So after tossing the disc for a bit someone took off a shirt and tossed it on the grass (I think maybe Tommy?).   I realized after a while that there were (slightly younger appearing)  guys on bicycles coming down the hill and using Tommy's shirt for a target to plant their skids on, so I felt cocky and sort of yelled, "Hey, what are you doing?"   as I started towards the guy who'd just hit the shirt yet again.

In hindsight (I certainly wasn't paying attention to this part of it at the time) it may be that even Tommy was muttering under his breath to me, "It's fine, don't worry", having way more "street sense" than I had.  Anyhow, as I approached the guy on the dirt bike (there were 2 of them I think), he whipped a pretty decent sized knife out from under the bar of his bicycle and raised his hand above his head with the knife in it and stepped toward me saying "is that right?  What are you going to do about it?" And I just folded, putting my hands up, and backing up almost at a dead run (until I realized that he'd only taken the one step).  At that moment I felt just utterly and completely emasculated and the only thing I can take solace in is that I didn't actually piss my pants.  And it got worse of course.  Because as soon as I had scuttled backward and pleaded "no, that's fine, hold on, wait, I didn't mean..." this guy realized that he had totally won and really started mocking me (at which the guys with me remained silent and I felt as small as I've ever felt.  It didn't work out for this guy on the bike in the end so well due to the fact that the other guy who was with Tommy and me was made of sterner stuff at the time than I.  After running me off so easily he turned on this friend of Rafe's and  got a totally different reaction.  The guy with the knife had a sort of careless extra energy about his movements and when he approached our friend in this fashion waving the knife over his head which had been so effective against the loudmouth (me), the guy who had been playing frisbee with me (and hadn't even acknowledged these guys on the bikes running over the shirt up until then)  just stood there completely frozen and stared him down.  Somehow without moving his posture had assumed an incredibly alert and almost "taut" aspect to it.   It took just seconds before the guy with the knife realized how silly he looked waving it around (and it was obvious he wasn't willing to try and stab this guy who was staring him down, and immediately the whole dynamic changed as he put the knife down and said "You're a lot tougher than your friend" and nodded to him in a gesture of acqiescence and he and his buddy hopped on their dirt bikes and hightailed it out of there.  I didn't feel any better when one (or all?) of us told Mark (who wasn't along on that particular day) what had happened.  Apparently Mark had quite a bit of karate knowledge or something and he asked me, "You mean the guy held the knife in his right hand above his head holding it like a fist with the blade protruding from the bottom of the fist like this?" and I replied, "Yeah,  that's right" and he just sort of nodded nonchalantly and Mark then explained (because I asked) how he would have grabbed the guy's wrist quicly with his left hand and then dropped him immediately with a punch somewhere or even just thrown him down.  For years afterwards my analysis of the situation was that I was a complete pussy and I thought  that that's just the way it was because I thought  about  what Mark said and thought that maybe the next time the exact same thing happened to me that I might be able to react completely offensively, but I knew I didn't have the balls to just stand there in the face of a knife-weilding stranger like the other guy did.    The fact that I can't remember this other friend of Rafe (and Mark?) who stood up to the knife guy sort of proves that I probably have lots of resentment directed at him. 

Anyhow, years later when I met the love of my life M and told her (sort of confessed actually) this story, she did what she does best, which is give a point of view that I never in a million years would have come up with on my own.  Her take was that I absolutely did the smart thing and of course the way she expressed it was superb as always.  She said that if she had watched this incident take place that she would be attracted to the guy who ran from the danger because it proved that I was the smarter one.  In her estimation, she said that the guy who stood up to the knife-weilder wasn't attractive to M at all because he was showing that he was either stupid or just crazy by reacting to an unknown threat from a guy with a knife.   Of course I'm sure it's the testosterone that got in the way of me ever reaching that obvious conclusion on my own..   I'm also sure that there's a subset of women (hopefully far below a majority) that *do* find that tough-guy type behavior (standing up to an overwhelmingly better armed healthy opponent) as attractive.