We spoke to men inside the Pillow Fighting Championship, or PFC, to find why knocking someone out with a pillow is so appealing

This might not sound like the average war cry from a competitive fighter, but then again pillow fighting isn’t your average sport. The craze is the latest hot ticket in fighting and consists, simply and entirely, of people bashing each other over the head with pillows.

The words at the top of the page are those of Terrell ‘TJ’ Jenkins, a fully signed-up follower of this new religion. Jenkins, who’s 6’2” and an enthusiastic player of several other sports, including basketball, judo and baseball, was one of the very first men to see the potential in pillow fighting. Now he’s one of the sport’s veterans and speaks about it almost as though he’s been brainwashed. “I’m ready to do something spectacular,” he says with an irrepressible smile. “It’s not about who’s looking at me. No. It’s already in my soul. It’s already inside me. Like I said, I knocked a guy out with a pillow.”

“I have two pillows in my car, you wanna try it out?”

It was when Jenkins was renting an office in Boca Raton, Florida, that he met Steve Williams, the godfather and CEO of the Pillow Fighting Championship (PFC). Williams, who told The Guardian that he has spent more than $350,000 of his own money investing in the sport, explained his dream to Jenkins. Would Jenkins like to join him on this journey, he asked. “I said, ‘Man, I’m down,’” says Jenkins. “Whatever happens, I’m all for it. It’s something different; it’s something unique

Jenkins joined a host of other competitors – some of them fighters but many of them not – making Williams’ dream a reality and trying out for the sport in south Florida. He auditioned in front of Yuri Villefort, an ex-MMA and UFC athlete who owns Indio Dojo in Boca Raton. Villefort had also been persuaded by Williams’ entrepreneurial spirit. (“I have two pillows in my car, you wanna try it out?” Williams asked Villefort. He then proceeded to smack Villefort with one of them. “And I was like, okay, this is real,” says the Brazilian fighter.)

As the appeal of the sport became clearer, the pillow movement – or “nocturnal neck support combat” as one announcer described it – began to pick up momentum.

“The great thing about pillow fighting is, everybody relates to it. Everybody’s done it, right? There’s no language involved.” Mark Keys oversees the digital operation of the PFC, where the brand has generated a wealth of international coverage, almost 60,000 Instagram followers and hundreds of millions of views. “It has been just completely insane,” he says of the sport’s rise. “I’ve got to go to juggling school right now; I’ve got 100 balls in the air.