What the Slap?
I attended the first Power Slap championship in Las Vegas and survived to tell about it
[For live footage of the Power Slap Finale, check my Instagram Stories]
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Slap fighting is trying to be the next big American combat sport.
There’s some question as to where and how this peculiar pastime got its start (slapping certainly wasn’t invented by Will Smith at the Oscars), but it’s safe to say that slap fighting caught the Internet’s eye over the lockdown years. At the time, there was an entire subgenre of YouTube videos dedicated to extreme talents and acts captured on video in Russia. The premise of two very large, strong weightlifters with thick necks taking turns slapping the sh*t out of each other wasn’t too far off base. Slap fighting continued to gain global traction amongst athletes (or “athletes”), both male and female, looking to boast of their pain tolerance and capacity to knock out an opponent with nothing but an open palm.
The one obstacle keeping the sport from further notoriety was that it wasn’t regulated. Although unofficial competitions and tournaments have been taking place worldwide, slap fighting needed a legitimate co-sign from the sports world. That came in October of last year, when the Nevada Athletic Commission approved slap fighting. UFC’s Dana White and Hunter Campbell, along with former UFC owner Lorenzo Fertitta, formed the Power Slap league. Saturday night, the first Power Slap championship took place in Las Vegas, Nevada, and I was there to witness history. Was this the next boxing or MMA? Or would it be a short-lived XFL gimmick, mired in controversy and cancel culture?
In the 1980s, arm wrestling was as big of a fad as leg warmers and trickle-down economics, culminating in Sylvester Stallone’s Over the Top about an underground arm wrestler who risks life and limb (pun intended) for his son. And his truck. I remember one afternoon at our Korean church, a circle of teenagers gathering around a folding table. Badass sophomores Mary and Grace rolled up their sweater sleeves and wiped the sweat off their Aqua Net puffy bangs, the rest of the room bloodthirstily coaxing and taunting them like we were watching an illegal dogfight. Grace wrenched her opponent’s shoulder forward and we all heard the sickening snap as Mary’s forearm folded in half. This might sound bizarre but we spent much of that decade clotheslining each other like WWF tag-teamers or crane-kicking each other in the face like The Karate Kid. This was the golden age of boxing: Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, Evander Holyfield’s ear, and Rocky vs. Clubber Lang.
Sport and violence have gone hand in hand since the gladiators. Devices like balls and sticks can be involved, yet the spirit of competition is not only being more cunning and agile than your adversary, but wearing them down. Even in non-combat activities like marathons, runners are pushing the limits of their bodies AND testing the boundaries of their competitors: missing toenails, pulled muscles, splintering joints, dehydration. Sports are advertised as healthful but they can also ravage the body. Football is the convenient example of how an entire culture and industry have built atop humans throwing themselves at each other, putting their health at serious risk and harm, in the name of human entertainment. The justification? There’s an almond-shaped pigskin ball at play.
Over the last few decades, Mixed Martial Arts, crystallized in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, has taken the sports world by storm. I’ve been an avid viewer since the 1990s, when the sport was raw, vilified, and far from being normalized. As far as anyone could tell, it was the nadir of civilization, the glorification of egregious violence, and anyone associated with the exploitation of this gory display should be ashamed of themselves. To be fair, professional MMA back then might be unrecognizable to today’s enthusiasts. The sport was still finding its footing and forging its definition in real-time. There were barroom brawlers1 matched with Tae Kwon Do experts, like the early Internet videos of scorpions thrown into fishtanks with centipedes. There were hardly any rules or taboos and no weight classes in this unconscionable experiment. And the injuries were catastrophic.
Today, MMA is socially acceptable recreation. To its participants, MMA is a serious discipline, akin to any other martial art like Judo or Krav Maga. It’s apparent how far the sport has ingrained itself into popular culture when even women’s MMA has become conventional. It took decades of education, investment, and open minds, however, for MMA to fight the stigma of being primal and lowbrow. Of course, there are still those who place the hammer fist punching of MMA in a different category from the hammer fist punching of hockey, but it doesn’t appear like the UFC is ceasing anytime soon.
Which, brings us back to Power Slap. For two hours, I sat in the stands of UFC’s Apex Center for the inaugural Power Slap Finale. The evening was heavily produced as it was also the live season closer of the Power Slap competition TV show. Expensive cameras swinging across the studio on booms, polished hosts interviewing contestants, and emotional 30 for 30 style intros before the “strikers” made their hallway entrances to deafening music. There were YouTube and TikTok celebrities in attendance. If you didn’t know any better, you might as well have been watching WWE or the Super Bowl.
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