Gluttons for Punishment
An inside look at Power Slap, Dana White's next big bet.
Shaking Makini “Big Mak” Manu’s hand, which runs 10.5 inches from thumb to pinky, makes me feel small in the way that a starry night sky does. To the touch, Manu’s right paw resembles a baseball glove filled with sand. I briefly calculate how much money it would take me to let Manu slap me in the face, abandoning the effort once my hypothetical sum surpasses my student loan debt. At Power Slap 14 in New Orleans, Duane “The Iron Giant” Crespo will do it for $5,000.
Manu’s smile is as infectious as his body is imposing. The super heavyweight is a renaissance man: proud father, husband, coach, sumo wrestler, multi-instrumentalist, former college and professional lineman, devout Mormon, aspiring WWE wrestler, and working stunt man. Each gig he cobbles together is in service of a tangible goal. Be it through film, music, or sports, Makini Manu was born to be an entertainer. In pursuit of this, he is relentlessly ambitious, frequently rejected, and devoutly faithful. At the moment, the most consistent presence in his life outside of his immediate family is the girl’s volleyball club he coaches with his wife; a close second, he adds with a laugh, is slapping people in the face.
Like everyone with some level of awareness of Power Slap, I first discovered Dana White’s surrealist combat sports enterprise through a vertical video on my phone. That’s by design. It’s not just that White’s newest race-to-the-bottom sports entertainment venture is precisely engineered to create viral videos—it is, of course—but that the genesis of the entire operation was found in a viral video of its own. In 2021, the Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO came across a compilation video of a 385-pound Siberian pig farmer named Vasilii “The Dumpling” Kamotskii slapping the shit out of people. Where the average observer might have filed the experience under what we hadn’t yet called “brainrot,” Dana White saw the future. The following year, he founded Power Slap, anointed it the world’s “premier slap fighting organization,” and mobilized the heft of the UFC’s organizational apparatus behind the fledgling venture. Ever the scout, White even signed The Dumpling himself; to sweeten the pot, he sent pigs as a gift to Kamostskii’s Illansky farm. I hear he has invested his slapping proceeds into a dumpling franchise back home.
The general idea of Power Slap is as follows: two consenting adults stand across from each other and take turns slapping each other in the face. The slapper must keep their feet grounded. The slap must be open-handed. The slap must fall between the brow and mouth of the recipient. The person being slapped must not flinch or move in any way. In the event that a fight is not ended by knockout, a panel of judges determines a winner based on “boxing-based scoring,” which, in this context, raises more questions than it answers. As best I can tell, Power Slap pays $5,000 to fight, $5,000 to win, and a discretionary bonus of up to $10,000 for a knockout slap. Despite my best efforts, I genuinely cannot tell whether the $10,000 payout is merely sponsored by Crypto.com or actually made out as cryptocurrency.
If Power Slap’s rulebook seems light on the specifics, it’s because the specifics don’t really matter. Power Slap is technically a sport much the same way that an Uber Eats ghost kitchen is technically a restaurant—a parasitic entity that uses a host physical space in order to occupy virtual space on your cell phone. This observation is not some feat of perceptive media criticism; if you talk to the guys in charge of Power Slap, they’ll more or less just admit it. Ask White or Power Slap CEO Frank Lamicella, consult any Power Slap YouTube broadcast, or just close this piece and look at Instagram Reels: Power Slap is popping on social media, and that’s the point. In its two-and-a-half years of existence, the organization has amassed a self-reported 26 million social media followers and 17 billion views across all of its platform’s videos. The defining business story of twenty-first century sports has been each league’s ability to adapt to a world governed by social media. Power Slap is the first organization trying to build the other way around.
