Have you ever been in a fight?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

I’ve been in more than my share of fights. When I was in 5th grade, I was picked on mercilessly, until it boiled over one day on the way home from basketball practice and after getting pounced on by a local bully, grabbed my belt from my bag and proceeded to pound him with the buckle.

I didn’t get back into fighting until my 20’s when it would happen at some point during the parties I held every weekend until it culminated in a knock-down-drag-out-carry-the-wounded-from-the-field brawl that miraculously didn’t involve the local PD.

From time to time I get the challenges, but usually, at 6’4" 290# all but the drunkest of the idiots actually follow through.

I’ve grown into quite a pacifist, but make no mistake, I will get the job done if necessary.

42

Only two. My record is 1-1. The first was when I was a Junior in H

43

Fought when I was about 7 because it was worth it and lost big time. Fought when I was about 15 for no good reason and “won”. Got beat up when I was 17 for no good reason. Got a black eye from some junkie when I was 22 and just walked away.

edit: haven’t been in a fight for over 10 years.

44

Got in fights every few years in school. Won some and lost some. Kids finding out that I didn’t even pretend to fight fair tended to put a damper on things.

Was a bouncer for a short time and a drunk wanted to take a swing at me. Telegraphed his roundhouse about a year in advance so I leaned out of it and then back in to add a little extra rotation to his swing. He lost his balance and collapsed in a heap. Real short “fight”.

Have had a bone broken sparring, but that doesn’t reall count.

45

Sounds similar to my youth. Other than one fight detailed in this thread:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=307393 (post 18 I think)

I’ve not been in a fight for years, although I have been tempted, particularly with a former next door neighbour who constantly parked across my drive and was a fat obnoxious bullying bastard.

46

Sure, been in a few, all in school days or college. Never intended to be in any of 'em. I lost a few fighting, a few running, and a few refusing to fight, didn’t find any formula for consistent success. I also won one now and then.

My most dramatic is recounted here.

47

I’ve been in a few. The most recent was at a bar where I’m a regular and I know everyone and everyone knows me. There was this obnoxiously drunk guy who had started coming in for karaoke once a week and he was always a real ass. Well, one night the bartender had enough and told the guy he had to leave. He refused and started getting up in her face about it. Finally, she pointed her finger at him and told him that she was going to call the cops. When she did that he grabbed her finger and twisted it. I happened to be standing the closest to him so I popped him in the nose and bloodied it. A bunch of my guy friends came over and physically removed him from the building. At that point it was about 2, so I decided to leave.

When I got out into the parking lot I could hear this moron still yelling about how he was going to kick everyone’s ass and other nonsense. He was standing out there chucking beer cans around when I head him say, “How many of you is it going to take to kick my ass? Five or six?” Something in me just snapped, but as calmly as I could I walked across the parking lot over to him and said, “No it takes one mother******!” and hit him again. He started wildly swinging back and missing except for one stray elbow that barely left a red mark under my eye and I put him in a head lock. Some other regulars came over and subdued him until the cops eventually got there. Apparently his pride was too hurt to admit that it was me who had given him the bloody nose, so the cops just sent everyone on their way and told the guy not to come back.

48

Had my nose broken in Bulgaria three years ago, in a bar fight. Being a tourist, I was stupid enough to get a table way in the back for me and my cousin. “It” got started, and by “it” I mean a chair being grabbed right off under someone and slammed into someone else’s chest, when the bouncer stopped the last guy in a party of five to tell him he was way too drunk to come in.

Unfortunately the chair snagged someone else’s date on it’s way 'round and it was on. I was just trying to get the hell out of there via a side door when a random guy comes sliding into my feet as I was sidling along the wall towards the door. The guy gets up, roundhouses me in the face, turns and gets back into it. I must have bounced or something, because I was up instantly, snapped my elbow into the back of his neck, kicked him behind the knees and shoved him over. Ambush, I know, and the guy looked like one ugly motherfucker so I made good my escape before he could get up and up the anté.

My face hurt like a bitch for days afterwards, but what I remember most was the painfully crisp awareness, lungs heaving and cold-sweat shock as the adrenaline left me some ten minutes afterwards. I got the shakes, bad, and could hardly stand although my face had already gone numb. It felt like going from being deeply asleep in a warm duvet, in a toasty room with pitch black night outside then brutally and suddenly having the bed tipped over into a ice cold pool.

(I was fortunate in the fact that I have an aquiline nose - knob at the top - and I’d already broken it once by accident, so I wasn’t freaked out and my cousin managed to set it fairly well. And what he couldn’t get to, my dad got the next morning. Doc took a look at it when I came back to Norway and said it was fine.)

I’ve had a few stand-up, I-know-where-this-is-going-but-I-don’t-care fights as well, some of which I ended on my terms, some of which the terms of surrender were read to me the day after as I woke up.

49

I got in a lot of grabbing/shoving kid fights in elementary school–I was the class dork, I got picked on, I learned to fight back a bit.

Fewer but similar fights in high school–I’ve never thrown a punch in anger, now that I think about it. I got to be known as the guy who would happily blow you off when you wanted to fight and then find a legal, sanctioned reason to make you regret it later–checking people off the boards in indoor field hockey in gym class, slide tackles with intent, that sort of thing.

In college, I bounced for my fraternity’s parties, given I was (and am) 6’0" and 245lbs. By then I’d taken some aikido, so I’ve never so much “got in a fight” as “gently but firmly escorted some belligerent drunk to the floor and kept him there while I called the boys in blue or had some buddies drag him outside”. It’s been around ten years since anyone’s taken a swing at me in anger.

