I’m 62 and I’ve never been in a fight. I’ve never punched someone nor been punched. I’ve never been tested in that primal way.
“I Love You, Tom Brady”
The closest I came to a fight was on September 20th, 2009. My nineteen year-old son Andrew and I were at MetLife Stadium in the Meadowlands of New Jersey to watch our New York Jets try to break their long streak of futility against the much hated and envied New England Patriots, led by their star quarterback Tom Brady.
We hated Brady not only for his talent, not only because he was movie star handsome, not only because he could be gang tackled and pop right back up, but because he was married to a gorgeous model Gisele Bundchen. Our hate was pure envy,
All Patriot fans, however, loved Brady, and many were in love with him.
It was an ideal late summer day, sunny and around seventy-five degrees. Jets fans were as optimistic as the weather was fine. We had our own talented rookie quarterback Mark Sanchez and a new coach, rabble-rousing Rex Ryan whipping up Jets Nation with talk of a new era of winning.
Rex was quoted as saying that this game against the evil Patriots was like our Super Bowl.
It would have been a perfect day except for the men sitting directly in the row above us and the woman sitting directly in in the row below us.
The woman in the row below was a brunette and not unattractive. She had brought to the game her homemade sign that said “I Love You Tom Brady.” I recall a large red heart but nothing else about the sign except that it was large enough to block our view of the field when she held it up.
We had good seats, near the fifty-yard line and not far from the field. The woman could hope that her shouts for her hero might somehow reach him.
As the game wore on and as the woman had more to drink, she became increasingly less discerning about when to stand and hold her large sign aloft. Pauses in the action were fine, but when the game was live, to stand holding her sign overhead and block the views of those in the rows behind her was a highly charged act of rudeness.
(The average football game lasts about three hours. The ball is in play for only about 18 minutes.)
The men behind us, Jets fans also fueled by alcohol, yelled at the woman to “sit the fuck down and put your fucking sign down.” They mocked her team, they mocked Tom Brady, they mocked her.
Near the end of the game when the Jets had the lead and possession of the ball, the woman stood without interruption in defiance of the men in the row behind us. She shook her sign and shouted her love as loud as she could. I admired her brave persistence.
The game ended with the Jets winning 16-9. Many of us Jets fans lingered, standing to chant and clap, savoring our rare victory over perfect Tom Brady, the hated Patriots winning machine, and their robotic-like, genius coach Bill Belichick.
The woman with the sign stayed standing too, unbowed in defeat, still shouting her love for Tom Brady.
The Fordham Baldies
To be a Patriots fan in 2009 was to be a fan of a dynasty. The Patriots had won three of the last eight Super Bowls. To be a Jets fan in 2009 was to have endured decades of frustration and missed opportunities. The Jets’ only Super Bowl victory had been in 1969. (It’s 2024, and we’re still waiting.)
So perhaps one of the men behind us had been affronted beyond his limit by the woman’s refusal to stand down. Perhaps he felt she was ruining this rare Jets’ moment in the sun. Perhaps he’d had too much to drink.
Whatever his reasons, he reached down swiftly over Andrew and me, snatched the woman’s sign, tore it into pieces, and threw the pieces back in her face. She went into a rage and launched herself against the man, her arms flailing at him. He flailed back.
I was in the direct path of all this flailing. I was perfectly positioned to block the man from hitting the woman. And that was my instinct. To protect the woman.
It wasn’t hard to do since neither of them had an especially long reach. And their flails had little force. From a birds-eye view it probably looked like they were both haplessly flailing at me, rather than one another.
I was sympathetic to the woman. She had been rude to block our views, but the destruction of her sign crossed the line from rudeness to violence. She might have worked a long time to make that sign, and she was crying at what had happened to it.
The man who’d torn up the sign left. I think his buddies hustled him away.
I told the woman that what had happened to her wasn’t right. I wasn’t sure if she’d heard me. Nevertheless, I was satisfied that I had shown my good manners and chivalrous instincts.
Andrew and I exited to the crowded concrete concourse that circles the stadium. We stopped and tried to remember which direction to go.
Then, like the way at the end of a horror movie when you think it’s all over, but it’s not, I saw the woman whose sign had been ruined pointing at me, picking me out of the lineup of Jets fans buzzing this way and that.
Her loud voice was full of tears and fury. ”That’s the guy who tore up my sign, and then he hit me”
Next to her was a young, wiry bald man. He had tattoos on his bare arms. Tattoos in 2009 signified danger to me. Perhaps a stint in prison.
The bald man took a step toward me and said, “You hit my girlfriend?” His tone and the sway of his shoulders and head gave off a sense of barely restrained menace. I could tell he was drunk by the unsteady way he moved.
I said, “No. she’s wrong. I did not.” I had an authoritative tone, my voice commanding, my diction clear. I was used to being listened to. To being obeyed.
