" which put fighters of different styles and studies in the ring to see who was the better fighter.
"I immediately fell in love with it," he said. "I mean, that's what I've done all my life is fight. This was the most pure form of fighting I had ever seen."
After watching "The Ultimate Fighting Championship" Bowling traveled to Chicago once a week to train with the brother of one of the fighters on the show. At this time, Bowling began to build up injuries. To continue to live the fighting lifestyle, he would have to find another way.
"My friends were still fighting, and they didn't have an outlet to showcase their talents. I was going to watch these shows, and I started thinking I could do that. I could promote a show and give these guy an outlet to fight," Bowling said. "Well, my buddies were wrestlers, and with all this training on the ground, we weren't able to showcase those talents. So I started doing MMA, and I created my own organization, and I started holding shows, and I've been doing shows since then."
Bowling continues as a trainer, manager and promoter to this day, training fighters in Muncie in a variety of fighting styles, while also managing some of the world's top MMA fighters. Because of his unique background in fighting, Bowling gets people from all sorts of backgrounds that want him to train them.
Training with Bowling is not easy, however.
"He pushed hard, and helped out a lot," Kidd said. "When we don't show up for training, he'll call and bitch us out. He makes it fun though."
Kidd, nicknamed Billy the Kid, is moving on to fight in the Golden Gloves championship next week.
Bowling lives, breathes and sleeps fighting, expects his fighters to do the same and has a great love for MMA.
"It's two guys going out there and giving everything they've got," he said. "It's the most pure form of man, in my opinion."
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