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Frank Sterle Jr's avatar
Frank Sterle Jr
Feb 19

I've long been bewildered and disturbed by the psychological or moral willingness/ability to throw a serious punch without any physical provocation. Boxing was bad enough as a professional sport, but now there’s (most notably) the barbaric ‘ultimate fighting’. It uses barely covered knuckles and even bare knees for knock-out blows — yet it’s legally selling live-viewing tickets to eagerly excited individuals and commercial-time slots to legitimate business advertisers.

Also disturbing are the only-too-eager viewers, with some girls/women among them. ... In the early 1980s, I’d see from a distance the mostly-male ‘audience’ at the after-classes fights between a pair of almost-always male students, one of whom was needed to initiate the barbaric exchange.

A few years later, during my own troubled-teen years, I observed how by ‘swinging first’ a guy potentially places himself in an unanticipated psychological disadvantage — one favoring the combatant who chooses to patiently wait for his opponent to take the first swing, perhaps even without the fist necessarily connecting.

Just having the combatant swing at him before he’d even given his challenger a physical justification for doing so seemed to instantly create a combined psychological and physical imperative within to react to that swung fist with justified anger. In fact, such testosterone-prone behavior may be reflected in the typically male (perhaps unconsciously strategic) invitation for one’s foe to ‘go ahead and lay one on me,’ while tapping one’s own chin with his forefinger.

Yet, from my observations, it’s a theoretical advantage not widely noticed by both the regular scrapper mindset nor general society. Instead of the commonly expected advantage of an opponent-stunning first blow, the hit only triggers an infuriated response earning the instigator two-or-more-fold returned-payment hard hits. [Could it be an evolutionary instinct ingrained upon the human male psyche preventing us from inadvertently killing off our own procreative species by way of gratuitously instigating deadly violence en masse?]

Regardless, matters should remain peaceful, or at least non-violent, if every party shows the other due respect. And, of course, everyone follows the basic rule: Only a physical first-swing justifies a returned blow.

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