I had been boxing for four years, competing as an amateur. An injury sidelined me from the sport for MANY years. Finally pretty much recovered from my injury, I set up a light sparring session with my buddies at my local park (they also box) ready to get back into boxing again. During our session, some guy came up to us, telling us how he's a boxer himself. He asked if he could join our sparring session, I said yes believing him about his boxing background, thinking he'd understand what light sparring meant. Well, he ended up turning into Charlie Zelenoff. He went balls to the wall. He mostly threw big power shots. Now, none of these power punches landed (only on my gloves, and boy could he hit hard), he did get me with two jabs at the very most which I barely felt . I hit him with two check hooks which made him stop the sparring session because he felt too rocked to continue. I won without getting hurt. The thing is, I was very timid and defensive the whole time, perhaps even a bit intimidated by the unexpected aggression. I kept backing up and I couldn't capitalize on all the big misses he made. The sparring session lasted around a minute before I rocked him with two consecutive check hooks. The guy obviously wasn't really a boxer, but he was an aggressive, muscular, and scrappy guy. Is one minute before you put your average street thug away too much? I always felt that my four years of amateur boxing experience would always give me a huge edge in self defense, but one minute of me dodging aggressiveness before I could comfortably find an opening felt too long. I guess, at least in my case, it's true that one has to continually practice boxing in order to stay sharp. Long story short. Where my performance expectations too high? I imagined that if I were ever put in a situation like that, I'd knock the guy out within 10 seconds. Reality was nothing like it.
Sounds like you won at the end of the day. It vaguely reminds me of the phrase “courage isn’t the absence of fear”. I can’t remember the whole of it. Any situation like that would likely feel horrible, I’d imagine I’d feel sick to my stomach in a real life or death self defense situation
while your training gives you the comfort of thinking your expertise would see you through any street fight you really dont know how experienced a fighter the person throwing hands with you could be the guy you sparred may have zero boxing training but could have been in dozens of school yard fights as a kid and some bar fights as an adult. sometimes you just really dont know who you are ****ing with
