"If we were truly brave we should not accept a challenge, but we are all cowards."
--New York businessman Matthew Clarkson to Gouverneur Morris, after the death of their mutual friend, Alexander Hamilton, in a duel on July 12, 1804
I played basketball when I was younger; some of it was on scrappy courts with players of wildly varying levels of skills and athleticism. On one occasion I was guarding a player who was stronger, bigger and better than me in every way. My advantage was he didn't realize how profoundly we were mismatched.
I played him tight; when he laid his body on me I pushed back. If he received the ball in good position on the low post I was lost, so I tried to deny him passes. He scored often but not always; on the other end of the floor I drifted on the perimeter, pulling him away from the basket. I hit a few open shots when he cheated off me. The game stayed close.
Then he caught a bounce pass low on the block and, instead of trying to whirl around me for a lay-up, turned and leaped, drifting backward into a stylish Dick Barnett-style fade-away jumpshot. Somehow I had been anticipating this very move; in a moment of attenuated grace I rose up, my left arm extended, caught the ball smack in my palm, and slapped it into the stands.
Then he hit me.
Actually his fist, traveling on a looping parabola from behind his right ear to the vicinity of his left knee, just grazed my chin. Had it landed, it might have broken something--my jaw or his hand. As players leaped between us to break it up, I stood nonplussed, my arms dangling at my sides. I can take no credit for my restraint; I simply didn't realize how pesky I must have seemed. I wasn't scared. I wasn't even angry. He was ranting and cursing. For a long second I just looked at him like he was a specimen, some fantastic orchid.
He stormed off the court. Someone from the team was recruited to take his place. We played on.
It took a moment before I felt deeply ashamed.
When I recall that moment, I still feel a residual shame. I understand how ridiculous, and even dangerous, it would have been to retaliate, to hit him back, yet there is a part of me that will forever believe that is exactly what I should have done. I should have waded into him and taken whatever beating came down. After more than 25 years I still replay the incident in my head; after he'd swung and missed I could have charged and wrapped my arms around him, driven him to the floor. I might have doubled down his embarrassment. He was bigger and stronger but I am not physically incompetent. It's probable he would have won a fight, but I had a shot.
I'm sure my wife, who will edit this column, is appalled. Had she witnessed the incident, she would say (and believe) I did precisely the right thing, escaping with my dignity and honor intact. By her lights, the guy who (tried to) hit me comes off as the bad guy in this scenario, while I showed a degree of maturity. But she is wrong. I should have fought him. All my instincts say so.
I'm reading a book that was released last week, The Professor in the Cage by Jonathan Gottschall (Penguin Press, $26.95). Its subtitle, "Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch," succinctly distills what it's about: The peculiarly masculine rituals of violence. Gottschall--an English professor whose 2012 book The Storytelling Animal was a similarly valuable discursion on the biological function of narrative--comes across as an intelligent, likable quasi-jock who shares a lot of traits with a lot of guys I've known. He admits his book is something of a "stunt memoir": In his late 30s, frustrated by his stalled academic career, the author began training for a Mixed Martial Arts bout at a gym near the Washington & Jefferson College campus where he teaches. For two years he sparred and worked himself into the best shape of his life, determined to fight in a cage in order, he writes, "to discover if I was a coward."
I wasn't much interested in the professor's progress, but his thoughts on the biological imperative of fighting as a way to uphold honor and retain respect are fascinating and feel very true to me. My experience with fighting is probably not atypical for American boys of my generation--I had several furious but ultimately harmless battles with a junior high school football teammate after practice. I never had a serious fight in high school or college, but I was attacked once as an adult by a young man with a screwdriver who wanted my wallet. (He didn't get it, and was sorry he asked.)
I had ample opportunity to observe and occasionally participate in what Gottschall calls the "monkey dance"--the elaborate rituals of codified aggression in which men engage. (Women fight as well but, Gottschall argues, usually for different reasons and in different ways.) The book contains a short history of fighting, touching on ancient boxing, schoolyard dustups, bare-knuckle battles, Toughman competitions, boxing matches and, perhaps most interesting, formal duels fought between members of the social elites.
Gottschall makes a good case for the ultimate rationality of this last brand of dueling; the consequences of refusing a challenge were worse than the possibility of killing or being killed. To be known as a coward was to be perceived as weak and invite predation. Less than three years after his 19-year-old son was killed in a duel, Alexander Hamilton was killed in a duel with Aaron Burr that neither man really wanted to pursue. But Hamilton couldn't escape; the men had engaged in a public war of words and both understood that avoiding confrontation would cost them politically and socially.
"Hamilton fought not because he was brave, but because he was scared of what it would cost him not to fight," Gottschall writes. To dodge the fight would have cost Hamilton his "honor"--the "entirety of his social wealth."
These days it usually costs us more to fight than to refrain from fighting. "In centuries past, men ferociously defended their honor because they were, in reality, defending their lives, families and property," the author writes. "But when [the government] started guaranteeing retaliation for crimes against everyone's life and property, the deterrent value of personal honor declined, and risking everything over a slight just wasn't worth it."
That's not to say the duel completely died away because the law substituted its remedies, only that a certain kind of highly ritualized form of fighting became passe. As Gottschall points out, "the duel--in the sense of an escalating conflict over honor--is now what it always has been: the world's leading cause of homicide."
In my line of work, you receive the occasional challenge, usually anonymously and almost always without serious intent. You can't worry about them; anyone with any sort of public profile is bound to attract what they call haters. It's hard to take mean tweeters and Internet trolls seriously when it's so easy to recognize the deep unhappiness that underpins their words. Besides, I know I will fight if pushed. But I still don't know if I'm a coward.
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Editorial on 04/19/2015