Punching Day: Dogfight Wild Tournament (Patreon)
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In 2023, a podcaster known as "The Spanish Joe Rogan," Jordi Wild, put together a fight promotion and if you're waiting for a twist in this half of the sentence, it's not coming. It was called The Dogfight Wild Tournament, and nothing I'm about to say will make you think, "Oh, that's not what I expected when I heard combat league started by the Spanish Joe Rogan." It is an avalanche of insane, terrible, and begrudgingly rad choices.
Calling your event "Dogfight" is already a bad start. You generally don't want to name yourself after something people specifically don't want you to find. It'd be like naming your company Best Way To Kill Yourself Fashion Essentials or Homemade Dynamite Adult Diapers or Shelly Miscavige Fruit Snacks. Except those are bad examples because they're million dollar ideas, every last one. Speaking of my judgment, the fact that I agree with so many of Dogfight Wild Tournament's decisions only helps prove they were crazy.
The event starts with a full hour of pre-fight before Salah Hamli and Alex Quilez face off in an MMA match. They are new to the sport, and really demonstrate the furious accuracy and deadly precision you'd expect to see in the opening bout of a novelty fight card being broadcast on YouTube.
They fling fight-like gestures at each other for about a minute. Then, after sharing a D+ in their stage fighting group project, they go to the ground and Hamli gets a quick choke to end it 90 seconds into the first round. Which means after more than sixty minutes of talking and a full fight, we've seen one guy land one move. That's a great thing to say if your wife asks you why you hated swing dancing class, but it's a shitty thing to say about a fighting event. And the Spanish Joe Rogan is in no rush to get things going.
He gives a post-fight interview to the winner, Salah, who seems to have a lot to say about the one thing that happened, but he's not asking for directions to the library, so my Spanish isn't good enough to understand him. "That is a beard with a face, not the other way around" my notes say, as if that would magically turn into a joke here in the finished article. It didn't! I only brought this part up because after the interview, they walked over and talked to the other fighter and I realized something was off.
I don't think you have to have a degree in showmanship to know a crowd would prefer to watch another fight rather than hear from the loser of this low stakes, uneventful opening match and how his game plan didn't involve getting choked. Each man has now spent twice as much time talking as they did fighting, and it's not over.
Salah takes the microphone again and gives himself a second post-fight interview. If you're not familiar with violence, it's hard to explain how strange this pacing is. It'd be like the coach of the New York Giants calling a timeout after the kickoff to watch the bonus audition footage of Jean-Pierre Léaud and Patrick Auffay on the Criterion Blu-Ray of 400 Blows. If you require a non-sports analogy, it'd be like taking a prostitute to a motel and then crawling into the ice machine to slowly grow old and die a virgin.
The next event is a slapping tournament, which is like rollerblading in that it's a sport with only indignity and injury. Two men take turns swatting the other in the face, and the competitors of the Dogfight Wild Tournament slapping tournament made me realize something I never considered: you can be bad at slapping. As an athlete, and a sports league. I've watched professional slap fighting, and I thought the only qualification was needing $800 bad enough to take a decade off your life. The slappers in Dogfight Wild Tournament can't aim, take a hit, or insert an earplug in less than 40 minutes. I know this because a weird jar of earplugs on the table is the only safety precaution taken. And I swear they lose track of how many they put in. A coroner is going to one day say, "This wasn't even in the top ten cause-of-deaths for this poor fucker, but I found 127 earplugs in his skull cavity."
This is going to sound crazy, but this combat league doesn't have enough rules for their slapping. These guys are allowed to move their feet to get full power on their swings, they're allowed to fake out their opponent, and no one cares where a slap lands. It truly is just two dorks going out there, cracking human heads, and hoping things work out. They don't! One minute this guy is thinking, "Giggle! Isn't it silly how I'm about to be slapped!" and the next he's relearning shapes and colors with the applesauce that was once his mind.
Not all of the slaps are catastrophic. Some are just insulting hams to the side of the head. Because there's no win condition in taking a slap. You either get your nervous system shut down or awkwardly absorb another earplug with your eustachian tube. I'd argue there aren't a lot of positive outcomes from giving a slap either. You either embarrassed yourself by doing nothing or maimed a helpless member of your tiny, shrinking community. It's a bad sport, and Dogfight Wild Tournament doesn't make it better by adding 70 minutes of interviews and earplug fussing.
