Tigers vs. Lions: 

The Locker Room Fight I Still Lost

 It all started over something stupid I said in chemistry class, to my buddy who sat in front of me — we'll call him A. We were pretty tight, actually. "Tiger or lion, who wins?" And this idiot wouldn't back down, kept insisting lions were tougher. (Found out later his old school back in Iowa had the Lions as their mascot. Ours were the Tigers. Looking back, that should've been my first clue this was basically a declaration of war.)

"Okay then, cheetah or ostrich — who's faster?" An ostrich? Are you kidding me? What started as harmless lunch-table nonsense somehow turned into a full-blown ideological battle. And that's when I knew. This wasn't something we were going to settle with words.

"Alright, tough guy. Locker room. After gym."

Look, somebody had to teach this kid that tigers were superior, and honestly, I figured I was doing it for the greater good — for his future kids, so this bad information didn't get passed down another generation. It was a burden, sure, but a true friend steps up. (That's real loyalty, that is.)

Gym happened to be next period. Coach Davis usually strolled in about ten minutes late with a gas-station coffee in hand, so five minutes was plenty of time to set this kid straight.

And who was I kidding — I'd been boxing at the Y since middle school and doing taekwondo at that strip-mall dojo wedged between the nail salon and the pizza place. I was built for this. The only wrinkle was B, who'd appointed himself referee without anybody asking him to. (We'll get to him. He turned out to be the real time bomb in this story.)

We squared off outside the shower stalls, and I was grinning like an idiot, way too pleased with myself, when A caught me completely off guard. Landed a one-two combo right on my jaw. Didn't even hurt. I remember thinking, this guy has a death wish, and I was about half a second from returning the favor with interest when things went sideways.

See, I'm a striker. Stand-up fighting is my whole game. What I'd conveniently forgotten was that A had transferred in from Iowa, where — as it turned out — he'd wrestled varsity. The second I cocked back my arm, he shot in low, wrapped around me like an octopus, and had me on the ground before I even registered what was happening.

Doesn't matter how good your right hand is if you're not standing up to throw it. And that wet tile floor might as well have been quicksand.

Then, to make things worse, I cracked my nose on the back of his skull and started bleeding. Everybody knows the rules — first blood, you lose. It's basically playground law, unwritten but ironclad, going back to kindergarten. And mine wasn't just a nosebleed, it was coming out of both sides. No arguing my way out of that one.

"Alright, alright — I'm done." The only loss of my entire fighting career. I was furious about it. But when I got back to class after showering off, something felt off. Turned out, while I'd been at the sink dealing with my nose, B — the guy who'd volunteered to referee a fight nobody asked him to referee — had gotten into his own fight with some other kid.

Completely unrelated to me. And he rearranged this poor kid's face so badly nobody could recognize him. I had no idea B had that in him. When I asked him about it later, he just shrugged: "I didn't even hit him, man. I was just swinging and his face kept getting in the way."

After that day, B became the undisputed toughest kid in our grade overnight, and I dropped to number three. Pretty soon the cafeteria chatter started — turns out I'd always been overrated, apparently. Funny how last week I was supposedly the best fighter in school. Fair-weather friends, every last one of them. ^^

Anyway, back to that day — the school had absolutely no idea what actually happened, and since I was usually the one people assumed was behind anything like this, I got the blame. Over the intercom: "Would [my name] please report to the front office immediately." The entire hallway went "ooooh" as I walked past.

I opened the office door and Mr. Hollis, my homeroom teacher, was already standing there, clearly upset. He taught English and had actually published a small poetry collection with some tiny press — the kind of guy who wore a corduroy jacket with leather patches on the elbows, thin, maybe half my size, deeply sentimental about everything.

But he didn't yell. Didn't slam anything. Just looked me dead in the eye and said, quietly, "I'm not angry. I'm just disappointed." And then he said it again. And again. Probably thirty times, each time with a slightly different emphasis, like he was workshopping a line of poetry. It felt less like getting yelled at and more like being swatted, over and over, with the world's gentlest flyswatter — disappointment, thirty times in a row. I've had football coaches scream in my face, and years later I'd have BUD/S instructors calling me every name in the book, but nothing ever got under my skin quite like that.

