“There’s just something so cathartic about getting hit in the head with a pillow,” posits Steve Williams as he grills a couple of steaks on the back deck of his catamaran. Catfish spin in the yacht’s neon stern lights, scanning the water’s surface for scraps of food on the Boca Raton harbor.
He cues up a video on his phone. It’s the second ever exhibition match produced by Pillow Fight Championship (PFC), an organization Williams founded in south Florida with the goal of turning pillow fighting into a professional sport. The match took place back in October, but tonight it’s available for the first time, free of charge, on Fite.tv, the premier direct-to-consumer streaming service for combat sports.
Despite a full stomach, two empty bottles of cabernet and the hum of trade winds, there’s a hint of anxiety on Williams’s face.
“I’m dying to know the stats for this fight,” he says.
People cheer on fighters at the PFC Pillow Fight Championship. Photograph: Bryan Cereijo/The Guardian
As Williams sees it, those stats, or number of streams, will determine the long term viability of his latest venture. In one week he will host the PFC Pound Down in Miami, his company’s largest organized pillow fight and the first pay-per-view event, where the sport’s inaugural champions will be crowned. A willing audience would be a boon for his cause.
“You don’t really need to explain [pillow fighting] to people – that’s the beauty,” says Williams.
The pillows – which make a crinkling sound like a dry diaper when held still and crack like a horsewhip when connecting with a cheekbone – are queen-sized, stuffed with foam and encased in nylon sailcloth. Fighters are matched up according to relative size and experience levels by what’s called a “matchmaker” in the universe of combat sports. There are only three 90-second rounds because hurling a broad, 2lb pillow with the torque of a golf club becomes virtually impossible after the four-minute mark, even for athletes in elite shape.
A serial entrepreneur with a very niche dossier – from third-party cellphone roaming services to airport “crash phones” to a kind of proto-iTunes music subscription platform – Williams has a gift for marrying usefulness with novelty. As he sees it, pillow fighting is not just a gimmick.
Steve Williams founded the Pillow Fighting Championship. He is working towards making pillow fighting a professional sport. Photograph: Mary Beth Koeth/The Guardian
“There’s hardcore aggression with pillow fighting, but nobody gets hurt. A lot of people don’t want to see the blood and violence any more.”
Williams is framing PFC as the next UFC – the largest mixed martial arts (MMA) organization in the world – borrowing heavily from the latter’s franchising business model and lurid, aggressive branding. Going door-to-door selling the martial-arts studios and boxing gyms of south Florida on his concept, he recruited dozens of active MMA fighters, reality TV stars, bare-knuckle boxers, mechanics, single moms and veterinarians to start training with his pillows. Then he hosted exhibition matches in south Florida gyms and casinos.
Professional fighters appreciated the intensity and competition as much as the laypeople. Due to the severity of the whupping in a MMA match, competitors can only handle one or two a year. PFC embodies the notion of fighting without risking serious bodily injury.
“I’ve been in martial arts my entire life, and I can tell you that this is going to be bigger than all of them,” says Yuri Villefort, a Brazilian professional MMA fighter who runs Indio Dojo in Boca Raton, one of the first gyms to partner with Williams. “Anyone can compete, and anyone can win. It doesn’t matter your size, age, or background.”
Santiago Seijo swings against his opponent, Markus ‘Maluko’ Perez. Photograph: Bryan Cereijo/The Guardian
Williams’ first pillow fight exhibition match took place last September, the second in October. They weren’t ticketed, but they generated video content, which was all Williams needed to spread the word outside of south Florida. Short clips went viral on Instagram, got picked up by Barstool Sports, and ended up on morning shows in England, which stoked a wave of new applicants.
“I’ve never seen anything take off like this,” he says.
Williams tallies that he’s spent over $350,000 of his own money to produce these fights and hasn’t made a dime in return. In his estimation, it’ll all be worthwhile this Saturday, when the bell rings at the Pound Down, the first “professional” tournament, which loosely means that athletes will be paid for their performance. Championship belts will be on the line, and the world will (with any luck) be watching.
***
“Live around the world, we’re set for two explosive rounds of nocturnal neck support combat,” says the announcer in an ill-fitting tuxedo jacket.
It’s 9pm inside a sprawling industrial park 20 miles west of downtown Miami. A throng of marginally famous social media influencers and fighters with blooms of cauliflower ear gather ringside. Resplendent in a blue velour blazer, Williams poses for pictures with Logan Paul’s boxing trainer. The VIP section is a bunkbed above the seating area, where a smartly dressed couple recline awkwardly. All told, there are a few dozen spectators and potential investors. Everyone else is associated with the byzantine video production effort.
With five months’ experience, Terrell ‘TJ’ Jenkins is considered a veteran of the sport. Photograph: Bryan Cereijo/The Guardian
Sixteen men and eight women from across the US and South America are competing in a single-elimination bracket for a shot at the title and the $5,000 purse. All matches are two rounds, with the exception of the final, which is three. Certain upgrades are evident: each fighter now has a trainer and a cut man in their corner, and a PFC branded uniform. (In Williams’ previous exhibition matches, competitors wore golf gloves and their own mismatched gym clothes.)
On an overhead big screen, a live feed shows Terrell “TJ” Jenkins on his slow march from the locker room to the ring for his first fight. The crowd chants his name as he climbs through the ropes. He flexes and smiles wildly. Staring menacingly in the opposite corner is professional MMA and bare-knuckle fighter Mike Trujillo.
Having all of five months’ experience, Jenkins is one of the few veterans of the nascent sport. For several weeks leading up to his first professional bout, he’s been weight-training and practicing MMA at Villefort’s dojo.
