When Niki ‘The Anvil’ Anderson, 31, 5ft 10in, 15.9 stone, digger driver by day, Norfolk’s finest light heavyweight slap fighter by night, steps up to the barrel at the UK’s — and his — inaugural ‘SlapFight’ league match in Liverpool, he wonders, just for a second, ‘What the f*** am I doing?’
He and his twin brother, Kim, have trained for months. That means smacking each other in the face ‘until someone says stop’ in the conservatory of his home, hitting speed bags (‘I’ve broken five now’), beefing up his formidable shoulders and neck ‘like a boxer’ to absorb the blows he’ll take and masticating the kind of squishy Jawliner trainer usually the preserve of vainglorious boys in the market for a more angular chin.
‘When you get hit, you don’t want to rattle around,’ says Anderson. A colleague from his old landscape gardening job printed ‘The Anvil’ T-shirts because ‘they used to say at work that I was so heavy handed I could break an anvil’. He says he thinks SlapFight is going to end up like the fictional phenomenon Fight Club, but tougher.
Come fight night he’s up against the massive ‘E Honda’ (Bret to friends): 6ft tall, 16st and with a face like thunder. An umpire in a black and white shirt runs through the rules: no ‘flinching’ (turning your head), no ‘clubbing’ (hitting above the cheek or using any part of your arm from your wrist down), no ‘stepping’ (moving your feet to gain extra power). Seven hits. Two faults and you lose a hit. Last man standing wins. E Honda sizes him up at the barrel, grabs Anderson’s jaw, twists his head to face him, then swings his arm to gently touch Anderson’s cheek once, twice, testing his arc like a golfer. Then he strikes him. ‘You know people say when you get hit you see red?’ says Anderson. ‘I saw bloody blue.’
Why would anyone do, or indeed watch, this? It’s brutal. Along with ‘ouch’ and ‘f*** me, that looks painful’, this is what’s rattling around my head as I scroll TikTok and YouTube videos of faces bulging and red cheeks wobbling. SlapFight is a relatively recent phenomenon: Vasily ‘The Dumpling’ Kamotsky, a Siberian farmer, went viral when crowned ‘slapping champion’ at the Siberian Power Show back in 2019 — a sideshow to Eastern Europe’s popular powerlifting competitions. ‘It’s not a sport, it’s a show,’ said Kamotsky dismissively at the time. That was before he clocked up millions of views on YouTube and became a celebrity. Still, it could never happen here. Then it did. This year, Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship with a half-billion-dollar fortune, channelled the resources of one of the world’s foremost mixed martial arts organisations behind the Power Slap League in the US. There’s a women’s league and celebrity backers like Arnold Schwarzenegger and YouTuber-turned-boxer Logan Paul. SlapFight, the most successful American league, founded by JT Tilley in 2017, has a spin-off in the UK. Most notably, it is the same combat-meets-reality format that The Ultimate Fighter — which first aired in 2005 — pioneered to make UFC the powerhouse it is today.
You know people say when you get hit you see red? I saw bloody blue
There are also critics — plenty of them. Chris Nowinski, co-founder and CEO of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, has labelled slap fighting ‘one of the stupidest things you can do’. In Poland in 2021, Artur Walczak died after being struck in a slap fight (UK promoter Josh Skeete is at pains to point out how much better regulated it is here and in the US, with strictly controlled weight classes). Every sport from American football to rugby and ice hockey is cracking down on concussion injuries. No wonder many find slap fighting repulsive. ‘Ninety per cent of the people can’t stand this sport’, JT Tilley told The New Yorker recently. ‘But 10 per cent become emphatic about it.’
Slap fighters aren’t in it for the money. A fighter from the US told me that prizes fixed between fighters in league matches were usually no greater than ‘three figures’ (liability waivers and NDAs are signed to shroud details in secrecy).
So, why? ‘It’s just a chance to see if you’ve still got it,’ says Alvin ‘Solid Slug’ Stewart, one of Tilley’s first SlapFight champions. ‘Also, my wife dared me to do it.’ Stewart, 33, a truck driver and videographer by day, drove the eight hours from his home in Alabama to a warehouse in Missouri to take part in his first tournament. A marine veteran who’s ‘no stranger to pain’, Stewart had spent hours doing ‘palm strikes’ on a wooden post with a little piece of cloth on it, punching a brick slab and doing push-ups on his knuckles — anything that ‘callouses your bones and makes your hands harder’. And he grew a beard. ‘To take the sting out of the slap.’
It’s just a pure brain damage contest. They might as well hit each other with hammers
Your correspondent did nervously volunteer for a SlapFight — I too have a beard — but the next bouts in Britain are not until May and promoter Skeete gently suggested I could use more training. ‘You ever been in a fight before?’ asks Stewart, equally unconvinced. ‘Look at you, you’re not going to have a good time.’
Fair enough, but I do want to know why men do this. ‘It does help you find that sense of brotherhood again,’ says Stewart. ‘I think we all have similar backgrounds and stories. Most of our lives we’re always working. We don’t have time to find friends or be around friends. When you get there, you bond with these guys immediately.’ Anderson has his own story. ‘For me, it’s an endurance thing,’ he says. ‘It’s testing myself to see how much I can take.’ He has his share of critics, too — for starters his wife and his mum, a retired nurse, think it’s ridiculous (it’s also a struggle to stop his two children copying him).
Smarter people than I have noted the positive impact physical discipline and regular social contact have on mental health. Especially on men’s mental health. Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch, was a 39-year-old English professor when he became so interested in the history of violence (and the rapid rise of cage fighting in America) that he trained to become an MMA fighter himself. ‘I thought MMA was bad for the athletes who did it and bad for society at large. I saw cage fighting as a metaphor for something darkly rotten at the human core,’ he says. But he changed his mind. ‘I set out to write about the darkness in men, but I ended up with a book about how men keep the darkness in check.’
But Gottschall draws the line at slap fighting. ‘It’s just a pure brain damage contest. They might as well be hitting each other in the head with hammers. This is not a skilled activity. It is a question of two things. How hard do you happen to be able to slap somebody? And how much of a freak are you neurologically that you can take these blows?’
And who wants to watch that? Power Slap: Road to the Title ended with a whimper, wrapping up its eight-week run on cable channel TBS this month with its worst numbers of the season, finishing the evening as the 106th-rated show on cable for the night. But for Anderson, the draw lies in seeing what he’s made of, the soft bits and the hard. ‘I’m a bit tougher than I thought I was,’ he says. ‘I’m not made of glass — but then I’m not made of titanium either.’ My advice?
Don’t try this at home.
