The other week I went to a local café with a friend of mine for dinner. It wasn’t anything fancy, just a little café that was attached to a shopping centre and surrounded by a few other cafes. We go there often because it’s local and they have reasonable food. And we go there to eat, drink coffee and chat. That’s usually what you do at a café, right? You sit and solve all the worlds’ problems over numerous cups of coffee and some food thrown in. You generally don’t go to a café to watch a punch up between two young guys that think they are MMA fighters. However, that’s pretty much what happened as our chill out session was interrupted by a brawl. Here’s how it went…

We’re sitting outside, minding our own, drinking coffee, when suddenly voices are raised and two young guys come into view. One guy was tall with some weird looking half shaved mullet on his head. The other guy was smaller, skinnier and had a constant smirk on his face. Mullet man was standing over Smirky man and was trying to intimidate him into running away. Smirky man kept smirking and antagonising him. They were practically nose to nose and were cussing and fussing and pushing at each other. Between all the swearing, we managed o piece together that this fight was due to Smirky talking to Mullet’s ex-girlfriend. (Now there’s a cause to fight if ever I heard one…) Anyhoo, Smirky had enough of Mullet and punched him, and from there it was on. They were punching, hitting and trying to slam each other to the ground, walls, chairs, whatever was nearby. Al the while, Mullet’s friends were standing around him watching the whole thing and calling out, “get off him, bro”. They didn’t really make much of an attempt to stop the fight, they just stood there circling around calling out, “don’t touch him…get off him.” There was one point where they managed to get Smirky off, but then they stepped back and just stood there, so Smirky took another punch and it was on again. Needless to say their method of helping didn’t really help. Eventually Smirky’s friends stepped in and broke it up just as security turned up. By this stage, we were inside paying and everyone else was ignoring their food to watch what was going on. The fight didn’t look finished as the boys had phones out and were messaging and making calls and eyeballing each other. We decided there were too many heroes and wanna be MMA fighters around, so we left, which just added to my irritation.

Let me explain why I was irritated. Firstly, I didn’t get to finish my tea. It was a good cup of tea and I was enjoying it after a heavy meal that I shouldn’t have eaten but ate anyway. So the tea was necessary and I had to leave it unfinished, which would have been fine if it was a bad tea. But it wasn’t, so I was annoyed. The other reason I was annoyed was because the whole thing was completely unnecessary. So the guy spoke to your ex-girlfriend. Is it really necessary to stand over the guy and cuss him out? And was that really a good enough reason to throw repeated punches at a guy in front of a café full of adults and children? No. No, it wasn’t. What if it got out of hand and they ended up smashing into the glass and injuring someone else? What if one of the punches was too hard and the guy hit the concrete and died? Violence does not make you a MAN! Punching someone out does not make you strong or brave or any of those things. It doesn’t make you look cool. It just makes you look like a fool. And if you think that it’s attractive, well, let me break it to you: it’s NOT. At all. If anything, watching that makes a guy extremely unattractive. I remember being out with a friend once and she had some of her friends with her and there was this super cute boy among them. And I mean SUPER CUTE! Anyway, we were all chatting and then some random guy made a comment as he walked past and that was it, the boys are all trying to hold this cute guy back from going after the guy and punching him out. Well, for me, that was the beginning of the end because it just made him look childish and uncontrollable. Women don’t want a violent man or a man that explodes at the slightest insult.

Just because you watch boxing or MMA or whatever fights sport you watch, doesn’t mean that you go out and imitate it on the streets. Talk to any professional fighter and they will tell you that you need to practice and have self-discipline when fighting, and self-discipline means not punching on with any random guy on the street that annoys or provokes you. Seeing fights like that remind me of being in high school and watching the schoolyard fights. Everyone gathered around and heckled and yelled and only stepped in when the teachers arrived. But we’re not in high school anymore; so all that heroism should be put away. You want to fight, go to a professional fighting school and learn how to do it properly. Then when you’ve learned how to do it properly, keep it in the ring or on the mats. Don’t take it outside and ruin everyone else’s night just so you can prove yourself because the only thing you prove is how foolish you are.