Imagine the Ultimate Fighting Championship… but with pillows.
Imagine the Ultimate Fighting Championship…but with pillows. That’s the basic recipe for the Pillow Fighting Championships. And it just might be the next big sport.
Steve Williams, CEO of PFC, joins me to share pillow fighting’s journey into worldwide popularity (and possibly into the list of Olympic sports).
A few curiosities you’ll uncover in this episode:
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Credits
Curious State is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast hosted and produced by Doug Fraser.
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Podcast Manager - Adam Cecil
Podcast and Advertising Operations Specialist - Morgan Christianson
Digital Operations Specialist - Holly Hutchings
Marketing and Publicity Assistant - Davina Tomlin
Intern - Kamryn Lacy
The Quick and Dirty Tips network is a division of Macmillan Publishers in partnership with Mignon Fogarty, Inc.
Have a question? Or a topic you’d like covered on the show? Maybe you just love sending emails? Whichever shoe fits, tie it on and send me a message at curious@quickanddirtytips.com.
Doug
There's nothing like clicking your way down a YouTube rabbit hole. It's a tropical dopamine paradise. The amount of time-sucking gold you can find when you sift through the sand is magical, like 10 things Pierce Brosnan can't live without. “I think we're all seduced by sunglasses” and in-depth features for an iPad I don't even have. “So this video is all about all the apps, widgets, automation, shortcuts that are on this iPad” or Robin Williams outtakes from Aladdin. And then sometimes you come across a real hidden gem, like a video thumbnail for what looks like a UFC fight. But the fighters are holding pillows.
It's not an SNL skit, or a feather flying fantasy. It's real. And it may be the next big competitive sport.
Steve
Hi, my name is Steve Williams. I am the CEO of PFC, Pillow Fight Championships.
Doug
I'm just so amazed that this exists.
Steve
I had a couple of girls actually that asked me, “what do you do?” And I told them pillow fighting. They just walked away from me.
Doug
The reaction is a common one. Steve has heard “it's a thing?” so many times that he thought why not make it the tagline?
Steve
We did get a trademark on “it's a thing?”, which is nuts. We've had about 5,000 fighters from around the country sign up. Probably by the end of the year, it will be up to 10,000. We're negotiating with about 20 countries now for doing licensing. It just exploded around the world.
Doug
I'm Doug Fraser and this is Curious State. Do you remember the rush of a childhood pillow fight? You're amped on youth’s energy elixir and maybe some caffeine. It's a game of give and take, you hit, you get hit, and then someone along the way gets cheeky. They ball up their pillow real tight in the pillowcase and swing it around and then…The pillow fighting championships, or PFC to those in the know, doesn't use your run of the mill childhood pillow.
Steve
We have gone through many different iterations of the pillow itself. You know, we had bamboo and we've got some spun fiber foam, you know, just a variety of composites. And now what we've kind of settled on, at least for now, is more of a sort of a spun polyfoam. Holds its shape better, it looks good on film, it sounds good. And it doesn't leave a lot of slack in the bag when the foam tends to bunch up in the end because of centripetal force. The outside is point seven five mil ripstop nylon.
Doug
Ripstop nylon is actually a pretty cool material. It's resistant to tearing, making it perfect for using in the great outdoors with say, a camping hammock or traversing the high seas with a strong sail on your sailboat, or for a pillow, it's built for repeatedly hitting people in the face.
Steve
Our material has a special coating on one side of it, which makes it waterproof. That's where the pop comes from. That's where the boom comes from. So your pillow becomes a sort of drum.
Pillow fighting can be done by anybody, and everybody who's done it actually had a good time. I've never seen anybody pillow fight and walk away and say “I suck. I don't want to do that again.” You know? It definitely brings back memories and then all of a sudden, this comes back and you're like, wait a minute, this is a sport? This is crazy. And it kind of makes them happy. Just even talk about it.
Doug
The PFC is essentially a family friendly version of the UFC. But family friendly fighting doesn't mean PFC pulls their pillow punches.
Steve
They're real fights. There's nothing fake about it. I mean, UFC you know, people are getting their face broken and just blood on their ring, and in our sport, there's no blood on the ring.
Doug
The PFC has two divisions, one for adults and PFC kids.
Steve
We're introducing pillow fighting to the fight academies around the world: the fight schools, there's Corner Dojo with jujitsu centers, local karate schools will be able to adopt PFC version of pillow fighting. If nothing else, it's a gateway sport. And it's something that any kid anywhere can walk in, pick up a pillow and immediately start fighting the biggest kid there and have fun.
