Carnage 2024, Initial Thoughts

Lot of stories happened at Carnage and it’s hard tracking down which ones that I saw I want to highlight. And obviously there are the many many stories I missed, as I spent this year mainly focused on my fights, my teams, and my opponents, and didn’t watch much else.

I’ve been fighting buhurt for almost 10 years now. Few have been at it longer in the States. I only know 4 for sure who were fighting at Carnage, Paul Friedel Cat Brooks Sam Awry and Bill Edward Woodbury II. Two on my team, the other on Ordo. Of OG 29, Bill was the only one competing. Of other vets coming up on 10 years or more, I know Michael Johnson and Johny Porter also started around that time not sure exactly when. Obviously Greg Polevoy but he’s from Canada so it only half counts. And I have no idea when the Brits or Aussies started. There may be more fighters who were in armor in 2014 so list them if I missed please. That said I think that’s it for people who could be argued were competitive at the top of their respective fighting events. The old guard is truly being left behind. 

The overall level of fighting has increased remarkably. I used to claim there were 3 top tier team in the US(and one all star international team that sometimes is a US team) and then the rest were clearly a different tier. I think this proved that’s not true. Kynaz took a round on dominus and made the fight hard. We took kynaz down to 2 fighters each round, close fights both times. And multiple teams in tier one took us to 3, hard hard fights. I’m not sure how that breaks things down. Does Kynaz dominant performance put them on another level with them and dominus? Is there a discount on Warlords dropping because of there missing personnel? And how do berserkers stack now? I think this shakes up my hard lines but nothing is yet settled. My instinct is that the clear top tier will now either contain significantly more teams. 

But possibly…possibly this year will see kynaz standing alone at the top of the heap with everyone else clearly a step below. To prove it they’ll need to do this a few more times, but we might be seeing the dawn of era of Kynaz after almost 4 years of Dallas being the clear club leader of the sport. I don’t say that just because they were dominant against the opposition in the tier 1, but because they brought a full second men’s which also fought well enough it needs to be considered for tier 1 next year. Nothing like that has been done before. Clubs have brought two mens teams, Dallas did it, Ordo’s done it I believe, and I know The Hall has done it a few times. But none of those teams were ever able to put on a performance that showed they could possibly hang with the big boys. The depth that club has reached in the mens is unparalleled.

Now for purposes of this I don’t count Dominus as a club. It really is more of an all star team…or perhaps a movement, though if I heard a member of them say that I would call it pretentious as fuck. By that I mean they are actively trying to do something different than just build a club that wins tournaments. They travel more than any normal club. They run seminars. They are primarily responsible for the change in the US buhurt meta. They actively put out teaching resources. They act as leaders outside of Dominus in multiple areas of the sport. I don’t say this meaning people on other clubs don’t do this. Obviously many do. But I haven’t seen any club really focus on pushing the sport so much as members doing it separately. And maybe I’m seeing a distinction where there is none. Truly I can’t point to any action they’ve done and not point to a club member who isn’t on Dominus that has done something similar. It’s all in the vibes though. No club seems to have the vibe Dominus does, where its looking to pull people into it as it grows and pushes. Instead most clubs feel like they are competing to see which can be the best. Which, to be clear, is a thing I like and hope most clubs do. That is necessary for the competition act of the sport. It just seems Dominus, while focusing on always being the best, is equally focused on getting as many people to that best as possible and ideally pulling them into its ranks. 

The only club I can compare with that is Palmetto Knights. Not on the skill of fighting. I don’t think there is a club that really is comparable there to be honest, partially because the clubs that get there often have members recruited into Dominus, which makes hypothetical comparisons rather difficult. How to compare something to itself? No the comparison is in the dedication to overall sport. Larry has proven beyond a doubt at this point to be the best event runner in the states. He constantly points out how much is due to his staff and his events are always put on by the Palmetto Knights, so in addition to recognizing him, we must recognize that team as raising the bar. And raising the bar in every aspect of event running, from registration, to scheduling, to information communication, fighter fun on and on the list goes. Carnage is the top fighter focused event in the States, if not the world. And Dragon con, is also pretty clearly, the top fan focused event. As these events continue to get better and better, they push every organization and club to step up their game which makes events better for everyone. And they do not keep the “secrets to success” secret, but willingly share advice and will sometimes even help organize and run events for other clubs. 

