Melanie Wayland sipped her PBR and swayed to the metal music. One of her favorite bands, Job for a Cowboy, was playing at The Bottleneck. All of a sudden, a drunken man barreled into her from behind, smashing her body into the bleachers in front of her. She regained her balance in time to see her friend running out the door, away from the guy who had punched him and the guy who had just fallen on her. In a split-second decision, Wayland pushed her drunken aggressor onto the bleachers, straddled him and started punching him.


“The whole time I totally didn’t spill my PBR,” she says, proudly, “and I gave the guy a bloody nose.”

Although Wayland’s bar fight sounds like a scene straight out of a movie, bar fights are not so glamorous in reality. With her short, dark brown hair and 16 tattoos, Wayland, a Lawrence resident and 2008 graduate, looks like the last girl you’d want to get in a fight with.

While getting into a bar fight might sound like a bad-ass experience to tell your 882 Facebook friends the next day, the consequences of punching back — even if you don’t throw the first punch — are not worth it. At the very least, you could be thrown out the bar for the night. At worst, you could be arrested and charged with battery, not to mention the possibility of getting injured.

You could also get your ass kicked by one of the door guys, adds Britton Zaloz, Overland Park junior and bartender at Quinton’s, 615 Massachusetts St. She says bouncers always try to break up bar fights before becoming part of them, but Zaloz admits her guys are “hot-headed,” too.

“If people try to start a fight with our door guys, they’re goin' down,” she says.

Zach Owen, a 24-year-old Lawrence resident, has seen a lot of bar fights working as a doorman for The Ranch, 2515 W. 6th St., Club Axis, 821 Iowa St., and now at Jet Lag, 610 Florida St. He’s seen people hit other people over the head with beer bottles and cops mace everyone in the room.

A guy trying to show off for a girl or a guy hitting on another guy’s girlfriend starts most guy-on-guy fights, he says. Girl-on-girl fights are usually initiated by a jaded ex-girlfriend. No matter the background situation, the majority of the bar fights he’s seen have been caused by a combination of three factors, he says: alcohol, attitude and women.

“That’s kind of sexist and wrong, but that’s just the way I’ve seen it,” Owen says.

Most people try to avoid conflict, but there are some situations — especially when alcohol is involved — when someone seems determined to start an argument with you. If someone verbally assaults you, spills their drink all over you or instigates a fight with you, just walk away, says Norah Dunbar, professor of communications at the University of Oklahoma.

If a person is drunk enough to confront a stranger, they are not thinking rationally. You can’t really apply conflict resolution communication strategies, Dunbar says. Just apologize to them — even if whatever happened is not your fault — so the instigator does not see you as a threat. Make it clear you don’t want to fight.

Rock Ontiberros, Overland Park sophomore, says he’s never been in a bar fight and he doesn’t consider himself the type of person to ever get in one because he controls the amount of alcohol he drinks.

But even if you keep yourself in control, there's still the possibility of getting dragged into a conflict by a friend. In this case, it is always best to just stay out of it. Bar fights often escalate because someone jumps in to either help a friend or stop the fight, Owen says. Even if you are just trying to calm things down, the other person just sees one more opponent.

In these situations, you can always notify a bar employee. Bouncers won’t kick someone out because you ask them to, but they will ask the person to stay away from you, Owen says. And if all else fails, leave the bar, Dunbar says.

“You shouldn’t really be so committed to being in a particular place that you can’t get out of a dangerous situation,” he says.