An inside look at Dana White’s next big bet.
Read this piece in full at Derange.
Damien “The Bell” Dibbell, the longest-reigning Power Slap Heavyweight Champion, is saving up for law school. The plan, he tells me, is to defend his belt a few more times, move up to New York to make himself eligible for in-state tuition rates, and eventually become a public defender. His face, which I’ve seen emblazoned upon promotional billboards around New Orleans all week, betrays a tacit awareness of the absurdity of his career path. He is grounded, humble, measured, and ambitious; it just so happens he’s put himself in a position to pursue a legal career and buy his dream car because of a preternatural ability to take and deliver slaps to the face.
Setting aside, for a moment, questions about the morality or desirability of Power Slap’s existence, Damien Dibbell’s story serves as one of the most compelling arguments for its viability as a major sports organization. Dibbell, who used Power Slap to supplement his income as an HVAC professional before his talent put him in a position to make legitimate money on the circuit, is as dominant a slapper as the young sport has ever seen. The 23-year-old is inevitable and immovable; in 2024, he won Power Slap’s “Chin of the Year” award for his unbreakable composure. His understated slaps make 250 pound men crumble like a house of cards. Hearing his future plans, I imagine a world in which Michael Jordan left the NBA not for professional baseball but for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. At the risk of armchair psychoanalysis, I am struck by the concept of Dibbell funding a future career defending vulnerable people through being the best at slapping defenseless people.
Ahead of the main event, Dibbell emerges from the tunnel with the swagger of a man at the height of his powers and the showmanship of a DMV clerk. He sizes up his competitor, Wes “Boom” Mena, the way I imagine he’ll someday size up the bar exam: an inconvenience that he must get through to end up where he wants to be. Once Mena sets his feet, Dibbell takes his aim and winds his extended arm back like a whip. His first shot is both deafening and easily absorbed, but replays suggest Mena got away with an uncalled flinch. Mena winds up his first strike on the wrong end of two compounding misfortunes, having become an enemy of the crowd and being tasked with knocking Damien Dibbell down. His circular wind-up produces a thunderous smack. While Dibbell does not move, his eyes suggest that Mena has earned his respect. During his one-minute recovery, Dibbell wipes chalk from his powdered face as the in-arena monitor loops footage of his face being flattened. Dibbell’s next slap is a thunderclap, knocking Mena’s protective earplug into the sky and Mena’s body onto the mat. Mena attempts to get to his feet, but for the first time all night, sense prevails. Damien Dibbell, having successfully defended his heavyweight belt, lets out an uncharacteristic shout. For Dibbell, the moment marks one step closer to the freedom to pursue the rest of his life. For the rest of us, it’s time to head to the casino.
From a product standpoint, Power Slap is a gambler’s catnip. Each slap presents a discrete opportunity to toss a live bet; each striker’s odds are prominently displayed throughout the broadcast and in-arena production. Power Slap, then, represents a synthesis of the interlocking and self-reinforcing logics of modern, mediatized society: stylized violence and sensationalist standard-flouting begets vertical video, which begets algorithmic manipulation, which begets the gambling and advertising dollars that keep the machine rolling. It’s only fitting that the logic of this boorishly masculine ouroboros requires that Power Slap give the influencers who keep the show going a venue to gamble at after.
The line to enter Caesar’s Casino feels similar to a bar at the Jersey Shore, instilling within me a sense of placelessness interrupted only by the disproportionate sight of men who bear semicircular welts on their left cheeks. When the friend I’ve enlisted as a photographer and I get in, we’re ushered around by Power Slap’s personable press liaison. She keeps a close eye on us, citing “security reasons.” She escorts us to the high limit room, whose cloistered space has been converted for the evening into the official Power Slap afterparty.
Due to the glaring and regrettable absence of craps tables, the afterparty feels less like a high-roller gambling bonanza than the hour of a prom afterparty where all the dudes’ dates have gone home. I speak to a beautiful young man with manicured eyebrows and an attendant entourage of lackeys who identifies as an influencer—his beat, he reveals, is “talking to females.” I meet a group of young bankers from Mobile, Alabama who quit their stint as high-rollers after learning the hard way why their Caesar’s Player’s Cards got them free rooms in Las Vegas. Elsewhere, a group of brace-faced young men from outside of New Orleans have gotten the drop on the strip club some of the UFC fighters will end up at tomorrow. They tell my friend and I about a casino cruise that disembarks from Kenner, Louisiana and will take you wherever you want to go gratis if you log enough time at the low-limit blackjack table, before giddily inviting us to watch their boy lose hand over fist at the $100 limit table behind them. I catch sight of a sweaty, victorious Makini Manu standing with his mother behind a man wearing a Stake baseball hat. When I go to congratulate him, I see that he is holding seven skewers of meatballs in his right hand.
As the night progresses, my photographer and I adopt a twenty-something man previously standing alone behind a blackjack table. With limited prodding, the life insurance salesman from Corpus Christi explains that he came alone for tomorrow’s fights, enjoyed his solo time at Power Slap, and is mostly at the afterparty to catch a glimpse of Dana White in action. He’s instructive of a class divide within the mass of jersey-wearing dudes elbowing for room at the open bar: there are the guys Dana flew out here, and then there are the guys who drove out here to see Dana. Our companion attributes his ability to afford tickets while his sad sack friends watch at home to the lessons he learned from Andrew Tate’s Hustlers University. For $50 a month (Tate recently raised the price to $200 a month, which the young man tells us is still a bargain), he gets access to courses and individual counseling on all things hustling, from crypto trading to drop-shipping to, as he insists, how to get ahead in the business of selling life insurance. His eagerness to hang out with the guy dressed like a skater and my friend in a pickleball-induced crutch makes him the most ostensibly pluralist dude in the room.
Just as my attempts at bro’ing out begin to stall, the press liaison whisks us into the tightly-guarded back room. Past two off-duty Orleans Parish Deputies and a number of muscular bodyguards, we find a room full of people filming a baccarat table with their cell phones. Above the table looms a professional boom mic. I make my way around to see what the hubbub’s about, only to find Dana White, his son Aidan, SteveWillDoIt (a Nelk Boy famous for chugging entire handles of liquor), and RazzaqLocks (a gambling influencer), all giddily massaging their cards. It’s here, standing around a table packed with hangers-on delightedly watching Dana White gamble, that I can finally make sense of Power Slap as a business proposition. It’s not that Dana White–both the North Star and patron saint of the manosphere–is confident that his Power Slap gamble will hit, but that he understands the ascendant forces in American culture will pay just to watch him gamble. The sense that he’s correct hits me like a slap in the face.
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