When you mess with the wrong one
I'm not saying anyone SHOULD get punched in the mouth for something they say, but many people have lost touch with the very reasonable fear that they COULD get punched.
I first met Olin Kreutz when we both were in college at the University of Washington. I wrote about him both at the UW Daily and later in 2006 when I was covering the NFL for The Seattle Times. I have never had an issue with him. We even talked on the phone after I wrote a story about a pair of fights he had with football teammates in which the other party sustained a broken jaw. Olin wanted me to pass along a message to Brock Huard — who was quoted in the story — urging Brock to stop saying Olin had chased him around a dorm-room cafeteria because Brock had said Olin’s mother was pretty.
Olin is in the news this week because he was involved in an altercation with a co-worker at a Chicago media start-up, and I was reminded of one of the formative experiences of my childhood which taught me that there are some people you simply should not play with.
If you’re interested in a more football-centric story, here’s a link to yesterday’s post on how misinformation gets inserted into draft coverage without NFL executives even bothering to lie.
Kenny Wilkinson lived next door to me growing up in Klamath Falls, Ore.
He was a year or two older than me, but several magnitudes tougher. He wasn’t the roughest kid in that little neighborhood that was located outside the rear entrance to the saw mill, but he was in that group. They shot BB guns, which I was not allowed to do.
Kenny was a bit of a handful. His mother, a sweet lady named Betty, was forever informing him to just wait until his father got home, the implication being that he had done something that would require redress from the patriarch.
Now, there was a very firm code of conduct that Kenny’s parents had laid out governing our interactions. He was not allowed to start a fight with me. This guideline was strictly physical, however. He couldn’t throw the first punch. I don’t remember the specific reason for this protocol to be put in place, but I can guess.
I have three very specific memories of Kenny. The first involved a tricycle that had been passed from Kenny over to me. At some point after this transfer, Kenny stomped on the plastic pedals, using the heel of his boot to break the plastic parts of the vehicle’s power source. This quite understandably upset me for while there was no formal transferring of a pink slip, I felt the tricycle was now mine. Kenny, however, felt his status as the previous owner entitled him to certain liberties when it came to vehicle modification.
The second thing I remember is a day when Kenny and Tracy Drake — a boy who lived nearby whose house I was definitely not allowed to enter — marched to the ditch that was located across the street from our house. This ditch had become home to a yellow-jacket nest, which was located near a culvert. My Pop, who was doing something in our yard, saw the sticks and whatever else Tracy and Kenny might have had and took an educated guess at their intentions. He informed them of his professional opinion that whatever they were thinking of doing to that yellow-jacket nest was a remarkably bad idea. Sure enough, 15 minutes later, the two were running up the street, fleeing an apiary reaction that was larger than anything they had anticipated. My Mom, when recalling this incident, would laugh hard enough to produce tears after imitating what Kenny’s Mom screeched that day:
“Kenny! Kenny! Take your shirt OFF! Take it OFF! There are bees inside your shirt. I know, I know, it hurts. Take your shirt OFF!”
— My Mom, imitating Kenny’s Mom
My most formative encounter with Kenny had already occurred by that time. Kenny was in our yard one day and we were playing on the large, black innertube that was inflated. These tubes, which were used for heavy-duty logging vehicles like skidders, were a staple of my childhood. In the summer, they were floatation devices for use on lake or river. In the winter, they were ideal for sliding down a snowy slope. In between, they would sit in our yard where two, three or even four kids could sit/lie/jump on it depending on your mood.
On this particular day, I was wearing my Pittsburgh Steelers windbreaker, which is important only because it narrows down my possible age. I had received that windbreaker as a Christmas gift when I was 7. The other thing I remember clearly is the numbness I felt above my lip and nose after Kenny had punched me several times in the face. I dropped to my knees and didn’t start crying so much as wailing after suffering a multi-blow blitz that produced one very bloody nose. It was not the final time I would be punched in the face, but it remains the most memorable.
I have no memory of what triggered the fight though I do know with absolute certainty that Kenny had not thrown the first punch. I had, probably because he had teased me until I lost my temper at which point I escalated the conflict to a physical encounter at which point Kenny had license to wail on me with impunity.
My father had a very specific piece of advice after this event: I’d stop messing with Kenny if I were you. Didn’t matter if Kenny had begun teasing me with the hope that I would react. Didn’t matter if Kenny’s response was disproportionate to my initial offense. I had engaged in a situation in which I not only failed to anticipate the response my actions precipitated, but was totally unprepared for that response to my actions. My father was clearly indicating that unless I wanted to be left on my knees in tears in the future, the best idea was to avoid that kind of engagement with this individual.
This is a long-winded introduction to the news earlier this week that Olin Kreutz, a former NFL lineman, was fired from his job at a sports-media start-up in Chicago after a physical confrontation with a co-worker. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Kreutz grabbed a co-worker Adam Hoge by the neck after Hoge made a flippant remark.