Have you ever won a fight that you should have lost? Here’s a funny story.
I grew up in a trailer park from age 6-18 with my single father, who was elderly. But my father had been a police officer for decades, and was an orderly kind of guy. He kept a tight household, and he would work each day and I basically had to be an adult from a young age to take care of myself, and he also put me in martial arts classes starting just before or around age 7 which I then did like clockwork multiple times per week for years straight. Many other kids in the neighborhood were less lucky by not having such attentive-but-hard parents, and went astray.
My neighbor Jordan lived with his single mother, who was kind of crazy and usually not home. Nobody really cleaned their trailer; it was gross. Jordan and his little sister grew up largely alone and in squalor, and were given no direction. But Jordan was a character, and he built his own direction as an agent of chaos. We became friends, and I would hang out with Jordan and his little sister there in the evenings after I came back from school and martial arts practice. Jordan’s best friends aside from me, were marijuana dealers and so forth, and I got to know them. Jordan was a couple years older than me and taught me how to play Dungeons and Dragons, Magic the Gathering, and a bunch of video games, and he was a big cultural influence on me. Most of my hobbies ended up being tomboyish probably because of him; he was the only kid on my street that was in my age range, and just slightly older to be a significant big brother type of influence on me, rather than me being the one to influence him. He and his friends joked that I was the “innocent” one among them; the nerdy girl across the street who was kind of part of them but also kind of different. Jordan usually didn’t call people by their name, but rather had a nickname for everyone. He always called me “Squeaks”.
A lot of people grow up in certain social bubbles, but my social groups at the time couldn’t be more different. My friends at school were like, fellow nerdy mathlete team members. Then I had friends at my highly disciplined martial arts school that felt almost like a military academy, with push-ups and rank hierarchies and “Osu Sensei!” type of shit. And then I’d come home and hang out with Jordan and his chill pot-dealing friends who did whatever the hell they felt like. I feel lucky that I had all these totally different vibes going on.
Jordan would host fights in his backyard with his friends. They were all bigger than me and kind of tough, but had zero martial arts training, and after some prodding I agreed to spar in it once when I was 15. My first opponent was a far larger guy who was obsessed with Pokemon and dealt pot, and he jumped toward me and literally picked me up and was about to body slam me. But he didn’t know what he was doing, and made the common takedown mistake of putting his head on my side under my arm, so I guillotine-choked him as he picked me up, and he immediately crumpled to the ground and submitted to me before he could complete the slam. Jordan was like, “Well, Squeaks wins.”
In my martial arts school, we fought full contact, like I had been punched and slammed and dropped and tapped out for years, but always with headgear on and mouthpieces in. It was always a safe, controlled environment. Julian’s fighting pit was acutely *unsafe*; just with some gloves on and nothing else. I always felt more afraid of a real fight than a controlled fight, and this moment and the subsequent adventures in it helped me build more confidence that even my fellow martial arts students rarely had.
From then on, Jordan held various fights in his yard and loved to put me in there from time to time because it was so unexpected to people. I wasn’t innately talented, and compared to every fighter being a boy I wasn’t strong, but nobody else had the 8 years of training that I had, or any training at all really, so I won every single time, usually through unexpected chokes after initially looking like I was losing, and Jordan was highly amused by this fact. It was comical to him when someone who didn’t know me was there, and he’d be like, “hey, you should spar with Squeaks here, she’s nice.”
The more that I would fight the same person over time, however, the closer the fight would be, because they were way stronger and would learn to avoid the easy traps. Anyone who knows the game of chess probably knows “Fool’s Mate”, which is the quickest way to checkmate someone in a few moves by immediately getting the queen into position near the opponent's king through their front line, backed up by a bishop. It’s one of those techniques that works once or twice against a newbie, and then they know how to avoid it. My initial chokes were kind of like that; I had a few tricks up my sleeve to win the first few times on easy mode against boys who didn’t know what they were doing. If they tried to take me down wrongly, they got insta-choked. Or, for example usually in my second fight against them, I would do the opposite and be super aggressive and go in and push them back, and then after a few seconds they would overpower me and push me back way harder, which I had anticipated and planned for from the start, and so as soon as their momentum shifted hard toward me I would instead immediately grab them and pull them *toward* me and to the ground with their own momentum, and then jump on their back and choke them out before they knew what the fuck just happened. But once they learned to avoid these certain common mistakes like “be careful about putting your neck under her arm if you try to take her down” or “don’t let her use your own momentum against yourself” or “just make sure to avoid her chokes at all cost because she’s not strong enough to submit you with an armbar or anything else”, then it would turn into a longer fight. And at that point they would be more cautious, and I would revert to kickboxing and relying on my speed and technique to just win with stamina and steadily out-hitting them, which was a longer grind. I would then try to avoid grappling them due to the strength difference.
