The following piece first appeared on The Bloody Elbow Substack on Sunday, December 10, 2023. Subscribe for early access to more premium pieces and to support your favorite online karate magazine.
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With TUF fading consistently into background static for fight fans around the world, Dana White has made Power Slap his personal passion. A sport of extreme violence, zero defense, and zero training required. It seems destined to create an endless cycle of almost entirely unknown participants knocking each other out in TikTok highlights.
It also seems like a guarantee that few will ever be able to be slap fighters for long enough to gain any kind of meaningful traction as a star of the ‘sport’ (for lack of a better term). Leaving nobody to collect checks outside of the people running the events. Is it any wonder White is so gung ho about the whole thing?
That shouldn’t mean, however, that the rest of the combat sports industry needs to greenlight this sad spectacle just because someone sees its potential to make easy cash.
Combat sports have to include risk mitigation
Fighting exists firmly in a rhetorical dichotomy through which fighters, fans, and pundits both celebrate its ultra violence and—in the same breath—defend it as being no more dangerous than any other contact sport.
Even if those dueling narratives seem a bit silly to outside observers there’s a real need for those ideas to exist in harmony. Fans and fighters should be able to defend the sanctioning of their sports with the idea that they can be practiced in some form of relative safety; that there is a defensive aspect to the game and that it requires technique and care and consideration. That combat sports are not literally just a brain damage showcase, there’s competitive nuance to it.
Slap fighting absolutely does not have that at all, and the fact that commissions are willing to let it move on through with hardly a sideways glance only makes much more obvious what their real functionality is within the regulatory ecosystem. Commissions exist to bring more money to the state, by making themselves an attractive place for promoters to put on events. Safety is a secondary (tertiary?) concern.
The neurologist that signed off on slap fighting for California gave it the go ahead because, in his own words, he didn’t see any ‘red flags’. An insane position considering that we know two very basic things about it:
1) Like every other combat sport, it’s absolutely causing brain damage or people wouldn’t be getting KO’d.
2) It actively prevents defense against said brain damage.
Sanctioning a combat sport without an argument that participants can defend themselves from the damage they’re certain to take is a position bereft of caution in the face of profit. It is a giant red flag.
California seemed more primed than most to challenge slap fighting
I can’t say I’m shocked at the news, but I am surprised that California is one of the very first dominos to fall. Far from a state that pursues events with a blind eye to safety, the CSAC has often felt like a higher standard for regulation in the US. It’s one of the only commissions that still discloses fight purses, the only state that releases rehydration data and encourages fighters to cut less weight, and a state that is at least trying (if only questionably succeeding) to create pension funds for fighters to recoup some of the money that escaped them during their time in the ring & cage.
I’d have hoped that kind of history would put them far and away on the more cautious end of business. Made them at least wait and see how other smaller commissions reacted.
After all, it’s not even like the UFC runs a lot of events there—in part because of the transparency, high fees and taxes imposed by California governance. But, with a single UFC PPV event looming out on the horizon (and zero events held in the state in 2023) it looks a lot like the CSAC just rubber stamped this thing to keep Dana White & Co. happy.
A roadmap for more regulatory capture
It’s exactly the kind of regulatory capture that our own Zach Arnold warned of back in July; that the UFC would make their willingness to work with ACs dependent on greenlighting Power Slap. Given what we’ve just recently seen about the UFC’s negotiation tactics with their own fighters, it’s hard to think they’re not hardballing the commissions as well.
Dana White may like to trumpet that the UFC runs to regulation and not away from it, but if he’s running at regulators to make Power Slap happen it may just be with a hammer in his hand.