To get to Great Falls from Missoula you take Highway 200 going east across Montana, out past where the bighorn sheep congregate on the road alongside the Blackfoot River, out past Potomac, with its lone bar/restaurant/gas station, out toward that open expanse of high green prairie along the Rocky Mountain Front, where golden eagles ride stiff air currents looking for roadkill and mountain ranges sit distant and shimmering with melting spring snow on either side.

Then you drift through the town of Lincoln, which, if it is known at all, is known only for being the base of operations for Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Then it’s Simms, with its abandoned cars. Then the lazy Sun River, where roadside signs advertise little aside from a faith in God and country and a deep mistrust of government.

When you get to where the Missouri River cuts sharply to the north before resuming its journey east and south to St. Louis, you know you’re there.

It’s a three-hour drive, empty and breathtaking on a clear April day, and at the end of it waits the city of Great Falls, home to an Air Force base, about 150 nuclear missiles, and at least for tonight, an arena with a cage inside it.

Conall Powers has made this journey with teammates and coaches so that, in the spring of his freshman year of high school, he can fight a grown man whom he does not know in a mixed martial arts bout that wouldn’t be legal or sanctioned in many other states. In Montana, for several different reasons, it is legal without being in any way sanctioned. And for Powers, it’s just one more weekend with his dad, doing the thing they’ve been doing in one form or another for about as long as he can remember.

When he arrives at the venue the night of the fight, Powers is pleased with what he sees. Not just the cage, but the lights, the VIP tables on the floor, the small stage backed by a giant screen. It looks legit. It looks like a place for a real fight.

“It’s a good set-up,” Powers says, looking over the Pacific Steel and Recycling Four Seasons Arena as the crowd filters in early on a Saturday evening. “I’m excited.”

When he speaks, it’s in a voice that doesn’t match his face. The voice is adult: deep and serious and mature. But his face is still that of a child just beginning to become something else. You look at him and see fine, delicate features. A thin pencil drag of a jawline. That awkward teenage boy Adam’s apple dominating a long, slender neck.

He is 5-feet-7. He weighs exactly 126 pounds. He is 15 years old. Once his fight is over, he has been instructed to text his mom and tell her he’s OK.

Tonight at Intense Championship Fighting 24 he’ll compete as an amateur, but he’ll wear no headgear, no shinguards. He’ll use the same four-ounce gloves the pros use, which already seem comically large on Powers’ fists as he walks the arena floor and casts calmly menacing glares at his opponent, who happens to be standing a few feet away, talking with his girlfriend by the concessions stand.

Richard Kohlman is the opponent’s name. He’s 23, though with his slight build and baby face he looks much younger. He sports a thin mustache and a brown mop of hair that gives him the permanent look of a man who just woke up from an unplanned nap. He weighed in at 120 pounds – a full 10 pounds below the 130-pound catchweight mark.

The DJ is cranking through his catalog of hits – Kid Rock and Lil’ Jon – so Kohlman has to raise his voice nearly to a shout in order to be heard, which doesn’t come naturally to him. He searches for just the right words to describe his current training regimen. He settles on a phrase that seems almost intentionally vague: “On and off.”

“I work nights,” he explains.

When they told him he’d be fighting a teenage boy, he admits, he didn’t like it at first. There seemed to be no upside. An adult who beats up a kid hasn’t done much worth bragging about. An adult who loses to a kid has done even less. But then they told him who the kid was, what gym he trains out of, and that changed Kohlman’s mind.

“The Dog Pound in Missoula, that’s a really good team,” Kohlman says. “So now I’m OK with it. It’s going to be a tough bout.”

The way he says it, you do not get the sense that he expects to win.

Already this fight has generated some small amount of controversy. A week earlier Powers’ hometown newspaper, The Missoulian, ran a column by sports writer Bill Speltz extolling Powers’ toughness and wishing him luck in the bout. Reactions from readers were, to put it mildly, mixed.

“It is hard to believe that the Missoulian endorses this human dog fighting, even for adults, let alone a 15 year old,” wrote one commenter on the newspaper’s website. “This is a new low for the paper, lets pump up a 15 year old kid so that he can either be brutally beaten, or hurt someone else and believe that it is the way of life. Nice job Speltz!!”

