Have you ever been in a fight?

In 6th grade with a guy named Carlos. It began during recess earlier in the day. We were picking teams for work-ups (a version of kickball) and things got out of hand and we all started talking shit.

Carlos got pissed at me and said "After school at the white fence!" The white fence meant at the corner house across the street from school that had a white fence in the front yard.

This was 1983. I watched a lot of boxing and hockey. I also had two brothers. I was, by and large, an athletic 12-year-old. I showed up to the white fence. So did Carlos. So did the "cool" group of 6th-graders, all of whom were friends with Carlos. A little background: I went to that school from K thru 3rd and ran in the same group of cool kids. And then for some ungodly reason my mom put me into the Lubavitch (Orthodox Jewish school) for 4th and 5th grade and the first 2 months of 6th grade. When I went back to the neighborhood elementary, I was looked at and treated differently and none of those old friends let me back into their circle. I wasn't one of the cool kids.

So I'm at the white fence with Carlos and 8-10 others who are rooting for him to kick my ass. I wasn't scared to fight. I knew I could take him. I grew up in an angry (and abusive) household so rage is/was part of my DNA. What I was scared of -- and scared is the wrong word but suffices -- was hurting Carlos and therefore humiliating him in front of the cool kids. I don't say this to be macho but I could have fucked him up. I was happy go lucky with a very bad mean streak. It began with us locking up like WWF wrestlers and we danced for a few moments. Carlos threw a roundabout right and I ducked it. Hagler was my favorite. I went into the fight pretending to be him. As I came back up I had the opening I needed to fuck his face good.

But in that very moment I knew that if I wrecked his face he'd go down for the count and that all of his friends would think lesser of him because he got his ass kicked by me, the kid they used to run around with but now shunned. Instead of clocking him like I really wanted to, I latched onto his head and we danced around then fell to the ground. And then the old lady who lived in the house rushed onto the porch and told us all to get off her lawn.

Carlos and I untangled and stared each other down but didn't aggress toward each other. He joined the other cool kids who started to walk away. I trailed about 10 steps behind and that was that.

I've often thought about that moment where I had the chance to clean his clock but chose to spare his feelings. I always wondered how my social status might have changed had I hauled off on him, as if I would have proved something to all the cool kids. I don't regret not punching Carlos in the face but I do think things would have been much different for me in junior high and high school had I "won" that fight.

A few years later, in 8th grade, I got into a (truncated) fight with a black kid named Rodney during P.E. class. I'll write about that another time.

 

Yep, been in a bunch. Like Songbird, I'm a pretty happy-go-lucky person, but I do have a bit of a temper, so it has gotten me into some situations. I got into a lot of fights when I was younger. My elementary school was full of mostly the poor kids in town, and most of the troublemakers, so I got into a lot of fights there. My dad always told me I was allowed to defend myself, but if he found out I started a fight, I'd have to deal with him. To this day, I've never started a fight.

Got into a few scraps in high school, maybe one or two in college (always defending someone, including once when I threw a kid down the stairs because he punched his girlfriend). Unfortunately, my friends know I can handle myself pretty well in a fight, so during our heyday in the bars, etc., they knew they had good backup, which sometimes led to them escalating a situation, rather than de-escalating.

Most recently, back in May, my cousin's bachelor party amounted to a group of eight guys bar hopping in Boston. One of the guys in my group (unbeknownst to me) grabbed some girl's ass in the club and her boyfriend and his two friends began pushing and shoving. I stepped between them all, pushed the guy in the middle backward and, when the two friends (both bigger than me, and I'm 6-1, 225) tried to grab my wrists, I wriggled free, grabbed both guys by their throats and moved them back. I got chest to chest with the guy in the middle (who was kind of their leader) and told him I didn't want any problems, we were just there for a good time and we don't anyone to get arrested. I told him I'd handle my friends if he handled his and offered to buy him a drink. He ended up buying me three glasses of scotch.

That was the first situation I'd been in since 2012.

 

He only threw one. I threw a few, which makes it even more embarrassing.

 

I have three brothers, and I wouldn't count any of our "fights" as actual fights.

And I pushed my older brother off a 10-foot-high sea wall once.

