If you’re like most Americans, you've probably at one point lost a drunken arm-wrestling match to a notoriously brusque future world leader to settle an argument over geopolitical power shifts following a few drinks at an Irish pub after a touch football game.

No?

California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, in fact, says he’s done just that.

The congressman told Kitty Felde of local public radio station KPCC-FM that, in the early 1990s, he got smoked by young Vladimir Putin, then a local official in St. Petersburg, in a booze-fueled Feat of Strength.

The story goes like this: Seeking refreshment after a game of touch football (which featured a lineup including Scooter Libby, the future chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney who was convicted of obstruction of justice), Rohrabacher and some visiting Russian politicians -- including the relatively unknown Putin – stopped by a DC watering hole, the Irish Times Pub.

After throwing back a few, the Americans and the Russians exchanged words about “who won the Cold War, etc.”

“And so,” Rohrabacher went on to explain, “we decided to settle it like men do when they’ve had too much to drink in the pub.”

(Read: the two challenged each other to an arm-wrestling match.)

Rohrabacher lost.

Here’s the congressman, in his own words, explaining the incident to KPCC-FM.

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