Bit of a necro, but I didn't want to make a thread about something that hasn't happened yet, but I'm starting to smell imminent spergery on the wind.
Gonna set up a lot of pretexts and pretexts within pretexts, forgive the autism.
So first off I'll explain the Ultimate Self Defense Championship:
The Ultimate Self Defense Championship was a martial arts YouTuber collab series primarily funded, produced, and orchestrated by martial arts YouTuber Rokas Leo, of
Martial Arts Journey with Rokas Leo (formerly Martial Arts Journey) with the idea that Rokas and five other martial arts YouTubers would collaborate on multiple self-defense "scenarios" to see who would perform the best overall in terms of self-defense.
The important people to know for this shitshow are:
Rokas Leonavičius
Host of the event and owner of the channel, Rokas is a Lithuanian Aikido practitioner who ran his own school for several years and had been practicing it since he was a teenager. He initially ran his channel marketing how "powerful" Aikido is and how it was a valid, if not superior, martial art compared to its peers.
Supposedly the school he studied under was outright a cult according to some vlogs of his I can supply if requested. He even dared try to prove aikido's superiority in a sanctioned match against some middling mixed martial artist, and got his shit kicked in. He immediately had a moment of clarity, realized aikido was horseshit, and got into mixed martial arts and started studying, while also trying to figure out if anything in aikido could be useable while looking at the style with a far more critical eye.
His struggle to maintain humility, his blatant autism, and the fact he fucking nearly bankrupted himself on this event when he was improvising a lot of it make him almost lolcow-worthy, but not enough to warrant a thread... yet. This post is gonna go into why he might enter that echelon, if not someone else I'll get to later. All you really need to know shorthand is he has a funny accent and really wants to be famous.
Jeff Phillips
Owner of the Australian self-defense school
Western Combatives (
archive) in Sydney, he acted as "Coach" for this event and his school - a massive gym with a lot of specialized areas for practicing combative scenarios of all kinds, ranging from fights in movie theaters to being attacked in offices. He's gotten some minor acclaim in Australia, and it's likely this bit of hype - plus the USDC event, made him become a bit arrogant that his insights on self-defense were the end-all be-all (A very common problem with people who run self-defense "dojos"), and seemed to become a bit too inattentive with the blatant problems of the event. He's one of the two main players in this shitshow, alongside
Ramsey Dewey
Ramsey Dewey, with no distinct or separate YouTube channel name, is a former kickboxer turned coach and referee after a series of horrifying career-ending injuries in the late 00s/early 10s kickboxing scene of China that left him more than half blind with a large hole in his skull that rendered him unable to justifiably get back in the ring. His channel mostly covers martial arts coaching, religious studies (He is very openly and proudly Mormon, and has an entire separate channel where he reads the Bible and discusses the verses), and various skits with his students and daughters.
One of his more popular styles of videos are his opinionated breakdowns of the "self-defense industry" - Dewey very ardently believes self-defense as a business is a scam and one should simply be trained in mixed martial arts, something that provably works in sanctioned contests of combat, instead of shit like
D.U.S.T.'s bullshido or Krav Maga, ranging from breakdowns of how various "self defense techniques" simply don't work to long unedited rants shitting on specific self-defense channels, This has garnered him controversy on multiple occasions, including beefs with self-defense-focused channels such as the aforementioned D.U.S.T. and the crazy screaming chink
Master Wong.
His harsh opinions on the "self-defense industry" are what put him at odds with Jeff Phillips. He's the other main player in what I think is gonna be a lot of upcoming spergery, as I'll go into detail about his part in the USDC later as well as how he might've just kicked up a bunch of shit today.
The other contestants include YouTubers Jeff "MMAShredded" Chan, "Sensei" Seth Adams, and "Icy" Mike Pesesko- the third might sound familiar given he's the guy who beat the shit out of
Spec Ops Obese Ninja Ron Collins. I'll mention them off-handedly if or when they become relevant in this rundown.
If you want to see the full thing, Rokas actually made a two hour long full "movie" of the event so you don't need to jump through a big ugly playlist.
