# The most "bad ass" act you have witnessed?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-bad-ass-act-you-have-witnessed/522838
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion
**Created:** [December 28, 2009, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-bad-ass-act-you-have-witnessed/522838 "2009-12-28T21:06:46Z")
**Posts on this page:** 11
**Page:** 8
### Author:  [@cosmosdan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cosmosdan)
#### Post date: [August 25, 2010, 8:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-bad-ass-act-you-have-witnessed/522838/141 "2010-08-25T20:30:16Z")
> [@chacoguy](#):
>
> Didn’t witness the act, but I met the man. I guy that worked for my dad got in a tractor accident and a disk plow fell on him. It severed his left arm and right leg. He realized that he was about to die from blood loss and the tractor’s fuel had caught fire. He crawled over to the fire and _stuck in his stumps to cauterize the wounds_. :eek:
Dam!!! He wins the thread.
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### Author:  [@Lanzy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lanzy)
#### Post date: [August 25, 2010, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-bad-ass-act-you-have-witnessed/522838/142 "2010-08-25T20:51:12Z")
My first bad ass event happened when I was in the 5th grade. I was the “new” kid as I had only been living there for 3 years, pretty much every other person had lived in this little country town their entire lives. Tim was the school bad ass (OK lower grade bad ass), and he decided I was his target during recess and he ran up and punched me in the stomach. He was huge and had been in more fights than anyone but made the mistake of hitting me at the top of a hill and it had been raining that morning.
I called him an asshole, that was my first curse word and I felt really badass about it.
As he threw his next punch I ducked under and pushed him down the hill. He slid all the way to the bottom and turned around and started back up. I waited for him and he threw another punch, I ducked and threw him down the hill. This happened 6 Times!! I wasn’t hurting him at all but the entire class was laughing at him the entire time. It ended his little bullying that day. But the badass act was yet to come.
The Principal, My Dyer grabbed me from behind to stop the nonsense and I spun around (without thinking) and punched him dead in the gut. That’s the act that made me a suspended badass.
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### Author:  [@cosmosdan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cosmosdan)
#### Post date: [August 25, 2010, 8:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-bad-ass-act-you-have-witnessed/522838/143 "2010-08-25T20:58:19Z")
> [@TruCelt](#):
>
> Rick reminded me of this one.
>
> My Grandfather was the quintessential Irishman. Not tall, but powerfully built, and had spent his teen (Great Depression) years driving railroad spikes into the frozen ground of NH and VT as part of a team consisting entirely of his own brothers. Generations of stone masons in our family. Solid guy; we’re talking strong.
>
> He also had a thing about bad language in front of ladies. You just didn’t do it.
>
> My Dad and Uncle were on top of the house, finishing a wall (they were building a new room to accomodate their new baby sister) and my dad realized that he needed one more concrete block to finish. (similar to breeze block or cinder block, but far more solid.) Going up and down ladders with blocks is never fun, and he was quite upset that he’d miscounted. He began to cuss.
>
> My Grandfather, noticing the neighbor lady talking to my Grandmother in the nearby backyard, saw red. He picked up a concrete block and tossed it up to my Dad - as casually as tossing a beach ball - and said “There’s your block, now watch your mouth!”
>
> Dad was sitting across the roof line, and barely managed to stay on when the thing hit him, square in the stomach.
Reminds me a bit of my own Grandfather. Coming from Ireland at two years old his own father died on the trip over. His mother remarried and Grampa wound up going to work in the Maine woods as a boy when his stepfather was injured and couldn’t work. He spent his entire life as a lumberjack and foreman of woods crews in an era where you had to be tough as nails for that kind of work. Several family stories of him but two of my favorites occurred when he was in his early seventies. Grampa usually had a cane but we were never quite sure whether he really needed it for walking.
He summered with my folks and wintered with my older sister. One day at her place her ex husband showed up drunk and belligerent. Grampa sat there letting them argue it out until her ex made the mistake of raising his hand as if to strike sis. In a flash Gramp was out of his chair and rapped her ex in the head with his cane. He staggers back shocked and surprised and decides it’s time to leave.
One summer Gramps is sitting outside in his chair enjoying a sunny summer day when our loud mouth 40 something neighbor decides to stop by. I’m pretty sure he was just running his mouth as he bragged what a bad ass he was and he had heard Grampa used to be a tough guy and blah blah on and on.
My mother says she heard some panicked yelling and when she ran outside to see what was up. Our loudmouth neighbor was crawling on the ground being followed by Gramps who was smacking him with his cane.
So, {smack} You’re a {smack} tough guy {smack} are ya? {smack}
I can only imagine the surprise of this loud mouth when this 70+ year old shut his big mouth.
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### Author:  [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)
#### Post date: [August 25, 2010, 9:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-bad-ass-act-you-have-witnessed/522838/144 "2010-08-25T21:10:06Z")
I once saw a Walgreens manager chase a purse-snatcher across the street, retrieve the handbag the criminal had stolen from one of his customers, and then casually walk back to return the stolen item, clearly daring the thief to do anything about it. I think I posted on the boards about it.
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### Author:  [@PunditLisa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PunditLisa)
#### Post date: [August 25, 2010, 9:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-bad-ass-act-you-have-witnessed/522838/145 "2010-08-25T21:41:03Z")
Back in college, I had a boyfriend who looked a lot like Andre Agassi, right down to his rather slight build. One day, I went into a rarely used ladies’ restroom and was in the middle of doing my business when a shadow passed over me and I felt the hairs of my neck raise up. I looked up slightly and saw a very tall black man looking over the stall at me. He may have been a basketball player because he didn’t have to stand on the toilet to peer down at me.
