Slap fighting has become one of the most controversial talking points in combat sports today, but competitors within the sport understand the dangerous involved and seem willing to flirt with disaster.
Just ask fighter Jewell Scott, who is currently competing as a member of Dana White’s Power Slap league. Scott has a background in professional boxing and professional mixed martial arts (MMA), but the 38-year-old has been dedicating himself to slap fighting for the past year.
White’s Power Slap league has received considerable backlash for its violent nature towards defenseless fighters and it has left athletes like Scott defending their reason to compete. Scott has been delivering some of the best highlights Power Slap has to offer, but that doesn’t mean the former professional fighter isn’t at risk of serious injury to himself.
Jewel Scott knockouts hit different
Watch #PowerSlap: Road to the Title Wednesdays at 10pm ET/PT on TBS pic.twitter.com/j39h0ilJ2n
— Power Slap Official (@PowerSlapdotcom) January 21, 2023
“I’m kind of thinking along the same lines with the thought in the front of my mind that I may get killed here, or I may die here,” said Scott in a recent interview with Complex. “So I’m willing to do whatever I have to do to not only survive, but win and be victorious.”
This is pretty alarming to hear, but White’s Power Slap league has left many combat pundits in disbelief at how it ever got sanctioned by the Nevada State Athlete Commission. The slap fighting series has only aired two episodes as part of its deal with TBS, but the video footage from those events already suggest the sport is not something that should be legitimized.
Scott is not the first person to find a home in White’s Power Slap league and he won’t be the last. With the president of Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) running the show it’s difficult for some of these athletes to pass up an opportunity to stand out.
“They put out a mass post for a new form of combat, and that’s what I do, combat for money,” said Scott. “So I dug into it a little bit and they reached back out to me, and they didn’t tell me what kind of combat it was but they started throwing around UFC a lot, saying the UFC is behind it, and that had me interested. So they ended up flying us to Las Vegas and that’s when everything was real then.”
While Scott acknowledges the dangers of White’s Power Slap league it’s only fair to mention that he has studied the sport of slap fighting and hasn’t found much evidence to suggest there are any long-term effects.
“I studied this for maybe a year solid, the game, the actual guys who were doing it for years now. I studied all of those guys, I know the promoters of the biggest league besides ours,” said Scott. “There’s not many injuries that go on, there’s not many guys with CTE. There is nothing proven harmful about all this in all of the years of previous existence. There’s not many injuries because of the system of commission and doctors and assistance that the UFC provides.”
What do you think, Maniacs? Is this sport too brutal or is everyone just overreacting?
Sound off!