“I just hit that guy as hard as he’ll ever be hit,” a professional boxer said of his opponent. “I don’t see that as mean or cruel. I see it as liberating him from the fear of being punched in the face, because no one else will ever punch him that hard as long as he lives. He’s free now, as I see it, and I hope he uses it.”

That is so over-the-top, it’s almost funny. Even those of us who aren’t funny understand that the quality of a joke increases with the level of truth. The harder we shake our head, the harder we laugh. Those of us who don’t know how to punch or take a punch can also see the logic in what the man said, until we see it as a universally agreed upon truth. It also helped the comedic value of this line that when the boxer delivered this line, he appeared to be serious.

I don’t care what you say, the guy had to be delivering that line tongue-in-cheek, or ridiculing the opponent he just hit in some pseudo-serious way. It sounds like something Muhammed Ali might’ve said to try to further humiliate Joe Frazier. It sounds like a verbal version of Ali looming over Sonny Liston.”

I understand you think that, but even if it was delivered tongue-in-cheek, the audience at home could tell that this believed it so much it was a part of his constitution. He spoke as if he were spreading the gospel. (It wasn’t Mike Tyson, though he did say something similar.) When we’re done laughing at this, we acknowledge that the difference between funny and hilarious is that this fella delivered this unusual, unorthodox philosophy as if he believed it. The more we laugh, throwing our own bits in rounds, we realize that what makes such a line even more funny is that there might be some sort of twisted logic to it.

Speaking in public might be listed number one on everyone’s list of their greatest fears, followed by death, heights, spiders, and a general sense of the unknown. The fear of getting punched in the face might factor low on that list, especially among adult respondents who know that law enforcement will deliver harsh penalties to those who cannot control their impulses. Among the younger contingent, the teens and early twenty-somethings in particular, this fear likely rates much higher. Think about how often a hit to the face, and the threat thereof, governed our day-to-day interactions with our peers.

A hit to the face, no matter what the situation, or how hard it hits, is personal. A little kid hit me in the face recently to punctuate a joke. I immediately went into cool-down mode, “Don’t do that,” I instructed him, in my calmest voice. “Not to the face.” He assured me that he was just joking. I acknowledged that and reiterated, “Not to the face.”

What did we do to avoid any situations that could lead to a fight and a punch to the face? Most situations, even among testosterone-fueled, confusion-laden, and king-of-the-hill youth do not escalate to an actual punch. There’s usually a lot of screaming, and threats, but an actual fight rarely occurred in the schools most of us attended. The fear of it, however, influenced so many of our interactions. How liberating would it have been, back then, to have no such fears? If we were well-trained and well-schooled in the art of combat, how different would our interactions with bullies have been back then? If, as I say, most confrontations often don’t escalate to the physical?

How many of us have dreamed of standing tall and hitting our bully back? How many of those daydreams involved our bully flying back into the wall with an explosive, haymaker that had anime graphics behind it?

In our dreams, enhanced by cinematic indoctrination, the bully takes our bone-crushing blow, and he reaches out to shake our hand. “That, my friend, was a quality blow. Didn’t know you had it in you. Will you be my friend now?” The reality, for nerds like us, is our best punch probably would’ve felt like a duck down pillow landing at moderate speed. The truth is it probably would’ve encouraged our bully to show his friends how hard he could actually punch, and if you think they might feel bad about putting someone in the hospital, you had nicer bullies than I did. My bullies would’ve put that on their personal resume for the next time someone challenged them to a fight.

The contrarian response might be, “How about we gather together to stop encouraging kids from punching each other kids in the face?” Hey, I’m all hands up over here. All for it. I just live with the notion that there’s something in that young, testosterone male that no matter how much we encourage alternatives or discourage, we’ll never be able to quell. There are some people, kids, adults, and everyone in between who enjoy punching people in the face to resolve disagreements, and they use it to help them define their character both internally and externally. “There’s little you can do to quell the nature of the beast, especially among teenage boys,” a priest once said in one of my classes. “The best method we’ve found is to try to redirect all that hostility, rage, and aggression they have into sports. Football, wrestling, boxing and any other sport that provides young males an outlet.”

We’ve all met the exceptions to the rule, but most people will do anything and everything to prevent children from being harmed, intimidated, or bullied in any way. The reality is that the playground is the jungle. There are docile creatures who only eat vegetation and there are meat-eating predators. The vegetarians hide, they develop techniques to camouflage their weakness, and they develop their own maneuvers to thwart predators.

