Welcome to my broadcast. What really happened today? Again, not that much except there was a fight in my swimming team. In the bathroom.
There’s one kid on the team whose name I’m obviously not going to say. He has a problem where, when he gets extremely angry, communicating with him becomes almost impossible. It’s like he enters another dimension. Most people, if they get into a fight, are angry at one specific person. But with him, once he gets into what I call “battle mode,” he can start hitting whoever happens to be closest to him.
Before we even got to the bathroom, things were already getting annoying. People were splashing each other, pushing a little, joking around the normal stuff that happens on a swim team. He was also trying to tickle my toes, which was extremely annoying, but still pretty normal.
Then we got into the bathroom, and the situation changed.
At one point, he said he was going to “murk” my friend. I knew what “murk” meant, basically to kill someone, although obviously I didn’t think he was literally going to do that. My friend didn’t even know what the word meant, so I explained it to him, and he laughed.
Then the kid came out holding a slipper and threw it at someone. That person had also been teasing him before, so the whole thing suddenly escalated. And this is something I’ve seen before: once this kid gets really angry, he becomes strangely accurate with whatever he happens to be holding. I jokingly call him Spider-Man, except maybe Croc-Man, because somehow the Crocs never miss.
I’ve actually experienced this before. A long time ago, somebody else was annoying him, and somehow he ended up coming over to me and hitting me with a mesh bag even though I wasn’t really the person he was mad at. That’s the strange part. Once he enters that rage mode, the original reason for the fight almost stops mattering.
This time, somebody got hit with a slipper hard enough to leave a red mark. Another person tried to step in, and then more people became involved. I mostly tried to stay away from it at first because I honestly didn’t know what I was supposed to do.
The strange thing is that our group has developed this unofficial rule. When he becomes extremely angry and starts hitting people randomly, people try to stop him physically until he calms down. I know that sounds bad when I say it out loud, and I know it could sound like bullying. But from our perspective, it has always been about stopping somebody from getting hurt.
Usually, after a short time, he suddenly calms down. It’s almost like a switch turns off. He doesn’t literally forget what happened, but emotionally, the whole thing seems to disappear for him. Sometimes he even starts laughing afterward as if nothing happened.
Today, though, calming him down took longer than usual. More people got involved, and eventually several of us were trying to stop the situation. I’m definitely not saying this was our greatest moment. Looking back, having a bunch of kids trying to manage another kid who is extremely angry is obviously not a very good system.
And there is another part of this that I know is questionable: nobody really wants to tell the coaches.
The reason is that people are afraid that if we explain everything, then everyone involved will also get in trouble for pushing, grabbing, or trying to stop him. So over time, we developed this idea of just dealing with it ourselves: notice what is happening, contain the situation, stop it, and move on.
But when I actually say that out loud, it sounds kind of ridiculous. We are kids. We probably should not be running our own emergency response system inside a swimming pool bathroom.
At the time, though, it feels different. If somebody is standing there extremely angry and throwing things, you don’t exactly have ten minutes to hold a meeting about the correct procedure. You react.
Also, I should make something clear. The fight was not one nonstop giant battle like I’m describing it. I’m putting all the interesting moments together because this is a podcast. In reality, there were long pauses in between—people staring at each other, somebody saying something, nothing happening for a minute, and then suddenly something else happened.
So yes, everything I described really happened. I just compressed it.
And I don’t think this kid is a bad person. Most of the time, he can actually be nice and funny. The problem is that when he gets into that rage mode, the entire situation changes. It becomes unpredictable, and everybody around him starts trying to figure out what mood he is in and whether something is about to happen.
That was basically my day.
Not exactly a normal swim practice, but somehow, on our team, also not completely unbelievable.
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