The unsolicited opinions didn’t stop there. In the days after the column ran, Matt Powers, Conall’s father, got it all from sides. On Facebook they told him he was a terrible parent, a child-abuser, you name it.

“They got pretty creative,” says Powers, 46.

You look at his mangled ears, his wide shoulders, the faint spiderwebs of scar tissue crisscrossing his brow, and you get a pretty good idea of what the elder Powers has been up to for most of his adult life. He has a fighter’s face: pounded flat in some spots, lumped and weathered in others. Nearly two decades in fight gyms, what else do you expect?

He was a late-bloomer. In high school they picked on him, a skinny kid whom puberty forgot. Learning to fight became a priority, and then a passion. He and his friends were beating each other up for fun in basement gyms and National Guard armories before anyone gave much thought to making a living at it.

Powers founded Missoula’s Dog Pound gym almost by accident in the early 2000s. He and some friends were looking for a place to train, and there weren’t many options in town at the time. MMA was still very much a niche sport with relatively few fans and fewer practitioners in this part of the country. Still, the chance to choke and punch other humans held a certain allure among the younger crowd in this college town. Soon after Powers rented mat space from a local judo club he had a handful of disciples eager to get their ears cauliflowered and their courage tested.

They were college kids, mostly. Or they were college-aged kids. Powers was a decade older than most, the lone responsible adult with a real job and a family. His son, Conall, was just a toddler, but he caught on quick. When his dad had the older boys over to the house for home-cooked meals or to watch a UFC event on pay-per-view, Conall would be there, trying out his punching skills on someone’s outstretched palm, shooting double-leg takedowns on preschool friends.

When he was 8, Conall had his first “fight” – essentially a glorified sparring session with a teammate his own age. He had two other similar bouts after that, all against teammates, all against kids his age.

This bout in Great Falls will be the first time he’s been in a real MMA fight against a stranger. Not a training partner. Not even a peer. Someone who is genuinely trying to hurt him, and who won’t feel bad about it if he succeeds.

Here’s where you can’t avoid the question of his father’s influence. People hear the facts – son of local MMA coach becomes local MMA fighter – and they think “stage parent.” They think that this is a new form of an old stereotype, the man who forces his interests and hopes onto his son, only instead of school plays or Little League baseball it’s fighting inside a cage.

Both Conall and his father are adamant that this isn’t the case with them. But considering how Conall grew up, and who he grew up around, did he ever have a chance to not do this? Or is it like raising your kid in a garage with a wrench in his hand and then saying that you didn’t force him to become a mechanic?

When I asked this question a few days before the fight, Powers paused and looked at his son. We were in the group exercise room of the local gym where the Dog Pound holds practices in between Zumba and yoga classes. Conall had taken off his boxing gloves and put on his glasses, an exchange that has the effect of making him seem 25 pounds lighter and at least a few years younger.

“You know,” Powers said after a long pause, “even though I didn’t push him, I think that because of everything I did and everything I was into, I kind of picked a certain path and set him on it. Just because my interests are pretty narrowed, maybe I didn’t expose him to as much different stuff as I should have.”

Behind him the Dog Pound fighters eased their way into sparring drills. Powers rubbed at his beard, dark with flecks of gray sneaking in around the edges.

“But I also think he would have found it on his own,” Powers said. “I think it’s just in him. I think people that fight, they fight.”

Sitting on a pile of folded-up mats, listening to his father talk, Conall gave a short, approving nod from behind his glasses.

Outside of the gym, fighting isn’t a problem for him. Kids at school don’t pick fights with him. Whether through gossip or deed, word has gotten around town that he is not someone you want to challenge. When I suggested that a kid like him might become a target, someone against whom other kids could prove their toughness, he laughed.

“No, that doesn’t really happen,” he said.

In fact, apart from this hobby he shares with his dad, he’s a normal Missoula teenager. He’s into his friends. He’s into his phone and its galaxy of apps. He’s into school sports, like wrestling, where he got his ribs broken in a match this past winter. He also plays football, which his dad isn’t crazy about.

