Jake Hager’s Power Slap Eye Injury Is a Warning the Whole Business Should Heed

A former WWE Champion getting surgery over a slap-fighting side gig isn’t a punchline — it’s a preventable tragedy waiting to happen.

Let me be blunt: Jake Hager had no business standing in a Power Slap ring letting a stranger tee off on his skull, and now he’s paying for it with a scary eye injury and surgery. This isn’t a hot take dressed up as concern — it’s the obvious conclusion anyone could have reached before he ever signed on the dotted line.

According to the reporting, Hager dropped his Power Slap 23 bout to Johnny Magna and left with an eye injury serious enough that Dana White himself publicly called the situation “not good” following surgery. When the promoter who is selling you the product is the one telling the world it looks bad, that should end the conversation about whether this activity is worth it.

Slap Fighting Isn’t a Sport, It’s a Concussion Machine

Here’s the thing that gets lost in the spectacle: in a real combat sport, you’re allowed to defend yourself. In boxing you slip, in MMA you shell up, in wrestling you protect your opponent and yourself because the entire craft is built on cooperation. Power Slap flips all of that on its head. The whole premise is standing perfectly still and taking an undefended, full-power strike to the head. There is no skill in absorbing brain trauma. There is no artistry in refusing to flinch. It is, functionally, a competition to see whose central nervous system can eat the most damage before the lights go out.

We have decades of research screaming about the cumulative effects of head trauma. Wrestling itself has spent years — rightly — trying to reckon with concussion protocols, cutting down on unprotected chair shots, and taking care of talent who spent careers absorbing punishment they didn’t fully understand. And yet a former WWE Champion, a legitimately accomplished amateur wrestler, decided the smart move was to volunteer for undefended slaps to the face for a payday and a novelty spotlight.

The Real Problem Is the Message It Sends

Hager is a grown man who can make his own choices, and I’m not interested in dunking on a guy who’s now dealing with a genuinely frightening medical situation. But this matters beyond one wrestler. When a name talent lends credibility to slap fighting, it normalizes the idea that this is a legitimate crossover lane for pro wrestlers — a fun little side hustle between bookings. It isn’t. It’s a way to shorten your career, or worse, your quality of life, in exchange for a viral clip.

Think about the risk-reward here. Hager works in an industry where his body is his instrument. A trios run, a tag program, a main-event cameo — none of that requires him to stand there and let someone rearrange his orbital bone. Compare the stakes to the kind of storytelling being built on regular programming, whether it’s the title picture shaping up around All Out or any number of feuds where the danger is choreographed and the payoff is real. That’s the business. Slap fighting is a sideshow that can cost you the ability to keep doing the actual job.

I’d go a step further: promotions should be discouraging their contracted talent from doing this at all. I’m not saying anyone should be a nanny, but if a wrestler’s employer has a vested interest in that person being healthy enough to perform, letting them freelance in an activity built entirely around undefended head trauma is madness. You wouldn’t let your starting quarterback moonlight as a crash-test dummy.

The near-confrontation afterward almost feels beside the point. The real story is that a talented performer walked into a format engineered to hurt him, and it did exactly that. I hope Hager recovers fully. I also hope this is the wake-up call that keeps the next name off the slap-fighting stage.

Am I being too harsh, or is slap fighting a menace that wrestling needs to keep its people away from? Sound off in the comments.