As you’ve probably heard by now, Patrick Swayze died at 57 of pancreatic cancer yesterday. Your girlfriend might remember him from “Dirty Dancing,” but the men among us who grew up in a certain time period most likely remember him for “Roadhouse,” the story of a philosophic bouncer who forever changed life at the Double Deuce. If you were an impressionable youth at the time, chances are you even learned a thing or two about fighting from the film, or at least you thought you did until your first actual tussle turned out to be much sloppier and featured less satisfying sound effects. Kind of like how when you saw “Point Break” you briefly thought you knew how to surf, only to later discover that you barely knew how to swim.

In honour of Swayze, here are the ten most important fighting lessons that you can take away from “Roadhouse”:

1. That dude probably has a knife blade in his boot.
2. And he is too stupid to have a good time.
3. Take the biggest guy in the world, shatter his knee, and he’ll drop like a stone.
4. If things get really hairy, call Sam Elliot.
5. Be nice. Until it’s time to not be nice.
6. If you’re gonna have a pet, keep it on a leash.
7. When a man sticks a gun in your face, you got two choices. You can die, or you can kill the motherfucker.
8. Pain don’t hurt.
9. Being called a cocksucker isn’t personal. It’s just two nouns combined to elicit a prescribed response.
10. No one ever wins a fight.

Although not smoothly spoken by Swayze’s character “Dalton” in the movie, Road House did provide me with one very eloquent line of scathing trash-talk that I would only pull out as a last resort when engaged in intense competition, when things got really extreme, during basketball games, badminton tournaments, and games of chess with family members: ”I’ve fucked guys tougher than you in prison.”

RIP, big guy.