I have been knocked out 3 times in my life:

1. When I was 13 years old, I was at my buddy’s swimming pool. He was trying to show me how to do backwards dives into the pool. The first time I tried it, I didn’t spring far enough away from the edge and slammed my head into the sloped portion of the concrete bottom. My friend pulled me out. When I came to, he was laughing, and his older sister was crying and screaming at him for laughing at me.

2. About a month after I got my first real job in the big city of Memphis, I was out in the work parking lot helping a co-worker load some stuff into his car. I noticed a sword, some football pads and a football helmet in his car. When I asked him about it, he told me that he did medieval war re-enactments on the weekends. I got a chuckle out of it, so he offered to let me try it out. I put on the football helmet and he hit me as hard as he could with the stupid sword. I dropped like a sack of potatoes. When I came to, I told him that I didn’t want to play with him anymore.

3. About ten years later, I was out on a construction site watching a crew drill test borings for a project of mine. I actually had my hard hat on, but only because my client was also visiting the site and I wanted to look professional. While I was standing there, a 140-pound hammer came loose from the rig and fell about 10 feet, hitting me on the head. I then fell backwards into a 4-foot deep footing that, luckily, didn’t have any rebar sticking up. If it had, I might have been impaled. I don’t know which knocked me out: the hammer or the fall into the footing, but either way, it was lights out. The driller didn’t laugh though. He had messed up big time, and he thought he was going to get fired.