As he sits across from me inside a heavily air-conditioned Bourbon Street hotel conference room a few days before the event, Frank Lamicella looks perfectly in place among the throngs of remote-working bachelor partiers preparing to descend on the French Quarter for another raucous weekend. The biceps poking out of his black v-neck suggest that Lamicella is a Joe Rogan listener, and his CV implies that he and Rogan are on texting terms. Lamicella is the CEO of Power Slap’s holding company, Thrill Sports, a role he entered after stints both at white shoe law firm Paul Weiss and as the UFC’s in-house lawyer, where he oversaw partnerships with DraftKings, Crypto.com, and the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture of Tourism. Speaking with Dana White’s aspiring heir, I hear a man who taxonomizes digital impressions the way your standard suit might treat Nielsen ratings.
In the early 2010s, when established sports leagues scrambled to keep up with looming social media hegemony, they relentlessly guarded content, issuing takedowns and filing complaints. A decade later, as content has ballooned, Power Slap has ferociously pursued it, courting influencers, streamers, and For-You pages with tenacity that would put a low-polling politician to shame. Lamicella tells me that Power Slap 13 saw more than 140 influencers flock to Vegas, who, in total, generated 1,000 posts across platforms to their more than one billion combined followers.
“I don’t know the last time you’ve been to an NBA game,” he asks me, “but they don’t want you taking out your phones to record. Here, creators will stream from the event, and we love that. This is like an organized chaos free-for-all.”
If baseball is best enjoyed on the radio and football on the couch, Power Slap is at home on the sort of short-form vertical video that has become the lingua franca of contemporary life. It’s clear that Dana White & co are parlaying a number of bets about humanity’s future: over on total screen time, under on attention span, sensationalized violence to continue its winning streak, and us to lose.
Makini Manu has dreamed of starring on a screen for his entire life. As it stands, he will have to settle for a supporting role in the most-watched sports-related YouTube Short of all time. A thirty-second clip of Manu slapping a briefly-stunned, triumphantly upright Eviahn Scott has been viewed more than 478 million times.
When I bring up the video during a sit down with him in the Royal Sonesta ballroom, Manu flashes a sheepish grin of his own. It’s not just that he didn’t realize how viral the slap was going to go–it’s that the blow in question was the first professional slap he ever threw. Only after experiencing the thrills of unexpected virality did Manu view Power Slap as anything more than a quick way to make $15,000.
There’s a sort of symmetry in Makini Manu’s nascent career as a super heavyweight slapper. He tells me that he first learned of Power Slap through a YouTube video. Power Slap, in turn, first learned of Manu through a moderately viral video of his sumo wrestling highlights. Manu seems to have intuited that the sports entertainment world he wishes to inhabit is one both made and broken by the whims of the algorithm. For instance, it was the aforementioned sumo compilation that opened the door for his appearing in the 2023 independent film Self Reliance, during the production of which he was able to share a green room with Christopher Lloyd. (As if to impart the importance of this to me, he giddily hands me his custom Back to the Future wallet.) He speaks somewhat ruefully about it all, his perspective humble despite feeling like he’s aboard a runaway train. “Definitely, down this path, there’s been a lot of rejection, because I’ve always wanted to be in entertainment,” Manu shares, “but Power Slap, they kind of helped me get out there, you know? Now, I’m like, denying people.” Like most people with a penchant for virality, Manu benefits both from his dedication and, more recently, his luck with the algorithm. He hopes to parlay this all into a SAG-AFTRA union card—no more indie movies.
I’m here in New Orleans at Xavier University’s basketball arena, which has been temporarily transformed into a sort of UFC minor league stadium. This is Power Slap’s first event in the United States held outside of Las Vegas. (Unsurprisingly, the organization has also graced Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia with its presence.) For the time being, Power Slap tours with the UFC like a deep-pocketed opening act. On Saturday night, roughly 18,000 people will flock to the Smoothie King Center, New Orleans’ NBA arena, to watch the Louisiana-born Dustin Poirier compete in his final fight. The night before, about one in five of those people will head five minutes down the interstate to watch a bunch of guys slap the shit out of each other.
