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I’d like to blame this essay on being from the South, but I’ve blamed the South for a lot in recent pieces. I think that what follows is really a product of growing up a typical boy around typical boys and a typical father who let me be a boy.
Growing up a boy, not to exclude the experiences of my female readers, is just a telling a retelling of the hero’s journey, at least in our own minds. We play games where we are heroes or villains, cops or robbers, and we resolve our disputes with eyes toward good and evil, us and them. It isn’t until we are older that we realize there is not that much that separates the “us” from the “them.” All heroes in our own story, every game and argument and social setting a battle in which we have positioned ourselves as the good guy, and the victor, should we be so bold.
Nowhere is this more obvious in the boyhood pastime of the fist fight. I am not advocating it, I am merely acknowledging its existence. Boyhood, at least as I experienced it, is a constant posturing and measuring of physical prowess. The process is how we determine if we are actually the hero. Hopefully, we learn something beyond winning and losing, punching and being punched. When I see grown men fighting at bars or on social media, I think, here is a boy who never learned the truth of the hero’s journey. Early on, we think the fighting is the measurement of the hero within. When properly engaged, we learn that the hero within is in and of itself the measuring rod, and the fight is nothing but a tool.
After all that ado, here are 6 things I learned from fights I won, lost, or saw. And some that never happened at all.
1. The place you end up matters more than the place you start.
We watched fight club in secret because our parents told us we weren’t allowed. They were afraid it would encourage us to fight. So we stayed up late after a friend’s parents went to bed and watched it in the basement. Good parents know their kids. We planned our fight club throughout the week, set matchups and wrote secret notes in our seventh grade math class. I was to fight John, a tough kid by all accounts. But I was overweight and cocky, so they thought it would be a good match up. I was afraid, but having gloves on kept things a little less real.
Rounds one and two went my way. Stick and move, get inside and land shots where you can. Use your wrestling when you have no other option, a cheap trick but necessary when you’re afraid. We had a progressive judging system for the time, the rest of the kids announcing the score in between rounds. In round three, it was much of the same. Then John stepped forward, dodging a sloppy, middle school style punch, and landed a right hand a la Mike Tyson, to the side of my head. I went down hard to one knee on the cement floor. Dazed, bleeding from lip and knee already starting to swell, I stood up and saw John loading another punch.
I put my hands up. Not to block. But to signal John that I was done. He didn’t get the memo, so I politely asked him not to hit me again, and began to pull off the loose-fitting gloves.
When the story was told by others, the fight was one round, and John had knocked me unconscious. They had peeled me off the floor and carried me to the couch. They had used smelling salts to wake me. My heart had stopped and there had been CPR. I lost teeth and broke ribs and cried uncontrollably.
The victors write the history, and perhaps they should. Them that last until the end will be saved.
2. There is weakness and there is Weakness, bullies and Bullies.
Early on, I thought that my dad’s rule on fighting was pretty clear. You fight at school (or some other place that will tarnish our family reputation), you had better win, because you won’t win at home if I hear about it.
Come to find out, there were exceptions. Specifically, there was my neighbor, Garrett. We lived next door to one another for years, and he was mentally and physically disabled.
We were friends. He was good at video games, loved NASCAR and baseball and WWE, and I let him win at basketball every day until his mother told me to beat him every once in a while. He needed to learn to lose.
At school, Garrett’s class did everything separate from the rest of us. The only time I ever ran into him was in the bathroom, every now and then, between classes. Because of his disabilities, he pulled his pants down at the urinal.
I think I was ashamed of it. Until the day I heard another kid, Josh, laughing. I forget what was said, or what was done, but I know that after our altercation, Josh told the principal that he was afraid to take a piss in between classes. That I was a bully. I thought that was a just punishment for his maliciousness.
I don’t know how my father heard of it, or if he remembers, but I do. I expected a form of parental justice to be meted out. But that didn’t happen. He did not condemn me, nor did he praise me. It was the first time I understood that some fights are ones that have to be fought.
