There’s been a lot of hoopla – and not necessarily the good kind – surrounding the Power Slap League ever since we found out late last year that UFC president Dana White would promote slap fighting and the Nevada Athletic Commission would regulate it.
It didn’t help that White was caught on video slapping his wife during a New Year’s Eve altercation, but with White not being punished for his actions by UFC-parent company Endeavor and TBS standing by him, the first episode of “Power Slap: Road to the Title” premiered last Wednesday.
And for this week’s “Spinning Back Clique” panel of Mike Bohn, Nolan King, Brian “Goze” Garcia and host “Gorgeous” George Garcia, it confirmed what a lot of people already believed – that slap fighting is nothing more than senseless traumatic brain injuries presented as a form of entertainment.
“I go into everything with a little bit of an open mind even when I think that I’m not gonna like something or that I think that something’s gross, and I have to say that this actually exceeded my expectations of just being wrong,” King said. “Not only was there the impact of the super slow-mo slaps and people taking just damage to the brain, but I also think the moments of recovery or the attempted recovery, that sh*t was beyond like – that was just way past the point of the threshold of what should be overseen by a commission and say that it’s safe. The whole thing just represented a failure to me.”
Said Brian Garcia: “It’s very unpleasant to watch. There’s the argument, like, OK (at) UFC 283, it was pretty brutal, too, right? There were two fights on there where I was saying, ‘Please stop it.’ But in those cases, those two fighters get the opportunity to defend themselves, and (in Power Slap) you don’t. The only guarantee is your about to get smashed, and that is such an ugly thing to watch, man. It’s just not for me.”
You can watch the panel’s full reaction to “Power Slap: Road to the Title” in the video above. The second of eight episodes is set to air tonight on TBS.
“Spinning Back Clique” is released each Monday LIVE on MMA Junkie’s YouTube channel.
