Have you ever been watching an MMA fight and found yourself thinking, “Yeah, this is cool and all, but I wonder what it would be like if these dudes were strapped to a cocktail table and had zero training”? Well, today is your lucky day. Freshly resurrected from the MMA graveyard is “XARM”.
XARM is the brainchild of Art Davie, one of the the UFC’s original co-founders. In its first incarnation, XARM nearly usurped MMA as the next “evolution of combat sports” before abruptly calling it quits, but now the ‘extreme arm wrestling’ league has returned and is poised to take over once again.
Amazingly, they’ve found backing by experienced television producers. MMAJunkie.com reports that Endomol USA—responsible for such high brow projects as “Big Brother,” “Deal or No Deal,” “Fear Factor,”, and “Wipeout”–will hope to parlay their international influence to make XARM a household name in countless languages.
The promotion is planning to launch an online game and is boasting to have injected an incredible amount of new technology into the sport (spoiler: the cocktail tables are made of pure tungsten). They can add whatever in-table cameras and carbon fiber tethers they want, at the end of the day calling this a sport is a ridiculously liberal use of the word. Two guys tied down just feet from one another with restricted movement and no choice but to swing for the fences? Who would want that?
While I am looking forward to XARM dying a very public second death, I must admit that there is one MMA rematch I’d pay to see under their banner before it falls. Are there any others?
