Mike and Kristi Bowersock say they never fight.

At least, not each other.

You see, if they did fight, she’s pretty sure she could kick his, well, you know what. And he’s pretty sure he could wrestle her into submission.

Still, for this Hicksville, Ohio, couple, fighting – of the martial-arts kind – is at the heart of their life together.

The two became a couple after Mike, a mixed martial artist, proposed – no, not marriage, but that Kristi, a titled kickboxer, enter a cage fight.

Together, they now run a Fort Wayne gym where they train fighters-to-be, while Kristi also organizes and promotes cage-fighting events, including a June 5 charity fight night that will benefit victims of human trafficking.

Most weekends, the two travel to fights throughout the region where they cheer on their student grapplers or serve as corner persons for the cage fighters Kristi manages.

And all with only the occasional heated discussion, says Kristi, 43, who holds black belts in kickboxing and karate.

“He knows better,” she says with a wry smile of why her husband of nearly five years won’t challenge her fighting skills – despite having a 2-1 professional record in the cage himself.

“He knows I could kick his face in if I wanted to,” she says with a laugh.

Now retired from competing, the Bowersocks spend much of their time fighting the stereotypes of their chosen sport.

Partners in Dragon’s Den/Hammer House gym in Coliseum Plaza, they want the gym to have “a family atmosphere,” Kristi says, not the rough-edged, back-street environment one might expect.

Monday and Thursday afternoons, students as young as 7 learn techniques of kickboxing, jujitsu and wrestling at the storefront gym, which transforms in the evenings into a place where local aspiring and established cage fighters train.

A fully assembled cage is in full view in the front window – although much of the time the 8-foot-high, $20,000 apparatus serves as a playpen for students’ preschool children, who gleefully chase one another around inside as their mom or dad takes to the mats. Yes, there are two female fighters on the gym’s roster.

“There are a lot of wrong ideas,” Kristi says of cage fighting, which has mushroomed in popularity in the past 10 years. “People look at it on television, and they see it as a violent sport, and some people get caught up in that part of it.

“Until they look at the training that has to go into it and know the techniques, they don’t know what it’s about.”

The point of cage fighting, she says, is not to draw blood but to physically outmaneuver your opponent so that he or she gives up – in what’s called a submission or tap out – or is unable to defend himself or herself by a referee’s decision or knockout. Fighters euphemistically call the latter “going to sleep.”

Cage fighters can use any combination of martial arts skills, including punches with lightweight gloves covering the hands, kicks, throws and wrestling techniques.

Yes, violence, more-than-occasional blood and the risk of injury are involved, Kristi acknowledges. But that’s also true in other sports such as football or boxing, she says.

“There are many rules,” says Kristi, who was involved a few years ago in getting legislation passed in Indiana to regulate mixed martial-arts matches and ban so-called “toughman” contests.

Trained competitors have ingrained respect for each other’s skills, and the toughest fights often end with combatants giving each other hugs.

“So we’re not just barbaric,” she says.

Successful competitors need strength training and aerobic fitness, and politeness and disciplined use of techniques are stressed from the outset at their gym, the Bowersocks say.

Today, professional cage fighting’s big names such as B.J. Penn and George St. Pierre fight with entourages in huge arenas and are well enough known among fans to be referred to only by initials – namely, “B.J.” and “G.S.P.”

Enthralled high schoolers sport graphic T-shirts from clothing lines fronted by popular fighters at school, as well as to the gym.

But when Mike, 40, entered his first cage fight at the well-ripened age of 32, it wasn’t exactly glam.

“When I first started, we’d go to bars, barns, rodeo rings, fairgrounds,” he says. “I think one fight was in a parking lot.”

A self-described scrappy kid who could find trouble even when he wasn’t looking for it, Bowersock came to mixed martial arts after beginning karate when he was 5 years old.

He wanted to wrestle in high school, he says, but the Christian high school he attended in Ohio didn’t have a wrestling program. So he started taking jujitsu lessons instead.

Jujitsu, which started in Japan as a way to disable an armed opponent, is like wrestling in that it employs holds, throws, pins and limb locks. But unlike traditional wrestling, opponents in jujitsu may continue to fight while lying on their back. Mike received a black belt in karate from Don Madden in Chillicothe, Ohio, and in jujitsu from George Annarino in Newark, Ohio. He started teaching marital arts in 1996, he says.

He got involved in mixed martial arts and cage fighting around 2001, after he met Wes Simms, fresh from competing on TV’s “Ultimate Fighter” series, which was among the first shows to showcase cage fighting to the public.

Mike started training with Simms at his gym in Columbus, Ohio, where he also trained with Mark Coleman, another well-known early cage fighter whom fans revere for bringing superior wrestling to cage fighting.

He competed at 135 pounds in the cage, even taking three so-called No-Holds-Barred fights. The fights are also known as bare-knuckles fights because competitors don’t wear gloves.

“Even my friends fighting then thought that was crazy,” he confesses.

Meanwhile, Kristi, a petite, blue-eyed blonde who calls herself “the cheerleader type,” turned to martial arts after domestic abuse put her in a physically vulnerable position she never wanted to be in again.

“My instinct told me I was good (at kickboxing), and they (her teachers) thought I’d do well, so they started me competing when I was a yellow belt,” the second level of proficiency, she says.

“It was hard. I was the only girl, and that made it hard – guys swinging at me, taking me on all the time,” she says.

When Mike and a friend asked her whether she would consider a cage fight, she declined, wanting to defend a kickboxing title instead. But she agreed to go watch one.

“As a stand-up fighter, I had no take-downs, no grappling – just kicking and punching was all I could do. When I saw the combination of weapons, that hooked me,” she says.

Kristi says her cage-fighting career was short – she won one fight but gave up the sport at the urging of her family after her nose was crushed in an unrelated accident.

But she has coached her son and two daughters in martial arts, and has about 30 fighters on her roster, including several women. She manages Cody Shipp, New Haven High School assistant wrestling coach, who has a 12-5 professional record at 155 pounds and teaches wrestling at the gym, and Brandon Inskeep of Fort Wayne, a 3-1 professional at 135 pounds.

Kristi, who says she strives to avoid injury to her fighters but has seen it nonetheless, says cage fighting is not for everybody.

“It’s in your soul,” she says. “There’s so much tactics involved. There are so many ways to win.

“You have to be (physically) trained, but you have to also look at it as a full battle plan. You have to be like the general in command of everything about yourself – mental, physical and emotional.

“When that cage door closes (you) have to take on the fight no matter where it takes you. You have to overcome and constantly adapt. There’s no other game out there like that.”

And there’s no other feeling like fighting in the cage, says Mike, who adds that he “sometimes” misses it. His day-to-day calm demeanor scarcely suggests belligerence, and novice students say they like him because he doesn’t yell at them.

“It’s an adrenaline rush,” he says of cage fighting.

“It’s a chance to do something you’ve wanted to do but thought you couldn’t. … It’s a chance to prove something to yourself.”

rsalter@jg.net