The only thing I had to be ashamed of was the fact that I had been ashamed of my friend in the first place.
3. No one fights like a woman who feels that her loved ones are threatened.
Our summer program essentially consisted of letting all the kids run around on our church’s playground until parents showed up.
My sister did not typically go to the program. She was in soccer or swimming or robotics or whatever camp for the incurably intelligent that my parents sent her to. She would sometimes walk from our house to the church, a short trip, to take me home.
We did not exactly get along until after she left for college, which was much earlier than everyone else (she skipped high school altogether to attend college). She was the smart one, I was just a little less so. She was well-behaved, conscientious. I, a little less so. She was kind. You get the picture. We did not often agree on much. Our particular seat in the living room or car was often up for contention. We agree on more now, though we often come to issues from opposing worldviews.
When she came to pick me up on the day in question, she found me in tears. Daniel was tall and lanky and her age. He picked on me, though not very often. She confronted my abuser, first by socking him in the face, and second by chasing him around and then off the playground. He jumped the fence to get away. Later, I came to understand that Daniel had been mercilessly bullied in high school. The cycle would not persist on my sister’s watch.
For the first time, I understood the vast capacity of the feminine spirit to fight over the right things.
4. Discretion is only the better part of valor if valor is present.
I played football growing up, like most rambunctious boys from the South. My tenth grade year I was on an unbelievably bad varsity team. I was fighting for a starting spot on the offensive line. Undersized for the position, but as one coach told me, “slower than a snail in peanut butter.” Far too slow to play linebacker or fullback. So incredibly slow.
One of our team’s stars played defensive end. He was 6’5”, being recruited to play basketball and football, and would later do a short stint in the NFL. He would crush everyone on the offensive line, every day. We could barely practice offensive plays while he was on defense, because he would run over whoever was in front of him. Plus, I’m short, and slow, or did I forget to mention?
Play after play, I would line up, and he would line up, and he would go through me or around me or over me. I had nothing for him.
Except one day, or rather, one play. A pass play, he took the outside, which meant I could just run him out of the play instead of actually trying to beat him. I did so, and when he realized that he wasn’t going to be able to sack the quarterback he became enraged. He rushed me, after all whistles, screaming. No one jumped in, which is the policy of high school football players and coaches. Let the fight play out, see who’s tough.
I wrestled in high school too. I was better at it, mainly because one needn’t be fast to win. When he rushed me, instinct took over. Here’s this giant who had been bruising and bloodying me for half a season, and I get one decent play, and he tries to kill me? I execute the best wrestling move of my life, using his momentum into a lateral drop, and I end up on top, him on his back. I think, my god, I won. I am a king.
Except, he does not concede my victory. When people pull us apart, he feeds me an eight piece combo before I even get my hands up. I hear one coach yell out, “Jesus, you’re gonna break your hands!”
There are few things more demoralizing than hearing someone else’s knuckles rattle off your facemask, knowing you can’t do anything, and the only person who shows any concern at all is more worried about the hands of the superstar assailant rather than my face only thick plastic and a few inches away from being changed into an unrecognizable mess.
It gets broken up, and they send us to get water. Everyone takes their helmet off, except I keep mine on, head on a swivel. He gets water and adds insult to injury.
“Take your helmet off, bitch! You wanna do it? We can do it!” People step in front of him again. I keep mine on, act like I don’t hear him. In the post-practice huddle, my coach tells me in front of my peers, “if you’re gonna be soft, I can’t use you. No room for that out here.”
Didn’t he see the other guy? Even if I wanted to punch him back, my t-rex arms are not long enough to hit him before he hits me. Plus, did he not hear the ratatattat of fist on face? I’m slow, remember? I’m getting my lights turned out before my first punch is thrown.
I told my friends that I didn’t think teammates should fight. That it would divide the team. We have the same goal, and I want to be a team player.
