I’m not much of an athlete, and even less of a fighter.

That’s okay now that I’m an adult — there are worse ways to hurt somebody than hitting them — but it was hell on me in high school. I couldn’t defend myself to save my pocket protector. Which was exactly how I ended up sitting on the tiled floor of the locker room one afternoon wearing nothing but tighty whities and staring up at Pete Thorn’s clenched fist with befuddled humiliation.

I don’t know how the fight started.

I didn’t like Pete, my high school’s star quarterback. But I didn’t like a lot of people, and I didn’t particularly dislike him. To me, he was as insignificant as the high-school homecoming football game, which I never watched, mostly because I failed to realize the giant oval due east of the library was a stadium until I had to find it for my senior graduation ceremony. Pete was just another jock — a well-muscled, loutish half-wit who had a lot of friends and probably grew up to have two or three successful marriages and a rewarding if low-paying and meaningless career as a pee-wee baseball coach.

Pete and his square-jawed pals didn’t like me, either. I’m not sure why, because they didn’t know a thing about me. They didn’t play chess and I didn’t play football, so we never got a chance to get together and bond over a steamy shower like some guys do.

But it’s fair to say we had our differences, the major one being that they wanted to beat me up and I didn’t want to be beaten up.

I desperately tried to avoid Pete and his posse, of course. One of my tactics was staying away from places they hung out — Detention Hall and remedial English classes, for example. Another strategy was to hide in places they didn’t go, like art class and the science lab.

But it didn’t always work.

One day, for instance, I was sitting in the library reading The Lord of the Flies or one of those seriously depressing literary books they force you to read in high school when you’d rather be reading Penthouse Forum. I felt safe there because I was surrounded by a roomful of books, which are to jocks what garlic is to vampires.

But Pete and about eight members of his entourage unexpectedly showed up to pay me a surprise visit. Lining up single file, they walked past me, punching me in the arm one-by-one and grinning.

It hurt — turned black and blue, and later, purple, green and blue — but what was I going to do about it? Risk losing my library card by throwing a copy of The Iliad at them?

Of course not.

The Iliad is 544 pages long. I could barely lift it, even in paperback.

So I took my lumps like a man — a whimpering, resentful man — and vowed to redouble my efforts to avoid Pete and his pals.

Sadly, all roads in high school eventually led to Coach Pulaski and gym class. No-neck Pulaski was as Polish as a pierogi, and about as perceptive. So when Pete and crew challenged me to a fight in the locker room, coach ignored the hullabaloo and retreated to his office, where I assume he spent most of his time scratching his nuts and lamenting the unfortunate turn of events that funneled him out of a lucrative professional sports career and into the sad job of teaching pimple-faced adolescents the fine points of dodge ball.

Pete caught me at a bad moment.

I was changing into my street clothes, naked except for my underwear, when he showed up at my locker with his buds in tow. I wanted to flee, but a crowd of boys had gathered behind Pete, hemming me in like a caged nerd. They wanted a fight, and I felt honor bound by some ancient code of machismo to give them one. So I raised my fists, and gamely socked Pete in the stomach with all my might, marveling at the stroke of good luck that allowed me to strike the first blow.

I expected Pete to crumple to the floor like an empty bag of Doritos. Instead, he laughed and thumped me in the chest. Just once, but so fast and hard that my feet slipped out from underneath me. I fell against the wall, and then slid to the floor like a … well, like a member of the chess club who’s just been punched out by the school’s star quarterback.

And that was the entire fight. Having convincingly proved that his physical skills were superior to mine — a point I would’ve gladly conceded in writing, or for Pete’s sake, in pictograms — neither Pete nor any member of his posse ever challenged me to a fight again.

Now if you think the moral of story is to avoid jocks at all costs, especially in high school, you’re right. I’d wager that 98 percent of all athletes are arrogant assholes who deserve to get punched in the face. But the world’s filled with assholes, many of the worst of them clumsy and weak, and I made my peace with athletes years ago. I even tried out for, and made, my school’s junior varsity football team the year after my fight with Pete.

But my acceptance of the muscle-bound began in earnest with my son, Gabe. He was blessed with the sort of speed, agility and strength normally reserved for Captain America or Thor. He’s smart, too, which not only confounds my view of athletes, but makes me sick with jealousy. Three of my best friends are also jocks, although I admit I like them mostly because it’s fun to trick them into buying me beer by confusing them with multisyllabic words.

What’s remarkable about this story, though, is that I “friended” Pete a few years ago on Facebook. We exchanged a few messages, and when I realized he didn’t remember me from a sweaty jock strap, I reminded him that he spent most of his free time in high school punching me.

Pete still drew a blank, but it did prompt him to say, regretfully, “I’m sorry, dude, I don’t punch people anymore.”

And that left me feeling a little sad. Like maybe the one thing Pete was good at had been lost to maturity and the advance of civilized society in violation of his true nature, rendering him as useless as a Viking without a battle-axe.

Recently, I noticed that Pete’s no longer on my list of Facebook friends. He must have quietly unfriended me when I wasn’t paying attention.

I probably shouldn’t have challenged him to a game of Scrabble and then played a triple-word score using “Pugilist” off the G in his biggest word, “Dog,” which he spelled “Dawg.”

I’m such as asshole.