This is one of the things people don’t expect, that a dad who would put his son in a cage with a grown man would have reservations about putting him in a helmet and pads to play linebacker on the Sentinel High School freshman squad. The fact that this is strange to most people is, Powers says, strange to him.

“To me, if he’s in a fight, I know there’s a guy trying to hurt him, but it’s only that one guy,” Powers says. “It’s not 11 people flying all over the place trying to hurt him too. There are just so many ways to get hurt playing football.”

Herein lies one irony in the public response to the upcoming fight. In Missoula, a city of about 70,000 people in a state of a little more than 1 million, with no professional sports teams outside of a few minor-league baseball affiliates, the University of Montana football team is something like a religion. Most Saturday afternoons throughout the fall, the town nearly shuts down to watch the Grizzlies play, with Friday nights reserved for high school games.

If a newspaper story about a teenager’s amateur fight prompts a few negative comments, it’s nothing compared to what you’d see if you had the audacity to suggest in print that the university and local high schools should end their participation in America’s most beloved concussion-prone pastime.

In January, Grizzlies receiver Ryan Burke retired before his junior season due to concerns over repeated concussions. Even then, the response from the community was largely one of support – not concern about the game that left a college student with so much head trauma that he had to withdraw from most of his classes that fall.

If his son followed that path, Powers points out, few people in the community would have had much to say about it. So what’s the big deal about a few amateur fights?

But then, Powers of all people should know what the big deal is. He’s the first to admit that he’s taken too many hits to the head. He gets confused. He slurs his words sometimes. Some days, he says, he’ll be in the gym running practice and he’ll have a moment or two where he doesn’t know where he is or how he got there.

The way he learned, Powers says, they used to think that taking punches in practice just made you tougher.

“It doesn’t,” he says now. “It turns your brain to mush.”

He holds himself up as a sort of cautionary tale for his son, and to some extent it seems to be working.

“Seeing my dad, he’s pretty punchy sometimes,” Conall says.

He says this in front of his father, who doesn’t flinch.

The fighters Conall looks up to are guys like UFC bantamweight champion Dominick Cruz, he says. He likes fighters who don’t get hit too much.

But everybody gets hit sometimes, especially when they’re still learning. And in the Dog Pound, they have a reputation for learning the hard way.

They spar two to three times a week at varying levels of intensity, according to Powers. Even now, in his mid-40s, you’ll see Powers show up at a local event or in a Facebook photo with his face split open or his eye blackened and swollen, the work of one of his fighters. His son regularly straps on the gloves and trades punches with guys in their twenties, some of them significantly bigger. That’s part of the deal.

“I don’t believe you can prepare to fight without fighting,” says the elder Powers. “I just don’t.”

But there’s fighting in the gym, and then there’s fighting in a cage with people watching. Conall has done plenty of the former. He’s eager to get more serious about the latter.

Tonight’s event in Great Falls will draw a solid crowd to the fairgrounds arena, where parking is free and plentiful but where you are reminded to move your car before the morning, lest it get towed to make room for tomorrow’s sports car racing event.

At the box office, a young woman asks the lady behind the glass to clarify for her, before she buys a ticket, that this is indeed the thing her boyfriend is fighting at tonight. She already messed up once and nearly went to the high school rodeo over at the livestock pavilion by mistake.

“Well,” the lady says. “There’s fights here.”

“Good,” says the girl. “This is it then.”

The fighters stand around on the arena floor in shorts and T-shirts, most of them with their hands already gloved and wrapped. They scan the room as they talk, searching for each other, watching each other’s faces to see how nervous they should be.

Lloyd Woodard is fighting in tonight’s main event, so he’s in no hurry to get ready just yet. He’s standing in the outer hallway, talking, killing time. When friends of the man he’ll fight tonight walk by giving him mad dog glares, he falls silent just long enough to give it right back. Usual pre-fight stuff.