After checking into the media room and extolling the roasted chicken with delegates from Slap News, The Nelk Boys’ subsidiary Full Send, and a Russian rag (who, at the presser, asks when we can expect to see The Dumpling slap again), I spot a cross-section of typical combat sport fans. Middle-aged couples exhibit gendered enthusiasm gaps, pods of dudes in short-sleeved button downs bray in support of the striker they’ve bet on, and divorced dads steer trios of broccoli-haired teens to their seats in what will surely be the high-water mark of this weekend’s visitation. Throughout the concourse, vendor carts hawk cans of Monster Energy’s “The Beast™ Unleashed,” a 6.0% ABV Four Loko retread that, with the limited exception of Monster’s Twisted Tea knock-off “Nasty Beast Hard Tea,” is the only alcohol at the venue being sold to the gen pop. Lines snake tepidly around the watering holes. I catch a mid-fifties man sniff his cup of offputtingly brown malt liquor disconcertedly; his white tee, which depicts a bloodied Donald Trump raising his fist in triumph, warns, “You Come at the King, You Best Not Miss.” Taking my seat, I’m startled by the hum of a drone that nearly grazes my head. It’s the only time all night that I benefit from not sporting the bussin’ haircut.
When the clock strikes eight, the slapping podium rises ominously from the center of the densely-branded mat, whose podium itself is emblazoned with ads for the aforementioned Monster Energy concoction du jour, a cryptocurrency asset called “Vet by VeChain” (trading, at the time of this writing, at $0.0274 a coin), and the moneylines of the respective fighters. The arena is bathed in a narcoticizing blue light—even when your physical body is at Power Slap, it still feels like you’re looking at your phone. After a series of commercials on the in-screen arena, including one indicating that you can earn Vet by Vechain any time you take a photograph of a “sustainable coffee mug” on your phone, Duane “The Iron Giant” Crespo walks to start the night’s only super heavyweight event. His challenger, Makini Manu, is a shot in the arm for the crowd. Manu is magnetic, made for professional wrestling if not a unionized movie shoot. By the time he’s completed the pre-fight Haka, he has the unconditional support of roughly 2,500 bloodthirsty spectators behind him; he’s also got 140 pounds on the Iron Giant. If I were a gambling man, I’d put my theoretical child’s college fund on his -130 odds. Manu, who won the coin toss, slaps first. His opening shot is clunky, disjointed, and off the mark, dragging a relatively unharmed Crespo along the base of his wrist. As Manu rests his sizeable stomach against the podium to get his licking, I read that he’s never been knocked down in any of his four fights.
Look: anyone can throw a slap. Strengthen your hand (more than one fighter tells me fractures are not uncommon), tighten up your core with some rotational work, and find your mark. The hardest part about slapping a guy, as far as I’m concerned, is the attendant guilt and shame. What I want to know is: how the fuck do these guys get hit like this? What mantras flit past their mind’s eye as your opponent winds back? Do they absent themselves of all thought? Do they brace themselves, or stay limp? To borrow from Lil Wayne’s ill-fated interviewer: do they ever get nervous?
Every time I attempt to broach the subject with a striker, it marks a break for the worse in our conversation, a point at which the striker is disabused of the notion that we are two dudes talking and made acutely aware that they are a man talking to a boy. They look at me like I am constitutionally incapable of understanding what they do—in fairness, I suspect I am. Call it evolutionary biology or the pussification of the Western man: I live my life in an ambiently-suspended state of avoiding being hit in the face. These men display no such fear. For Dakota McGregor, being hit just affords an opportunity to get back up; in a life structured by struggle, these slaps are a sort of controlled salvation. Ditto the champ, Damien Dibbell, who lets on in a moment of surprising vulnerability that his ability to take hits stems from his aggressive, turbulent childhood. Manu, for his part, rejects the premise I advance entirely. When I ask him whether he harbors any neurological reservations about taking such hard hits at his side gig, he quips that he’s still waiting for his first real smack. “I can feel the people hitting hard,” Manu confesses, “but I want to know how it feels to be knocked out. I don’t know what it’s like. And it sounds cocky, but nobody has given me that rocking. I’m waiting for that.”
