DM writes to point out that Al tackled the guy from behind. And he managed to break his glasses? (eyes rolling) “Franken emerged from the crowd and charged one male protester, grabbing him with a bear hug from behind and slamming him onto the floor.”
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that I’ve taken out someone from behind myself, actually, the same guy twice in a row. I was talking with a friend who travelled in similar martial arts circles one night while he was working as a bouncer at Prince’s Glam Slam. Three guys got into a pretty vicious fight right behind us, and there as were only two bouncers at that door, I tagged along and grabbed the leftover, bounced his face off the wall and held him there with an armlock. He was stunned and seemed pretty relaxed, so I asked if he was cool. He said that he was, so I let him go. In the meantime, the other bouncer, a 300+ monster, had simply picked up one guy and marched him outside, but it had taken my friend a little while to subdue the other combatant and he was just frog-marching him past at the moment I let the other guy go.
Okay, it was dumb, but I’m not a bouncer, I don’t know these things. Anyhow, the guy getting marched out spits on my guy, who then, naturally enough, goes for the spitter. My friend managed to pass off the spitter to the huge bouncer just in time to intercept, and started wrestling shoulder to shoulder with him. I wasn’t sure what to do, being paralyzed with a plethora of options, but the guy was leaning forward, so I finally just reached over and picked up both his feet. (It would have been more elegant to sweep them, but like I said, I was frozen, I had too many options. When you train with experienced fighters, you’re lucky if you get a window that’s half-open for a split-second. And if something is open, it’s usually a trap.)
He was pretty tall, about 6’2″, so he hit the ground hard enough to knock the wind out of him. My friend was extremely annoyed at this point, as he’d taken a good punch in the face from the other guy, so as the guy started to push himself up, he jerked him up by the shirt collar and gave him a little heel of the hand into the solar plexus. That was pretty much lights out. The guy went down and didn’t fuss at all when the huge bouncer came back in, scooped him up and carried him out like a baby. That was fun. Admittedly, I was either training or lifting weights seven days a week then, so my definition of entertainment was perhaps a little off.
Other than a few minor incidents like that, I never had any occasion to seriously use any of my training, which was probably for the best. Some of the other Dragons got into some interesting tangles, though. I’ll save those stories for a rainy day.