 "Photo: Staff Photo by Alyssa Ramos")
You could call him a celebrity.
After all, he did play a giant role in a series of notorious videos that have sold more than 300,000 copies in seven years. But life has been far from glamorous and more like a reality nightmare, for the now clean and sober Rufus Hannah.
Hannah, 52, a former homeless man, or "bum" from San Diego, appeared in "Bumfights," a series of videos put together by Ryan McPherson, then a young Grossmont Community College student.
In the videos, Hannah performed humiliating and dangerous stunts for as little as $2, or sometimes, only for "booze."
Hannah, now wearing clean, ironed jeans and a polo shirt, spends a lot of his free time touring the country and speaking passionately about protecting the homeless from hate crimes, and of his on-going attempts to have legislators pass the Rufus Hannah Act.
That bill that would automatically add three years to a sentence for anyone convicted of committing violent crimes against the homeless. The law has not been passed in any state. In California, it never got out of committee.
But Hannah said he is sure the law is the right way to go. He is a recovering alcoholic who had been living on the streets for years. The places he has called home have ranged from bushes near a freeway underpass to baseball dugouts.
He claims to have been the victim of a crime, committed by McPherson and his friends.
"He told me he was doing a video for his economics class," Hannah said. "I never had any idea the stuff he was filming would become what it did."
McPherson defended himself and his videos by declaring during an interview on "60 Minutes" last October that what Hannah was doing was a merely a "skit," and that he wasn't the one "hopped up on drugs, but rather just a kid with a video camera shooting stuff."
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---The editors of The Herald, after long thought, decided to include the Bumfights videos. We urge our readers to view them with an objective eye. The videos have been included through YouTube for informational purposes only.---
The Bumfights Web site claims that the purpose of the video series is to help the poor and make the public more aware of the problems faced by the homeless.
Hannah, who once had a reputation for getting drunk and falling down a lot, takes nothing for granted these days.
"It's nice to be able to wake up and take a shower," he said. Now he has his own apartment, something he hadn't had since 1985, and works as a painter.
But during his days of living on the streets, Hannah used to drink his problems away. "Vodka was cheap and our choice of drink," he recalled.
By "our" he means he and his friend Donny Brennan. Brennan is Hannah's best friend, and also a fellow Army veteran. Brennan introduced Hannah to the streets of La Mesa, and was also featured in the "Bumfights" videos.
Hannah is determined to make a difference. He has been transformed from a man who was once considered by many to be a plague, a loiterer, a non-productive citizen, to a man with credibility, someone worth listening to, and an Army veteran, a title that didn't sound as honorable when he was living on the streets.
Hannah has become a man who in his recent past spent many nights in jail for trespassing, but it was OK, because at least he had a place to sleep.
But Rufus Hannah has permanent scars. Today, he still bears visible tattoos across his knuckles that read, "BUMFIGHTS," and he suffers from epilepsy, a medical condition that he says was brought on from his head injuries during his stunts on the videos. In the "Bumfights" videos, Hannah performed such stunts as running head first into milk crates, being pushed down a flight of stairs while being drunk in a shopping cart, beating up his best friend, Donny, so badly that Brennan suffered a broken leg as a result, and spray painting other homeless people while they slept.
Four years have passed since his last drink, and Rufus Hannah has come a long way.
"I found out I have grandchildren," he said, "and one of the best things is that I can see my kids again."
He also has faith that his homeless friends will turn their lives around some day, admitting, "Some of them aren't quite ready."
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