But my voice of command had no power in that concourse at that moment. The boyfriend was not interested in a debate, not interested in clearing up his girlfriend’s misidentification of me as her attacker rather than as the peacemaker.
He kept coming toward me, repeating “You hit my girlfriend?” It was less a question and more a prelude to the consequences he had in mind for me.
He wanted to fight. I was scared of him because he looked like the type of guy who liked to fight, knew how to fight, and would fight with vicious abandon, especially when drunk. And then there were those tattoos.
The man-–call him Baldy–– lunged toward me. I retreated. Now he was close enough to throw a punch. I turned my back and crouched. I ran behind a locked-up concession cart.
I shouted for help from our fellow Jets fans. They responded and created enough traffic to block Baldy and allow Andrew and me to escape.
I told Andrew we needed to remove our Jets jerseys and caps so we would be hard to recognize if Baldy pursued us. We made our way through the massive parking lot, ever watchful for Baldy.
The closer we got to the car waiting for us, the more my fear subsided.
Later, I thought my fear of Baldy might have been accentuated by memories of the “Fordham Baldies,” one of the fierce gangs in the cult movie “the Wanderers,” a film I revered, probably because it was about violence as a rite of passage, a rite that had passed me by.
A lesson learned
On our way home I thought of a tragic story that happened to the son of my father’s good friend, an especially sweet and gentle man. His college-age son had tried to break up a fight at a fast food restaurant and had been stabbed to death in the struggle.
My mistake, I told Andrew as we headed back to Manhattan, was trying to prevent contact between the woman with the sign and the man who tore it up. In the hectic heat of the moment and in her drunken state, the woman understandably confused me for her attacker. And if her boyfriend Baldy believed that I had attacked her, it was also understandable that he felt honor-bound to at least threaten me.
I’d have been better off not intervening and ducking away with Andrew, leaving the drunkards in the rows above and below us to pursue whatever melee they wanted to get into.
And that’s how I summed it up for my son as the lesson learned from my mistake. Avoid people who seem violent, especially if they’re drunk. Don’t speak to them, don’t get involved. Fights are not for us.
A Bruised Ego
One way to tell the story was that I had successfully avoided violence to Andrew or to me. Another version, however, is that I had quailed when confronted by a smaller man and ran away leaving my son vulnerable to attack, although I was the target.
That second version weighed on me at the time and weighs on me now remembering it fifteen years later. It demands certain self-searching questions.
If I’m scared of violence, does that make me less of a man? Should I have stood my ground next to my son in case Baldy turned on him? What if standing my ground instead of running would have defused the situation just as effectively as evasion? I’d have been prouder.
And when we got home and told the story, my son wouldn’t have told my wife that I had fled.
Fighting and Class
In a post in
, he writes about the connection between class and the experience of physical violence.“Among many class differences, one is that the vast majority of educated people have never been in a real fight or experienced serious physical injury. On occasion, I’ve wondered if this is why many of them believe words are violence. They have never known serious physical pain.” 1
(This is part of Rob’s theory of “luxury beliefs”––see my post The Death Of The Leisure Class, which explains why I think luxury beliefs is a flawed theory.)
If Rob Henderson is right about “educated people” rarely getting into fights, then it follows that most fights and most violence occur among the “uneducated.”
However, some refined definitions are in order. I think by “educated,” what Rob really means are those who grew up in affluent households where children went to good schools and where it was assumed they would go to college.
And so the rest, the “uneducated,” the majority of Americans, are those who grew up in less privileged circumstances, anywhere from the foster homes Rob grew up in to the vast American working class.
Rob is really speaking of social class, rather than “educated” vs. “uneducated.” But I can’t find any data that would back up Rob’s contention that fighting experience and social class are correlated. It seems like they would be, but “seems” is different than “is.”
If military recruitment is a proxy for a willingness to put oneself in harm’s way, then the evidence would not support Rob’s generalized assertion. Enlistment is not that heavily skewed by neighborhood income. 2
I’m left with the sense that the willingness to fight is some unpredictable mix of nature and nurture. In my case, I was raised in circumstances where I didn’t encounter any real violence at my private schools or in my Upper East Side neighborhood. As well, I was shy and shrank from attention, always afraid to thrust myself into the arena, always more comfortable observing from the stands.
Brains and Brawn
My son was never the target of Baldy. And it was smart of me to avoid violence by retreating and then calling on fellow Jets fans to block Baldy’s advances and give us an escape route. It was smart to have us remove our jerseys and caps to limit identification.
I gave a draft of this essay to Andrew. He helped me fill in a few details. He told me that at the time he was concerned for me, not for himself. He now thinks of it as a funny anecdote.
He remembers clearly my telling him that the lesson was to avoid fights whenever possible. I take that as a parental victory.
But faced with a violent guy, my son by my side, I turned and ran. I still feel shame in recalling that.
Question for the comments: What’s been your experience with physical fights? Either as a participant or close observer.
