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The history of bar fighting is, as far as I can discern, almost wholly undocumented, though a few historical tidbits can be found glittering amid the archival dust. The origins of the phrase "the real McCoy," for instance, are said, perhaps apocryphally, to be traceable to a turn-of-the-century saloon fight. As the story goes, an obnoxious drunk accused then-welterweight boxing champ Norman Selby, a.k.a. "Kid McCoy," of being a fraud. McCoy, inventor of the notorious "corkscrew punch" that Muhammad Ali later claimed as his own, promptly and definitively beat the stuffing out of his accuser, who weakly admitted, as he clambered back upright, that he'd been laid out by "the real McCoy." Without bar fights, too, the history of the American west would be one very long episode of Little House on the Prairie. One of the enduring Western myths is that gunfights were staged, quite formally, as cowpoke variations on European duels. More often, if not always, they were standard-issue saloon brawls that spilled out onto the street and resulted in the snap-crackle-pop of gunfire. Beyond that, however, the history of bar fighting remains locked among the men, young and old, who trade their smoky stories in private, twisting the fights' origins and outcomes to suit their egos and/or bleary memories. ("The guys who get beat up always deny they started anything," an ex-bouncer from Maine told me. "And if they got beat up by two guys, it's ten in the retelling.")

Despite this hazy history, however, I think it's fair to make a few assumptions. The first is that the original bar fight surely happened within hours or days of the appearance of the first bar. (The scientific basis for this will be explored shortly.)

The second is that no culture in which alcohol is publicly served is immune to them. Even Tibetan Buddhists-widely, if perhaps inaccurately, considered to be more violence-averse than we hayseed Americans-have their share of bar brawls. In Tibet's Kham province, fights between Tibetan and Chinese drinkers are said to be commonplace; several years ago, in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, a fingernail discovered in a dish in a Chinese restaurant sparked a giant brawl, during which wine bottles were hurled at policemen trying to restore order. Stray fingernails are not typically fuel for fights in the United States but then we do not suffer from the sorts of geopolitical tensions that would cause one to suspect a restaurant of serving human flesh. In a similar vein, we are also not prone to bar fights caused by soccer club rivalries, as in Europe, though college football rivalries seem to take up a little of that slack. Suffice it to say that bar fights are not a product of globalization. When it comes to late-night scraps, we are the world.

The third assumption is that the unwritten chronicle of bar fights features a cast of mostly men, though women of a certain flinty temperament are also prone to bar fighting. In my lifetime I've witnessed two girl-on-girl brawls and both scared the bejesus out of me. Girls are not indoctrinated, by pop culture or society, with the vague code of fighting that usually-and I stress the word usually-keeps boys from pulling hair or gouging eyes. The term catfight is popularly applied to these fights, and it's an apt analogy; as with battling cats, there is rarely anything you can do to stop these fights, and it's best, from my experience, to simply run for cover when one breaks out. This isn't to suggest that such fights aren't worth witnessing. If you're accustomed to ladies of a genteel sort, there's a world-upside-down element to them, and they can sometimes have the frightening appeal of Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. I'm told that many men take pleasure in the spectacle of females fighting. Though this fetish falls outside my sphere of kinks, some overly red-blooded men also get turned on by car wrecks or Christina Aguilera. Disaster, I guess, can have a certain pervy allure.

Young men are the predominant combatants in any saloon fight, since the tempers of older men take much longer to come to a boil. (Regarding alcohol and youth, Plato warned, "It is wrong to add fire to fire.") Tim Sylvia, the former heavyweight champ of the Ultimate Fighting Championship league, told me that he used to pick fights in Maine bars when he was nineteen or twenty "just to prove my masculinity." Young men feel they have much to prove; older men, as a very general rule, tend to feel more comfortable in their skins.

This is not to suggest, however, that old men are immune to beer tempers. Many years ago, in a Deep South beer joint, a white-haired man of about seventy threatened to kick my ass because he suspected I was a "beer spy." The full story emerged after I'd denied the charge and was able to calm him down: He claimed he'd found a condom floating in a capped bottle of Budweiser. He'd notified Anheuser-Busch, he said, and they'd agreed to ship him a free case of Bud if he would just send them back the bottle in question. "I told 'em that'd be fine so long as either Mr. Anheuser or Mr. Busch called me to apologize," he said. "And, lookit, I told 'em they'd have to call me at night because I ain't about to sit by the phone all damn day." Because I'd been alone at the bar, scribbling away at some piece of writing or other, he'd assumed I was a spy dispatched by Anheuser-Busch to find and reclaim that dread bottle. I'm not sure what I would have done if the old man had actually attacked me-hard to envision a happy outcome there. In the end, though, he apologized and fetched me some homegrown beef-steak tomatoes from his truck, which, to this day, are the best tomatoes I've ever eaten.

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 connection. According to a study published in the January 2003 issue of the medical journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, acute administration of alcohol can induce a rapid increase in testosterone-four times the normal amount, in some cases-in the brains of rodents. The implications for human behavioral and endocrine pathology seem clear: The more you drink, the more your social inhibitions dissolve, but also the more your testosterone amounts-the dipstick level of your co-jones, so to speak-may rise. A chalkboard equation, then, might look something like this: C2H5OH (ethyl alcohol) = negative inhibitor neurotransmitter abilities + 4x testosterone levels = Pop-eye, on a shore leave bender, giving Bluto a big black shiner for goosing Olive Oyl's skinny little rump. Argh argh argh.

Scientific evidence notwithstanding, that bartender would be only half right. If mere drunkenness were the cause of barroom brawls, happy hour at T.G.I. Friday's would be the most dangerous sixty minutes on the planet; you'd have to step over bodies just to order a Tom Collins. If you liken a bar fight to, say, an exploding can of gasoline, then bloodstream alcohol is surely the gasoline; there's no disputing that. But for every such explosion there's a spark that makes it go boom. As Seneca wrote, "Drunkenness does not create vice. It merely brings it into view."

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.