Bohurt Sucks

Everyone who joins this sport(Armored Combat, Steel Fighting, Bohurt, FightSword, whatever you call it) seems to think its the next big thing; that we’ll be bigger than Jesus, Bigger than Wrestling. Hell, Bigger than the Beatles and Bigger than Breast implants. Bigger than guns. Bigger than Cigarettes(Thank you slug for letting my plagiarize your lyrics)

We won’t. Our sport sucks. Sorry, but it does. It’s just boring and confusing, all hype and no substance. A few big moments that quickly piddle out to sloppy and slow grappling and ineffective striking. It prides itself on a historical nature that is…questionable, at best, and demands adherence to standards that can’t even be noticed from the stands and are of no interest to most potential fans. The sport lacks a central focus, and following what is happening in the chaos requires significant specialized knowledge, which in and of itself will still not be enough if you happen to be watching the wrong part of the fight.  

We want this to be a major thing, and everyone who runs an org, league, or team is pushing to get media and build a presence. It won’t matter, though, because the core of the sport is just fundamentally flawed, from a spectators viewpoint. We have problems; production value, organizational structure, consistent reffing, and reporting/ambassadors, but that won’t matter if the sport stays the same. It’s also something people are trying to work on…but in general, it seems like it’s still focused on unsustainable growth and an end goal for the sport that simply isn’t achievable.

I keep hearing about getting us on ESPN. On getting into the Olympics. On getting another reality TV show/or another season. And like…it just doesn’t feel achievable to me. For one thing, We all Suck. and that keeps the fighting from really looking good. The top levels look better than lower levels, but even then, it’s just a slow and boring fight far too often. And the most popular ruleset makes it worse. Hanging on the rail is simply a net negative to making watchable fights. Even getting rid of that, though, there is no tournament I can grab, find a generic fight or sports fan, and turn them onto the sport by showing it. Nor can I pull in people from the nerd side, whether fantasy lovers, history buffs, or gamers who play virtual fighting versions. 

The most popular sports in the world seem to come in three categories;Net Sports like Volleyball or Tennis, Field sports like Basketball or Soccer, or shitty sports like Baseball, Cricket, or Golf. We’re gonna ignore the last three as they are objectively bad, and people only like them because high action scares them, and thus so will our sport with its random outbursts of violence between cuddle sessions. We are also gonna ignore net sports because while they might be a decent comparison to our singles style fights, we can look at a much closer version in MMA, Boxing, or Wrestling. That leaves field sports for comparison with our melee’s, and so we will focus on Basketball and Soccer, two of the most popular versions in the world, and Football, the biggest sport in America and still one the fastest growing sports.

All three sports are diverse, with different aspects that cause excitement and different “flaws” that cause people to be bored. They all have a few similarities, though, that bohurt mostly lacks. The biggest thing is a central focus you can use to direct a complete noob who’s never heard of the sport to follow, that will allow them to know the basic state of the game at any given moment. There is a ball ,and it’s nearness to a goal indicates which team is “winning” a play. Just watch the ball. There is no “ball” in bohurt. Nothing to direct someone to watch. Instead, they have to watch the entire field trying to pick up multiple fights happening at the same time. This is a struggle for experienced fans and fighters and becomes a huge barrier to entry that no other major sport faces. I believe without solving this’ our sport will never really make it out of side-show status. This is one of the problems that Paintball faced and never solved despite having a MUCH larger build in audience.

If we do solve that issue, we will want to do it in a way that supports some of the other commonalities of those major sports. The first one is facilitating more comebacks. In soccer, every single shot is a big moment of bated breath and, GOALLLLLLLS are epic to the level of winning plays in other sports because a single goal is often enough to clinch victory. But that also means games are almost always within reach cause there’s always A CHANCE to score, it doesn’t take that long and so comebacks are not all that uncommon, and they always feel possible. Football and Basketball are much higher scoring. It can be harder to always feel in the game, but being down is not a physical disadvantage, and with clock management, it becomes very achievable to turn games around, particularly at half time. A couple of stops can be huge and really set the tone to let the offense change the game.

