The “Pillow Fighting Championship” pay-per-view shows are set to start streaming in January.
What began as innocent horseplay between children has now become a full-blown professional sport between two fighters with the introduction of pillow fighting as a professional combat sport.
The Pillow Fighting Championship (PFC) is set to hold its first live, pay-per-view event inside a sports arena in Florida this January 29, and PFC head Steve Williams promises that it will deliver all the drama of hand-to-hand combat minus the gore.
“It’s not something where you sit there and laugh and feathers are flying,” Williams told Reuters.
“It’s serious. It’s hardcore swinging with specialized pillows.”
The fights are perfectly PG too. Although the male and female competitors come from the cutthroat businesses of MMA and boxing, Williams claims that no one will ever draw blood in PFC bouts.
“The only difference between our fights and MMA fights is that nobody gets hurt,” he said. “The fighters don’t like to get hurt, and there’s a lot of people who don’t want to see the blood. They want to see good competition, they just don’t want to see the violence.”
With the new sport, Williams hopes to tap into a new audience, one that relates to the nostalgia brought by bashing their friends or siblings with a soft pillow.
“You can call it an alternative sport, but we think it’s going to have mainstream appeal,” he said.
“Think about how they mixed country music with rap music and brought these diverse audiences together. That’s what we’re doing, and we hope it brings in a different kind of viewer.”
The three-round contests will be available to watch on the sports streaming platform FITE. Past brawls are also up on the Fight PFC YouTube channel.
Art Daniella Sison
