Punching Day: Ultimate Self Defense Championship (Patreon)

Modern self defense is mostly YouTube instructionals where scrawny Canadians in denim vests try to ninja out of gangland executions. It’s ridiculous, everyone knows none of it would work in real life. Everyone knows it… but has science proven it? Finally the answer is yes! In 2023, self defense YouTubers put their money where their dim maks are. This is the first ever ULTIMATE SELF DEFENSE CHAMPIONSHIP.

Choose your fighter. Canadian scrawniness is included but it’s BYODV.

Let’s start this off reasonably, with a scenario we all face in real life: A full contact karate fight on a moving bus.

Final Fight understood that the subway was the preferred form of transportation for karate violence. There’s room to spam jump kicks and running pipe charges. You won’t find a steel barrel with a single chicken in it on a bus. The driver would never let you on with that. Even worse, we learned absolutely nothing from this contest: The dude who fights professionally won this unprofessional fight. The older man who has to shop the Junior section for pants did not win this fight.

The next event is called Shark Tank. It’s not as cool as it sounds, but holy shit – it’s almost as cool as it sounds.

Each contestant has to survive five rounds of common self defense scenarios ranging from 2-on-1 martial arts battles, to getting surprise-whomped by a guy with a Nerf bat. It’s a competitive fighting labyrinth full of minotaurs. A karate gauntlet. In 1986 you would rent Karate Gauntlet if American Ninja was checked out. The final round of Shark Tank is the ultimate test of a YouTube tough guy: a mock mugging. This is the subject of every video they post. It should be 101.

After getting fed most of a bus in the Bus Attack Round, Icy Mike came out strong with legitimately one of the coolest moments in this entire competition – he roundhouse kicked an attacker’s knife into their own head.

He was given zero points.

Okay, technically he was stabbed a little bit before performing muay-thai surgery. Fine, dock points for that. Maybe getting stabbed in the Don’t Get Stabbed contest loses you like 100 points, but executing a kick lobotomy should be at least 8 million. If there aren’t points awarded for radness, what are we doing? This is an Insurance Adjuster’s Kumite.

Next up is Jeff, who instantly shoots for a takedown and pins the attacker’s knife. Submission hold the knife, Jeff! Fuck yeah!

He got zero points.

Jeff assumed that since he had completely won the fight, the event was over. Idiot. Dope. He let the mugger up and they stabbed him afterward. The judges allowed this. The judges loved this. This is actually a mugging contest, isn’t it?

Next up is Ramsey who used all of his martial arts training and…

…mimed giving up his wallet.

The judges disqualified bitchin’ knife kicks and allowed a post-match stabbing, there’s no way they-

Ramsey got full points.

According to the officials, that’s a win. Somebody check to see if our panel of esteemed judges are wearing little black eyemasks and striped jumpsuits.

Sure, fine, if this was a real life scenario, of course you just give the man with the knife your wallet. But this isn’t reality, none of these men live in reality, this is the goddamn ULTIMATE SELF DEFENSE CHAMPIONSHIP. Why bother living your entire life in an imaginary karate dimension if you can’t shine in this exact moment? If decades of practice kicking ass leads to the exact same outcome as a person who has zero kicking ass experience, it kind of seems like the guy in the denim gi just wasted his life.

Let’s just get to the next contestant…

To be expected. Rokas is an Aikido expert, lying down at the first sign of trouble gets you a black belt.

Surely Matt, the guy who works and trains at this place and explicitly lists himself as a self defense martial artist is gonna-

Is the next event calling the cops instead of asking your neighbor to turn the music down? The 100 Yard Avoiding Eye Contact With Teenagers? Wait. Competitive Pillow Screaming.

It’s going to take some work to get the audience to take these guys seriously again.

Let’s play Hide and Seek.

The contestants are given five minutes to hide in a warehouse before armed terrorists bust in with knives. Then they have to make their escape to safety by any means possible. Yes. YES.

That’s Die Hard. We’re playing Die Hard. Please disregard all previous sarcasm, this rules. This is the only way karate should ever be evaluated. Every strip mall dojo should have an attached Die Hard warehouse for belt evaluations.

Let’s go, let’s fucking-

Ok, maybe more like Die Hard 2.

Sudden Death?

Home Alone 3?

No one. Zero points.

A clean sweep for the bad guys. This martial arts tournament to prove the value of martial arts sure is making all the martial artists look worthless. I’m surprised none of them tried to join the terrorists. There’s precedent there.

Again, the whole event is bullshit. Three of the contestants actually made it out of the building safely. And then-

They had a professional rugby player hiding in the bushes to run them down. After they thought the game was over. The contest organizers are going for “never drop your guard” and landing on “karate banged my girlfriend and therapy did not help me move on.”

While no one claimed the actual victory, Icy Mike once again went for the moral one.

Icy Mike might’ve only earned himself a tombstone, but at least it reads “Fuck Yes.”

That’s it, we’re out of ideas. Zombies.

Remember bus karate? How young we were then, how naive. Now here we are, older, wiser, watching pretend ninjas fight pretend zombies and it doesn’t even star Scott Adkins. Why. Why.