This is exceptionally hard to mimic in the standard 5v5 tournament model. Losing a single fighter isn’t a death sentence but, it’s very bad, and once down to 5v2, it’s basically unwinnable due to how every time a team “scores,” they are in a better position to “score” again.  So while there may be some comebacks at the 5v4 level and even a few at 5v3, they are few and far between,but what’s worse is the numbers being so close there it feels less like an epic comeback. Unlike soccer, though, each fight requires at least four takedowns to win. So takedowns, while big deals, are not the momentous occasions that a goal is in soccer. It’s more like a touchdown in football, though still more exciting than any individual basket in Basketball. That is only compounded by the first to two rounds mechanic. A team can only go down one loss. So while epic matches can come with ties taking it to a 4th or 5th round, in general, it only goes to three ,and winning two after losing one isn’t really a major reversal. This limits the amount of storylines that can be told, the type of drama, and the depth of emotion. In the end, sports are just adventure stories we are watching happen live and to cut off that amount of narrative seems like shooting yourself in the foot to me.

There are two other commonalities between the sports that Bohurt currently limits. One is an exceptional and obvious athletic achievement, and the other is consistent dynamic movement. Now it should be obvious to anyone who has watched serious amounts of Armored Combat that there are examples of both spicy running maneuvers and singular outstanding plays of athleticism. It could be said that every one-shot drop falls in this category; there are throw reversals, giant checks/slams, moving trips, flying knees, etc. etc. This is true. But they do not happen every round or even every match that includes high-level talent. Go watch a high school soccer match between good teams, and there will be multiple moments of “OMG, did they just do that?” Basketball will have unbelievable three’s and dunks galore. Football will have one handed catches, throws, and kicks with length and power of a bomb, hits that the whole crowd feels. The average Bohurt match is a grindfest in comparison ,even with good teams. Most of the fighting is stationary on the rail, with a person occasionally making a single direction run across the list to deliver a moving blow that often yields no result.

Gonna switch gears for a moment to follow up on that; another significant problem with Armored Combat is in the name. The Armor. It works. And that reduces the number of big hit swings. There are tons of MMA fights between high-level opponents with no significant action. Lots of circling, “lighter” hits that seem to leave no damage, and stalled out grappling. However, there is ALWAYS the possibility of a knockout shot or a submission. Every second there is that tension, that SHIT. COULD. GET. REAL. And most of the time, it doesn’t. Most matches go to decision. But that possibility is always lurking, and what’s more, the feeling of that possibility is always there because you can see the flesh take damage. Cuts and bruises can appear in the match, even when there is no real debilitating damage. Armor not only cuts down on the chances of hurting your opponent or knocking them out, but it also makes it much harder to see the effect of blows. After the first 10-100 times a big loud shot does nothing; it stops being as impressive. 

Speaking on MMA and its occasional “boring” nature, we come to yet another problem with the sport, though one we’re getting better at. When UFC started to get popular, people hated the grappling. Partially this is because of an exploit in the meta where Wrestlers learned they could just get the top position, and as long as they were somewhat active and knew how to defend submissions, they’d win. It was also because people didn’t understand what was happening in the grapple and just saw two sweaty dudes hugging each other a lot and not even kissing or taking each other’s pants off. It was both sexually and blood sport-ually teasing, with no climax. Blue balls and blue…knuckles? Blue balls again? I don’t know. Look the point was people got over it, but it took years of Joe Rogan explaining what the fuck was happening and fans eventually learning to appreciate parts of the ground game. 

