Slap fighting! Is this brutal sporting craze headed to London?

He and his twin brother Kim have been training for months. That means slapping his face in the conservatory of his home “until someone says stop,” hitting speedbags (“I’ve broken five now”), strengthening his impressive shoulders and neck “like a boxer” to do that absorbing punches he’s about to take and chewing the kind of squishy jawliner trainer usually reserved for braggart boys looking for a squarer chin.

“If you get hit, you don’t want to rattle around,” Anderson says. A co-worker from his old landscaper’s office printed “The Anvil” t-shirts because “they always said at work I was so clumsy I could break an anvil”. He believes SlapFight will end up like the fictional phenomenon Fight Club, only tougher.

On fight night he takes on the massive ‘E Honda’ (Bret to friends): 6ft tall, 16th and with a face like thunder. A referee in a black-and-white shirt goes through the rules: no “twitch” (turn your head), no “club smack” (hit across the cheek or use any part of your arm from the wrist down), no “step” (move your feet to gain extra strength). Seven hits. Two mistakes and you lose a hit. The last man standing wins. E Honda measures him by the barrel, grabs Anderson’s jaw, turns his head to look at him, then swings his arm to gently touch Anderson’s cheek once, twice, and tests his bow like a golfer. Then he hits him. “You know people say if you get hit, you see red?” says Anderson. ‘I saw bloody blue.’

Why would anyone do that or even watch? It’s brutal. Along with ‘ouch’ and ‘f*** me, that looks painful’, that’s what’s rattling through my head as I scroll through TikTok and YouTube videos with bulging faces and jiggling red cheeks. SlapFight is a relatively recent phenomenon: Vasily “The Dumpling” Kamotsky, a Siberian farmer, went viral when he was crowned “Slapping Champion” at the 2019 Siberian Power Show – a sideshow of popular powerlifting competitions in Eastern Europe. “It’s not a sport, it’s a show,” Kamotsky said dismissively at the time. That was before he racked 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 fortune of half a billion dollars, has channeled the resources of one of the world’s leading mixed martial arts organizations behind the Power Slap League in the USA. There’s a women’s league and celebrity supporters like Arnold Schwarzenegger and YouTuber boxer Logan Paul. SlapFight, the most successful American league founded by JT Tilley in 2017, has a UK branch. Most notably, it’s the same fight-meets-reality format that pioneered The Ultimate Fighter — which first aired in 2005 — to make UFC the powerhouse it is today.

There are also critics – many of them. Chris Nowinski, co-founder and CEO of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, has called hitting punches “one of the dumbest things you can do.” In Poland in 2021, Artur Walczak died after being hit in a slugfest (UK promoter Josh Skeete is at pains to point out how much better things are here and in the US with tightly controlled weight classes). Every sport, from American football to rugby and ice hockey, is cracking down on concussions. No wonder many find slap fighting repulsive. “Ninety percent of people can’t stand this sport,” said JT Tilley The New Yorker lately. “But 10 percent will do so emphatically.”

Strikers aren’t in it for the money. A US fighter told me that the prices set between fighters in league matches are usually no more than “triples” (disclaimers and NDAs are signed to keep details private).

So why? “It’s just a chance to see if you still have what it takes,” says Alvin “Solid Slug” Stewart, one of Tilley’s first slapfight champions. “Plus, my wife challenged 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 compete in his first tournament. Stewart, a Navy veteran who is “no stranger to pain,” had spent hours doing “palm smacks” on a wooden post with a small piece of cloth on it, slapping a slab of brick, and doing push-ups on his ankles — anything that “caused calloused ‘is your bones and makes your hands stronger’. And he’s grown a beard. ‘To take the sting out of the slap.’

Your correspondent nervously called in for a slapfight – I have a beard too – but the next fights in the UK aren’t until May and promoter Skeete gently suggested I could use more practice. ‘Have you ever been in a fight?’ asks Stewart, equally unconvinced. ‘Look at you, you’re not going to have a good time.’

Fair enough, I want to know why men do this. “It helps you rediscover that sense of brotherhood,” says Stewart. “I think we all have similar backgrounds and stories. We always work most of our lives. We don’t have time to make friends or hang out with friends. When you get there, you immediately connect with these guys.” Anderson has his own story. “For me, it’s a matter of perseverance,” he says. “It’s testing myself to see how much I can take.” He’s had his share of critics, too — for starters, his wife and mother, a retired nurse, find it ridiculous (it’s also a struggle to keep his two children from copying him).

Smarter people than me have noticed the positive effects of physical discipline and regular social contact on mental health. Especially on men’s mental health. Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Love 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 as an MMA fighter himself. “I thought MMA was bad for the athletes doing it and bad for society as a whole. I saw cage fighting as a metaphor for something darkly rotten at the human core,” he says. But he’s changed his mind. “I wanted to write about the darkness in men, but I ended up with a book about how men keep the darkness at bay.”

But Gottschall draws the line when it comes to punching. “It’s just a pure brain damage competition. You might as well hit yourself in the head with hammers. This is not a qualified activity. It’s about two things. How hard is it to hit someone? And how insane are you neurologically to be able to take those hits?’

And who wants to see that? Power Slap: Road to Title ended with a whimper and ended its eight-week run on cable channel TBS that month with the worst numbers of the season, ending the evening as the 106th show on cable for the night. But for Anderson, the appeal is seeing what he’s made of, the soft bits and the hard bits. “I’m a little tougher than I thought,” he says. “I’m not made of glass – but I’m not made of titanium either.” My advice?

Don’t try this at home.