Woodard is something close to a celebrity in the Montana MMA scene. He’s one of the few fighters from here to make it to a national stage and rep the 406 (the area code for the entire state of Montana) with outspoken pride. He fought for Bellator MMA for two years, lost a close decision to former lightweight champ Michael Chandler and then submitted Patricky Freire before going on a three-fight losing skid.

Tonight will mark his first fight since last summer, when he was knocked out for the second consecutive time. It felt like it was happening too easy, he says, like the slightest shot made him dizzy.

After that he took some time off from MMA. His brain felt like it needed a break, he says. Then he started to worry that, if he couldn’t take the hits anymore, that might be it for him at 29. When he started thinking of it that way, all he felt was depressed.

“It just kind of seemed like, man, this is winding down,” he says. “If I go out tonight and get hit with another flash knockout, I don’t know. I kind of just want to see how my chin holds up.”

Woodard started training with Powers in the very beginning, back when he was just a teenager and Conall was barely out of diapers. To find himself now fighting on the same card as the kid who used to crawl around on the mats during jiu-jitsu practices is a little surreal.

“I kind of hope he gets his butt kicked a little,” Woodard says. “Not in a bad way. Just, that’s what I’d want for him if he were my son, is a tough fight to show him what he’s made of.”

But see, once you stop and consider that possibility, that this teenager might get thoroughly beaten up by an adult man, what with his facial hair and his testosterone and his grown man strength, that’s when you’re reminded of what a potentially terrible idea this is.

How is it even legal? Who looked at this situation and decided it was OK?

In most other states, this fight probably wouldn’t happen. In plenty of them, it wouldn’t even be a conversation. Those state athletic commissions that do sanction some form of youth MMA usually do so under very different rules, such as California’s youth Pankration program. Others allow minors to fight, though only with safety equipment like headgear and shinguards, and only against other minors.

But while Montana does have a state “athletics program,” which falls under the jurisdiction of the state’s Department of Labor and Industry, that program does not sanction or regulate mixed martial arts events in the state. It doesn’t even officially acknowledge that those events exist. In practice, the program regulates very little.

According to Traci Collett, a supervisor with the Licensing Bureau of Montana’s Department of Labor and Industry, it’s a financial issue.

“The program is about $20,000 in the hole right now,” Collett says.

Federal law requires state sanctioning for any professional boxing matches in the state, but there aren’t many of those in Montana these days. It’s been more than a century since middleweight champ Stanley Ketchel got his start in the rowdy boomtown bars of Butte during its mining heyday. It’s been more than 90 years since Jack Dempsey’s heavyweight title defense bankrupted the small Montana town of Shelby, which bid lavishly to secure rights to the bout.

These days, most of the boxing here is done by amateurs. When there is a pro event, promoters usually bring in commissioners from another state, such as Kansas, to satisfy federal law.

As for MMA?

“They won’t even look at it,” says Terrill Bracken, an MMA and motocross event promoter in Billings. “We’ve been trying for a long time to get sanctioning. They won’t even put it on the books.”

Bracken is one of the three main promoters of MMA events in the state. Ever hear of the passing curiosity that was “Backflips and Beatdowns,” the event that saw motorcycles jumping off ramps, flying over the heads of fighters as they competed inside the cage below? That was Bracken’s show. He caught some flack for it, but he’s quick to point out that the motorcycles only jumped over one active fight in progress, with the rest of the jumps taking place between fights. And anyway, he says, all the risk in those jumps comes with the landing, which took place well beyond the cage.

“The fighters were never in any danger,” Bracken says.

Bracken’s territory is Billings, on the eastern side of the state. He owned a martial arts school there for 20 years where first they did taekwondo and judo, then jiu-jitsu and MMA. He’s also worked as a referee and a judge for events in Montana, as well as Wyoming and both Dakotas.

Now he owns and operates Fusion Fight League, which recently hired an independent regulator in Washington to oversee one of its events. He did it, Bracken says, to give peace of mind to fighters from out of state, some of whom faced the threat of suspensions from athletic commissions back home if they fought in an unsanctioned event – which, in Montana, is pretty much every event.