We do not have a Joe Rogan. And our grappling games, particularly on the rail, are simply less technical and interesting even if we did. So it really does just look like two guys in armor cuddling…and sometimes that really is all it is because the guys are simply too tired to keep putting out effort while carrying an extra 50-70 pounds. Because of this, our shit just looks and is, in many cases, sloppy and amateurish. No one wants to watch that. No one cares about a 300-pound person leaning on someone till their legs give out. It’s a boring, predictable story that doesn’t even look that cool when the script gets flipped. 

All that would be manageable, maybe, if our fighting season was easier to follow. ACL had a good idea with Chapter Wars, teams you can identify with and follow, but it never got buy-in from the whole league and barely got off the ground before the league exploded. ACS has not brought that back in any meaningful way. AMCF barely hosts tournaments. Internationally, IMCF is pretty much exclusively for the championship. HMB/WMCF is doing better with multiple high-quality tournaments and a team standing board based on how teams do in each tournament….but that’s the golf model, and we already rejected that for being shitty.

My prejudices aside, that model is much better than the nothing that is happening everywhere else. But it means following requires tuning in to a few all-day broadcasts a couple of times a year with no real holdover. And while Golf has reporting, keeping fans up to date if they miss tournaments, we haven’t developed anything close to that. Even our live streams, which are coming up across the board and HMB/WMCF still leading the pack by miles, do not do a good job of showing the previous events of a tournament. Replays are occasional, and I can’t remember watching a stream where they would pull up footage of a match hours ago. In golf, you can tune in at any point, and they’ll show you all thecool moments up to now on repeat; since the sport is that slow…but then so is HMB with the rail grabbing. 

So how do we fix it? Luckily a lot of the fixes are coming. The reporting and live streams are getting better in quality, and we’re seeing more and more of them. That’s one thing the sport is doing right, HMB in particular. We need better ambassadors, though. We need our Joe Rogan who can talk with knowledge and also be interesting. We have yet to find that, though the announcers we have do a passable job and are far better than a Goldberg, so that’s also a plus. What really needs to happen is better consistency. I personally much prefer the “season with individual matches,” approach to a “cumulative tourney score,” style, but that could work if enough events pop up with decent, watchable streams…IN A CENTRALIZED LOCATION. I can’t stress this enough. Finding good content requires going all over the internet, and no one wants to do that. Once you hook someone with a good video, they should be able to keep exploring without hopping to a different location, cause they will get bored and start playing Halo 2 again. Which remains the only video game anyone should ever play. GOAT.

These are surface fixes, though, and will mean the sport will only pick up a small subset of the already niche sword nerd community. Instead, we need to fix the rules. Things need to be clarified and easier to follow. Drop AC bullshit, cause no one watching thinks it’s worth shit. Find a central focus. Capture a banner, a piece of territory, or take out a specific fighter. All these types of rules exist, and fighters, for the most part, love them, so you won’t lose much in fighter participation. Remove rail hooking, which IMCF has done completely. This is a great move that will see much more field movement. Extend fights so that striking is more effective. Right now, it’s just not worth it to put small amounts of damage that add up over time; by the time it takes effect, your opponents will be fighting someone else. This will change the meta to bring striking up and reduce grappling. Grappling is tiring, and the longer the fight, the less you can make that a go-to. And while it might suck for fighters, whatever we can do to increase either the appearance of blood/damage or shots that drop fighters while still maintaining safety, will increase excitement. This is a blood sport…the fans want the blood. Shrug. It is what it is, so let’s embrace it. 

Lastly, everyone involved in any aspect of promotion or production should focus on making the little things right instead of going for big spectacles. More small scale events. More small scale streaming. More getting locals involved with their team. We do not have the foundation to build off of if another big break comes. Multiple other sports with far larger bases have failed after breaking mainstream due to that lack. Hell, Hema, our closest neighbor, was briefly on ESPN and hasn’t been back. Because the people with buy-in were not bought in enough into watching the spectacle to make it worth it on that level. If we ever want to make this a spectator sport, it needs to stop trying to be a Ren Faire sideshow and embrace what makes modern sports work. 


*Photo by Strike Exposure