UFC champ Sylvia seconds that judgment: "In bar fights you don't see strategic fighting at all," he says. "Just a lot of haymaking. Usually the guy who gets in the first punch is the winner."

The typical bar fight, then, can be easily choreographed: It's a sucker punch that may or may not be followed by a second punch, but rarely a third. A number of fights go quickly to the floor and become dusty wrestling matches. This often happens when the victim of a sucker punch, dazed and weakened, tries to ward off any further blows by tackling his opponent. Punches thrown in close quarters don't have much oomph to them, so the tackler attempts to give himself a respite via sloppy grappling. This isn't a recommended tack, however. "Personally, I hate to fight on the ground," Quinn wrote in A Bouncer's Guide to Barroom Brawling, his 1990 primer on bar fighting. "For one thing, if a guy has any buddies or you have some enemies around, they will often start kicking your head and ribs while you're on the floor and otherwise preoccupied." By and large, however, bar fights are settled by a single punch, one angry whap to the head that defines and decides the evening.

Which is not to suggest, of course, that there aren't variations. Smart bar fighters, says Sylvia, hit their opponents smack in the nuts. "Best place to strike," he counsels. Goofy types who are destined to fail attempt intricate martial-arts moves, something Quinn strenuously discourages. Some guys pull hair and bite: Mike Tyson's chomping of Evander Holyfield's ear may have been a freakish anomaly in the boxing ring, but in a particularly rabid bar fight, c'est la vie. I might also add two intriguing variants on bar fighting tactics that I've come across in my readings. During America's frontier days a noteworthy fighting technique was to get your opponent's bottom lip between your thumb and fingers and then yank it down like a stuck window shade, half-severing the lip from the face. This is obviously an abomination and has no place here except as a gruesome point of interest. A description of the other tactic appears in Raleigh Trevelyan's recent biography of Sir Walter Raleigh. As a young rakehell, Raleigh grew tired of a "bold, impertinent fellow" in a tavern and, after popping him one, "sealed up his mustache and beard with wax." To my mind this facial-hair waxing clearly violates bar fight decorum, but it is kind of funny.

I like to think that I was once involved in the perfect bar fight. This was about eight years ago, in Mississippi, back when I was spending nine or ten hours a day in a second-story saloon on the town square, a time in my life for which I bear a certain hungover nostalgia. My opponent, in this case, was my best drinking pal, a longhaired South Carolinian a year or two my junior. The cause of the fight was, naturally, a woman-in this case, one present in the bar. For a while she'd been my girlfriend, and then she wasn't, a change in status that I seemed unable to reconcile in my head. No one else had much liked her, and the judgment of pals was that, by splitting with her, I'd escaped a grim future-a judgment endorsed, adamantly, by the South Carolinian. Yet I was drunk, moony, unsure, second-guessing my fate as old Tom Waits songs crackled on the bar's hi-fi. An hour shy of last call, the ex approached me in the bar, and, forgive me, I thought this might be my one thump-hearted chance to woo her back. That's when the South Carolinian appeared, butting into the conversation in a way that I might liken to a circus clown crashing a Middle East peace conference. Scram, I told him. He scrunched up his face and made nonsensical noises. The ex-girlfriend, who'd long lamented my lack of maturity as well as my choice in friends, rolled her eyes and made motions to leave. I mean it, I told him. He crossed his eyes and stuck his tongue out to one side. I grabbed him by the neck. He grabbed me by the neck. We began throttling each other, muttering mean curses. No punches-just throttling, growling, bared teeth. I don't recollect how long this went on, but at some point we looked up, simultaneously, to see the entire bar population frozen in a baffled stare, watching us choking each other. And the ex? Nowhere to be seen.

We looked at each other, sighed, shrugged, dropped our choke-holds, took two stools at the bar, and bought each other beers. We've pledged to finish that fight, and perhaps someday we will. In the meantime, though, we drink in peace.

Jonathan Miles is a contributing editor to Men's Journal and Field & Stream, and writes regularly for the New York Times Book Review. His work has twice been included in The Best American Sports Writing anthologies. A longtime resident of Oxford, Mississippi, he now lives in Warwick, New York, and is at work on a novel.

Coda

This essay was actually assigned as punishment for punching a Men's Journal editor at a staff party at an East Village saloon-the magazine journalism equivalent, I suppose, of having to write "I will not punch my editors" one hundred times on the blackboard. I won't bore you with the details of the scuffle though I will note the following: (a) tequila was involved, and (b) truth to tell, the editor had it coming. Let me add that this is strenuously unusual behavior for me. I am a happy drinker more prone to sloppy hugs than frothy fist-throwing, but, again: When you mix tequila with a blowhard editor, things can sometimes fall apart. My starkest memory of the evening is the sound of the locks clicking shut on the door after I'd been ejected from the bar; they seemed to go on forever. As a fresh transplant to New York from the South, I didn't know a door could have that many locks.

Naturally there were consequences: For one thing, I had to write this essay. Bad behavior has always fascinated me, though the subject of bar brawling arrived with its own set of difficulties. The line between bad behavior and sociopathic behavior, in this case, is terribly thin. I have zero interest in the kinds of fights bullies engage in to puff up their frail sense of machismo; that's just violence for violence's sake, and it happens all too frequently and odiously around the world. What interested me, instead, were the kinds of amateur bar fights ignited by overdoses of passion plus liquor. That is to say, bar fights fought by otherwise reasonable (or semireasonable) people for concrete (or semiconcrete) reasons. Broken hearts, political differences, grudges, and slights, that sort of thing. Obviousness aside, I wondered: Why does liquor-and a bar setting-prompt people to violence? What exactly causes people to snap? And why do so many of them rip off their shirts before fighting?

As to my essay's happy presence in these pages, I must confess that it rarely occurred to me to think of bar fighting-at least of the amateur, one- or two-punch, black eye-resulting variety I tried to focus on-as a crime, though I suppose it certainly is. The ideal bar fight should be quick and for the most part painless enough to never require police attention but, true, it's assault and battery, no matter how loose and saggy the punches. I'm reminded of the time, ten years or so ago, when I was fired as a reporter for a small Mississippi daily for listing a man's legendary bootlegging past in his obituary. Huffily, the publisher informed me that the paper was not in the habit of noting people's crimes in their obituary. "But bootlegging isn't a crime," I protested. "It's a…service." I believe my newspapering career ended at that very precise moment.

I no longer touch tequila, by the way. (A pal of mine smartly calls it "felony juice.") Nor do I punch people. I am, however, still inexorably drawn to saloons where folks do both. As they say: One thing at a time.