“Every state is different in how they deal with that,” Bracken says. “Some states won’t suspend you (for fighting in Montana). Some states will give you a 30-day suspension, which is no big deal. Other states will suspend you anywhere from six months to a year.”

State sanctioning and oversight would be a good thing for Montana MMA, Bracken says, but he doubts it will happen any time soon, if ever.

For one thing, it would require passing new laws. The Montana State Legislature only meets for 90 days every other year, and passing a bill to sanction and regulate MMA in the state isn’t high on the agenda at the moment.

In some states the pressure to sanction MMA has often come from without. After years of intractable political opposition, New York passed a bill to regulate amateur and pro MMA earlier this year, but only after Zuffa, the UFC’s parent company, spent lavishly on lobbying efforts.

The UFC doesn’t seem nearly as interested in Montana, for obvious reasons. This is a state that’s slightly bigger than Germany, but has fewer residents than San Diego. It is 48th in the U.S. for population density, ahead of only Wyoming and Alaska. Not exactly a market that the UFC – or any major MMA promoter – is clamoring to get into.

Current state legislators seem content to ignore MMA altogether, and as long as nothing terrible happens at an unsanctioned, unregulated event, there’s nothing to pressure them into changing their positions.

Local MMA promoters say they’d welcome sanctioning, but at the moment they also enjoy certain freedoms that they’d probably lose if state regulators started keeping tabs on them. For instance, the freedom to jump motorcycles over the cage. Or the freedom to match teenagers up against adults.

Some restrictions come from the venues that host the events, but a traditional venue isn’t necessarily a requirement in the summer months. In Montana, I’ve attended MMA events in bars, movie theaters, even the parking lot of a motorcycle dealership.

Powers himself has promoted events at the rural bar he owns, The Rock Creek Lodge. (That bar, coincidentally, also plays host to the annual Testicle Festival, a gathering nominally devoted to feasting on “Rocky Mountain oysters,” but which is mostly known for its liberal attitude toward public, outdoor debauchery in various states of sobriety and undress. Oh, and security at the “Testy Festy”? It’s mostly handled by fighters from the Dog Pound.)

At the moment there is nothing to stop anyone who can afford to from putting up a cage and putting on an MMA fight in Montana. There’s not even anything outlining what safety precautions the events here have to follow, or what rules the fights must be contested under.

Some events require fighters to submit results from recent blood tests, while others, such as tonight’s ICF event, don’t. Some conduct pre-fight medical exams, and others settle for keeping a chiropractor on hand to serve as cageside doctor. Some events in the past haven’t even asked fighters to sign liability waivers before stepping into the cage.

“We had one person trying to put on an event in Billings once where one of the rules was going to be that if you threw someone out of the ring and onto the floor, then you automatically won,” says Bracken. “It was crazy.”

The fighters will tell you that they don’t worry too much about regulations or sanctioning. Skye Folsom, another fighter out of Missoula’s Dog Pound, has fought on plenty of these Montana shows. If anything, he says, it’s safer to be a pro than an amateur in these things. At least pros are more frequently asked to submit blood work.

“Plus,” Folsom says, “a guy who’s a pro is probably taking it seriously, training hard and living pretty clean. An amateur, that could be anybody. That could be somebody who’s actually out there doing crazy stuff and then rolling in there with hepatitis on fight night.”

Folsom, 23, is one of Conall Powers’ main sparring partners in the gym. He made the trip to Great Falls tonight mostly to lend moral support, which means a lot of sitting around in the cramped bomb shelter of a locker room, listening to one another’s jokes bounce off the white concrete walls as fight time creeps closer.

Slouched in a corner with his pale, tattooed arms crossed over his chest, Folsom shrugs off any concerns about the age difference between his teammate and the man he’s going to fight.

“I think it just sounds bad,” says Folsom. “You hear 15-year-old kid against a 23-year-old man, you get the wrong idea. You have to look at who that 23-year-old is, and who the 15-year-old is.”

Folsom knows a thing or two about the teenager’s toughness. At a recent practice, he dropped the kid with a flying knee to the forehead. He didn’t mean to, he says. He was trying to gauge the distance, trying to condition his reflexes for the sake of his own fights. He heard the thump of knee on skull before he felt it.