After a couple years, the very last time I fought there before Jordan graduated from high school and we ended up going our separate ways, Jordan put a 200-pound black belt cousin of his in there and was like, “you should fight Squeaks, I think you’ll be the one to finally take her out but trust me it won’t be as easy as you think, and she’s also a black belt, and be careful of her chokes”. We were of similar age and training, but this guy was 75% heavier and a half a foot taller, so this was by all accounts an absolute non-starter of a match. Jordan asked me if I wanted to fight, and I was like, “Sure, why not. I’ll lose this time, but it’ll be fun. At least we have gloves on, lol.”
So, we get into the yard and this guy starts utterly beating the shit out of me every bit as thoroughly as one would expect. Jordan had told him that despite appearances to the contrary, not to hold back, that I had never once lost here before after several fights, and this guy indeed took Jordan’s advice seriously and didn’t play the over-confident routine. He had fought many opponents of many sizes in his training and knew not to underestimate people, and he just wanted to win from the start and treated me as though I was his equal. I got slammed all over the place. I was throwing punches back, but barely. Eventually I was dropped on my back, and before I could get up, he kept coming for me to punch me while I was down. But I rolled and flipped backward and got back to my feet, eyes wide in desperation. He came to me again and kept slamming me over and over. I blocked most of his hits, but the sheer power of his hits made my own elbows dig into my ribs and cause damage. He eventually got over me and started wailing on me over and over, and I couldn’t really go anywhere, like he was looming over me and had me trapped from multiple sides and I couldn’t even really back up. I was focused entirely on defense, because all of his hits had knockout potential against me and I couldn’t let any one hit my head clean, and I couldn’t last long like this. One false move and I’d be literally unconscious. My goal at this point was just like, don't lose teeth or get knocked out.
But after he failed to drop me with those initial barrages, he got more open, more aggressive, more comfortable. He punched me over and over on my forearms, harder and harder, letting his guard down to generate more power, trying to finally end the fight by just breaking through my defenses.
And then, amid my beatings, I saw a brief opening. In his comfort, he started focusing too much on damage and not enough on defense. Between his punches, I regained composure, and I did an all-out full-body hook punch right on the deep side of his jaw. I put every ounce of technique and twisting all my body weight I had into it, and it came out of nowhere from his perspective. He stumbled back from that one hit, dizzy, and sat down on the grass, unable to focus his eyesight. I stopped and looked at Jordan. Jordan asked if he could continue, and he shook his head no, unable to speak. Jordan and me looked at each other like “O_O” and Jordan was like, “holy shit, Squeaks wins.”
But it was a fragile victory in many aspects. I had way more bodily damage than my opponent did. In a half hour he was fine, whereas I was hurt for the next week. My ribs were utterly black and blue the next day; he had hit me so hard and so repeatedly before he got KO’d, that even when blocking his hits, my *own elbows* had repeatedly jammed into my ribs and caused bruises as he pounded my defensive forearms. And my forearms and shoulders were black and blue from taking so many direct hits. Both of us were chilling and playing Playstation 2 with Jordan the next day and I was the one that was injured, not him, even though I had technically won the fight. It became a funny joke among us. All I had done was avoid a knockout, gradually lose on all metrics throughout the course of the fight, but then win it all with one strategic haymaker hook punch after he let his guard down.
He asked, “Want to do a rematch?” I said, “Maybe give me a week to recover first, holy shit.” But by that time he wasn’t around anymore, and the rematch never happened. Likely he would have won, so that was for the best.
My experiences with Jordan and his friends in middle school and high school were some of the most defining for me in my malleable years. My mathletes team for example didn’t teach me shit in comparison to what Jordan did. Jordan was a significant influence on my hobbies and cultural influences for years to come, built my confidence in a real-world setting, and was a good friend.
