There are phenomena so singular, so strange to behold, that I struggle to believe that they are fruit of the same tumults of history and inconceivable coincidences that brought the universe into being: the song “Vacation” by the Go-Go’s, the Instagram account of murdered rapper Julio Foolio, and now, I guess, CarJitsu. The what of CarJitsu is simple: it is jiujitsu inside a car. The why is best answered with the question, why not? The how is threefold: it begins with Vik Mikheev, a Russian-born PhD student and martial artist living in Kansas who began filming friends doing jiujitsu in cars in 2020; it passes through JT Tilley, a former joke writer for Yakov Smirnoff turned novelty sports entrepreneur; and it ends in the kitsch capital of Branson, Missouri, where the studios of the Pro League Network serve as an incubator for “licensing and producing bettable niche sports.” Other offerings include Ultimate Tire Wrestling, Gorilla Games (imagine two men holding a plank position, each trying to knock the other over), and SlapFIGHT Championship. Pro League’s strategy is clicks and views, endorsements and crossovers, with a hope of viability in a far-off future to be achieved through brute-force assault on social media users’ attention: look at how garish this all is, how absurd. How can you not share a clip with your followers? Wouldn’t the adrenaline spike of gambling be sweet relief from the gray malaise of the doomscroll? For now, betting on CarJitsu is only approved in New Jersey, but soon it will no doubt be available on the online sportsbooks where almost one quarter of Americans have accounts. As for what the athletes feel when they stuff their opponent into the floorboard or bend his arm backward over the door panel, none of my friends was willing to risk a cracked windshield to let me find out. But non-car jiujitsu, speaking from experience, gives you a fleeting sense of pure consequence: existence compressed, intensified, and reduced to a small set of problems—how to submit another person and not be submitted, how to control and not be controlled. The stars of CarJitsu—like the “Mexicutioner” and the “Seatbelt Assassin”—are not, and will never be, athletes in the sense that Saquon Barkley is an athlete. They are the carnies of our time, setting up shop on YouTube rather than in muddy fields in whistlestop towns. CarJitsu is meant to go viral, which means it is destined to peak and die off. Its medium is the chronic nonchalance born of overexposure: Who can say anymore how many gifs they’ve looked at, how many unlikely animal friendship videos, how many individual gigabytes of inanity make up the sea of virtual shit that washes over us daily? It is a single-use sport, a fresh relic like the artificial ruins fashionable in eighteenth-century Europe, a reminder of the destruction wrought by time. Look upon my backseat bloodshed, ye mighty, and despair.
