As fighters in the next locker room wrap their fists, Kanesia “Goldie” White unrolls a length of two-sided tape, lines the inside edge of her custom white bikini and presses it to her skin.

The tape, the 26-year-old cosmetologist from Maryland says, will keep the fabric in place as she struts around the fighting cage between rounds.

It’s a cage girl trick. Show enough, but never too much, unless, of course, we’re talking about confidence and attitude.

That’s what brought White to the Roanoke Civic Center last Saturday evening to compete for the $1,000 cage girl bikini contest prize during the fighting event Ruckus in the Cage.

“When I go in there, it’s not really me,” White says. It’s an alter ego. “I don’t have a name for her yet, but she’s way more confident than me.”

As White fixes her bikini in place, 11 other women curl their hair, rub their skin slick with baby oil and ooze lip volumizer in colors such as “pale pink diamond” and “plumy jam shimmer” across their mouths.

Each one has plans for the prize money.

Ring girls do not go back as long as fighting for sport. But few remember a professional boxing match where leggy under-clothed women didn’t pace the ring between rounds while fighters recovered on corner stools.

The same goes for Ruckus in the Cage, where fighters punch, kick, wrestle and choke their opponents into submission inside an octagon cage made of plastic-covered chain link fence.

“It’s a whole minute between rounds,” says Ruckus promoter Chris Smith. “That’s a long time for the audience to just sit there and wait. The girls keep the excitement and drama up.”

Smith’s wife and business partner, Andrea, says it’s only fair. “There are a lot of good-looking guys in there,” she says, referring to the fighters. “You have to have good-looking girls.”

At Ruckus in the Cage, the winning cage girl would be the only competitor of the night to take home cash.

As the clock hits 7:40 p.m. and the first punches are thrown, the cage girls sit ringside on metal folding chairs and shiver. Most of the 3,500 spectators are still wearing their coats.

During most matches, one fighter is knocked out or forced to tap out in submission in the first round, sometimes within seconds.

When fighters make it to the second round, two cage girls stand up.

“Let’s hear it for our lovely cage girls,” Smith drones into a microphone before introducing the girls by the numbers that hang from their bikini bottoms.

The women climb the steps into the cage, oddly stable on four-inch stilettos. Together they take a lap, a silver sign with the round number held aloft.

After the fight is finished, they enter again. As fighters work to catch their breath (and in a few cases their consciousness), the women hand the winners a trophy and hang a medal around the losers’ necks.

Few fighters have the energy reserves to attempt a hug.

Before it was over, White, and another cage girl, Lori Rivero, 24, of Danville, would watch their boyfriends get beaten bloody in the cage. White would not smile for an hour after a fighter knocked her boyfriend dizzy with a well-placed right to the chin.

The cage girls range in ages from 18 to 27. They come from as far away as Atlanta. Their day jobs range from accounting to serving burgers at Hooters.

Cheryl Clark, 25, one of several Roanoke women in the competition, is a respiratory therapist at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital. Her husband got her interested in being a cage girl.

Clark competed in the cage once before, in 2006. She didn’t win, but had so much fun she wanted to try it again.

She knows some people think she is crazy, that prancing in front of screaming fight fans in a tiny bikini reinforces the idea that women are eye candy.

She doesn’t much care.

“I don’t think it’s degrading,” Clark says. “If you take life way too seriously, you are not going to enjoy a lot. I wouldn’t be up there if I didn’t want to.”

Clark ordered a new bikini on the Internet for the fight, but it didn’t arrive in time. No matter. She brought four other suits.

She would wear only three of them — a brown one, a yellow one and a tight black one covered with safety pins and “hustler” printed in white letters across her rear end.

Halfway through the event, Clark walks down an aisle through the crowd to the locker room to change. As she passes, men’s heads swivel .

Roy Bedwell, 49, catches Clark’s attention. He tells her she is a shoo-in for the money. Clark smiles, gives him a loose hug and keeps walking.

Bedwell sits back down, a bottle of Budweiser in one hand, an unlit cigar in the other.

“I think the ring girls add an ounce of femininity to the violence,” he says in a tipsy voice. “It takes the sting out of it. I mean, why do we fight?”

That’s a minority sentiment in a crowd that appears to number about 10 men to every woman. Roundhouse punches and solid kicks to the face bring far louder roars than the catcalls when the women enter the cage.

Sarah Parks and Angie Hall, two 28-year-old women in the crowd, say the cage girls are beautiful but more of a sideshow.

“We are here for the fights,” Parks said.

As the clock ticks closer to 10:40 p.m., the official cage girl competition begins. The judge turns on a hand-held decibel meter. The women enter the cage. Crowd response will choose the winner.

While the women circle the ring, men yell for their favorites. A cage girl from Virginia Tech wiggles her hips, trying to draw out more noise. Others strike supermodel poses. White flexes a toned biceps .

In the crowd, it’s hard to tell who is winning. The roar sounds about the same for White, Clark and Michelle Wickert, a 27-year-old elementary school music teacher from Richmond.

The decibel meter knows. It’s cage girl number five, says the announcer.

Wickert, the oldest contestant, has won. She smiles and poses for photographs before stepping out of the cage.

There are two fights left. The women sit back on their chairs. A few put on T-shirts.

At 11:40 p.m. fighters are trickling out of the arena with broken noses, twisted joints, eyes swelling purple and black, and compression cuts across their faces.

Back in the cage girls’ locker room, a Roanoke College student throws her makeup in a bag and stomps out mumbling something about the contest being fixed.

The others congratulate Wickert, who is pulling white athletic socks over her feet. The women exchange MySpace accounts and make plans to meet later at Hooters.

What will Wickert buy with the prize money?

First a rum and Coke, she says. Then she’ll pay bills.