I was reading, a while ago, an article about Nate Newton, an offensive lineman for the Dallas Cowboys in the 1990s. Newton talked about how he spent time in prison afterwards (something related to drugs) and how, despite his great size and physical strength, he was afraid in prison.
Now, I know there are many reasons for someone in prison to be afraid, and not all of them are related to physical harm. But it got me wondering: Suppose there were a professional athlete in a sport where physical power and violence and strength is important - i.e., a boxer like Muhammad Ali or a football player like Nate Newton - how safe would such a person be in prison?
In any 1-on-1 physical altercation, you’d have to think that the athlete would be favored to win, but would his celebrity status make him a target of the other inmates? And if he’s strong and powerful, then wouldn’t that simply cause other inmates to gang up on him, several attacking him at a time, rather than one at a time, in order to compensate against his strength?
I’m not all that sure he would be favored to win. I know small-to-average sized bikers (seriously 1%/gang types) who could take the average boxer or middle-linebacker apart in a street-type fight. Dirty/survival fighting is a skill, like playing football, and the average career criminal probably has the training. Besides I’ve seen how seriously buffed-out some cons are upon release. My money is more on that side of the fence.
On being a target; it would depend on the person and the crime. I don’t recall Mercury Morris being targeted but there are some athletes I could believe it happened to.
I remember back when Mike Tyson was convicted of rape that there was speculation that he might be targeted by fellow prisoners seeking bragging rights for kicking his ass.
I don’t think it’s a really important distinction, though. Everybody bleeds when they get stabbed or hit over the head from behind. Prison’s an awful, terrifying place.
Eh a lot of it depends on the boxer and middle linebacker in question and how the fight starts. If it starts with the 1%er tackling the boxer then all of the boxer’s skills are out the window. The middle linebacker might not have any fighting skills and would lose to someone that does have them.
A UFC professional level fighter would have nothing to worry about in a fair fight. They could knock out/submit any prisoner within a minute or two. The problem is that prison fights are rarely fair. They start with some guy shivving someone or it’s a shot from behind or it’s ganging up on one person. That’s what the fighters need to be afraid of.
A boxer is trained to box; that is, to punch and deflect punches to the body and head, while conserving energy and marshalling resources to cause an opponent to waste energy and tire out until they drop their guard or get forced onto the ropes or into a corner where they don’t have mobility. Boxers are not trained to block low kicks, eye pokes, windpipe crush, any weapons beyond fists, or any kind of ground fighting. Inside the ring, a trained boxer can probably take down anyone of comparable size or even a heavier weight class by dint of skill and endurance training. In a street fight or prison attack, he may have a certain advantage of speed and strength from his conditioning, but the tendancy to revert to boxing training is actually a detriment against an experienced street fighter who will go quickly for a disabling ‘kill shot’ that would not be permitted under the ‘Marquess of Queensberry’ mentality.
You will fight like you train; if you train to ‘fight’, someone trained to maim or kill will likely prevail regardless of size.
I think its pretty obvious what would happen nobody, even the strongest athlete is superhuman, if a gang of people even just two or three average size guys they’ll likely overwhelm the biggest man 9/10 times, especially if they have nothing to lose and want it more. Add prison shanks into the mix and I wouldn’t expect the athlete to survive especially if he is caught off guard. Kind of makes me think of Iran’s strongest man that was killed in a struggle with three men with knives. That guy was huge and you know what if it was just the three guys he may have prevailed, but they had knives. It took them 40 minutes, obviously the guy fought back with everything he had which was considerable strength but in the end it wasn’t enough.
Rorshach was full of shit. The other prisoners are not locked in there with the athelete. The athlete is locked in there with him.
In the real world, very few people can defeat two similarly-sized opponents at once in unarmed combat; very, very few can beat three such opponents; and nobody can take four or more. Such melee upsets happen in movies only because the single fighter has super-powers or the attackers are foolish enough to attack one at a time–and in the latter case, it doesn’t take long for fatigue and accumulated injury or both to wear hte single fighter down.