Doug
Okay, so you've got your specially made pillow, and you're in the Octagon against an opponent. Now the question is, how do you win a pillow fight match?
Steve
Well, it's just a matter of points. One point for the hit to the head. If you do as we call a “spinning back pillow”, that's two points. If it hits the head, it is three points. If you get a knockdown three points are very rare. You'd have to really get your timing perfectly to take someone's legs out. You catch them off guard, but it's been phenomenal to see somebody get knocked down in a pillow fight.
Doug
With it being a new sport, Steve and his team are able to test things out, like modifying the rules or seeing which color works best for the camera. They even took a page from WWE and tried tag team. But alas, that didn't work out so well. Are there any other versions of this that you're testing out like maybe two pillows?
Steve
We toyed around with the two pillow idea, but it's too much. Most fighters can't handle two pillows. We've had fighters switch hands. Some of the fighters are ambidextrous and they can switch hands. Holly Tillman, he's a karate expert, and he can switch hands. He's like nunchucks. He swings the pillows around like nunchucks; he's got a totally different style.
Doug
Even with all the hits, connecting from different fighting styles, knockouts never happened. Well, almost never. The one recorded TKO goes to show you that pillow fighting is an even battlefield, where the Goliaths can fall hard. The world record for the largest pillow fight took place at an evangelical Christian concert in Minnesota back in 2018. 7,861 people joined in. “It's fun, it's cathartic, it's fierce but wholesome,” as sports writer Joe Capozzi described the PFC. And then one day, things got more fierce than usual. A mixed martial arts fighter named Mike Trujillo entered the ring.
Announcer
“Introducing first the man fighting out of the blue corner, a Mixed Martial Artist and Bare knuckle boxer, Mike T. Trujillo”
Steve
He was one of the first backyard bare knuckles fighters. He got hit in the neck actually or in the head, and then in the stomach really hard. That was right at the end of the first round. And our countdown, which was the big pay per view we had, you know, you had one minute rest period, but at the end of the rest period, he still was gassed.
Doug
With 25 seconds left in the second round, Mike bends over and rests his hands on his knees. His opponent approaches and hits Mike in the face. A shot Mike barely bothers to block, his hands fall back to his knees, he gets hit again on the head. And again.
Steve
The ref had to call the fight because he couldn't fight any more. And he ended up laying down on the ring for about five minutes on his back while we called the ambulance. You know, I mean, we all saw what happened and we kind of couldn't figure out what was wrong with him because we've all been hit with the pillow before. But it was a combination of him just being absolute gas, and then the combination of hits. And that was sports history. Now most of the guys and girls, they're MMA fighters. And they never want to lose, no matter what it is. They're playing tiddlywinks, they don't want to lose. So they're competitive people, they’re kind of not expecting all this seriousness and passion to come out. It absolutely comes out and it comes out even more.
Doug
When people talk about PFC, what do you hope they say about it?
Steve
We've been in a couple of bars before where we had the pillows and we'd see this little granny over in the corner look over at us with a gleam in her eye. And she you know, she'd be smiling and going like this. You know, it's like, you can see that she was remembering when she was a little kid and it just kind of chokes you up to see the reaction. There's something magical about it.
Doug
Instead of pillow fighting in Japan, they have makura nosh. Makura means pillow and nosh means throwing. The slight variation of pillow throwing offers a different path to the same happiness inducing pastime. One that Steve Williams works to keep alive every day, and every day, more people join him and practice countless others in pure intrigue. If everything goes as planned, he'd like pillow fighting to become an Olympic sport. It would be a dream come true, and not just for him. To learn more about Steve and Pillow Fighting Championships, visit fightpfc.com. For more information about the show and where you can find us across the internet, check out our show notes or visit quickanddirtytips.com. Special thanks to the Quick and DirtyTips team: Adam Cecil, our Audience Development and Podcast Manager; Morgan Christiansen, Podcast and Advertising Operations Specialist; Holly Hutchings, our Digital Operations Specialist; Davina Tomlin, Marketing and Publicity Assistant; and our intern Kamryn Lacy. Curious State is hosted and produced by me, Doug Fraser, for the Quick and DirtyTips network, which is a division of Macmillan Publishers in partnership with Mignon Fogarty, Inc. Until next time, stay curious.