Ready, steady, pillow up: World gets its first professional pillow-fighting champions

If you have ever fancied your skills at being at your warrior-best when armed with a pillow in hand, now might be your time to shine as pillow-fighting is a well-recognised professional combat sport now. In fact, this bedroom antic that borders on playful behaviour has been taken all-too-seriously and now the world even had its first Pillow Fighting Championships (PFC) that just concluded in Florida with several pillow fighting champions being crowned. Yes, read that again!

Pillow fighting, once only contained within the walls of the bedroom, has taken bold steps and entered the sports ring - where it means serious business and the pillow-fighters cannot be snoozing around once the clock starts for the fight. From being grandly shown in your run-of-the-mill Hollywood romcoms where pillow fights ended up with a lot of fuzzy cotton flying around (well) to being just another activity kids engaged in during sleepovers, pillow fighting has evolved and now it is a professional sport too!

Being the first of its kind, the Pillow Fighting Championships saw participation from 24 contenders, out of which 16 were men and eight were women 'athletes'. Using mixed martial arts techniques and customized pillows to launch at their opponents in attack, the Pillow Fighting Championships made for a very intriguing watch, as it got introduced as a pay-per-view event.

At the end of the first-ever championship, Istela Nunes emerged as the winner in the women's category after she gave a good pillow-thrashing to Kendahl Voelker. On the men's half, Hauley Tillman went all out against Marcus Brimage to win the crown. Both the winners got a cash prize of $5,000 USD and a belt to flaunt for this rave and unique achievement.

Already garnering a lot of interest in the public, it does seem that the Pillow Fighting Championships are here to lounge around for longer, given the popularity it is seeing. Social media is already abuzz with users welcoming this with er, open arms and urging for its inclusion in the Olympic games also someday - pillow-fighting is no longer to be taken trivially.

While speaking to the media, Steve Williams, the CEO of Pillow Fighting Championship, said, "PFC delivers all the drama of hand-to-hand combat without the gore of mixed martial arts or boxing. The only difference between our fights and MMA fights is that nobody gets hurt." He further added, "There's a lot of people who don't want to see the blood. They want to see good competition, they just don't want to see the violence."

And we cannot agree more - ready, set, pillows up - fight!