“But he just got up, kind of shook it off, and waved me in,” says Folsom.

In fact, Folsom owes one of his flashiest victories to the kid. Two years ago, at an event in Missoula’s minor-league baseball stadium, Folsom took on a guy named Ryan Ware, who proved to be tough to track down in the striking exchanges. Between rounds, Powers, just 13 at the time, came running over to Folsom’s corner to tell his dad that Ware was leaving himself open for a spinning backfist.

Since the elder Powers was working Folsom’s corner, he relayed his son’s advice. Folsom went out in the next round and threw it. The backfist landed flush on Ware’s chin. His legs went stiff and he fell like a cut tree, out cold before he hit the mat.

“If anything,” Folsom says now, “I’d be more concerned for the 23-year-old in this fight.”

And it’s true that Kohlman isn’t anyone’s idea of a blue-chip MMA prospect, even in Great Falls. He’s fought three times as an amateur. His record stands at 0-3. A cynical observer might even wonder whether he wasn’t chosen precisely for that reason, to give a young fighter from a prominent local team a chance to get some experience without risking damage or defeat.

Cory Smith, owner of 221 Industries and the promoter of tonight’s ICF 24 event, doesn’t exactly dispel that notion.

In a blue dress shirt and jeans, his round face poking out from beneath a baseball cap, Smith is busy making the rounds at cageside before the event begins. His VIP tables on the floor are sold out tonight – actually, he’s quick to point out, they sold out a month ago – and this is where a local promoter lives and dies.

Paid attendance for tonight’s event will hover right around 2,000 people. Some of that is in the bleachers, but his real concern is the tables where many of his sponsors are plowing through nachos and downing Bud Lights.

“My whole thing is marketing,” says Smith, who will turn 30 just a few days from now. “It’s the only thing I’m any good at it. But you look at us, and our sponsor renewal rate for these events is 100 percent. And they pay big money for this stuff.”

Sometimes you have to get creative with the matchups to keep these events fresh. Smith even brought a whole squadron of fighters up from Brazil, matching them all against American fighters for a country-vs.-country event. It was hideously expensive, and the Brazilians thrashed the Americans, but it generated some interest. Now there’s this thing with the kid and the adult man, though it doesn’t worry Smith much.

“I mean, the 15-year-old’s going to win,” Smith says. “It’s kind of a hard fight to match, but it’s also not. Conall’s very experienced. He’s bred for it.”

But as fight time drifts closer, the kid’s father is having doubts. Not that he’d let his son see. When they’re in the locker room together, he is the picture of placid confidence. Stepping just outside, however, he becomes jittery.

“I have total faith in my son,” he says. “But they’re wearing four-ounce gloves. Anything could happen. How many fights have we seen where the better fighter just gets caught?”

There are 10 fights scheduled for tonight’s card and, as it turns out, plenty of ways for things to go wrong.

After the first round of the first bout, a cageside judge who turns in a 9-7 scorecard will require a quick tutorial on the basics of the 10-point must system. Fighters wear all different types and brands of four-ounce gloves, seemingly whatever they brought with them. When one fighter is knocked out cold early in the night, the doctor will help his cornermen plug his bleeding nose with tissue, then check him out with a penlight in his eyes.

“He was only out for a couple seconds,” says Dr. Shawn Nesbo, a local family practice doctor who’s been the cageside physician at these events for years.

“A while back we had one guy who was out for about 45 seconds,” Nesbo says. “We only found out later that he’d once been in a coma for three weeks. He never told us.”

Nesbo has been at this long enough to notice certain changes in the overall demographics. A few years ago, he says, he’d show up to do medical exams prior to fight time and the heart rates would be sky high. The fighters were mostly local tough guys, scared out of their minds. Now there are more athletes, he says. People are actually training for this.

The injuries he sees are generally superficial. Cuts and bruises. Broken noses, the occasional broken hand. Every once in a while someone will dislocate a shoulder. This knockout victim whose nose he helped plug, he’ll check him out backstage, maybe send him to the hospital if he still seems rattled. The insurance policy that Smith purchases to cover the fighters comes with a $500 deductible and a $5,000 limit. Any medical costs over that fall to the fighters themselves.