The vegetarians’ parents develop rules and codes of conduct, they put on seminars to reinforce rules, and they have one-on-one sessions with children who continue to violate those rules, but they don’t understand the rules of the jungle. The number one rule of the jungle is he who isn’t afraid to throw the first punch, or has the reputation thereof, often wins the argument. The second, and perhaps more important, rule of the jungle is he who is not afraid to take a punch has power equal to, and greater than, he who isn’t afraid to punch. To my old-fashioned, dated mind that deals in generalities as they apply to human nature, this prize fighter’s twisted logic actually makes a lot of sense.

We can all try to change the rules of the jungle, and we should, but when adults attempt to micromanage a kid’s world, the first and last question they should ask is, “And then what?” In my day (insert old fogey voice), the first and last thing we did, in our teens, was try to violate every rule we could find. We treated finding a way around the rules our high school administrators passed as an inmate might the rules of a penitentiary. So, if we try to engineer and re-engineer human behavior, do we change the nature of the rebel, or do we make those who still rebel more powerful? Do we accidentally make those who still aren’t afraid to punch and be punched more powerful?

Aside from the pain involved, there is something shocking about getting punched in the face. If the same person delivered the same blow to the stomach, it might hurt just as bad, but it’s not quite as shocking or personal.

If we didn’t receive such a blow by the time we graduated high school, it’s likely we never will. When we were younger, however, the perceived threat of being punched in the face was the fear of the unknown. Most of us didn’t have an older brother, a neighborhood kid, friends, or enemies to diminish this fear, so no one ever liberated us from this fear in the manner the prize fighter proposed.

We never heard the theory that a punch to the face could be liberating, when we were young vegetarians in the jungle, but the absence of it, and its subsequent qualities of the unknown, influenced our every day … until they approached the guardians at the gate. No matter how small, passive, and invisible some vegetarians might be, everyone has a threshold.

***

By the time Sean (the bully in this production) whipped a wadded up piece of paper at my face I’d already had enough. I just didn’t know it yet. The hit was so perfect that it achieved Sean’s goal of impressing Dave, the all-star defensive tackle at our school.

Dave never had anything to prove to anyone in high school. “The bigger they are, the harder they fall!” those who love to fight love to say, but when a man Dave’s size walks toward them, fighters part for him. He was one of those very few gargantuan human beings who have trouble holding pencils, because their fingers were the size of most teenage calves. When I asked these thrill-seeking fighters if they would fight someone as big as Dave, they said, “Well, there’s no sense in getting yourself killed.” Dave never had anything to prove to anyone in high school.

Sean did. He was a medium-sized guy who was always looking for ways to prove himself. Those of us near him, on the hierarchical totem pole, often received his proverbial boot to our face, so Sean could define himself worthy of the respect and friendship of his superiors, someone like Dave. The proverbial boot to the face, in my case, was a wadded up ball of paper that landed so flush that Dave considered it hilarious.

If I gave my reaction some thought, I might try to characterize it as brave, but it wasn’t. It was an impulsive, blind rage that drove me to pick up that ball of paper and throw it back in Sean’s face. I then, again without thinking about it, loomed over his desk.

“Knock it off!” the scariest teacher in our school yelled. “Return to your seat!” he said, yelling my name. It took me about five seconds to cool down, and I did after this scary teacher screamed at the top of his lungs again. He had one of those deep, baritone voices that called to mind the power of the bass in a live, Motley Crue song. I sat back down, and I tried to cool off. “You two, see me after class,” the teacher said, calling out our names, in his deepest baritone.

“You think you’re a tough guy don’t you?” the football superstar, Dave, whispered to me when class was over.

“I don’t,” I said. “I really don’t, but I’m not going to put up with that.”

What Sean and Dave didn’t understand was that I put up with such incidents for years from Sean and others, and I never did anything about it, because I feared I might not fare well in the final confrontation.

Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a strategy, until they get punched in the mouth.” It’s true, but how many failed strategies do we employ to avoid getting punched in the mouth? How many bullies proceed unimpeded with the implicit threat of that punch to the mouth? “We both know you’re not going to do anything about it, because you don’t want to get punched in the mouth.”  

