LAS VEGAS -- The image of a slap fight is jarring, particularly for someone who hasn't seen one before or hasn't spent time looking into it. Two people stand a couple of feet apart from each other. One holds a baton behind his or her back and must remain still. The other winds up and slaps that person on the side of the face.
It's gotten enormous amount of criticism, even from the likes of the erudite Jon Wertheim, who slammed its very reason for existence in a Jan. 17, 2023, piece for Sports Illustrated.
This was a lowering of civilization’s limbo bar, Wertheim wrote.
Chris Nowinski, the former pro wrestler and Harvard football player who is the CEO of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, blasted it in an interview with The Associated Press last year.
“There’s nothing fun, there’s nothing interesting and there’s nothing sporting,” Nowinski told the AP's Mark Anderson. “They’re trying to dress up a really stupid activity to try to make money.”
It's an easy target, though Wertheim and Nowinski are highly intelligent, thoughtful men. UFC CEO Dana White has shrugged off the criticism of the league he founded, saying he heard the same concerns when he purchased the UFC for $2 million in 2001 along with Las Vegas casino executives Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta.
The fighters, too, have largely ignored the criticsm. Franciska "Sheena Bathory" Szabo, one of the breakout stars of the first year-plus of Power Slap, will meet Jackie Cataline Friday at the Durango Resort in the co-main event of Power Slap 6.
Neither of them are carnival sideshow freaks. They're legitimate athletes with long histories in competition and a record of success. Bathory is a judo black belt who has competed internationally. She's a wrestler, competed in a bodybuilding competition last year and is training at MMA Masters in Miami, Fla., to become an MMA fighter.
Cataline twice went to the finals of the U.S. Olympic wrestling trials, only to lose in the finale and not get the trip to the Olympic Games. She's an MMA fighter who has fought for Bellator and the PFL and is hoping to get a fight in the UFC. She's also an electrician and was a deputy sheriff.
"I've dabbled in quite a few things," Cataline said. "And I'm dabbling in something new again. I just have to have a lot of things on my resume, I guess."
Power Slap officials approached her about competing about a month ago. There are other strikers who leave near her in the Los Angeles area and have taken her under their wings and tried to show her the ropes. She's facing Bathory, who had violent knockouts of Kortney Olson and Christine Wolmarans in her two bouts, with the Wolmarans bout being the only official match.
After Bathory took a strike from Olson, it was her turn to hit. She delivered a powerful blow that sent the heavily muscled Olson stumbling backward. As Olson tried to regain her equilibrium, she moved forward and went down, and nearly somersaulted off the stage. Bathory knocked Wolmarans, an ex-MMA fighter, out in the second after blowing a kiss at her once she ate Wolmarans' slap in Round 1.
Cataline isn't concerned about the experience difference between them, even though the first hit she takes from Bathory in the competition will be the first time she's actually taken a slap.
"I don't think it's necessarily a disadvantage," Cataline said. "I think that, one, this is so new, that everyone is still trying to figure it out and still trying to learn. Luckily for me, one of the guys from the main event has been coaching me because he lives 10 minutes from me. I feel pretty confident, but it is something new. For me, I've competed on such high levels with wrestling, with fighting, that the nerves don't really get me."
Bathory said she plans to turn pro as an MMA fighter once she has her boxing improved. When she was a teen-ager, she saw a video of a men's slap fight and it stuck with her, so she jumped at the chance when she had the opportunity to try out for Power Slap.
"I never thought I was going to be a Power Slapper," she said. "In my early 20s, my dream was to become an Olympic champion in judo. But I think I was 19 years old when I first discovered on YouTube men, guys were slapping each other. ... And I remember every three, four months, I was looking to see if there was some new video they had uploaded.
In a way, she was built for this. She's looking forward to wowing the crowd again, but she knows that Cataline is an elite athlete.
"We can't really tell [if my experience is an advantage] because I didn't know I would have an advantage in my first Power Slap competition," she said. "That was the first time I ever tried it. We discovered that the power of my slap is super strong, and that I was also able to eat the slaps, too.
" ... I really hope she can brings her best so we can have and create a really amazing and huge fight. I'm not going to give it to her easily. I really want to take my next knockout."