“If they need help, they can come see me,” Nesbo says. “We take good care of each other here. Because in Montana, if you wrong someone, you’re probably going to see them again.”

Backstage, the young Powers is deep into his warm-up. He hits mitts with his father, pummels in the clinch to work up a sweat. His dad talks to him in a low, steady voice that’s almost a whisper. When he decides his son is warm enough, he backs off and lets him pace the locker room floor with his headphones on.

“Got to stay warm,” remarks Leo Bercier, another Dog Pound fighter. “Go in cold, come out cold.”

Powers shakes out his arms, staring at the floor. The whole team is there. On the bench behind him, Woodard waits his turn. There’s no way out of this now.

Then it’s time. Out the door, across the floor where fighters from previous bouts lay stretched out on the floor or slumped over in metal folding chairs. Up the stairs to the small stage as the smoke machines bellow and the music thumps out a welcome. Down toward the cage trailed by an entourage a dozen strong, a show of strength and solidarity from the Dog Pound crew.

Kohlman enters the cage second and then kneels in his corner, trading uncertain glances with his one cornerman. Powers waits across the cage, this blonde kid who can’t even drive a car yet. His father is behind him, clad in his usual fight night kilt, shouting last-minute instructions through the chain-link.

The referee gives his final instructions. The ring girl traipses through with her round card. The judges at cageside indicate they are in their seats and paying attention. A clap of the referee’s gloved hands marks the beginning.

Powers rushes across the cage to start the fight and slaps Kohlman with a leg kick before bursting into a four-punch combination that drops Kohlman to the mat in the opening seconds. Powers pounces with right hands as Kohlman rolls over and covers up. The crowd is one long shriek, sensing the finish.

But Kohlman isn’t done just yet. He gathers his wits enough to grab for a takedown, and though he has to eat some hammerfists while committing to it, he eventually succeeds in putting Powers on his butt. Powers looks to his corner as Kohlman holds on, content simply to not be losing for a few brief moments.

Kohlman bores down into Powers’ guard. Powers keeps looking to his corner, then eventually decides on a sit-up sweep. It’s Week 1 jiu-jitsu stuff, but it works.

Powers explodes up and reverses the position, rolling into full mount with Kohlman stuck on bottom. Here come the right hands again.

“Yes!” shouts Powers’ corner. “Beat him!”

And Powers does, short right hands threading their way through Kohlman’s defenses. Kohlman brings his feet up to entangle Powers’ arms, hoping to buy himself some time, but it doesn’t take long for Powers to push them aside and go looking for gaps in Kohlman’s defense. When he finds those gaps, he batters them.

“Right to the face!” his corner shouts. “Punch, punch, punch!”

Powers swarms with both fists now. Kohlman covers up and waits, turning his head slightly to the side as if checking to see if the referee is still watching. Finally the ref decides he’s seen enough. He thrusts an arm between them, waves the bright blue latex glove of his other hand, and that’s it.

One minute, 35 seconds after it started, this fight is over.

Powers stalks off with his fists in the air, celebrating with hugs from his coaches. Kohlman stays down. First it’s the ref kneeling over him, then it’s his cornerman. Soon it’s the doctor, the promoter, his girlfriend, and finally the paramedics.

Occasionally Kohlman sits up, looking around with wide, blank eyes. The doctor holds up some fingers. Kohlman just looks at him. This goes on for close to 20 minutes before he’s finally carried out on a stretcher – a precautionary measure more than anything, Dr. Nesbo says later.

Through it all, the crowd waits patiently. Occasionally the night’s MC and ring announcer, Bob Sather, gets on the mic to remind them that the safety of the athletes is of paramount concern here at ICF.

“See?” Powers’ teammate Folsom says with a sarcastic smile. “This is why 23-year-olds shouldn’t be allowed to fight 15-year-old kids.”

“He got his bell rung,” Dr. Nesbo says of Kohlman. “He’s a little confused right now.”

