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If you ask a bartender the cause of a just-fought brawl, during that excited hush that settles upon a saloon in the moments after the combatants have been tossed, chances are he'll answer, "They were just drunk." And chances are he'll be right. (Bartenders, I've found, usually are.) The science behind this is rather simple: By depressing the central nervous system, alcohol acts as a disinhibitor, making us feel more freewheeling and incautious. This is why, after four of five drinks, you have the courage to approach the laughing blonde in the dizzyingly see-through blouse, but also why you might feel sturdy enough to take on the six-foot-six meathead who won't stop wagging his tongue through his fingers at your girlfriend. "We call that 'beer muscles,' " says Sylvia, the UFC champ.
Recent scientific research has added an interesting wrinkle to the alcohol-violence co
Scientific evidence notwithstanding, that bartender would be only half right. If mere drunke
What's the most common spark? To answer that we have to first divide bar fights into two distinct categories. One we'll call Psycho Fights. Plainly put, these are fights that happen because someone in a saloon is a psychotic asshole, and they include fights prompted by out-of-the-blue utterances like Whatthefuckyoulookinat? or Yougo-taproblemwithme? Psycho Fights don't actually require a cause; the presence of the psycho is cause enough. "A lot of guys go out looking for fights," says Sylvia. "They're pissed off at something their wife or girlfriend did, or about something that happened at work. When that guy is looking for a fight, he can't be talked out of it." Bullies are bullies, and they're always uninteresting. Our interest here lies more in the causes of the second category of bar fights, which I hesitate to call Rational Fights, since, of course, no violence is rational, especially after seven Coors Lights and two shots of Cuervo. Let's just call them Non-Psycho Fights.
In order to gauge the top three causes of Non-Psycho Fights, I surveyed a wide swath of bartenders, barflies, bouncers, lawmen, and other folks with some co
Cause One includes acts of "chivalry"-protecting a woman's safety or honor-but also encompasses acts of rabid jealousy, e.g., pummeling your ex-girlfriend's date. Cause Two is so closely related to Cause One that an argument could be made to merge them, but there is a distinction: In the first case the fights start suddenly, with the attacks unpla
Which leads us smoothly into Cause Three: old grudges. You see this less in big cities than you do in small towns, where the tight confines of the county limits mean that you're forced to come face-to-face, on a regular basis, with the dickhead who fouled you in that high school district finals game way back when, a foul that, though the referee didn't call it, caused you to (a) miss the gamewi
Not long ago, at the Dunes Saloon in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, I ran into the novelist Jim Harrison, who offered me this theory: "Most bar fights can be traced back to someone's dog getting shot twenty years before." Some urbanites among you might cry bullshit-it's difficult, though amusing, to imagine two fellows tussling over a dead bird dog in Manhattan's '21' Club-but I can attest to its limited accuracy. Several years back, in Mississippi, a man shot and killed my German shorthair pointer-long story, not worth rehashing. But if I ever come across that bastard in a saloon…well, I swear I'll knock him halfway to next Tuesday. I have warned my wife and lawyer of this pledge, along with the owner of the bar where this knocking is most likely to occur. None of them approves, but the bar owner is a dog lover, so I suspect he'll overlook any damages.
A dirty truth: Most bar fights are just noisy nonevents. The average barroom brawl lasts about two to five seconds, according to Peyton Qui