Getting punched in the mouth hurts, and losing fights is so embarrassing that we do whatever we can to avoid it. In the cushy world our parents provide us, by sending us to quality schools, we never had to fight before, and we feared that the guy, challenging our manhood, might expose that.

In the high school arena that I call the jungle, we witnessed the non-confrontational tactics our fellow vegetarians tried to employ to end their torment. We saw them laugh with their bullies, to try to convince them that they were in on the joke. That tactic involved the nerd basically saying, “Your shot at my character not only failed to hurt my feelings, I thought it was actually pretty funny.” That never worked. We’ve also witnessed some nerds laugh when their bully picks on another nerd in a desperate quest to form some level of solidarity with their tormentors. This calls to mind another Tyson quote, “A man that’s a friend of everyone is an enemy to himself.” We empathize with the nerds’ efforts of course, as they desperately tried everything they could think up to end their torment, but those of us who survived high school know that nothing works better than finding a way to prove that we don’t fear that final confrontation. We nerds learned, from other nerds, to avoid overdoing our defense too, for that exposes the effort for what it is. We nerds need to muster up the courage to look the bully in the eye (and that’s essential) and confidently say something that suggests we don’t fear being punched in the mouth as much as they think. I wish I could give my fellow nerds a great line to end it once and for all, but those lines are almost always situational.

By the time Sean tested my boundaries, I’d had enough. That wadded up ball of paper blasted through my threshold in such a way that I wouldn’t have cared if it was the 6’5”, 250 lb., star defensive tackle who threw that ball of paper at me. I didn’t think of it in the moment, but I think I would’ve risked the hospital stay, and a month spent in traction just to send a message that I was done with it all. I was done with fearing a punch to the face. I was done taking it on the chin, figuratively speaking, because I feared that the other guy might have had older brothers who taught him how to punch, how to take a punch, and how to fight. This whole idea that I feared the unknown world of fighting just didn’t have the mystique it once did for me, when the alternative involved me continuing to allow them to do whatever they wanted to do to me.

I’m a smaller than average male now, but I was even smaller back then, and I wasn’t one of those scrappy little guys who knew how to fight either. In the few scrapes that came my way, I proved that I didn’t know what I was doing. There is, however, that flirtation we all have that if driven to the extreme, we might surprise them all with a sweeping haymaker that shocks the world. The truth, if we ever found out, is that our most devastating punch will probably come off as uninformed and untrained as we fear, BUT, more often than not, so will the other guy’s.

How many of us wish we could go back in this world and redress the wrongs done to us? I changed the course of one incident, and as you can probably tell I’m quite proud of it, but it was the result of silently putting up with so many other defamatory and embarrassing incidents that I will not provide for your entertainment. I also thought that if I did this to one person, word might spread, and I might not have to put up with others bullying me. Life doesn’t work that way, especially in the jungle. I also thought that if I displayed the temerity necessary to prove myself one day, I might be better prepared to do it again the next day. Again, life doesn’t work that way. Each confrontation is its own separate entity, and each high school student has to deal with each incident accordingly.

How many of us so feared the thought of being punched in the face that we allowed far too many confrontational tests go unchallenged? How many of us would love to go back to that world and say, “I honestly don’t give a crap if you punch me anymore. Punch me! Do it! Let’s just get this whole thing over with. I should warn you, however, that I’m going to help you christen this moment by bleeding and crying all over you.”

That probably wouldn’t diffuse the situation, but I thought of that unusual rebuttal one night, thinking of another incident that occurred so long ago that it is laughable that it still bothers me. When I found out that my sister-in-law thinks about confrontations that occurred decades ago, I didn’t feel so alone. Her confession led me to wonder how many of us think about these character-defining, yet decades-old incidents at three in the morning? How many of us get so tense over these moments that we might as well climb out of bed, pour ourselves a bowl of cereal and watch a sitcom to try to erase that 5^th grade memory from our mind. Did we dream about it? We don’t know, but we know we won’t be able to get back to sleep until we rewrite the whole memory in such a way that we end up whipping them with Indiana Jones’ bullwhip. 