 

Two real fights, if you don't count my brother, which were some real knockdown, drag out fights that ended with bloody noses, black eyes, bruised faces. I also don't count sparring matches when I was taking taekwondo.

First fight was in sixth grade on the playground and was over a girl. Guy who I thought was my friend accused me of stealing his girlfriend (which I didn't) and he challenged me to a fight during recess. Not wanting to be a coward, but still shaking in my shoes, I went out and accepted my fate. He was bigger than me, but I got the upper hand and ended up on top of him raining down punches when they broke us up. We shook hands and became pretty good friends until we got to high school, then kind of went separate ways.

Second fight was in freshman year during recess after lunch. Resident tough guy decided he was going to just target me that day. Not even sure why but the minute I walked around the corner, he was standing there, challenging me to a fight. I tried to talk him down (I didn't like fighting, plus he was known to be a good fighter), but he was just in a fighting mood that day. He threw the first punch, I was able to duck it, but he followed that with a punch directly to my throat. He whooped my ass pretty good, my only hope was to grab him and take him down and that backfired because he got me in a headlock and was smashing me on the top of my head. Pretty good crowd of people had gathered and I'm sure if it had been during the age of the cell phone, I'd have been one of those viral fight videos of someone getting his ass kicked. He probably would have continued to beat the shit out of me if I hadn't talked him into stopping by promising I'd make him a set of nunchucks (long story short, I had JUST started taking taekwondo and I was in a ninja star/nunchucks phase). He let me go and I never made his nunchucks. He kept asking me about them, and even threatened to beat me up again, but he ended up getting in trouble for a fight and left our school. Last I heard, he had just gotten out of jail for domestic assault and has been in and out of jail since high school. I looked him up on Facebook recently, and apparently he's still into fighting, in his mid 40s.


Have had a couple of close calls since then, one of them in Disney World of all places when an asshole decided he didn't want to wait for breakfast and he cut the line (probably a good two dozen people waiting) completely, and then got in my face when I told him that wasn't cool. Had his fists all balled up and everything. Security was called and he and his family were escorted out of the park.

 

See—that last situation, the line cutter, is exactly what I'm talking about. If you hadn't said anything, and just let him cut the line, my guess is that would still bother you a little. (It would bother me, anyway.) Instead, even though it was a risk, you confronted him, and the universe worked things out the way it was meant to work out.

The resident Appeasement Crew here would have just given him a dirty look and then kicked rocks the rest of the day.

 

My story is a bit similar. Last fight was in eighth grade and on the way home from the school bus stop, so at least we kept it off school grounds and avoided disciplinary action. A neighbor kid had been baiting me all school year and I'd finally had enough, so I went after him. Fought to a draw; no injuries beyond beyond a few scrapes and bruises. He kept his distance from me for awhile after that, and we both apologized a few months later and then got along pretty well. I'm sure we'd joke about it if we saw each other again after all these years.

 

I had a guy jump on me and land some glancing blows. Managed to just shove him away. No real damage done.

 

Nothing since my grade school and high school days. I'm too old for that B.S. now.

The most memorable was during a high school football practice. A starter didn't like that a scout teamer embarrassed him on a play, so he whacked me upside the helmet after the play was over. When he started running his mouth after, I punched him in the gut. We ended up knocking each other down and getting into it pretty good for a football fight.

Coaches came over, cussed us out and said if we had so much G-D energy, we could run laps around the field. For the rest of practice.

In hindsight, the punishment worked. The other player and I got along really well after that day. We had the hatred of our coaches in common!

 

No doubt about it. It still bothered me throughout the day, even though it had been resolved. I'm not really one to pick fights, or say things that may instigate a fight, but when I've been waiting in line for 15 minutes and have worked my way from the back of the line to the front of the line, I'm not going to let some entitled asshole cut in front of not just me, but everyone else. My wife was mad at me for confronting the guy, but if you let people like that just continue to do shit like that, they'll never stop. Felt bad for his two kids that were escorted out with him, because it's not their fault their dad is an asshole. But he's teaching them bad habits, so maybe that'll help be a life lesson.

 

Given how I react to being physically threatened (usually with smartass laughter), I'm a little surprised I've only been in one real fight.

 

You're Irish. I expected at least seven.