The next event is an undersize-glove boxing match between two women with a combined fight record of one. It goes the distance, and every bit of it is fully dissected in lengthy post-fight interviews. This means that after two hours, we've seen 12 minutes of combat, and 83% of that was two ladies gently and cautiously learning to box. As a spectacle of violence, Dogfight Wild Tournament is a below average Greyhound trip from Harrisburg to Philadelphia. So far. All that is about to change, because they're about to get stupid with it.
Hell yeah. They're going to have one man fight two men and see what happens. This is the kind of thing you're supposed to book when you're a group of maniacs with a podcast and no athletic commission. What's extra crazy about this is the two teammates don't combine to be the other guy's size. All three men are basically the same weight class. Normally, when lunatics book a freak match like this, they give a size advantage to the handicapped fighter. For instance…
You might have seen this. It's from a British event in 2024, and you can see what it looks like. It looks like career day in a third grade classroom where one dad is a minotaur and another dad hypnotizes children into attacking minotaurs. Fucking god damn it, look at it. It rules.
Dogfight Wild Tournament's one-on-two match also rules, in a more competitive yet equally deranged way.
While the solo fighter, Cesar Alonso, is trying to figure out how to shake hands with two opponents at once, the one wearing a gladiator skirt charges at him with a desperate knee tornado. It's closer to how you'd scooch past a Christmas tree than defeat a man, so Cesar ignores it and attacks his partner. Everything the two men try bounces off Cesar like a child support warning notice on a slap fighting world champion. Despite being mostly the same size, it is immediately clear how fucked these two men are. This is a "fair" matchup for Cesar not because his opponents are small, but because he is a pro fighter and these men have absolutely no goddamn idea what they're doing.
After half a minute of human plinko chaos, Cesar creates some space and thinks about his next move. Half a millisecond later he's done forming his strategy. It's to just step over and obliterate the face of the guy in the skirt, and it couldn't have gone better. The guy topples fifteen feet away, but lands his team's best attack yet when Cesar sprints into his flailing foot. But it does nothing. It barely slows down the mauling. "Ha ha someone needs to stop this fight," any sane referee would say. "Let's see what happens next," these referees say. But what happens next is so strange, I might need your help figuring it out.
So Gladiator Skirt Guy is clinging to a hopeless little brother headlock while his partner is trying to figure out a way to punch Cesar. He thinks about a body shot, then an overhand, decides on an uppercut, and I think he hits his teammate? All I know is he throws a punch into the tangle of flesh and then his teammate is left for dead on the mat. Did he knock out his own partner? Was it an accident, or a betrayal? Could it have been an unrelated panic attack? Maybe it was a side effect of not pulling off that skirt so violently? I have no idea because there were three people in the way and if a fight announcer is not asking if I like the beach, his Spanish words are meaningless to me.
Whatever happened, a man who can't fight is now alone with Cesar. And unfortunately, dropping a fragile guy on his face was only the first hit in this combo. While Skirt Guy's body is still bouncing, Cesar lands a left straight to the back of his partner's brain. "Fucking GOODBYE," say the man's teeth and memories of his grandmother.
Cesar follows his last opponent's mostly sleeping body to the mat, grabs his arm, and coils it around itself until he submits. I don't mean he taps out. I mean he gives in. He lays down and waits for his arm to get pulled into parts and for God's light to take him. He is literally in shock from arm trauma he could have stopped by asking his attacker to stop, and I feel like this might be why athletic commissions rarely sanction matches between a single trained mixed martial artist and a couple enthusiastic bros. There are no post-fight interviews after this match, despite it being the first time tonight viewers might have a lot of questions.
Next up is a bare knuckle boxing match between two inexperienced fighters that goes to a split decision, and if you're a fight fan, that's as dull as anything has ever sounded to you, and you're right. It is three hours into the event, and including several slaps, the grand total of fight time is exactly 23 minutes and 8 seconds. If you subtract the time spent bare knuckle boxing, and you should, that's a talking-to-punching ratio of 41-to-1. I don't know how gentle things are in Spain, but in America, we call that a normal episode of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
I have some good news. Up next is a classic freak show:
Raymison Bruno weighs 130 pounds, and he's taking on Roger "Goliat" Dalet, a guy who came in six pounds over the limit for heavyweight and gave himself a cool nickname for his first and only pro fight.
This means he's over twice the size of Raymison, and doomed as fuck. Because statistically speaking, if you're fighting a little athletic guy, the worst thing you can be is a gigantic chubby one.
Sure enough, it takes a little over three minutes for "Goliat" to get caught in an armbar, and he spent almost all of that time trying and failing to land a piledriver. He might not be very good at fighting, but at least "Goliat" went into this spectacle of nonsense understanding the assignment. He was going to win by spinal murder or not at all.
