The Brain Dump

8-5-24

Combat Sports

I'm a very casual MMA fan. Like, "only watches at Buffalo Wild Wings" casual. Over the past 17 years or so, I've watched MMA grow up and become mainstream. As brutal as it can be at times, it does have rules and regulations and all usual sports stuff that helps minimize the possibility of injury. However, in the last few months I have learned about "indie combat sports" that lean a little more towards "let's get hammered and watch someone get fookin' wrecked". Enter the three contenders in order of likelihood of tramautic brain injury: Redneck Brawl, Street Beefs, and Slapfight Championship.

Redneck Brawl

This is the latest phenomenon I stumbled upon. I thought it was just your typical amateur boxing thing, but it's way less than that. It has rules (sort of), but really just leans on the spectacle of "white trash boxing" really damn hard. Here's a little taste that can explain it to you better than I can:

If you're the more sensitive type, I can understand if you think it seems a little exploitative. However, it all seems to be tongue-in-cheek and people seem to generally enjoy the spectacle. Given their fanbase also seems to be their competitor pool, I think it's the least worst(?) of the bunch. I've watched clips, but knockouts seem to be pretty rare, so possibly safer than boxing with training, I guess.

Street Beefs

This is basically ghetto UFC. That's about all there is to it, really.

This one is also fairly innocuous in the sense that it's just a very low-budget version of UFC with a little bit looser rules. Knockouts can happen, but still not something that's very common.

Slapfight Championship

This is the one that I think is probably the most brutal of them all. I am aware of other "slap fighting" leagues (Like UFC's Power Slap & Slapfighting Championship out of Poland) but this one caught my eye because although it's the same sport, it seems that knockouts are quite a bit rarer.

In the name of science (and having fuck all to do), I watched a number of different slap fighting competitions to find out how common knockouts were. It was strange. Power Slap was by far the worst with a significant number of knockouts (including 1st round, 1st shot knockouts), followed by Slapfighting Championship, then Slapfight Championship. Power Slap is by far the most regulated of the three leagues, but they have more knockouts than either of the other two who have fewer regulations. Who knows WTF that means; I'm just watching the sideshow.

At the end of the day, I have no idea why this was what jumped into my head. I was just doing a casual search for sports that sounded misanthropic and this is what I found. I'm sure there's probably worse stuff out there, but this is all I could find by flipping through endless channels on YouTube.