Nesbo has been cageside for all Kohlman’s fights. According to his observations, Kohlman “tends to disassociate before he gets in there,” which isn’t a great sign.

“This is his fourth time fighting for us,” Nesbo says. “This needs to be the last time.”

Powers has to wait around in the cage until his opponent has been safely removed, by which point all the adrenaline has faded away. When they finally get around to making the official announcement of his victory, Powers is in pain.

“My thumbs,” he tells his father back in the locker room. “I think they might be broken. While I was …”

“I know,” his father says.

For now, that’s about all they’ll say to each other on the topic of the thumbs. Whatever’s wrong with them can wait. The joy of victory will soothe the pain in the meantime. Besides, Powers the coach has to corner another fighter. Powers the fighter wants to watch video of his bout on a friend’s cellphone. And hey, did he remember to text his mother?

“Oh!” he says. “Thanks.”

Woodard fights last, against Jake Roberts, an undefeated lightweight from The MMA Lab in Arizona, home to fighters like former UFC lightweight champion Benson Henderson.

Word around the locker room is that Woodard might have his hands full. John Crouch, head coach at The Lab, is here with Roberts. His mere presence manages to be somewhat intimidating. It’s hard to see him making the trip all the way Great Falls for a fighter in whom he didn’t see real promise. Especially when, to hear him tell it, he’s not a fan of these unsanctioned shows.

“It’s terrible,” Crouch says before the fight. “The weigh-ins are a mess. You don’t know what the rules are going to be. I hate it.”

But what can he do? It’s tough to get competitive, well-paying fights for his guys in Arizona, where The Lab represents a pelt that every other fight team in the state would like to nail to the wall. Promoters there either want to overmatch or underpay his fighters, Crouch says. Sometimes both.

For his part, Woodard will make $2,000 to show tonight, and another $2,500 if he wins. Not bad for Montana.

But early on it becomes clear that Woodard will not be taking the win bonus home tonight. Roberts clips him on the jaw in one of the fight’s first furious exchanges and Woodard reels into the fence. Roberts follows him all around the cage, thumping him every chance he gets, but Woodard hangs on. He nearly snags a surprise armbar toward the end of the round, but Roberts escapes.

Back in his corner between rounds, Woodard slumps onto the stool, spits out his mouthpiece and shakes his head. Blood pours from his mouth. His coach puts his head inches from Woodard’s face, imploring him to get up and go on. Nothing about Woodard’s body language suggests that he thinks this is a good idea, but eventually he rises and somehow wills himself back into the fight. Roberts will end it a few minutes into the second, hammering a downed Woodard with punches until the ref steps in.

Later, once he’s had time to think about it, Woodard will start to wonder if this was it, his last fight. He’ll even tell his family that he’s done fighting, in part because he knows they worry about him, but also because he might believe it himself.

“The thing is though,” Woodard will say a couple weeks later, “I don’t think I can stop.”

He already got a taste of what his life is like without this in it, and he didn’t care for it. The way Woodard looks at it is, what’s the point of having a body and brain in perfect working order if you’re miserable all the time?

“My goal is just to make it to the UFC,” Woodard will say. “Even if it is just once.”

As for Kohlman, who left the fight against Powers on a stretcher, he’ll be fine. Just a concussion, according the ICF promoter Smith, who adds that Kohlman will be “ready to rock and roll again soon.”

A couple weeks later, Kohlman will attribute the loss to a lack of training. He’ll take some time and work on his skills, he says, then he hopes for a rematch.

Powers will spend the rest of the night grinning and rubbing his thumbs. He got what he wanted out of the fight, he says. He’s a little disappointed in himself for getting taken down, but he was never worried.

“I really wanted to knock him out standing,” he says, shaking his head.

In the morning his thumbs will feel better. Still sore, but probably not broken. A good thing, too. He already has another fight scheduled in May, this one against a “true bantamweight” from a real gym in Billings.

Another long drive east across Montana, out where the landscape rolls by in waves out the window and eagles ride the stiff air currents over the highway, looking for roadkill.