At least I think that's what he said in one of his several post-fight interviews. It was either that or, "I was given to you as a miracle, the world's largest baby, and you monsters made me fight!" Again, my Spanish is not very good. "Stop calling me Ivan Dorito," he might have said, but that could just be another mean thing I put in my notes.
It's time for the final round of slap fights where one of the world class slap athletes misses the other guy's jaw so badly he smacks him upside the skull and breaks his own hand. He does knock out an earplug, which the judges would like if they existed. Shattering your opponent's hand with your head counts as a win in this sport, so the slap tournament ends the same way every slap tournament ends– sadness by way of technical awkward.
Let's move on to the main event.
At first I was disappointed to see it would be a normal MMA match between two similarly sized men, but then Zdravko "Bad News" Tarnadzhiev came out looking like fucking this. This is a main boss in a Scott Adkins movie. This is a man who makes a stranger emerge from the shadows and say, "It can't be Tarnadzhiev. MI6 took him out in Obninsk." Zdravko is the first time I've considered misspelling someone's name in case they Google themselves.
Zdravko is up against normal-looking guy, Aitor Gaspar, and here's another hot combat sports tip: If two guys with 0-0 records are about to fight, never bet on the gym-buff one. Zdravko lasted about 20 seconds.
As absurd as it sounds, Zdravko's traps weren't quite tall enough to prevent a cartoon windup head bash and Aitor used this to his advantage. The main event of the Dogfight Wild Tournament ends with the fastest knockout of the night, not counting the dumbshits who shattered to slaps, who you never should.
Aitor gives what viewers already worry is the first of many post-fight interviews. Unfortunately, during the brief mauling, something tore in Zdravko's shoulder. I know this because when the camera cuts to him, he's wrapped in several miles of bandage. I wasn't being cute when I said how much they talk during this fighting event. They had time to treat a shoulder injury on the man with the largest shoulders I've ever seen in the time it took the guy responsible to finish a speech about it.
There are no hard feelings. In fact, quite the opposite. The two combatants share a tender embrace.
The tenderness escalates.
These warriors have only spent half a minute together, but those seconds were eventful. Intimate. This isn't the ending of a battle. It's the start of something else.
Zdravko gives his own lengthy analysis of the dozen or so moments he remembers from the fight, then he and Aitor shake hands again.
Shoulder injury be damned, it becomes another hug.
You saw this coming, but Aitor gives another post-fight speech where he congratulates his opponent…
… nay, his beloved opponent.
In a seventh emotional climax, at least six more than you'd expect from two dudes having their first MMA fight, Aitor raises the hand of his vanquished foe in sportsmanship. It's a kind gesture, but arguably less kind than the kiss they already shared. It is also, by my watch, 14.8 minutes of celebration for every blow landed during their fight. If every fighter celebrated at this scale, George Foreman and Muhammad Ali would have started a standing 69 after the Rumble in the Jungle and ended it right about… November 19th, 2083.
You know what? I can't think of a better way to end half a minute of fighting and 30 minutes of embracing than another hug. Let's do it.
This is easily one of their best hugs, a bar of intimacy so ridiculously high I can't even show you what I mean without fucking you. These two men are leaving nothing in the cage. They will never let it be said they didn't give every last drop of their love on this night in Spain.
The camera finally pulls out to mark the end of this weird night of some combat, a little bit of slap, but mostly interviews and hugs. I believe broadcasters call it a pre-murder The Jenny Jones Show.
In the distance of the crane camera footage, you should be able to barely make out a familiar sight.
Speaking of making out, are these once-enemies locked inside the cage by the walls, or by their passion?
"Cut back to camera 2," says the director, a tear streaking down his face, a glow in his heart. He watches Aitor and Zdravko's 179th intimate embrace, his hand already dialing a familiar number. "I made a mistake," he tells the voicemail of his ex-wife. "No one can live without love."
Zdravko, overflowing with emotions, and probably concussions, raises the arm of his new brother one last time.
And while Zdravko is here next to the man who has hobbled him, maybe one last hug. Like every last thing in this unraveling disaster of an event, their affection is as unrestrained as a wild horse. It's beautiful. Their, by my count, nine sincere hugs capped off a four hour fighting event where over 200 minutes were spent watching awkward rookie fighters discuss every second of awkward fighting except the 98 interesting ones. It may not have had much combat, but it had the most important thing. Love. May you each find your Aitor, my Zdravkos.
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