That was a lie. I had traded blows with teammates before, and would again later. That same year I went toe-to-toe with the captain of the wrestling team, and got a couple shots in before the bloody nose he gave me put me down. That guy was intimidating, but he shook my hand after, and told me it had been a pleasure to beat up a guy that would at least fight back.
But this was different. Not enough of my pride had been at stake. Sheer, unadulterated fear. I took my time taking my pads and other gear off that day, for fear he would approach me in the locker room. There had been no discretion, only deep, abiding fear that I would be physically killed, socially assassinated.
To this day, I hear the refrain. Jesus, you’re gonna break your hands!
5. A “good fight” fixes most problems between men.
To tell the truth, we were only boys, but the principle applies.
There are several things that constitute a “good fight.” Neither of us were truly angry, only frustrated and annoyed. We had spent every day together for almost a whole summer, and neither of us knew at our young age to say, “hey, I don’t want to hang out again tonight.”
We weren’t trying to hurt one another. We agreed to pull punches before kicking it off in the front yard.
We weren’t prideful, and there was no risk of our social circles finding out who won or lost, of losing social status. There were no girls present to impress. No real stakes. Just solutions.
We fought out our frustrations for what felt like an hour, in the front yard, in broad daylight. No one called anyone’s mother. No one held a grudge. No one got hurt. Just a good clean fight.
That night, we watched Anchorman at his place after his parents went to bed. We laughed until we cried.
6. Fighting can be toxic, or it can be beautiful.
Our current cultural moment decries toxic masculinity without providing a definition. The worst parts of the political left describe all masculinity as toxic, as though toxicity is embedded in all behaviors from cradle to manhood.
The more obvious truth is that there are certainly distinctively mas
culine behaviors, meaning, there are things boys do that girls don’t always do, and a subset of those behaviors often have a toxic element. The inverse is also true of toxic femininity, but alas, another essay.
For example, I once participated in a middle school brawl behind the bleachers during a high school football game. To this day, the only cause of the fight that I am aware of is that they were them and we were us. This brawl, ultimately harmless, basically consisted of toddlers blindsiding anybody with a different color t-shirt on until someone’s mom came down to yell at us. Fruitless, tribal, toxic in the way arbitrary gang violence is toxic, and there is little difference.
But there can be beauty to a fistfight when the toxic elements are removed. When I watch reruns of Arturo Gatti versus Mickey Ward, the first time they fought, there is a shocking beauty, wounded doves and fallen angels. It is widely regarded as one of the most brutal boxing matches of all time, and it, along with the two fights that followed, altered both men’s lives forever.
There is a moment where Gatti lands a body shot that drops Ward to the canvas. Ward cries out, grimaces, and punches the floor three times before standing up and winning the rest of the ground. On the fifth round, Ward is battered by Gatti with about 25 seconds left, blood streaming down his face and Gatti turning on the gas. He then gives a slight nod, walks forward and lands a combination on Gatti that nearly buckles him, and then stalks him until the end of the round. I remember Ward’s punches to the floor, Gatti’s head rattling back and forth between Ward’s punches like a rock falling down a crevasse.
To me, they samurais, water dancers and warrior poets. Gods at war.
Some will call this toxic, that boys like me who idolized fighters will learn violence. Maybe. But I also learned the lessons above.
And to get your back off the ropes. To fire back when you’re down. That a well-timed body shot is better than a barrage of poorly executed punches to the head. That there are some fights you don’t want to win. That there are some fights that you don’t want to fight at all. That you need a good corner to throw in the towel when you’re too tough for your own good. That toughness is honorable, and honor is honorable. That the fighter with a reason to fight beyond himself is ten percent better than his ability dictates.
We live in a world where fighting and war are the most utilized metaphors we have, for politics and culture and gender and education and everything else.
I, for one, am thankful I learned to fight, even though losing was required.
That’s not toxic. It’s an education, a trial by fire and combat.
wonderful. we need more men who process the stories of their life and distill them into truths or lessons that can be passed on to the next generation.
everyone fights, learning to fight in the right way, at the right time and against the true enemy is what takes wisdom.