Adding Insult to Injury

Some time ago, we had a somewhat large altercation that required the attention of most of our floor staff. I happened to walk inside as a rather large gentleman was being forcefully removed. The floorstaff member removing him was having quite a time getting him out, seeing as our good-natured customer was 6"5 (I checked his ID after this happened, so I'm sure of his height) and, by my estimates, weighed about 230 lbs, and the floorstaff member was much shorter and lighter. I was informed well after the fact that he had slapped a girl inside the bar and was confronted about it by one of our guys on the floor.

Being the nice guy I am, I took over the duties of continuing escorting the guy out, namely by wrapping my arm around his neck backwards, much in the same way as a rear-naked choke is applied. This is usually a great way to get someone out who is resisiting when you're doing it on your own, and as several of our other guys were busy restraining or keeping back some of the giants friends, I was on my own to get him out at this point.

Guys who are 6"5 often have long arms, and getting a gentleman out as tall as this guy was also invovled him grabbing onto whatever he could latch on to. Namely, window frames, bartops, and door frames. This made our journey out rather difficult, so, finally with the help of another door guy, I put him on the ground, gave the choking duties to someone else and grabbed both ankles under one armpit in a "figure 4" grip in order to give him less leverage.

This particular guy wore his pants in the popular baggy fashion and in no time, they came off in my hands and were around his ankles. It took more effort on my part at this point not to laugh at him hanging out everywhere than to keep him from kicking, as I had his legs locked up pretty well.

We threw him out on the sidewalk when we finally made it outside, just as several other guys were being tossed out. It was at this point that another floor staff member came out, bleeding profusely from the back of his head from a bottle that someone had been kind enough to smash over it while his back was turned.

The ambulance was called and he made a nice scene of bleeding everywhere before they took him away to the hospital.

This is a great reason why when doorguys are dealing with a situation, not everyone has to get involved and put their hands on someone. A good team always has those who hang back, acting as support, dealing with crowd control and watching the guys backs who are doing the ejecting of the patrons, making sure no one gets a cheap shot in. We had some new guys working that night and they didn't do what they were supposed to do, and someone ended up getting hurt. Inexperience really kicked our asses that night, and helped us find new and better ways of dealing with those situations when we're kicking out a half dozen people or more at at time.

But the best part of it all was watching the tapes later from the cameras and seeing the guy getting tossed out on his ass, pants around his ankles, in front of the crowd on the sidewalk. The way he jumped up and tried to pull his pants on after getting ejected was hilarious. It's bad enough getting tossed out forcefully, but with your pants down, too?

I laughed about that for a long time.