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A mile or so off the interstate that cleaves the small farming town of Bakersfield, California, the smackdown has begun. I watch as two rival gangs of dark-skinned, half-naked adolescent boys, sweating and barefoot, eye each other across a bare dirt field. Somewhere on the edge of their collective consciousness, endless eighteen-wheelers whip down the I-5; this is the town they grew up in, though few of them were born here. One of the boys on the eastern side of the field gets brave. He steps forward in his black shorts, murder on his face, ready to rumble. Like a cowboy readying to draw, Black Shorts lifts his hands at his sides, even though he's clearly unarmed. It's four against one. That's guts, I think, watching from a safe distance away.

"Stick him baby," one of Black Shorts' friends shouts behind him, and he charges.

Instead of piling on Black Shorts, though, his nemeses link elbows, forming what looks an awful lot like a chorus line. Black Shorts lunges forward and delivers a light flick to one of the chorus dancers' arms, then turns and bolts back to his friends.

I think to myself: that's it?

I had driven three hours that morning to understand the appeal of the legendarily rough sport of kabaddi, a form of team wrestling that began four thousand years ago in India's Punjab region and has more recently made its way to this dusty field behind Guru Angad Darbar, a Sikh temple. Unlike many American males, I don't like watching contact sports any more than

I like participating in them. Now, as the cheesy refrain blows into my brain — "God, I hope I get it! I hope I get it!" — I feel almost relieved at the lack of the very bloodshed I'd come to see.

Not that I'd known what to expect. Though part of the Asian Games for decades, and a staple entertainment in Punjabi communities from Vancouver to Singapore, kabaddi is still a "people's sport," its heroes still too obscure for corporate sponsorship or the cover of SI.

In the impoverished rural villages of the Punjab, however, kabaddi exceeds even cricket in popularity, for good reason: it costs nothing to play. Seven players, oiled up and usually wearing only boxers or briefs, gather on each side of a field. Each team takes its turn sending a "raider" into enemy territory to tag one of his opponents. The raider must then get back to his side of the field before the tagged opponent can stop him. It is after the tag that kabaddi gets rough: the tagged defender has almost the entire World Wrestling Entertainment playbook at his disposal to prevent the raider's escape. Scissor holds, tripping, headlocks — it's all fair.

Compared to WWE stars, though, kabaddi wrestlers make relatively modest salaries, with top athletes earning $50,000-$80,000 a year. (Unlike in most team sports, kabaddi players can profit individually from their victories, however.) Success in the sport can lead players to careers in modeling and politics, as well as a healthy gambling concession. In early March, the Indian government held a kabaddi match between parliamentarians and journalists. The sport has even seen its share of doping scandals, with some overdoses rumored.

Still, despite having arrived in the U.S. more than a century ago with the first Sikh immigrants, kabaddi has only recently found notice here. I only learned about the sport after watching Kabaddi Cops, a Canadian documentary on the first all-white kabaddi team, formed by the Toronto Police Service in 2002. More recently, U.S. soldiers stationed in India have added kabaddi to their counterinsurgency training.

Sikh culture expert Gurinder Singh Mann isn't surprised, given the sports' origin in the barracks of Punjabi soldiers. "Invaders were always trying to attack Delhi," explains Mann, a professor at UC Santa Barbara. "If the war isn't going on, the army would stay fit by playing the game."

The players are proud of the game's scrappy reputation. "The

people driving by always stop their cars," says Oppy Singh, 25, son of one of the coaches, pointing to a road running along the edge of the gurdwara, or Sikh temple, where the kabaddi field lies. "They think we're beating each other up."

They must not see very well, I think, watching the next raider step up. Again, the chorus line and the sissy slap; this time, though, the raider isn't fast enough as he darts away, and the defender gets a hand around his neck. The two of them dance for a moment, then yank each other to the ground. "Stick him, baby!" the same teammate shouts.

This is what I'd come to see, this ensuing sticking. Dust flies as the defender locks his legs around the raiders'. The raider tries dragging himself and the defender toward his side of the field before his time runs out. In the sports' traditional version, the raider isn't allowed to draw a breath while on the opposition's turf, and must continuously shout "kabaddi-kabaddi-kabaddi" to prove he isn't cheating. In today's version, he has thirty seconds, and spends most of it locking limbs with his defender, the pair grinding groins together in a painful looking manner. In the end, he can't do it. The coach blows the whistle; the raider stands, dusts himself off and retreats home.

I find myself smiling and remembering games of Red Rover in third grade, the last time sports were fun for me. After that came sixth-grade phys ed, where I found myself getting dry-humped by the same irony-impervious boys who called each other faggot as soon as they reached the locker room. The sport we were learning was called wrestling, and for all his earnest effort, Mr. Van Cherry never managed to communicate its appeal to us. Even the absurd psychodrama of the WWE (then the WWF) seemed more interesting at the time. Sort of.