Issue
08
Words
Tayler Willson
Published
Reading Time
5 Min Read
Listen
The first thing you hear isn’t the slap. It’s the silence before it, that little vacuum between the raised hand and the face waiting for it. Everyone in the room holds their breath. Then crack. It’s not a sound so much as a punctuation mark. Frank Lamicella watches it happen like a producer watches a take. He knows the rhythm. “People like knockouts,” he tells me. “They always have. What we did was build a sport where every moment feels like that.”
Lamicella is the CEO of Power Slap, the sport turning open-hand striking – yes, literal slapping – into a televised, regulated, and monetised spectacle. Founded in 2022 by Dana White, Lorenzo Fertitta, and reality-TV veteran Craig Piligian, the organisation feels like something pulled from the algorithm’s subconscious: brutal, cleanly lit, and engineered for infinite replay. Lamicella doesn’t flinch when people call it absurd. “At first glance, it looks wild,” he admits. “But we’ve built a rulebook, a structure, a sport. It’s not chaos. It’s a contest.”
The rules are simple: two competitors stand across a podium – one strikes, one receives. No blocking, no ducking, no dodging. The non-striking hand grips a steel bar behind the back, called the Power Slap Stick, as if the body itself needs to be anchored for what’s coming. Before each match, fighters are weighed, scanned, and tested. Chalk dust for grip, cotton wicks in the ears, mouthguards. Each bout runs up to three rounds. You win by knockout or by scoring clean, legal hits under the eyes of official judges.
It’s ritual, not brawl – a minimalist choreography of violence. “There’s a rulebook. There are fouls. There’s scoring,” Lamicella says. “It’s structured, it’s controlled and safe.” Safety, in this world, has to be repeated like a mantra. Power Slap has athletic commission sanctioning in Nevada, California, Florida, Texas, Louisiana, with new states joining monthly. “We do the same MRIs, MRAs, blood work, and eye exams the UFC requires,” he says. “Doctors, EMTs, drug testing, everything. People assume it’s more dangerous than it is. But we’ve got two and a half years of data. The numbers back us up.”
In the early 1990s, the UFC was banned across America for being too brutal. Power Slap is living that deja vu in fast-forward – sanctioned, televised, and already world-touring. Power Slap 9 hit Abu Dhabi. Power Slap 11 landed in Saudi Arabia. Power Slap 14 brought the show to New Orleans. “It’s the same blueprint [as UFC],” Lamicella says. “Back in 1993, UFC had no rules, no gloves, and no future. Fifteen events in, they were being banned everywhere. Now look at it. We’re at that stage, but we’re already sanctioned, already global.”
The numbers are dizzying: 20 billion total video views, 28 million followers, 16 clips with over 100 million views each. “It’s a sport designed for the scroll,” he says. “The world’s attention span changed. We just met it where it is.” Scroll through your feed and you’ll see what he means: a man’s face slow-mo rippling from impact, sweat arcing into the air like glitter, a crowd reacting in perfect GIF-able disbelief. It’s primal, algorithmic, and hypnotic – combat distilled for the attention economy. Power Slap started with one sponsor, Monster Energy, now has over 40.
“It’s an advertiser’s dream,” Lamicella says. “No faster way to get attention.” He talks about virality like an engineer explaining combustion. “It’s the math of it,” he says. “You get 100 million views on a single clip, that’s not marketing, that’s ignition.” And the ignition has money behind it. “We’ve already paid over ten million dollars to athletes,” he adds. “We’ve got guys who were working blue-collar jobs, one was literally in the swamps of Florida, who now own houses, boats. They can make more here than regional MMA or boxing.”
The Power Slap gym in Las Vegas is half-fight camp, half-reality-show set. Rows of podiums. Chalk dust suspended in the light. Every few months, the organisation runs training camps, 40 to 50 new athletes per session. Coaches teach striking form, neck stability, and how not to foul. The scouting list reads like a collage of modern masculinity: ex-wrestlers, former rugby players, college linebackers, blue-collar heroes, TikTok fighters looking for something real. “We get one to two thousand applications a year,” Lamicella says. “We’re scouting everywhere in wrestling, rugby, football. Then you’ve got your tough guys, too. People who can throw one, take one, and want a shot at something bigger.”
Power Slap is the sport the internet deserves with its clean lines, violent symmetry and immediate payoff. Every slap is a micro-story with a setup, a hit, a collapse and a slow-mo. “We’re a product of this era. Short-form content, high stakes, viral reach. It’s primal, but it’s also algorithmic,” Lamicella continues. It’s strange hearing a sports executive talk like a social-media theorist, but he’s right. Power Slap isn’t just a sport – it’s content architecture.
The violence is minimal; the emotion is instant. It’s combat as code, optimised for thumb speed. Still, Lamicella resists the idea that Power Slap is chasing acceptance. “What’s mainstream?” he asks, eyebrows lifting. “TV? Cable? Social? We’re already there. There are eight billion people in the world and they’re all watching [Power Slap] on their phones.” He’s half-smiling when he says it, as if the absurdity and inevitability of that statement exist in the same breath. “It’s a spectacle,” Lamicella adds. “But so was everything that ever changed the world.” It’s easy to laugh, to scroll, to move on when it comes to Power Slap – but either way, the world keeps watching. The slap lands, the views climb, and something shifts. Perhaps this isn’t just a trend, but instead the beginning of an era.
