Dave Hannigan: UFC’s Dana White scraping the bottom of the barrel with ‘Power Slap’

There’s a video on YouTube showing Artur “Walus” Walczak, a former Polish strongman, in training ahead of an appearance at a slap-fighting event called Punchdown Five in Wroclaw last October. The footage captures him working out in the gym, smacking a heavy bag with his open hands, and talking animatedly about how he toughens up his face ahead of allowing opponents to take free shots at his cheeks. A few days after that was filmed, one such blow to the side of his face caused him to suffer a stroke and, after a month in a medically induced coma, he died.

In Las Vegas last Tuesday, nobody brought up the unfortunate “Walus” when the Nevada State Athletic Commission considered an application from the charming folks behind UFC to license “Power Slap”, a professional slap-fighting enterprise. Within days of receiving approval, the outfit had dropped a typically slick trailer, previewing a press conference in New York on November 11th by offering slow-motion shots of participants, hands behind their backs, getting their facial features seriously distorted before crumpling to the canvas. Standard fare combat porn for these lads.

From the meatheads that convinced an entire generation of gullible tattooed young fellas with pneumatic pecs that Conor McGregor was worthy of hero worship, kneeing somebody in the temple was an audacious act of skill, and caged fighting was actually a kind of human chess, we will now get the spectacle of grown men and, presumably women too, lashing each other across the face in the name of sport. Don’t worry, they assure us, there will be weight classes. medical supervision, and regulations such as mandatory gum shields and cotton ear padding. As if any of those prevent concussion or render this any less ridiculous, offensive and puerile.

“What we’ve found is that this is actually a skill sport — that the participants that are at a high level in this are skilled athletes,” said Hunter Campbell, Chief Business Officer of UFC, part of the Power Slap consortium, and somebody capable of keeping a straight face while giving this tripe the hard sell. “They train. They’re in good shape. They take it seriously, not dissimilar with what you see in MMA or boxing.”

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Except of course that in both those other codes, combatants must defend themselves or bouts get stopped. In slap fighting, the sporting equivalent of that viral video craze where demented adolescents once snuck up and “happy slapped” unsuspecting passersby, individuals face off across a table and take turns whacking each other full force with their open hands. Until one doesn’t get up or the judges (they are making a big deal of how these, eh, contests, will somehow be adjudicated) decide somebody has won. Presumably, the artistic merit of one almighty clatter over another will be the clincher in this grotesquerie.

“I saw a lot of the goofballs talking s**t — goofballs being media guys — talking about, ‘What’s next, mallets?’ Stupid s**t like that,” said Dana White, the UFC’s chief carnival barker, reacting to the inevitable criticism of his latest plumbing of the depths. “The bottom line is, in a boxing match, guys get hit with 300-400 punches in a f****** fight. These guys are going to get hit with three slaps. For these morons to be talking all the s**t that they are about the athletic commission, the athletic commission did the right thing. So did we.”

The Nevada State Athletic Commission did the right thing by White, giving the concept its imprimatur and the obligatory fig leaf of respectability. Of course, they were not motivated in any way by fear of upsetting UFC and potentially losing all the revenue their shemozzles bring to Las Vegas each year. When Thomas Hauser, doyen of boxing writers, contacted the commission to establish exactly which doctors they talked to in advance of their decision, he was told a single physician, whose identity could not be revealed, was consulted. That sounds like some serious due diligence all right.

“Meanwhile, don’t call it ‘slap fighting’,” wrote Hauser. “That cosmeticises the brutality. Call it what it is — ‘whack a defenceless person in the head as hard as you can to cause brain damage.’”

For all the justified complaints, this putrid guff will succeed because those behind it have deep pockets, and plenty of experience peddling lowest common denominator fare. In their bizarro world of faux machismo, White and his consiglieres like Joe Rogan (who has a lucrative side hustle around the octagon when not spreading dangerous conspiracy theories on his podcast) are the ultimate influencers. Their gurus, their method, their teachers, these testosterone twins hold sway over an entire demographic of impressionable lads, and it is mostly lads, who, since they were first weaned on the WWE have mainlined hype with the same enthusiasm that they now quaff quasi-legal supplements down at the gym.

Those whose biceps are more exercised than their brains are no doubt already salivating at the prospect of the inaugural Power Slap event taking place before the end of this year, most likely at the UFC Apex in Vegas, and live on some television network that should know better. White reckons some of his (mostly underpaid and exploited) MMA fighters are interested in taking part and the promotional juggernaut will kick into high gear any day now. The sound it will make is that of society scraping the very bottom of the barrel.