Every eye in that office was on me. Even the secretary stopped typing. Some of the people watching were teachers who actually liked me — my guidance counselor, who'd already agreed to write my college recommendation, and my history teacher, who always had my back. Watching their faces shift from surprise to disappointment was somehow worse than anything Mr. Hollis said. That quiet disappointment left a small crack in my seventeen-year-old ego — the kind you get on a brand-new windshield from a rock on the highway. Small, but it never quite goes away.

"This is on you today. Whether you like it or not, you're someone the other kids look up to in this grade. That means you set the tone. You're missing some basic empathy for your classmates. I know you're better than this. That's exactly why I'm so disappointed."

I couldn't believe it. A fight that had absolutely nothing to do with me, and somehow I was the one taking the fall? I wanted to argue my case so badly. But this was peak zero-tolerance era — didn't matter who started it, everybody involved got punished the same. Saying "it wasn't me" in that office was basically a confession. I got a week of detention. Sat in the back corner of the library writing a three-page essay titled "What I Learned From This." Real Breakfast Club energy. And the actual fight I'd actually been in — the locker room one — nobody ever found out about. I got punished for the wrong crime entirely.

That loss stuck with me, though. Bad enough that I ended up taking judo classes at the rec center afterward. And that same stubbornness followed me all the way to a Navy recruiting office after graduation. Nobody pushed me into it — I walked in and signed the papers myself. Most guys who show up ring that bell and quit within the first week. I made it through Hell Week — running the beach with a boat on my head, spending all night freezing in the surf — and I've got that dumb high school locker room fight to thank for it, weirdly enough.

I actually ran into A again years later, right before I moved out west, at a going-away thing some friends threw for me. Guy ended up owning two gas stations off the highway. And of course, the second he had a beer in him, he started retelling the story of how he "took me down" in that locker room like it happened yesterday. I genuinely considered round two. Then I remembered I'm a grown man now and let it go.

For the record — I've since added Brazilian jiu-jitsu to the striking I already had, so if it ever did go to the ground again, I'd be a lot more comfortable down there these days. But honestly, whatever fire we had back then, there's no real animosity left for an old friend, just two guys who used to throw hands over nonsense.

When it was just the two of us, I told him: "Alright, enough. You win, you got me in that locker room, congratulations. How long are you gonna milk that one story? We're grown now — time to stop fighting each other and start fighting the world instead. One-on-one. You and me against everything else."

---

Danny, man. It's been way too long — hope life's treating you right. I hear bits and pieces from the guys every now and then. Hope you and your wife are still doing great. I still think about you driving all night to help me load the U-Haul before I moved out west — that's not something I forget.

Looking back, it went by so fast it's almost unreal. Two idiots who used to throw punches at each other are somehow middle-aged now, somewhere in the third quarter of life. Feels like yesterday we were behind the school sucking honeysuckle and catching crawdads in that creek.

And obviously I remember your finest hour — that brawl in the parking lot after the game against Jefferson. Every pizza place around the school pulled their shutters down, two cop cars showed up, and there you were, front and center, an absolute legend. Not gonna lie, kind of a dumb legend ^^ — but a legend nonetheless.

And honestly, a wrestling transfer kid who was just as good in the classroom as he was on the mat? That's about as likely as Uganda fielding a national ski team. (And yeah, I remember — AP Calc, you got an A.) That's exactly why I respect you as much as I do.

How life shakes out is mostly luck of the draw. But I like to think both of us gave it everything, wherever we ended up. And we both built good families. That's really all that matters in the end.

Stay healthy, man. Turns out that's basically the whole game. Whatever the kids are calling it these days — "grit," I guess — as long as we don't lose that, I think we're beating this thing called life just fine. Your way, my way. The way we always have.

Wishing you nothing but good stuff, brother. Go Tigers! (P.S. Tigers beat lions. Not up for debate.)

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