Three different models of “club” success noted here. And yet I wonder if we can truly call any of them the most successful? Palmetto is currently not putting out a top tier fighting team. Kynaz may have the best depth and the top talent of a non all star club for men, but they have only just claimed that title and have yet to defend it. Dominus may win everything for mens buhurt but they have no women’s team. That is not a thing that can be casually brushed off. So as always the conversation must turn to Dallas. The Mythics continue their tradition of excellence by reclaiming their Carnage title and adding to the growing horde of gold medals they have collected. The womens fighting in the US is no longer in its infancy, as evidenced by Kaylas comparison post of the unity Carnage to this one. In these still early chapters of a fully developed competitive environment though the protagonist is clearly their club. The line up has certainly changed over the past 4 years, but the dedication and skill has not. Which is honestly perhaps more impressive. Most clubs cannot remain in the conversation of top team as members are replaced, let alone rise to the undisputed best team. And yet that they have done.

Speaking of remaining and returning to greatness though, I have to take the time to stop praising others so I can brag a bit. See I started talking about carnage in light of the history of the sport, cause being an old timer, thats how I see things. And I don’t think there’s any group that compare to The Knights Hall’s success when looked in that lens. It’s true we walked home with bronze and silver, not a single piece of shining gold. But is there any team that fielded at Carnage that’s been around as long as the Executioners?  Are any of the other teams from 10 years still medaling in major tournaments? Has any team held a place near the top as long? There’s only 2 fighters left from the first executioner’s line. Only 3 from our second real line up. And still we show up strong. 

And I will not forget the Banshees, no one should. One of the first femme teams out they too have seen quite the shake up. As a fielding team the Banshees started in 2020 best as I can recall, but the hall has been putting out non-men’s teams since 2017, occasionally multiple teams at tournaments headed by hall fighters. They’ve struggled for years to keep a full line, losing members to other teams, to injury, and to malaise as covid lock down forced us to run few events during the early years, which really set a tone for a club. They’ve pushed through though, 3 of original members remaining despite life and the sport quite often kicking their teeth in. With 2 more members of the hall joining them and 3 Knights hall adjacent fighters, this team managed to bring home a bronze in the toughest women’s field to date. 

I bring this up because I wonder by what metric one should judge what is the most successful club? Or if one should make such a judgment at all? Hell I begin to wonder what a club even is, when almost every single one involves people who either rarely train with the team or live much closer to another team. Mercs are a sometimes hot button issue in the sport but what even is a merc? How many times does one have to fight on a team to become a “true” member? I know people have called Mickey a merc for Kynaz and both Paul and Josh mercs for the Executioners, despite all of them having fought on those teams repeatedly for months if not years.

When I started, the country was split between two types of clubs. Geographically based clubs called chapters and regions or socially based clubs where members could live states away and still be part of it. This was not the only divide and in truth both sides of the split basically ended up using both methods. The other major divide, philosophically, was how to build a championship team. One group argued that the best way was selecting the best individual fighters and bringing them together while the other insisted that a team was more than the sum of its parts and the benefit of fighting together often made predetermined club teams better than any all star team. In the end of course they both ended up being right. I bring this up because I’ve strayed away from Carnage specifically to begin dealing with the sport in a more general sense. I think clubs are currently much less a point of pride or importance to a large section of the sport, in the way they may once of been. And in way they appeared not to have been if the very very early days. Fighters drift from team to team depending on the needs of a tournament. They wear personal heraldry when they fight singles.

