REAL Tough Guys Don’t Fight—What They Do Instead Will Save Your Life
How to Avoid a Street Fight
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So you want to learn self-defense? Are you worried that you can’t fight and that someone will embarrass you?
Let me tell you the truth of the matter: if you live in the United States, there’s a good chance that someone has a gun. If it’s anywhere else where guns aren’t so easy to acquire, then they might have a knife. No amount of training makes you bullet- or knife-proof.
- Take boxing classes for fun.
- Take Brazilian jiujitsu for fun.
- Learn kickboxing for fun.
- Learn Krav Maga for fun.
Whatever you do, don’t take it to puff yourself up for a street fight. The days of “having hands” are over. When I was younger, people took pride in settling differences over a “fair one,” but those days are long gone. Now you’re more likely to get jumped, get a brick to the dome, or catch a bullet.
I’ve got experience fighting in both the ring and on the streets. While the two might seem similar, the difference between boxing and street fighting is that boxing is a sport with rules.
In boxing, there’s respect between opponents. Generally speaking, the two guys fighting don’t actually want to hurt one another. It just so happens that the conditions of victory are to do just that.
In street fighting, there is no respect. There is no thinking.
Street fights are no joke.
Because there are no rules, it’s easy to lose your life or be permanently incapacitated. On the flip side, if you’re the “winner” of a street fight, then it’s easy to find yourself facing serious jail time or retaliation.
The step to avoiding street fights is to avoid places where they’re most likely to happen.
You know where the problem spots are. Even if you aren’t actively looking for trouble, you know that there are certain environments where violence is much more likely to occur. Unless you earn a living by being in these environments—and if you do, I strongly suggest you find another way—then avoid them.
The usual places come to mind.
Clubs, bars, the hood, the block—pretty much any place with lots of alcohol & even more ego. Generally speaking, if it’s most active at night or it’s a place where criminals hang out or criminal activity goes down, avoid it.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But sometimes, even if you avoid the places where trouble hangs out, trouble goes out looking for company and finds you.
A few years ago, I was walking through a Best Buy parking lot, in broad daylight, in a not-at-all dangerous or sketchy part of town, when I passed this young thuggish-looking dude and his provocatively dressed girlfriend.
As we passed by one another, the dude looked at me and was like, “Yo, nigga, what the fuck you lookin’ at?”
Apparently, he thought I was eyeballin’ his girl. I’m a married man—I’ve mastered the art of looking while not looking—and even if I wasn’t, I’ve been around long enough to know that looking at another man’s lady like she’s what’s on the menu is an invitation to get cooked.
Now, this dude, intimidating as he looked to most civilians, was not scary to me in the slightest.
I grew up in the projects next to a trap house. I didn’t even know people could settle things without swinging fists until I was, like, 14 and I started going to a high school with middle- and upper-class white people.
On top of that, the dude must have been like 5’8” and couldn’t have weighed more than 170 lbs., soaking wet. If a miniature dude built like a dope fiend is willing to talk to my big black ass like that—and for reference, I’m 6’1”, 215 lbs., and I was still fighting professionally, so I was at like 12% bf—then I figured he knew something about the balance of force that I didn’t, and that unknown variable was not in my favor.
He looked like the kind of dude who had priors and didn’t mind catching another case to show his young hood bird that he was ’bout that life.
So I kept it moving.
I didn’t even acknowledge him because I knew that nothing good could come of that altercation.
Even if he wasn’t packing, the last thing I needed was to deal with the legal nightmare of proving that the aggravated assault I would have certainly been charged with was self-defense.
While I can more than hold my own in a fight (former Golden Gloves State champion, PAL National Boxing Champion, and #4-ranked heavyweight in the nation right here), I do not provoke them, and I will not engage in them unless there is absolutely no choice.
Which brings me to my next point about avoiding this type of trouble.
Ain’t no shame in running away. And I emphasize “running.” If you end up in one of these situations with the type of guy who wants to throw blows or more, then turning your back on him is only going to make him angrier. That’s not just anecdotal or unscientific street-smarts babble.
Research has shown that the brain processes social rejection, such as being ignored, in ways similar to how it processes physical pain, meaning that, at a neurological level, “being ignored” can feel like “being hit,” activating the same brain areas associated with physical pain perception. I’ve dropped the link to this research in the description if you want to make sure I’m not just talking out of my ass.
So if you’re gonna turn your back on a guy, you may as well face him and hit him. At least that way, you don’t get sucker-punched from behind. Really, though, please run away and live to fight another day.
Obviously, there are situations where you can’t do that—like if you got your girl or your kids with you—but if it’s just you and it looks like it’s about to go down, take flight and don’t look back until you’re safely away.
This is yet another reason that you should make physical fitness a priority. It’s not so much about being in shape to fight as it is about being able to survive, and being able to run as fast and as long as you can away from dangerous situations is a big part of that.
The other part of being able to survive is knowing how to de-escalate and defuse dangerous situations, but before we get to that, we need to talk about not provoking a situation in the first place.
How to De-escalate a Confrontation
Graveyards and prisons are full of people who couldn’t control their emotions in a tenuous environment, and this extends beyond environments like a rough inner-city ghetto.
Gun violence stemming from road rage is on the rise. Analyzing data from the Gun Violence Archive, Everytown Research & Policy found a concerning upward trend in road rage shootings since 2018.
That year saw 70 deadly road rage shootings nationwide. By 2022, that number had doubled to 141 road rage shooting deaths. Non-fatal road rage shootings rose at a similar rate, increasing from 176 injuries in 2018 to 413 in 2022. Overall, these incidents meant someone was shot, either fatally or non-fatally, in a road rage encounter every 16 hours on average in 2022.
The safety of a moving vehicle creates a false sense of security, making many people believe that they’ll be fine making an obscene gesture at someone in response to being cut off. The belief that they’re anonymous and unidentifiable makes them even more aggressive—but you never know how far someone will go to satisfy the urge to retaliate.
In July 2022, right in my hometown of Pittsburgh, PA, a driver was so angry at being cut off that he followed the man home and shot him on his front porch.
You can prevent many bad situations before they start with good manners and a sincere apology. It doesn’t matter who’s right or wrong. As long as the person wasn’t blatantly disrespecting you or attempting to harm you, let it go and keep it moving.
Not only let it go—respond with a simple “my bad.” For those who don’t speak hood, “My bad” is the equivalent of saying “I’m sorry.”
You bump somebody in a crowd? “My bad” goes a long way.
Step on someone’s foot on a crowded bus? He might get mad, but you can often defuse the situation by just saying “My bad.”
And the key is that when you say it, actually look and sound remorseful. Few things make a person angrier than a b.s. fake apology that lacks any tone of sincerity.
This includes telling someone “they’re right” or saying something like “whatever you say” with that tone, which says they’re obviously wrong. It’s a type of passive aggression I warned you about in that other video, and not everyone will remain passive in the face of it.
Look, I’m not saying that it’s easy or even always appropriate to take the blame. All I’m saying is that if you find yourself on the business end of beef, you’ve gotta make a choice:
Do I want to avoid a street fight that could turn ugly, or do I want to prove that I’m right and get the last word in? This part right here isn’t general advice about how to live your life—it’s a specific strategy to get out of a bad situation before it gets worse.
You never know who doesn’t care about going to jail if they feel disrespected. One of Mike Tyson’s most famous quotes is “Social media has made y’all too comfortable with disrespecting someone and not getting punched in the face for it.”
As many people have argued with me in the comments and in other parts of social media, most people aren’t willing to get physically violent over words. And those people are right.
Most people aren’t interested in catching a charge because someone doesn’t know how to communicate like an adult. But that’s MOST people. You never know when you’re dealing with someone who ISN’T one of those people.
Always be polite and treat people with respect—even if they treat you with disrespect. In fact, I’d say especially if they don’t treat you with respect, because those are the types of people with nothing to lose and a lot to gain by messing your day up.
Back when the IRA tried to blow up former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and failed, they issued her a warning. “Today we were unlucky, but remember we have only to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always.”
Sure, it feels better to let them have it so they know that you aren’t the one to talk to like that, but every time you do that, you have to keep getting lucky that they aren’t the one either.
How Road Rage Can Escalate Into Violence
And I know it’s easy to dismiss physical retaliation to someone’s bad attitude as something that only happens in the hood, the schoolyard, prisons, or wherever you think you won’t be because you’re better than that, but a lot of that road rage I mentioned earlier wasn’t between two cats from the ghetto thugging it out on the freeway.
Back in 2022 in Portland, Oregon—one of the softest cities in America—wealthy businessman Geoffrey Hammond murdered a man in broad daylight during a road rage incident. The initial confrontation started over a perceived slight. One driver believed the other was not showing proper respect by blocking traffic.
The victim, Ryan Martin, pulled up behind him and tried to encourage Hammond to move, but the two “exchanged middle fingers as Martin drove around Hammond,” according to an arrest affidavit. Martin climbed out of his car and started tapping on Hammond’s window. Hammond rolled down his window and shot him in the chest.
Then, just to get his street cred all the way up, he shot a dude who was filming it with his phone. Fortunately for that concerned but foolish citizen, the bullet only hit his leg. The other dude is gone, though.
This Hammond cat is worth 8 figures, comes from a family of entrepreneurs worth 9 figures, has a family, and still lost his mind because he felt disrespected.
I want to make it clear that I’m not blaming the victim or excusing the perpetrator. I’m just reminding you how quickly things can get dangerous when someone feels disrespected.
The motto I live by is that good manners never make a situation worse and bad manners never make it better.
Self-Defense When You Cannot Walk Away
Now, if all of this fails—the person is too angry to be calmed down, or you can’t run because you got people with you counting on you for protection—then you have to neutralize the aggressor. My choice of words was precise and intentional.
If you knock out a dude who is posing a threat to your family, you’ll probably be cool in the eyes of the law—even if he lands funny and unalives. But if you start stomping him while he’s unconscious, you’re probably gonna have some problems.
This isn’t legal advice, and I’m not a lawyer, but you get the idea.
I know more than a few people who got 2–4 years inside on aggravated assault charges over fights they didn’t start, all because they let it go on longer than it needed to after they got the best of them.
Neutralize the risk to you and your loved ones as dispassionately as possible. You want it to look like you were protecting yourself, not like you were a vigilante or getting revenge.
Unfortunately, street fights often turn into legal issues, either because of the fight or because someone died.
There’s no point in protecting your family’s life only to be out of theirs because you wanted to act like Lionel Messi with the dude’s head—even if you felt like he deserved it.
Where and When to Avoid Confrontations
Now, while I just told you that things can get crazy anywhere, here are those habits you can start developing right now that reduce your chances of ever regretting learning how to fight or getting in good enough shape to run from a confrontation.
First tip is “Avoid anywhere where there’s a possibility of running into drunk people in the wild.”
The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that of the 11 million people victimized by violent crime each year, 1 in 4 are certain the person was intoxicated—and those are just the people who were sure because the signs were obvious, so it’s likely higher.
This tracks with another stat they deliver in the same report that says of the 5.3 million convicted offenders in prison, 2 million of them (or 36%) say they were intoxicated when committing the violent crime.
The report is from 1996, but it’s worth checking out, and it only reaffirms my decision to get sober.
The second tip is one that all my family men don’t need to worry about until their little ones turn into teenagers, and that’s to avoid being in public gatherings past 11 p.m.—if you’re really cautious, you could just not go out after dark, but that’s ridiculous and nearly impossible.
Now, obviously, there are some people in some lines of work who can’t avoid this, but the numbers are clear.
Most of the violent crime that happens in the city happens between the hours of 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. After that, jackers, junkies, and other types of night stalkers appear to rest and recharge, as the safest part of the day is from 8 to 11 a.m., followed by 5–7 a.m.
If you do those two things, you have to get pretty unlucky to find yourself in a street confrontation.