63-year old man holds off robber

Sat Aug 13 09:03pm EDT http://sports.yahoo.com/mma/blog/cagewriter/post/63-year-old-...

63-year-old holds off robber with rear naked choke

By Maggie Hendricks

A
robber messed with the wrong man in Florida on Thursday night.
63-year-old, 5-foot-7 Fred Kemp used a foot sweep and a rear naked choke
to disarm a robber who pointed a gun at Kemp and his wife.

The couple was getting into their car in Boynton Beach when a man
came out of the darkness and approached them with what turned out to be a
pellet gun. Wanting to keep his wife safe, Kemp returned to the skills
that he learned as a wrestler for Hofstra University.

"He started to hit me, so I reacted from there," a
bruised but smiling Kemp said Friday. "I got him out into the street and
held his arm. I foot-sweeped him down and I was trying to get a hold of
the gun. He banged me up a little bit but my main concern was the gun."

Kemp's quick thinking led him to
apply a rear-naked choke, then when the robber was weakened, he took the
gun from him. The police report mentioned that Kemp held the robber
down until the police arrived.

"He asked me to let him go when I had him down," Kemp said. "I said, 'No, I'm not going to do that.'"

Fighters who started as wrestlers often go back to rely on their
wrestling skills when they get in trouble in a fight. Clearly, that
instinct sticks with them, because Kemp was smart enough to rely on his
sport when danger found him. Joe DeMeo, a friend of Kemp's through
wrestling, was not surprised to hear that Kemp took out the criminal.

"Fred Kemp's the last guy I would rob," DeMeo said.
"He'll go down fighting. … He does have a lot of physical ability. He's
a no-nonsense, get-the-job-done kind of guy."

Remember that the next time you approach a diminutive 63-year-old. It's probably not a good idea to mess with him.