One cause of this is the lack of centralizing force that things like Buhurt League and the ACL once brought. I think another is how covid killed world championships for a few years. Many people started this sport with the only ways to really do it was to show up to smaller events and do singles or pick up teams. The dissolution of the ACL, which at the time was the dominant US fighting org, promised an exciting unity that never really saw its potential reached until now. In its wake  some joined the ACW where they were simply put onto teams with no work and when they fled they were left adrift and teamless, not sure how to proceed, just as any new fighter would. As HMB folded than resurfaced as Buhurt League only to fold immediately again, the chaotic organizational whirlwind probably made focusing on build a team to dominate the competition hard. There was no league to be the top of, no true championship to win. Add in Dominus changing the game by adopting both the all star method and the home club method, by training and fighting together more often than once a year, and it begins to seem like a suckers game trying to build a club “organically” for lack of a better word. 

There is limited benefit to bringing up new fighters rather than just trying to poach ones already doing well in the sport. Running events does not require a team of fighters to be the home club. A gym can send its fighters out to multiple clubs and claim their success to build its brand without making its own team. So…why do we build clubs? Why do we separate in this predetermined way, forming cliques we stick to by default? At the carnage party Saturday night one of the most striking things I saw walking in, was that there were just a bunch of different groups of individuals hanging out in pockets of already known acquaintances and not interacting with each other pretty much at all. Of course as more people came and more alcohol was consumed this began to change but I was not alone in seeing that we do not come together by default so much as separate. 

One of the things I miss about the ACL is that we tried to act like the whole league was one team. Andre called it a family and pretty much everyone laughed behind his back at this, because a) it was corny as fuck and b) family shouldn’t charge you to be a member. I’ve yet to pay a family fee once in my life and if you have to, time to find a different family. That said, it truly did feel different than how the sport is now a days. There were rivalries, there were teams, and of course cliques and drama. What would nerd sports be without endless drama over injured pride, as 95% of all drama is? But we all came together trying to beat each other in the pursuit of making the best team USA we could. I didn’t get that feel at AMCF Quals this year and I definitely didn’t get it at carnage. But I did feel, something.

People like to say Buhurt is love. I think it’s a trite phrase that oversimplifies and aggrandizers the bond that sharing danger brings. But I do not deny that bond exists. And I did feel it at carnage this year…more than I did last year. And perhaps more than I did at AMCF quals even. There was a sense of being part of something grander, of sharing the moment of excellence and achievement. I don’t know if that was due to the scale of the event or perhaps that so many unprecedented new heights were reached and new bars set. Perhaps a nod to Dominus’s attempt to change the way the sport is played and trained should be given. Or maybe it was a personal thing and not felt by others. Maybe being able to fight with the boys, in our colors, on our terms, joined by our sisters and siblings and supported by the greater hall was it. Maybe seeing fighters who’s journeys I helped guide come out as monsters in their own right brought me pride I didn’t earn as their work and rewards are all their own, but will still treasure as if it were mine. Maybe it was seeing that a new crop I didn’t help build was willing to accept me as an older cousin who they only knew through family legends and fables and welcome me as if I had been there with them while they paid their dues and let me celebrate their victories as one of them. 

Maybe it was none of that. Maybe it was just that I felt good fighting for the first time since the Unity Carnage where I had to watch my team struggle and lose without me. Maybe it was just sharing the field with the known best teams and knowing there were no excuses I could make this time. Maybe it was all of it. Maybe it wasn’t real at all and just a thing I imagined. I can’t prove the existence of a vibe. I can just hope others were able to sense and experience it too, whether in the moment or just in memory looking back. It took me a while to get to the narrative I wanted to focus on, the one I desire to share and highlight. Three days and some three thousand words, mostly rambling but I think I’ve found it. The big important story of carnage, for me, and I hope for others, was a renewal of the 2020 unity carnage. We aren’t all family and we aren’t all a team, but most of us are pushing this sport in the same forward direction, even if we do it in our own separate ways, it comes together to make this amazing whole.