(Will try to download to directly archive later, it's a big fucking YouTube video and Ghostarchive just refuses to even humor archiving it)
The event was controversial for a lot of reasons, namely it was very clear Rokas and Jeff had no idea what they were doing, improvising how the score systems worked, kept levying their biases against contestants (Namely Jeff Chan, who ultimately won the competition because all the other contestants were too injured, gassed out, or incompetent most of the time, but was frequently denied wins for arbitrary reasons), and even resulted in nearly crippling Ramsey Dewey during a "zombie apocalypse" event where one of the "zombies" leapt off of a ceiling directly onto Dewey's head and tore open his knee, a severe injury he is still failing to recover from several months later.
In spite of the controversy, it
was a rousing success and Rokas managed to crowdfund a second season featuring "Karate Nerd" Jesse Enkamp, video game reviewer Ranton, and
Catboy Crusher Natan Levy.
During the initial popularity surge of the event, nearly all of the contestants did react/discussion videos about their participation in the event, reflecting on what they did right and wrong, behind-the-scenes tidbits, the like. The most critical of these were by Ramsey Dewey, to the point he stopped about halfway through because people disliked how he was negative about the event.
Jeff Phillips did not handle his criticisms well, with multiple response videos ranging from
quick 5 minute videos trying to clarify his side of things (
archive) to
trying to flex how their training weapons aren't "pool noodles" because they made a tiny dent in a gutter (
archive). If you might notice, these videos are half a year old. Ramsey decided to turn the other cheek and ignore it - bridges were burnt, event was over, money was made, who cares.
Well, apparently, Ramsey's commenters really wanted him to finish his reactions, in spite of the negative reactions they got, and so he delivered:
(
archive)
(
archive)
In both, he goes into detail about the event being a shitshow, how they kept making up deductions based on arbitrary "What-if" excuses that did not happen in the scenarios they participated in, called it "LARPing," and at one point goes into the closest thing a devout Mormon will get to a swear-laden rant before finally cursing in the follow-up video, repeatedly calling the event "Piss poor."
Among his various complaints:
>Everyone was immediately shoved into the event ltierally the same day they got off the plane, meaning they were still jet-lagged and didn't even have time to breathe
>They weren't even told this would happen as they initially all went to the beach together before Rokas and Jeff set up a rope ring and made them play a glorified sumo match
>Jeff claimed the event was going to use "MMA Rules," and every single combative event featured multiple glarifying violations of unified MMA rules, ranging from groin attacks to 12-to-6 elbows and oil checks
>The zombie apocalypse event, which was discussed in prior videos, did seriously injure him and he still has trouble walking over half a year later
>They seriously endangered the final contestants in the last event by making them get into fist fights over a bridge that was tall enough that if any of them fell, which could easily happen from even just a poorly aimed double-leg takedown, they would die
>Jeff lied about the output his lackeys would be using on them in scenarios, claiming it'd mostly be taps and just indicators they'd been hit, before letting them sucker-punch the contestants with their eyes closed
>Rokas repeatedly edited clips to misconstrue events, like in a scenario where they have to get out of a female boss sexually harassing them without getting MeToo'd - the woman pounced on Ramsey and claimed he touched her when she in fact touched him
>Jeff had a blatant bias against mixed martial artists and kept trying to make up excuses for Jeff Chan to not get points, even saying in a match-up where he had a man twice his age and half his size pinned down and his skull renovated by about 10 elbow strikes was "a draw" because Chan didn't pick him up and slam him on the ground
>On several occasions the contestants just weren't allowed to actually fight back - for example, one of the contestants was chased up a ladder, and instead of being able to push away the attacker with his foot, he just had to keep yelling "I'm hypothetically kicking you in the face right now!" which ultimately did nothing to help him
It remains to be seen if there'll be a reaction, but this all got revealed in wake of Rokas revealing he'd have to delay the premiere of the second season because he claims to have long COVID, and Jeff clearly being very reactive and sensitive to criticism, I fully anticipate some fun sperg wars.