Hoosier Toughman Fighting Banned

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(UNDATED) - Indiana has banned toughman fighting and its brawling cousins.

Indiana will still allow martial-arts fights and even ultimate fighting, which allows competitors to use any mode of combat against each other.

Wade Lowhorn with the Indiana Professional Licensing Agency says there's a difference between those events and Michigan-based toughman, which lets anybody come down out of the crowd to duke it out.

"Basically, you could set up a huge ring in a bar, and anyone who was in the bar could just step into the ring, put on some boxing gloves, with no check to see if the person's actually sober, no physician on site, no EMT on site, no ambulance," Lowhorn says. "You might have somebody who's 350 pounds fighting someone who's 150 pounds."

Several states have banned toughman and similar fighting for fear of serious injuries or deaths.

By the end of the year, Lowhorn says the state plans to write more precise definitions of what's legal and what isn't.

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