I know a lot of trends come and go in the large array of YouTube communities, but one that seems to have stuck around for some ungodly reason is Boxing. I’m really unsure how this came about but everyone seemed to be doing it and it did wonders for their channel metrics. That’s what I figured anyway when I signed up for the fight against ValleyWhispers, I’m not particularly bloodthirsty and not a particularly good fighter either by nature but I was sick of eating ramen for most of my meals so could use a little boost in popularity, this was the only reason why I agreed to do it.
For those of you reading this who have no idea what I am on about, a few months ago a smaller ASMR channel called ValleyWhispers who happens to live about an hour or so away from me challenged me to one of those ‘influencer boxing’ matches. I first thought he was joking, but he started doing promo all over his channel and some pretty awful diss videos. His channel is deleted now (I’ll get into that later) but one of my favourite quotes was something like;
“Danny’s got no hands, the only thing he can throw is shade, like an saudi arabian thief with an parasol launcher strapped to his legs”
Which admitidally was a real thinker. I was initially very reluctant to get involved in any way but I saw that channels seem to skyrocket after events like this and the press seem to get involved and I’m a sucker for all that nonsense. I made a few calls to my family and friends to see what they thought and the stand out response was that it would probably be a laugh and there’s no harm that could come from it. Apart from the initial harm of being punched in the face.
In February I signed up for a local boxing gym, ironically called Dave’s Gym which I’m sure was the title of a fictional gym I made up for one of my first videos, started training, and got back to Valley to let him know I was up for the challenge. He DM’d me to say he was really happy I was up for it which was nice. I trained a few times a week for the rest of february and stepped it up a little in March. I started off treating it like a bit of a laugh but I found the idea of winning a boxing match quite intoxicating and it got to my head a little bit, after a while I was training almost every night with my coach Hannah Hammer, not her real name, but it was a cool fighting name I couldn't not include it.
Throughout this time Valley did more hype and diss videos, I didn’t have time for that, I was training. It didn’t look like Valley had done much training either which was a great boost for me as well to keep training harder. If this fight looks totally one sided that’s going to look great for me, some form of amatuer boxing champion all of a sudden, or something like that. That’s what I thought anyway.
It got to the night of the fight, we were fighting in a gym near Port Talbot, someone called Stevo was organizing it but I don’t think I ever met them, I think it’s someone Valley knew, so if you’re reading this, cheers for letting us use your gym for this nonsense. I turn up in my gear, opted for black boxing gloves instead of red as I think they look cooler, and as we are stood in the middle of the gym I spot Valley going into one of the toilets and he looks absolutely jacked, like he’d pre-recorded all of his diss videos beforehand to throw me off. I could actually see the individual muscles of this man from a distance, comparatively I’d just lost a little bit of weight. This was when I started to get worried. I should also mention at this point that Valley is 6”6. I’m not.
Time passes, I lose another stone just by pacing in the car park sweating and wondering what life would be like with less teeth. I remember looking at the gravel and wondering if I would get a competitive advantage by shoving my boxing gloves full of it, I then remembered that’s probably cheating and went inside to meet my maker. We both ‘climbed in the ring’ (it was just some matts on the floor) and I could see the rage in his eyes. My eyes were just filled with fear and small tears. Some guy who was filming it on his phone and also somehow the referee says to touch gloves, we do, the force of him touching my gloves almost pushes me off balance. Yikes. I blink and my face hurts, I think I was punched in it. It hurts again, and again. The ceiling is where he used to be and the back of my head is being cushioned by the matts. I'm lying down. This isn’t great. The dude recording briefly stops his media career to check if i’m alive. I was. He helps me up and motions for us to begin again. There are three quite blurred Valley’s in front of me. I’m not doing particularly well.
Suddenly, I hear an odd noise coming from my feet. It sounded like wheezing. I take a brief pause to wonder why the ground was making that noise and quickly figure out it was Valley. I pondered why he was on the ground, I hadn’t thrown a punch yet, but he wasn’t, I was, again. I picked myself up this time as the referee was outside having a smoke. Hannah had always told me that boxing was about finding your opponents weakness and exploiting it and I had clearly found Valley’s weakness here, it seems like he’s not paying attention and spending time wheezing at the floor. I stumble towards him and without really thinking land a blow on his face. He tells me to stop but you can’t do that in boxing, can you? You can’t just tell the other person to stop it’s a boxing game? I’ve had a lot of conflicting opinions on this since the fight and I just want to put on the record now that I genuinely thought you aren’t allowed to ask the other fighter to stop, and you have to ignore it and continue boxing. I kept hitting him in the head, he was wheezing and coughing, at one point he fell over and I kept hitting him over and over again. Remember this was the only chance I was going to get to win so I needed to make the most of it. This continued for about five or so minutes of him wheezing and me getting some really expert shots whilst he lay in various degrees of motionless on the ground or gasping for breath.
The referee comes back in, he seems surprised and asked what happened, I just said something fightery ego-y like
“I happened mate, don’t mess with Quiet Fingers”
Admittedly I could have thought of a better boxing name but I was on the spot, I was pumped, I’d just floored this opponent in a boxing game. I was full of adrenaline. I’d smashed it.
Now. It’s been brought to my attention that some people think what happened here was assault and that I shouldn't have punched him whilst he was “clearly” having an asthma attack and I should have handed him his inhaler instead of punching him repeatedly in the face. My take on that is that it’s a boxing match, in a real one you aren’t allowed your inhaler, and both of our channels reputations were at stake here so it is very important. I’ve got nothing against Valley and I don’t wish ill of him, I just did what I thought we were there to do? If you can’t handle the heat don’t go in the kitchen or whatever the phrase is. I didn’t give him asthma.
I have been getting a LOT of hate about this situation in my DM’s from people who have seen the video and the CCTV (because no one turned up, we forgot to plug it, whoops) and I really think it’s uncalled for, I know he had a small and loyal fanbase but he really brought it on himself, if you think about it. After the fight his channel was deleted and his social media was wiped which I think was a bit excessive but his Mum really wanted that and I can respect that.
I’ll of course be donating a portion of the winnings (I think it was about £10 + travel in the end) to his family and to the asthma + lung charity and OBVIOUSLY it goes without saying I’m really sad that he died but I can’t really see how this is my fault.
The main take-away from this is that I think it’s pretty obvious that I won the fight but for legal reasons I can’t show the video anywhere as it’s currently evidence, but honestly my record is now an undefeated 1:0 in Influencer Boxing and I’m retiring there, there is far too much drama in this boxing community and I want to get back to making videos and put all this behind me.
Please don’t message me about Valley, I've already said I’m sorry and no i’m not giving the trophy back.
Thanks for reading my side of the story.