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Fueled by its viral moments of crystalline violence, the combat sport of Professional Slap Fighting—in which combatants take turns smacking each other in the face—is soaring in popularity online and off. The estimable Ander Monson (and here) investigates…

The image that I can’t forget—the one that truly pulls me into the savage, surreal, and ridiculously compelling world of professional slap fighting—is the open hand of heavyweight champion Damien “the Bell” Dibbell smashing into the giant bearded face of Ryan “the King of Kings” Phillips in slow motion. In the moment, I can’t tell whether my horror or pleasure is greater. Phillips’s eyes are closed, all 255 pounds of him anticipating the blow, hoping to endure it so he can return fire. He can’t move to evade the slap. That’s not allowed in this relatively new, super-fast-growing combat sport. Flinching is a foul—spiritually, the greatest foul in slap fighting—and the penalty is that your opponent gets an extra chance to smash you in the face. So you just have to take the blow. Dibbell’s slap takes maybe a second to deliver in real time. Phillips drops—whatever was him, gone at least briefly—and his body crumples to the ground…

… Most articles incorrectly trace slap fighting back to a 2019 video from a Russian strongman competition that went viral. But they’re wrong, at least according to JT Tilley, CEO of SlapFIGHT Championship (SFC), the original slap-fighting league, which continues as an underground, more intimate alternative to [the newer, better financed, and bigger] Power Slap. Tilley tells me that he started slap fighting as a rules-based sport four years earlier, in 2015, after he saw a viral video from Lubbock, Texas…

… It was after seeing that video and the response online, says Tilley, that he decided to “invent” slap fighting as a proper sport. That meant giving it shape and rules. And also trying to make it safe—by which he means safer relative to what it was at the time, which was a total free-for-all. The underground videos he was watching online were wild and compelling, sure. But he remembers thinking, Somebody’s going to die out there. So Tilley worked out a simple set of rules and the format. SFC started streaming its first events in 2017, and from there it grew.

The sport began to catch on overseas, including in Eastern Europe. A couple years after Tilley launched SFC, he was asked to consult with an unregulated Polish slapping show called PunchDown. Tilley says he told the organizers that they needed to incorporate his safety rules to protect the fighters. They didn’t. And shortly after that, someone did die. In 2021, Artur “Waluś” Walczak, a Polish bodybuilder, suffered a stroke in PunchDown 5 and died in the hospital. People freaked out. PunchDown disappeared, and, briefly, so did every other slap-fighting organization except for SFC.

But the visceral appeal of slap fighting was too potent not to attract new competition. And soon it caught the eye of the unofficial king of combat sports himself. In 2022, Dana White, the longtime president and impresario of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), founded Power Slap in Vegas, based on SFC’s rules and even using some of its fighters. Power Slap held its first bouts in January 2023, debuting on the TV network TBS. The initial ratings were disappointing, however, so Power Slap moved exclusively online, where it has been booming ever since.

The metrics tell the story of slap fighting’s social-media popularity. From April 2023 to early May 2024, Power Slap’s YouTube subscribers jumped from 121,000 to 2.4 million and its Facebook followers more than doubled, from 1.6 million to 3.3 million. The Power Slap YouTube channel has racked up more than a billion views in roughly two years. And White has leveraged that audience to help Power Slap acquire sponsors such as Anheuser-Busch, Crypto.com, and Fanatics. SlapFIGHT can’t match the speed and scale of Power Slap’s growth trajectory, but it still boasts a pretty robust global following. The SFC YouTube channel has some 250,000 subscribers, with more than 57 million views since it launched. Tilley claims that SFC has garnered more than 2.5 billion views globally across all platforms and says the league has been televised in Hungary, Switzerland, Germany, the South Pacific, Nigeria, and the Middle East. Its most recent event, says Tilley, was seen online by 500,000 people live.

Slap fighting is unsafe, but all combat sports are. This is why we watch them. Frankly, most contact sports are dangerous, points out Power Slap president Frank Lamicella, who was tapped by White to run the league. The proven connection between football and CTE doesn’t seem to be hurting the NFL, after all. Both Lamicella and Tilley say that slap fighting is safer than boxing or MMA. Lamicella, who happens to be a lawyer, rattles off a whole list of medical precautions his league takes. Power Slap errs on the side of safety, he says. “So far we’ve had zero positive CT scans and really a very low hospital-transport rate compared to other combat sports.” Plus, he points out, no one is being forced to compete in his sport. “We live in a country where it’s capitalism and your freedom to do what two people want,” he says. “Look, people want to fight. We provide the platform to do it; we spend the money to make sure they’re safe and healthy. We make sure it’s as safe as possible.”…

… I met Tilley, the SFC founder and CEO. A former wrestler, Motown singer, comedian, and Hall of Fame MMA promoter, he is a big, burly, likable guy who recently turned fifty. He has a promoter’s jovial personality, a genuine smile, and an infectious enthusiasm for slap fighting and especially for the people who slap and get slapped. He is the face of SFC and, with retired MMA star Mark “the Hammer” Coleman, does the play-by-play on all the SFC live streams. From our first communication, he was super welcoming and described what they do as a family operation. That would come to be echoed by nearly every person involved with SFC. Tilley is a self-described inventor of “bullshit sports,” as he told me with a laugh, like carjitsu, “jujitsu but inside of a car,” a new sport for which he signed a deal with ESPN; ultimate tire wrestling, “a big stack of tractor tires, and your objective is to stuff the other guy inside the hole,” also ESPN bound; beast ball, “one-on-one football in a shipping-container unit”; sumo boxing, which I couldn’t entirely figure out; and a new one he was developing where two guys get roped together as in the “Beat It” video and have to fight…

A fascinating– if macabre– look at one corner of the cultural moment that we’re in: “Inside the Savage, Surreal, Booming World of Professional Slap Fighting,” from @angermonsoon.bsky.social.

* Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System

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As we trade blows, we might recall that it was on this date in 1980 that LOT Polish Airlines Flight 007 experienced engine failure and crashed on approach to Okęcie Airport in Warsaw. All 87 people on board were killed, including 14 boxers and 8 staff members of the U.S. boxing team and Polish pop singer Anna Jantar. Future world heavyweight champion boxer Tony Tucker was supposed to be on Flight 007 but could not go because of a shoulder injury.

 We might also pause, on Pi Day, for a piece of pi(e)…

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… in celebration of Albert Einstein’s birthday; he was born on this date in 1879.

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“Violence sometimes may have cleared away obstructions quickly, but it never has proved itself creative.”