I quickly skedaddled out of there, and found my boyfriend to tell him what had happened. A few minutes later, the peeping tom walked past us and I pointed him out.
Well, my 5’9" 160 pound boyfriend walked right up to this 6’7" giant, grabbed him by the shirt and shoved him against the wall. I was too far away to hear what they said to each other, but there was no mistaking the look of fear on the dude’s face. A few seconds later, I got what seemed to be a very sincere apology from the peeping tom under the watchful eye of my badass boyfriend.
That boyfriend never amounted to a hill of beans, but, by God, you didn’t want to fuck with him. Or his girlfriend.
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### Author:  [@Knowed\_Out](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Knowed_Out)
#### Post date: [August 25, 2010, 9:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-bad-ass-act-you-have-witnessed/522838/146 "2010-08-25T21:52:32Z")
I used to live on the upper floor of an apartment building. Our AC petered out, so we called the landlord. Later that day, I heard a loud THUNK outside our front door, then knocking. It was a skinny guy, maybe 150 lbs, in just his shorts. There was a big canister behind him, almost his size. He asked if this was the place where the AC was out. I said yes, and he said OK, I gotta climb up top.
He picked the canister and set it beside the railing. He then hopped up to the top of the railing and held on to the support post. I asked him if he needed help, and he said Naaah, I got it. He reached down, gripping the railing with his toes like a monkey, and grabbed the top of the canister. He then picked it up, tossed it upwards a little bit and caught it as he straightened up on top of the railing, keeping his balance. Then he lifted the entire canister over his head and put it on the roof that was about a foot over his head, exhaling a big UUUUUNNNNHHHH!!! while doing so.
He did this all in one motion. Then he hopped up on the roof like Spider-man. I just stood there dumbfounded and hoped his people would never declare war on us puny humans.
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [August 25, 2010, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-bad-ass-act-you-have-witnessed/522838/147 "2010-08-25T22:05:19Z")
No antagonist in this one, but still pretty bad-ass: I used to have a summer job at a kiddie amusement park. One of the rides was some small electric cars which meandered about under the roller coaster and back. Well, one day, I was talking with one of the other ride operators, when without warning, he suddenly bolts, launches himself over a chain-link fence, and is putting a kid back into his seat who had unbuckled and was starting to climb out of the car-- All this before I even noticed anything. I think he might have even crossed the roller coaster track in the process.
Another, more conventional one: My high school was in a pretty bad neighborhood, but there was about a 500 yard radius of safety around it, enforced by Coach Russ. A friend of mine and I were taking down the flag at the end of the school day, when some local thugs decided that the front lawn of the school was an appropriate place to have a rumble. Coach Russ flies out the front door to break it up, and gets a hard kick right in the kidneys. Now, what happens when a normal human gets kicked in the kidneys, is he falls down in agony and pisses blood. What happens when Coach Russ gets kicked in the kidneys, though, is he turns around, picks up the guy that kicked him, and throws him through the hedges.
Russ was also the Dean of Men at the school, by the way, the guy in charge of discipline. Need I mention that nobody even knew when the last time was any of the students ever got into a fight at school?
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### Author:  [@GameHat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GameHat)
#### Post date: [August 26, 2010, 2:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-bad-ass-act-you-have-witnessed/522838/148 "2010-08-26T02:27:38Z")
I didn’t see it, but I gotta vote for [Techno Viking](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2voJMSe7L0)
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### Author:  [@NurseCarmen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NurseCarmen)
#### Post date: [August 26, 2010, 1:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-bad-ass-act-you-have-witnessed/522838/149 "2010-08-26T13:17:21Z")
A buddy of mine found a house on fire, the first floor was fully engulfed. He found out 5 kids were inside upstairs. He and two other cops formed a human pyramid and pulled all five kids out of the house, fire roaring within feet of them.
He was killed in the line of duty 16 years ago today.
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### Author:  [@racer72](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/racer72)
#### Post date: [August 27, 2010, 1:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-bad-ass-act-you-have-witnessed/522838/150 "2010-08-27T01:57:43Z")
This happened just today. I came to a stop at a red light, I was the 3rd car in line. An older and I assumed homeless guy knocked on my passenger window and held out his hand. I waved him off. He spit on my window.
He walks to the car in front of me. He knocks on the passenger window and a few seconds later does the same, spits at the window then walks away towards me again. A girl, likely late teens or early 20’s opened the passenger door, jumped out and walked up behind the old guy and let him have it with an open hand to the side of the head. He staggered to the sidewalk and she followed him. She then doubled up her fist and let the guy have it in the face. He went down in a heap.
3 or so cars honked their horns and I heard someone yell “you get him girl”. She climbed back in the car about the time the light turned green and off they went. I pulled into a gas station a few blocks away to clean the spit off my window.
Guess I should mention the guy was about 6 feet tall and at least 250 pounds. She was a good 6 inches shorter and probably weighed half as much.
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### Author:  [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)
#### Post date: [August 27, 2010, 2:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-bad-ass-act-you-have-witnessed/522838/151 "2010-08-27T02:49:08Z")
A lot of people don’t realize that Chuck Norris is actually Chuck Norris. Can’t get any more badass than that.
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