When PE teachers had a twisted version of 'Fight Club'

I love my father-in-law. He's 84 and living in Oregon. He's an outstanding grandfather to my sons.

Before that, he was a really great dad to Mrs. Brad, who grew up knowing she was loved by him and who shares warm memories from her childhood with him.

Before that, he was the husband of my mother-in-law, to whom he has been married more than 60 years.

Somewhere in the middle, he was a longtime high school football coach and athletic director, a public figure in my hometown, which was both a blessing and a hurdle when I began my sports writing career.

Before coaching football, though, he was a junior high physical education teacher, which is the point of this column. Last week, I shared memories of my junior  high teacher Mr. B, who oversaw a bizarre game of dodgeball, involving fully grown ninth graders firing balls at wispy seventh-graders in a war simulation.

My father-in-law tells me of an even more harrowing situation a half-generation earlier.-

He taught junior high PE when the town's only junior high gym was in the basement of the aging high school building, so there was already some built-in horror movie elements.

His story involves how teachers handled on-campus fights in those days. If boys started fighting, the solution was to break them up . . . kind of. The two fighters would wait until their PE class, when they'd be given oversized boxing gloves and told to fight while surrounded by their peers. Whichever boy first stopped throwing punches would be punished, the boy who kept throwing haymakers would escape punishment.

That was the only rule: If you kept throwing punches and your opponent quit, you would escape punishment. The other guy would likely have to grab his ankles and get smacked with a yardstick (my memory of school punishment).

I guess the teachers thought this would get out the aggression. Maybe it did. But maybe it rewarded  maniacs.

Anyway, my father-in-law described the typical scene for such fights (which apparently happened frequently): Thirty or 40 junior high boys would gather in the basement gym, surrounding the unfortunate pair who got in a scrap. The PE teacher would tell the two kids to start fighting, punches would fly and the mob would start chanting "Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!" while pounding on the walls.

Draconian enough? How about this: The walls were covered with asbestos, the flame-fighting material that was later determined to cause cancer.

So two sweaty seventh-graders would exchange roundhouse punches while wearing oversized gloves as their classmates urged them to fight, pounding the walls and creating a haze of asebestos.

That was junior high PE in the 1960s. That's the generation of men who were then sent to fight in Vietnam.

What's the point? Well, for one thing, it proves that teachers in that era – and perhaps all adults – were lunatics, at least in my hometown. But there's another point.

I'd ask younger people to have some grace for the old man whose opinions drive you crazy or who can't figure out how to operate a smartphone or who rails against social media. It's possible that your dad or grandpa or neighbor isn't just a silly old man.

It's possible he has brain damage from a school-sanctioned brawl held 50 years ago in a cloud of asbestos.

He's not a crazy old man, he's a heroic survivor.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.