TJ Jenkins squares off against Mike Trujillo in the PFC Pound Down event. Photographs: Bryan Cereijo/The Guardian
“You can’t apply too much technique. Otherwise, you’ll freeze up,” he says. “I’m fine with being the underdog. It’s part of my identity.”
Jenkins, who is 6ft 2in with shoulders like Dwight Howard, had an admittedly troubled upbringing in Yonkers, New York. “We didn’t have the things that most people have – money, stable home, father figures. And whatever you’re lacking at home you seek elsewhere.” He spent a decade on probation in New York and several weeks being homeless after landing in south Florida in 2019. He slowly saved up to start his own mobile detailing business – his first office was in a commercial building owned by Williams.
“We hit it off right away,” Jenkins says. When Williams started PFC, he invited Jenkins to try out. “I felt like a little kid again,” he says wistfully. “It brought back waves of that same joy and excitement. I needed to pass that on to other people.”
He appears to be in a state of perpetual awe concerning how his life turned out – a business owner who’s able to employ members of his family, and a local favorite to win the main event on Saturday.
“When I get in the ring, I’m thinking about my past, I’m thinking about all the stuff that tried to break me,” he says.
***
“Work the back hand, and stay on him!” Villefort yells from Jenkins’ corner.
Jenkins holds the pillow with both hands and swings like he’s trying to send a baseball out to left field. In this case, the ball is Trujillo’s head, and twenty seconds into the second round Jenkins does the unthinkable: he sends Trujillo to the canvas. The referee stops the fight, declaring Jenkins the winner by technical knockout (TKO)—the first victory of this kind in the short history of PFC. The crowd goes ballistic. Jenkins climbs out of the ring and hugs his brother.
“I hope he’s alright,” he says, watching as the ringside doctor promptly escorts Trujillo out of the ring and to the hospital. So much for not getting hurt.
In the midst of all this excitement, one of the women fighters, Meriah Hall, calmly bounces her one-year-old son, Alaric, on her knee. She looks unexpectedly relaxed.
A week earlier, she exhibited a similar manner, pushing Alaric through a park on the west side of Delray Beach, Florida. Hall prefers to train outside rather than in the gym, her workouts consisting of long runs and meditation. In the ring, she’s known as the “Shuttle Launcher” – a reference to her hometown near Cape Canaveral and her fighting style.
PFC fighters Meriah Hall, Xavier “Hurricane” Santana, Phillip Aughinbaugh and Krystal Tait get hit during their fights at the PFC Pillow Fight Championship Pound Down event. Photographs: Bryan Cereijo/The Guardian
“I needed it,” she says about pillow fighting. “Things changed when I became a mother. It was an outlet to vent all my frustrations about my new life, motherhood and the pandemic.”
Last October, around the time of the second exhibition hosted by PFC, her cousin died of complications from Covid-19, leaving a husband and three children. A few weeks later, her aunt died too.
Hall won both of her exhibition matches last year. She’d like to protect that undefeated record, but most of all, she wants to honor her late relatives.
“Who knows where all this will take me,” she says. “But it has a new meaning now that they’re gone.”
***
Hall is more conservative than usual when she enters the ring on Saturday night. Her supporters speculate as to whether this is a strategy or an off night. Regardless, she still wins her first fight handily against a jiu-jitsu blue belt from the Bronx and advances to the semifinals. But Hall has no answer for Brazilian UFC fighter and two-time Muay Thai world champion Istela Nunes, who goes on to win the women’s division and hoist the title belt at the end of the night.
Hall is introduced before her fight. Photograph: Bryan Cereijo/The Guardian
Sipping a beer ringside, watching the men’s semifinals, Hall is visibly exhausted. “I feel like I did after my first fight. I guess I didn’t train hard enough,” she says. “I could also use a babysitter.”
Jenkins, on the other hand, still has a title fight on the line. In the semis, he faces Hauley Tillman, a local boy, but loses in a split decision. A crescendo of boos rises behind the judges’ booth – the crowd says it was a robbery.
Before stepping out of the ring, Jenkins hugs his opponent. “It’s all love,” he says. “I put my name on the map. No one in my family has ever done that. I’ll be back”
Of the many winners and losers at the PFC Pound Down, the person who had the most to gain is Williams, and by Sunday morning he’s doing victory laps in the tide of predictably corny headlines, from the New York Post to Haaretz, that has surged overnight.
Hall turned to pillowfighting as a way to combat the stress of motherhood and the pandemic. Photograph: Mary Beth Koeth/The Guardian
“You wouldn’t believe what’s going on,” he says over the phone. “Japan, England, Brazil, America – they all want to know about pillow fighting.”
His plan to install the program in schools, gyms, and dojos all over the world is being hatched expeditiously with mail-order model – call PFC and have a box of the (patent-pending) official PFC pillows delivered to your gym’s doorstep in one week. The wheels continue to turn as he thinks about the kids’ league, noting that the connection between contact sports and neurological diseases such as CTE has made parents less inclined towards football and martial arts. And then there’s the advertising: he says the absence of blood and gore makes this more attractive for mainstream corporations.
“Bed, Bath, and Beyond would make sense,” he muses. Current sponsors include a bedding company called Pillow Guy. “Not to be confused with ‘the MyPillow guy’ – we’re not trying to get political.”
Istela Nunes is declared winner of her fight against Meriah Hall. Nunes won the women’s division of PFC Championship. Photograph: Bryan Cereijo/The Guardian
That anxiousness from the previous week has clearly been supplanted by elation. Williams says that he has the streaming numbers from Saturday’s Pound Down but doesn’t want to publicize them, either because they’re paltry, or so strong that he wants to play them close to the chest. This is yet one more reminder that it’s his sport, and he makes the rules.
No matter, he’s still flush with confidence. “I’m sure that one day we’ll have a multimillion-dollar pillow fight, and the world will be watching.”