Contestants are given four tasks: retrieve weapons, find keys, save survivors, and escape in a car. Pretty basic stuff, kind of like The Walking Dead back when things happened on that show.

What followed was deeply silly, and made no more serious by the weapons being pool noodles.

Everyone seemed to be having fun. Think a mid 2000s nerd bachelor party – just a bunch of dudes hitting zombies with sticks, learning a little something about teamwork and maybe, just maybe, friendship?

And then it was Icy Mike’s turn.

Icy Mike, pictured above going foam akimbo, has been preparing for this exact moment his entire life. His muscles are tight, his mind is sharp, there is nothing silly about this.

It's not just zombies who feel Icy Mike’s fury. One of his teammates is bitten and Mike instantly kills him in cold blood. No thought, just action. If they’d accidentally given him a pool cue instead of a pool noodle, this would be the story of the greatest bludgeoning massacre in YouTube history. Icy Mike is so over-prepared for this exact moment, they start creating traps specifically to stop him.

IT DOES NOT WORK.

Here we see a drop zombie hanging from the wall, in direct violation of zombie canon, hoping to stop Icy Mike (he does not stop Icy Mike).

They put the exit at the end of a hallway full of zombies. What does Icy Mike do? He retreats.

To forge body armor.

At the end of the obstacle course he finds the survivors, a worried mother and her two daughters. Icy Mike thinks he sees a bite on one of the children-

She wasn’t even bit. Icy Mike just murdered an innocent child faster than you can skip the terms and conditions of volunteering at the SDC’s Zombie Defense event. He wasn’t even sorry when he found out. Whatever humanity he once had is gone. He left it, along with all memory of the fourth grade, smeared across a bus seat in the first event.

This is getting stupid. Ungrounded. Fantastical. Zombies? Ludicrous. We’re having too much fun, but this is serious. This is life or death.

Let’s get real. Let’s talk about survival. Let’s talk about fighting in a movie theater.

We’ve all been here. You got your lady, your popcorn, your body armor, and some jerk starts ruining Zack Snyder’s new epic for you. You can’t even hear that snappy Zack Snyder dialogue! You could move, you could glare, you could complain to the manager. There are a lot of ways to deal with this guy.

That is not your task, Self Defense Masters. You must face… Your Girlfriend.

Notice the contestant is clinging to his adversary for protection against his own girlfriend. This is a reasonable response. She is on nobody’s side. She worships chaos. She came ready for war.

She throws drinks-

She throws fists-

She throws slurs-

How do you win this? Are you supposed to run? Start a new life? Fight your own girlfriend? Are you supposed to pick her up and carry her out? Are you, Icy Mike?

Full points to Icy Mike.

The hard airquotes “best” martial artists YouTube has to offer got together to devise the most difficult self defense scenarios people would realistically face in day to day life, and they came up with Bus Karate, Die Hard, Zombies, and Your Girlfriend. There’s one last chance to bring this thing back to reality. To be taken seriously. To earn some respect.

It says here “they have to fight the poop man.”

You know, fight the poop man. As we all must do.

These men.

They are fighting the poop man.

He is covered in poop and he has a knife.

And they have to fight him.

They are scored on how well they fight the poop man.

This is just self defense.

You fight the poop man, it’s not something you like to do, but it’s something you need to be prepared for in case it happens in the workplace. It’s like those sexual harassment trainings your job makes you take-

Yes.

That is exactly what it looks like.

That man put on all his body armor and mentally rehearsed eight ways to kill the ninja hiding behind that desk, but he learned no ways to block a handjob.

You came prepared to fight. To battle maniacs, animals, terrorists, perhaps robots. Did you come prepared to sexually battle a gorgeous amazonian goddess in leopard print? What in your precious training has prepared you for this, the scenario where you fear not for your life, but your dick game being mocked at a happy hour later?

In the Mugging Event we saw three of these dudes get full points by handing the attacker their wallet. Giving in and doing whatever your attacker says is absolutely a viable strategy here. And yet, not a single one just goes for it. Not one learns from Robert Picardo, who said what the hell and got himself some Gremlin titty one time.

No. Never happens. They all run away with suspiciously covered crotches, like an 8th grade slow-dancing to Eric Clapton's “Tears in Heaven.”

One of them fears her kung fu grip so desperately he physically moves her aside, and this happens.

Negative 100 points.

Negative one million points.

In this contest of realistic self defense scenarios, our heroes are sexually propositioned by a stunningly hot woman and are then framed for sexual assault by that woman if they refuse. That’s a problem they believe they are going to face often, and that karate has uniquely prepared them for it. This is like-

Wait, this is just Disclosure. This is karate Disclosure. Michael Douglas in Karate Disclosure.

Eagle-eyed martial artists will use their disciplined vision to notice it’s the same woman from the movie theater. So the organizers of this contest came up with two events daring all comers to molest this one particular woman, separated only by a brief intermission of Fight the Poop Man.

What actress would even do this?

Oh.

Okay.

This isn’t Karate Disclosure. This is Cuckold Bloodsport.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Justin Brewer, who knows the only way to truly defeat the poop man, is to become the poop man.

You can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM.