UFC middleweight Nick Ring recently broke up a mugging:
“I was leaving Starbucks last night in Calgary, and I see a big group of, uh, I don’t know what you want to call them — wannabe gangster guys — beating up a couple,” Ring told MMAjunkie.com Radio. “It was a boyfriend-girlfriend. They were beating them up and robbing them, basically. It was 10 against two. It didn’t look right. I pulled the car over and everything to see one of them kneeing a girl in the face. I’m not even joking. It was so hardcore, I can’t even tell you.
“I get out of the car, and I yell, ‘What’s going here?’ The girl takes off, rips this other girl’s backpack away from her, and the whole group of them, the 10 of them, they run down the street. I went to check on the two, and they got their faces cut open, and they’re bleeding everywhere. It was me and another stranger who just arrived on the scene.”
Once Ring established that the victims weren’t facing life-threatening injuries, he made a split-second decision, but one he said really didn’t require much thought. Ring and the stranger took off after the assailants.
“We just looked at each other, and we said to each other, ‘Let’s go get them,’” Ring said. “We ran after them. We tackled one of them, and we called the police. The police came, and I got into another little foot chase with them as I was on the phone with the police.”
Ring, who said the assailants appeared to be in their late teens, said the group stayed close by while waiting to learn the fate of the one member of the group who was tackled. That allowed Ring to direct police in their direction, as well as aid in a secondary chase. Seven of the 10 attackers were eventually nabbed.
“They need to be straightened out,” Ring said. “This is not behavior that can be condoned. And you know what? Turning a blind eye to it, and this goes for everyone in society, don’t turn a blind eye to it. If you see something wrong, you go out there, and you straighten it out. The cops are there to help out, as well, but you’ve got to call them.”
It’s interesting that — although I assume Mr Ring is a fairly intimidating presence — it only took one show of defiance to cause 10 muggers to flee. Ten-against-3 is still pretty good odds, even when one of them is an MMA champion.
Criminals are a superstitious and cowardly lot.
(Nick Ring is a pretty clean-cut All-American, er, All-Canadian-looking athlete, and “just” a middle-weight, so he’s probably not super-intimidating in his street clothes — until he decides to be.)