One sleepless night, I was scrolling through my feed of Instagram Reels when I came upon the most bizarre thing. A video of two men seated in the front seats of a car quickly unbuckling themselves and…lunging at each other? Before I knew it, they were twisting and contorting in the right confines of a car, looking for some gap in the other’s defense.
It happens to us all: it’s past midnight, you’re restless and wanting to fall asleep, but you just cannot for the life of you put down your phone. You can’t resist the urge to scroll. For some of us, it’s Bluesky or Twitter. For others, it may be Reddit. For me, and I bet for a lot of others, the vices I can’t quite put down are TikTok and Instagram. I’ve always been a late adopter of these platforms for fear that they’ll get their hooks in me and expose me to some deeply stupid stuff. Well, I called my shot, because this is, in fact, one such story where exactly that happens. This is the story of how one of the most ridiculous sports, CarJitsu, found me.
Every few years, it seems like some coked up sports enthusiast corners an executive with money to blow and pitches them the crazy idea to redefine sports and make things more extreme. In my lifetime alone, I’ve born witness to the life, death, rebirth, and second death of the Xtreme Football League, shortened to the XFL, as well as the mainstream adoption of middle school slap fights, and even something called the Underwater Torpedo League, which looks suspiciously like Final Fantasy X‘s Blitzball. I suspect a similar drug-addled meeting in some seedy Vegas club culminated in the realization of CarJitsu.
CarJitsu, for the uninformed, is more or less what it sounds like. Within the extremely small space of a vehicle, two competitors—-largely men, but sometimes women have featured on the program—-grapple for supremacy while leveraging the many nooks and crannies of a car to their advantage, or at the very least, to the disadvantage of their opponent. Bouts last about three minutes and can be reset if the competitors exit the vehicle, but there’s also a surprising lot of car that’s in play at any given point.
Of the many clips I’ve seen on social media during my late night spiral sessions, I’ve seen a guy open the passenger door, balance himself on the space where a window would be, and then leap back into the car to get a better position on his opponent. Matches that begin in the front seats have often wound up in the backseat, and competitors can even lower the former to make room should they need it, which they often do. There’s even a common strategy where players will often try to force a submission, or knock each other out completely, by—-in quite the ironic twist—-effectively strangling their competition with the safety belt, which must be unbuckled at the very start of a round.
Yes, this is what some (mostly) men are spending their time doing and watching these days. It’s all exactly as macho and brazenly idiotic as it sounds.
While the sport is small fry in the grand scheme of things, it’s clearly gaining some kind of traction. The whole thing airs as part of an official program called the Pro League Network, which puts on similarly extreme(ly dumb competitions, like tire wrestling, where you must dunk your competition into a stack of oversized car tires, and other bizarre “alternative sports.” As was the case with me, it seems like a league that panders primarily to young males, leveraging the algorithm on several social media sites to reach especially impressionable audiences that might find this risky and edgy kind of activity cool.
Many of these social videos are captioned in a way that capitalizes on the memes, music, and slang of the moment, like joking about a couple wrestling with one another “when your situationship tries to hard launch on main” in a clip set to Doechii’s “Anxiety.” Another video jokes about men coming to blows “when bro suddenly turns into a comedian around your girl.” A lot of it is low-hanging fruit, but this is the stuff that a certain kind of men, old and young, laugh about in private, so I can’t say they don’t know their demographic.
Unfortunately, this type of humor can be a slippery slope, one that often ends in straight up misogyny, which a number of these videos (as well as their comments) begin to exhibit the deeper you go. Under one video, a comment specifically highlights the presence of “truly idiotic things like woman’s hiphop dance” at the Olympics, while earnestly bemoaning the lack of CarJitsu at the same prestigious competition. The commenter then says that it may be better for CarJitsu to remain underground so as to not endure “DEI bs.” And for what it’s worth, whoever manages the CarJitsu Youtube channel liked the comment.
In at least one other instance from a breakout clip on Instagram, a color-commentator carelessly tosses out the phrase “rape choke,” referring to a stranglehold that has sometimes cropped up in more typical jiujitsu despite its illegality, and whose namesake—which is in no way official—stems from its prominence in real-world sexual violence.
Alongside the proliferation of these clips, the Pro League Network and CarJitsu are accruing a number of co-signs that are ensuring it reaches a certain demographic. A reply in the comments of one video makes clear that the folks behind CarJitsu are close to Twitch streamer MoistCr1TiKaL, or at least consider themselves to be, enthusiastically claiming, “He loves CarJitsu!” Kai Cenat, who has made waves in the streaming landscape for his loud personality, celebrity-guest laden marathon streams, and accidentally inciting at least one riot in New York, has appeared on the program, and even T-Pain, who streams on Twitch regularly outside of his music career, has thrown the program some love.
All of these immense red flags, as well as the usual hang ups with sports like the widespread acceptance of gambling and the high risk of disastrous injuries, leaves CarJitsu in an all-too familiar and disappointing place. When a clip of it first popped into my algorithm, I really wanted to like it. It was idiotic and silly, but often that’s what play is. It’s why I wanted to write about it in the first place. But as is usually the case, a murkier vision came to light, one that has once again pushed me away. It’s a shame, because underneath lots of that shit was something that looked as fun as it was ridiculous, and which seemed to inspire, at least in its competitors, an aspirational kind of athleticism. Ah, well. Maybe that Blitzball-like Torpedo League stands a better chance of capturing what can be so great about sports and play instead.
Moises Taveras is a struggling games journalist whose greatest aspiration in life at this point is to play as the cow in Mario Kart World. You can periodically find him spouting nonsense and bad jokes on Bluesky.
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