X Arm is a Hybrid Sport Invented by Art Davie… The Father of the UFC… This Ludicrous Sport Has a Dedicated Global Following… Check Out Some of the Madness From Around the World…
Everybody has arm-wrestled at some point. When you win it’s the best feeling ever, because you’re asserted your physical dominance over somebody else. When you lose you just feel incredibly emasculated. Especially if there are onlookers watching on.
This classic game played in every schoolyard is surely part of everybody’s childhood. Somebody decided though that you could turn arm-wresting into a hardcore combat sport, crossed over with what can basically be described as MMA rules.
That somebody is the original founder of the UFC, Art Davie. Davie was on the scene back in the MMA promotion’s original conception, way before there were proper rules and Royce Gracie was about to teach the world a thing or two about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Check out below and see just how insane X Arm is. These dudes are properly throwing down.
Violence
In case regular combat sports and martial arts like boxing, MMA, and Muay Thai weren’t hardcore enough. X Arm literally ties the two opponents to each other, with a table in between them. They were special digital gloves that count the numbers of punches thrown. The main rule is that you have to stay on your side of the table, but you can go to town with whatever strikes you like.
Watch the footage above and see these two dudes absolutely laying into each with kicks and punches. There’s literally no escape if you get caught by a strike because as we said, you’re bound together. The loser in the fight above gets absolutely mauled by football kicks before the referee intervenes.
Testosterone
In a world where there are a million types of kickboxing, it takes something special to catch the imagination of fans. There’s a reason bare-knuckle boxing has done so well in such a short period of time.
“They’ve got arm wrestling on tombs in Egypt that go back almost 4000 years,” XARM CEO, and UFC fore-father, Art Davie said about the sport. “Arm wrestling is something young guys compete at as much as anything else that they might test their manhood with, and it’s something that hadn’t been expanded on, quite frankly, at all.”
Niche
While it’s highly unlikely that this is ever going to go mainstream, it also has to be remembered that people said the exact same thing about MMA in the early days of the UFC. That being said, there are some crazy niche sports on this planet, such as chess-boxing. Yes, that’s a real thing too.
“My idea was a short-form entertainment that would work very well on a Blackberry,” he says. “Boxing and mixed martial arts and professional wrestling take place in an arena that goes from 20 to 40 feet in size. With arm wrestling, I knew I’d be doing this on a table that would be less than three feet in diameter.”
“The biggest challenge I’ve had in promoting a new sport is the same one that I had when I wrote the business plan for ultimate fighting back in ’93,” he says. “You know, you go to people and you show it to them and they go, “Well, this has never been done before, this will never work.”