50

I went to military school from the middle of seventh grade until graduating high school. There’s a lot of free-floating testosterone in the air at places like that, and fights were pretty common. There were only seven seventh-graders, so we were housed in the same barracks as the high-school kids. We got picked on a lot by older boys who knew they couldn’t take the people they were really mad at. I got my ass kicked a couple of times (I have to admit I was usually at least partly to blame – I had a smart mouth) before I had the idea of befriending the baddest MF in our barracks. Just like in prison, except I didn’t have to sleep with him.

Later, when I was in 10th or 11th grade, I was in the communal shower one morning and people were goofing around, snapping each other with towels. I decided to join in (out of character for me) and popped another boy on the butt with my towel. He was NOT amused and followed me back to my room, loudly declaring that he was going to kick my ass. I had just enough time to get some pants on before he came bursting through the door. I hate fighting – it makes me feel physically ill to hit someone – and I tried to apologize, but he’d psyched himself up and was past the point of no return.

The fight that ensued was short and (for me) painless – before he managed to connect with any of his punches, I shoved him and he hit the back of his head on the corner of a cinder-block wall. Lights out, tweety birds, fight over. A couple of spectators in the doorway came and half-carried him away.

About twenty minutes later, just as I was getting ready to leave for morning formation, one of the guy’s friends came to my door and said, “You gave X a concussion, you fat bastard, and I’m here to avenge him.” (Yes, people really talked like that at my school.) Once again I tried to talk my way out of it, but no dice. This fight was more of a wrestling match, and I was NOT doing well – he got one good punch in on my ear that rang my head like a bell, and we both went down. He stumbled over my footlocker and I saw that his head was between said locker and the wall; instinctively, I pistoned out with both feet and smashed the locker against the wall, breaking his nose and almost cracking his skull. All the fight went out of him.

I grabbed him by the collar, dragged him out of my room into the hall (heads disappearing into doorways all up and down the way), dumped him in a heap, and yelled (actually, it was more of a shriek) “Does anybody ELSE want to do this?!?” I didn’t get any takers, and in fact that was my last fight at that school. Thank god, because a) as I mentioned, I hated to fight and b) I wasn’t actually any good at it – I’d gotten very lucky in both of those fights that day.

51

I got in a bar fight once.

52

I was mugged about a year and a half ago walking home from the train in my (very safe) neighborhood. It was a teenager (with her friends, who were too scared to leave their car) from the other side of town doing it for kicks. She rammed me from behind, knocking me down, then started beating me about my head and shoulders because by knocking me forward, I ended up curled around my purse and she couldn’t get at it.

I turned my head and saw it was just a kid, so launched myself into her chest and knocked her down. I think she cracked her head on the street; I know I did. After that she was pretty eager to get away from me, though she dropped her cell phone and demanded it back real briefly before she finally acquiesced to her friends in the car yelling at her to just let’s go, already.

I still had my purse and the cops had all of them in custody within ten minutes, but if she’d been armed I’d probably be dead. The time it took between her car pulling up and her on top of me was less than 2 seconds. Even if I’d seen her coming (she was behind me, remember) I wouldn’t have had time to run.

There were two or three homophobia-related fights I was in close proximity to in high school, too. Meaning within about 15 feet for one (the instigator tried to run right through our much-smaller-than-him teacher in the middle of class to get to another student), and within about 4 feet from another (a friend of mine was attacked during lunch period).

Oh, there was the fight related to an attempted sexual assault a few years back, too. (He lost.)

You don’t have to instigate a fight to find yourself in the middle of one, like it or not. While I know I am a responsible adult, other people clearly aren’t.

53

Oh, and in seventh grade, when I was walking down the hall to leave after school was done, and some guy runs up behind me, punches me in the kidney hard enough that I couldn’t breathe (much less move) for about 10 seconds, and runs off. I still have no idea what that was about.

Hell, there’s probably more I’m not remembering, too.

54

by fight, I assume you don’t mean the kind where they shoot at us and we shoot at them. I’ve been in a couple of those.

I’ve been in four what you would call fist fights although two of them were not with fists.

I got in a fight in the sixth grade and met the guy after school in an empty lot. we traded punches a little and nothing was decided.

I got in a fight once in my first year of college. I came back to the rooms where I was living a little drunk and a guy called me a name and I got offended and called him out and lost a tooth to the first punch. fight over.

my last two “fist” fights were both in training in the Army in 1969. Both involved rifles rather than fists.

We were cleaning M-14 rifles after the range. One guy got up from his seat on a horizontal telephone pole (a very desirable spot) to take it to the arms room to see if it was clean enough to turn in. I knew that if you tried to turn your rifle in too early, it would always
be not clean enough. I took his seat while he was gone. When he came back with his rifle disassembled by the armorer, he demanded his seat back. I wouldn’t give it up. both rifles were partially disassembled (I was still cleaning mine). We clashed using semi-disassembled M-14s until the drill sergeants broke it up.
Still in the Army in 1969, in Advanced Individual Training (AIT) for the job of Army Medic, those of us destined for Viet Nam had to go through the BB-Gun (quick reaction) course with (simulated) booby traps and (actual) snipers. We (and the snipers) were provided with BB guns and helmets with plexiglass face shields. I got halfway through the course and a sniper decided to do a frontal assault on me. My BB gun stopped shooting BBs. I shouted that I was out of ammo and asked the nearby SGT for an emergency resupply and at the same time shook the gun in case there were still BBs in it and continued shooting. Evidently there were still BBs in it. I shot the guy and he got angry because I had shot him after I had declared that I was out of ammo. (they rig it that way so the guys going through the course don’t have much ammo but the snipers do). I turned to continue the course and he hit me in the back of the head with the butt of his BB gun. The SGT came over and the sniper tried to explain what happened. The SGT indicated my helmet on the ground and said something to the effect: “his helmet’s on the ground. You hit him. shut up.” Then told me to continue to course.