Luxury Beliefs Have Consequences (may be paywalled)
I've been involved two fights as an adult.
Late 90s, as I was leaving a bar with my then- girlfriend/ now wife, Dani, after she played a gig at a lower east side dive, a very drunk guy, who was with equally drunk friends, stepped between us and the exit and said something leering to Dani. We tried to keep moving but the guy wouldn't be ignored, he kept partially blocking our exit. I used my hand to try to get him to move - same gesture and force one would use to clear a face level branch on a hike - at which point he said "f-ing nigg-s" (Dani is Black and the friend we were with was dark skinned Hispanic). I then shoved him. He then hit me pretty lightly in the face. I grabbed him by the throat and threw him up against the bar. I remember having what felt like his Adams apple in the hard 'C' of my thumb amd forefinger and thinking with weird clarity that it wouldn't be that hard to crush his windpipe. I felt... exhilaration. Then one of his friends hit me in the back of the head with something, I released, and our group of three got out of there, lots more yelling, racial slurs, no one hurt. I look back on those seconds when my hand gripped a stranger's throat - I don't recognize myself in that moment, but I cannot deny the weird admixtures of both thrill and curiosity.
[2] In late 2017, after a work party, I had words with a severely intoxicated now-ex parole judge. We were introduced to each other at the party and instantly disliked each other. The dislike abated somewhat over the next couple of hours but resurfaced at the party's end, when we were milling outside the venue.
I said something taunting to him, he said something very weird and threatening to me, and the next thing I remember, I awoke in an ambulance. The incident was captured on video and was witnessed by friends. The drunken judge suckerpunched me with a vicious right hook. I fell backwards, hit my head on the sidewalk, and lost consciousness. The judge - who weighed about 325 lbs - lost his balance on his follow through and fell on me. The collarbone connevting tendons in my right shoulder were permanently torn as a result. Otherwise, I was fine. There remains my deformed shoulder and a picture of me in the Daily News with a nasty black eye.
[3] In both these instances, I got really really lucky. Incident #1 - had I squeezed harder and longer, had the guy's friend not hit me with something, I could have seriously injured or even killed the stranger. Over pretty much nothing. Manslaughter plea, years of prison, no career as a public defender, no beloved daughter. (But maybe a substack about what life in and after prison is like?? Sparks from Sing Sing!). Incident #2 - I could have had my skull fractured and been vegetable-ized. In both incidents, I had consumed a fair amount of alcohol, and my adversaries considerably more. Had we all been sober, I'm convinced neither would have happened. It's interesting and appropriate that under NY law, in a claim of self defense, to introduce evidence of a victim's past violence or aggressive nature, the defendant must have known about such violence or aggression.for a jury to hear about it. Otherwise, even if the victim had killed five people in the past, if the defendant didnt know about it, it is not admissible. But if the victim was intoxicated, that fact is admissible regardless of a defnedant's knowledge - because courts recognize thar people just act differently (i.e. worse!) when under the influence of alcohol and certain drugs. All of the cass of stranger assault I've handled as a defense attorneys that I can recall involved intoxication, usually on the part of both defendant and conplainant/victim.
[4] There is a great, great book by Bill Buford, Among the Thugs, that ties together themes of violence, class, and sports - specifically the orgiastically violent escapades of soccer hooligans in late 70s/early 80s Great Britain. Buford himself, though educated and obviously super smart and thoughtful, was seduced into this culture, and much of this incredibly entertaining and scary book is occupied by his attempts to understand the nature of that seduction. The characters in this memoir make Baldy look like Rachel Maddow.
I grew up in what pass for “elite” environments in New Orleans and have been in plenty of fights. I think I’ve lost most of them, and the older I got the more of them I lost: time winnows the number of men stupid enough to fight without knowing how to fight, such that by college most of the scraps I had were with dudes who easily whooped me. I’m little and angry, the classic moron type known to all who drink: I mistake the intensity of my prideful anger for physical capability. In my mind, at 43, my anger is still a “force,” when it is in fact the opposite, a weakness. I learned to box to try and get some discipline, but I was never going to be much of a problem for people.
I do think you learn things from fights, such as “the limits of the mental world” or “the irrelevance of concepts or claims” in some quarters. Knowing violent people changes your model of “the root causes of violence” for sure; plenty of them aren’t victims of any sort, plenty of them straight up love violence. I had that in me, and if I weren’t a weak little guy I’d have been a monster and possibly substantially criminal.
I don’t know that you missed any lesson you couldn’t more easily read though, honestly. I’m still reactive and would’ve intervened with the woman and the sign for sure. I’m foolish, but honor cultures pride themselves on foolishness, and I have to admit to doing the same. The strongest defense of this I’ll make is: a lot of people benefit from some people being willing to take on risk to enforce norms. I’m inclined to be that norm enforcer sometimes, and I’m okay with the possibilities, even in New Orleans, where lots of people are armed.