The best advice I can give someone facing a similar incident is that your liberation from fear will probably occur a short time after you’ve exhausted every tactic you can think up and every resource available. It probably won’t arrive in the midst of your desperation either. The moment of liberation, in my experience, occurs shortly after you stop giving a fig what might happen. If we do it to get our bullies named Sean in the jungle to respect and like us, we probably won’t be able to muster up the conviction necessary to stop it. Similarly, if we employ desperate, nerd tactics, we perform them with hope, as opposed to belief, that they will stop the carnage. What it took for me to get one of the most hated bullies in our school to leave me alone was being done with all that to the point that I no longer feared the punch to the face, the fight that followed, or whatever the final confrontation entailed. What it took for me was to approach this matter in a relatively fearless perspective, and I only reached that point after years of abuse.

The point of this article is that it’s too late for vegetarian dads to do anything to change their past, but there is something we can do to alter the future of our vegetarian sons. We’re not talking about offensive measures. We’re talking defense. We’re talking about building confidence.  

It’s possible that modern anti-bullying programs have made great strides in ending what we had to endure throughout our youth, but how do they quantify success? I don’t know, but I’m not so confident in them that I’m going to trust that my son won’t have to find some place beyond desperation to end his torment. I also know that with the modern dictum against masculinity, I’m not supposed to encourage my son to do anything more masculine that might help him in the jungle-like climate on the playground. My guess is that even the most modern boys on the most modern playgrounds still exhibit some of the most primal elements I saw on the playground, when the teacher isn’t looking, and that he’s going to zero in on the boys who are afraid to fight. I know most early aged kids don’t fight each other, and most of them don’t punch each other either, and most of them probably don’t even think in such terms. My personal experience in the jungle-like atmosphere on the playground taught me that this changes much quicker than most people know.

My son got punched in the mouth in a controlled setting. The two combatants were padded up, and there was little risk of physical injury. Yet, it was still shocking for him to get hit in the face. It still felt very personal to him, and it hurt his pride. He cried as a result. 

I almost cried with him. I knew that pain, I felt that pain, and I was that little kid getting hit with no one to protect him. My initial instinct was to step in, in some way, as it appeared obvious that this kid, this bully, delighted in my child’s pain. As difficult as it was to restrain myself, I thought about that prize fighter’s quote, and I thought that this controlled environment was the best place for my child to learn how to take a punch, how to fight back, and how to make all of the tiny, mental adjustments he needs to make against a kid who just keeps coming. 

When nerds and vegetarians think about getting hit in the mouth, they fall prey to the notion that all they need to do is counterpunch once, and the whole matter will resolve itself. We fall prey to the conceit that the other guy is simply testing our mettle. Some aren’t. Some love to fight, and they don’t stop. Some stop when they see another kid in actual pain, but that encourages others.  

When we witness it. We know it can be overwhelming, no matter how old they are. Our fatherly instincts kick in, and we don’t think it has to be this violent. We want it to end. We want to end it, but by doing so, we effectively negate the lessons learned in the jungle. We need to stay in our chair and empathize with the lesson we learned so long ago that he’s learning now. There will come a day when youth will pass away, and we won’t be there to protect them. No one will. It’s as scary for us as it is for them to learn that we’re not always going to be around to protect them, but we know this because we learned it. 

We all try to be there for our kids, but we know there is a frustrating extent to it. We also know that we can alert the authority figures in our kid’s school, and we can write emails to school’s district leaders if the more immediate authority figures don’t respond to our satisfaction. We can become that satellite parent who ensures their safety and well-being, but there is a frustrating limit to that too. There’s a frustrating extent to any tactics that we, as parents, can employ. The best tactic available to us is to teach them how to defend themselves in the “best defense is a good offense” mindset. The tactic might teach them what it means to take a punch to the face in some relatively safe, controlled environment.

If the unorthodox, twisted logic of the boxer in the intro of this article holds any weight, one of the elements that impede development is the fear of getting punched, it’s possible that our kids might handle matters differently when the threat of being punched in the face arrives. If we enroll them in boxing schools or one of the various martial arts schools that house heavily cushioned gloves to soften the impact of the blow so that our young kids can experience getting hit in the face without experiencing too much pain or damage, is it possible that we might be able to eliminate some of the stages we went through to defeat our bullies? It won’t spare them the pain of a mean-spirited, shocking bare-knuckled punch, but if we want our children to lead better lives, it could liberate them from that fear of getting punched in the mouth we experienced that influenced our lives so much in our youth, and it might prove to be the best money we’ve ever spent.