And even apart from that: even Batman has to sleep, and while hee’s asleep he’s gonna get his throat slit,or wake up bound and gagged with half a dozenguys whaling on him.
I have heard (can’t look for a site right now) that both Mike Tyson and Michael Vick were treated like heroes by other prisoners. Not sure what exactly the specific conditions were at these prisons, though.
EDIT: Hmm, after some cursory research, looks like it was Vick who was treated well by fellow inmates. Tyson experienced more of a mixed bag (though his issues seemed to be more with guards than inmates).
Yeah, I don’t remember hearing anything about Tyson actually being attacked in prison, the speculation I was referring to was probably just a brief mention in an article in a magazine like SI or Newsweek about his conviction.
IIRC Tyson first got into trouble in prison for giving his autograph to another inmate. Prison rules forbade inmates from giving each other anything of value, and his autograph was considered valuable.
Fights inside prison are not all that different from fights outside prison - they happen for a reason. Groups of inmates don’t automatically attack newbies. Gang violence certainly exists, and the drug trade, and things like that, certainly motivate attacks. But the kind of jockeying for status that motivates fights inside and outside of prison are more individual efforts. And it is going to be significantly more difficult to intimidate a professional athlete like a line-backer or Mike Tyson, although these are extreme examples.
Nobody is invincible, that’s certainly true. But a professional athlete like a lineman is going to be much bigger, much stronger, and at least as used to pain as most prison inmates. Besides, you don’t necessarily have to win a fight - if it winds up inconclusive, or a draw, and the attacker is hurt as much as the defender, that tends to mark the defender as not an easy mark.
I’ve never been in prison. The only person I know who was, didn’t get beat up until he ripped off people in various drug- and other kinds of deals.
I would say crazy beats tough in most fights. And there are plenty of people in prison with a crazy, nothing-to-lose attitude. If you recall the Holyfield/Tyson fight, it is hard to box with someone who is eating your ears.
How safe anyone is in prison depends mostly on how they interact socially. I saw Tyson mention in an interview that he didn’t really have any trouble in prison because he knew how to talk to and interact with those types of people (criminals); indeed that’s the background he spent most of his life around. He probably would have been ok being a dick and fighting the first couple people in prison (he was a street criminal who used violence and aggression to hurt people before and during his boxing training; he was never just a pure boxer), but if he’d have gone that route it wouldn’t have taken long for him to get outnumbered or outsmarted and hurt badly. Coming from a street background he would have known that.
Keep in mind that prisoners have a pretty strict behaviour code even beyond what the guards enforce; they are pretty crowded and have very little freedom and room to relax and get away from each other; you learn a certain level of respect for each other or you get ostracized pretty fast. That behavior code is a bit different from non-prison life, but it’s real none the less. So it’s mostly your behavior that affects how badly other prisoners want to beat you, and not so much how muscular you are or how skilled you’re reputed to be. You can be smaller and not so impressive and still come through the experience all right; you might not ever be “safe”, but the right attitude can keep your risk minimal.
Of course there are some people who get “marked” and targeted for violence, but again that seems to often be due to how they acted or what they said at some particular point more than who they are. So a football player who bragged all the time on TV about being able to beat any prison clown down would get a lot more negative attention than another pro football player who just acted normal and did his time.
I saw a reality jail show where they brought guys in to a busy city processing unit; mostly at night and mostly just for a few nights before getting bailed out. There was one very out of shape very cheery fellow who kept a big grin on his face and was constantly joking with everyone one around him; about the furthest thing from a serious athlete-type as you could get. Over the course of the 20-minute show the cameras caught him getting attacked and beaten down 3 different times by complete strangers. The guy just had an annoying/disrespectful way of interacting and couldn’t keep from getting his ass kicked regularly.