Dallas - The principal and other staff members at South Oak Cliff High School were supposed to be breaking up fights. Instead, they sent troubled students into a steel utility cage in an athletic locker room to battle it out with bare fists and no head protection, records show. Documents obtained by The Dallas Morning News say the "cage fights" took place between 2003 and 2005. The records don't say how many fights may have taken place... Internal district reports obtained by The News describe a culture of sanctioned violence in which school employees and even the principal relied on "the cage" to settle disputes and bring unruly students under control... "It was gladiator-style entertainment for the staff," said Frank Hammond, a middle school counselor in Cedar Hill who was fired from South Oak Cliff High School and has filed a whistleblower lawsuit. "They were taking these boys downstairs to fight. And it was sanctioned by the principal and security."

This is one of those moments when you come across a story and wonder how it ever made the news. A school settles disputes with cage fights. In Texas. The place where the Texas Steel Cage Death Match was invented. Where two men solving their differences in the squared circle surrounded by iron bars is a long, proud tradition that dates back to the glory days of Bruno Samartino and Bobo Brazil. I'm pretty sure there's a Roddy Piper-Jimmy Snooka Texas Death Match portrayed on the back of the Texas quarter. Telling guys from the Lone Star State that they've got no right to put schoolboys in a cage and making them battle it out is like telling a Coloradoan he can't ski, a Wisconsiner he can't eat cheese or a Florida teacher she can't seduce her students. It's part of their culture, and you can't take that away.