Duane Crespo, it becomes evident, will not be the one who gives Manu his sought-after deliverance. On his first slap, Crespo’s hand seems to pass through Manu’s unmoving head. Ever the showman, Manu keeps his eyes closed as he stands perfectly still before peeking his right eye open in faux-surprise: “did he go?” Before his second shift, Manu cakes Crespo’s face in chalk. His hit, far sounder than the first, leaves Crespo momentarily dazed in a cloud of powder. By Crespo’s second slap, it feels as if even he knows he’s forestalling the inevitable. With his final hit, Manu knocks Crespo’s beard to Arkansas. To his credit, the 285-pound man attempts to roll himself off of the floor and onto his feet, but the officials call it. The crowd, treated to its first knockout of the card, smells blood.
If China initiated a ground war with the United States tomorrow, could America possibly emerge victorious? Should it? Forget that—will God forgive us for how far we have fallen? Is mercy something we deserve? Can I, from where I now stand, even speak of mercy without making a mockery of it?
The main card is a series of executions. The first contest, a middleweight fight between Darren “The Tarantula” Godfrey and Ke’ali’I “The Chief” Kanekoa, initially grabs my attention for its even betting odds. The contestants appear to effortlessly absorb their respective first slaps, but Godfrey insists that Kanekoa flinched. The crowd, upon slo-mo replay confirmation, goes ballistic. At Power Slap, flinching is the gravest possible sin, resulting in both a point deduction and a do-over slap. The arena groans in orgiastic delight as Kanekoa lines up to receive his punishment. Godfrey’s penalty strike sends Kanekoa’s head straight into the podium and his mind to the abyss, and the influencers to my left roar approvingly at justice served.
It's with this knowledge of flinching’s consequences that my heart sinks when, the very next fight, heavyweight Vernon “The Mechanic” Cathey flinches in receipt of a slap from the showman Austin “Turp Daddy Slim” Turpin. Watching Turp Daddy line up his punishment shot activates an ancestral memory within me; I stand in a muddy town square waiting for the sword to fall. It does—or, rather, an already dazed Cathey does. Upon receipt of his second straight strike, the 41-year-old falls head-first into the podium, where he remains in corpselike prayer for about three seconds before the two catchers usher his body down and to the mat. Once horizontal, Cathey lays with his eyes open but obviously lifeless; his right hand fingers stretch out like he is reaching for something just beyond him, a grotesque post-concussion involuntary movement known as the fencing response. The roars around me indicate the crowd’s satisfaction with the prostrate man’s punishment. A triumphant Turpin humps the mat three times before flipping off the arena with both hands.
For all its viewership on social media, Power Slap is yet to establish its own audience. As best I can tell, the only people I can confidently say are here for Power Slap itself and not the UFC match tomorrow are the teeming masses of influencers who appear to have been bussed in like the Soros-funded outside agitators haunting the right wing imagination. After a particularly vicious knockout, I make my way down to the floor’s “influencer section,” where steroidal men with clean fades and surgically-enhanced women walk by with streaming apparatuses not dissimilar to Nathan Fielder’s chest-mounted laptop. When the prelims end, the section transforms into a pigsty within which one mass of bodies leads to the open bar and another lines up for selfies with Theo Von. I tuck a Zyn into my upper lip—when in Rome—and head for the bar.
Idling in line for a drink, I am overpowered with regret about my decision to bring a tote bag to a Power Slap event. Tanned men with cauliflower ears and razor-lines in their eyebrows size me up pityingly; one group remarks disdainfully that I look like a skater. Nearby, a man who looks exactly like Caitlin Clark shares war stories from his time competing both on American Idol and America’s Got Talent. I fortify myself with a gin and tonic, then add a Monster Nasty Beast Hard Tea at the bartender’s encouragement, which was undoubtedly the source of my infernal hangover the next morning. When I ask the bartender to break some cash for a tip, she seems genuinely disarmed. I place $5 into an empty tip bucket and buckle up for the final matches.
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