Hunter Jones

In Scottsboro, the Armored Combat Worldwide (ACW) Iron Swan are currently training for their first event, a training event in Tulsa, Oklahoma. However, training or not, a fight is always a fight. Competing in the sport buhurt, their fights involve medieval weapons and armor, all metal, with the only differences being a three millimeter edge at the end to blunt traditionally sharp weapons. As they fight in their full suits of armor with the various historical weapons, each clash sounds like a small car crash, with metal banging on metal until one man falls.

“The way I always justify it is some people have a bass boat, I have a suit of armor and an axe,” ACW Iron Swan Founder and Team President Jake McClung said.

Several years ago, McClung first found the sport through YouTube. On a first watch, it did not seem like a sport he could do. However, as he got out of the Marine Corps, he found himself searching for that sense of camaraderie and brotherhood. While he does still have that as a member of the Rainsville Fire Department, he decided to get into the sport himself. As one can imagine, the sport is not particularly cheap to get into, with each man expected to have a full set of armor as well as their weapon of choice.

When looking online for teams of the sport, he found that there had never been a team in Alabama. He joined an online group and asked how to get into the sport without a team to join, when he was directed to Andre Sinou, founder and CEO of the Armored Combat Worldwide, who guided him through the process of starting a team while McClung acquired his armor and traveled to Tulsa, Oklahoma to train with the Tulsa Tyrants. After six months of training, McClung traveled back to Alabama, ready to start up his own team and the first in Alabama. Now, a year later, McClung stands with 15 active members. After getting a taste of Nationals, competing last year with the Tyrants, McClung hopes that the next national tournament can be him leading his own team to a good placement.

“We compete everywhere. I went to Nationals in Salt Lake City last year. We go to Tulsa all the time, we’ve been to New Jersey, North Carolina, Mississippi, Texas. What we do is put on our own events and compete in sanctioned tournaments also,” McClung said.

Starting out, McClung found that recruiting those first few members was hard, often having to train by himself while waiting for a response on the recruiting calls.

“I had no clue what I was doing in the beginning. I just got on my social media pages and asking if any of my friends wanted to come over, train to put on armor, travel the country and fight people. It didn’t go well,” McClung said. “There were weeks where I’d post that I’m hosting a training on this day in the park and to come out (to join). I never got a single person doing that. I’d show up to the park, do what I had in my mind by myself.”

After months of nothing, McClung took to the various “What’s Happening” pages to try and find some members. He decided to put on an introduction event, where there would be no fighting or training. At the event, McClung, with his weapons and armor on hand for visuals, simply taught about the sport. 12 people signed up after that event, with seven or eight still being active today. They still hold those introductory events now, allowing people to get a taste for the sport. Once someone joins, no armor is required, they are allowed to train with the team all they like while everyone works together to slow piece together the armor pieces to compete. 

While the cost to join the action can be daunting, anyone is allowed to join the team, armored or not and train with the team while they slowly piece together their kit. The armorer used by McClung, located in New Jersey, sends people their armor piece by piece to allow people to slowly construct their armor kit.

“It took me about five or six months, buying it piece by piece to get (the whole kit). The way he does it, there is no interest. You just slowly pay it off and he sends you armor as you pay it off,” McClung said. “The first time I went to fight, I would not have traded that experience for the cost of armor.”

In the fights themselves, there are different ways people look to win. Some rely on speed or power, others simply look to outlast their opponents. McClung credits his work as a firefighter to helping him often endure in the fights.

Fights can be anything from one-on-one duels, five versus five or as many as 16 on one side. While there is some variation in how the fights go in terms of strategy, the aim is always to knock down your opponent.

“There is a thing for dueling that is for points but when you show up to a five versus five brawl, you can either forcefully take them to the ground or you pain them out, where you hurt them so bad that they have to take a knee or can’t stand,” McClung said.

Once you make three points of contact in a fight, you are considered out, with the reason being that is simply too difficult to get up at a reasonable speed when you are wearing armor that can weighs upwards of 80 pounds with another similarly armored person hitting you with metal weapons.

“It’s good armor but it’s still hard to get back up especially when someone is beating you on the ground,” McClung said.

Of course, even with a suit of armor, in any combat sport, injuries will happen. While McClung has not had as bad a time as others, at 27, he does have osteoarthritis in his neck courtesy of a move called ‘head ripping’, where they locked their axe underneath his helmet and did a hard ripping motion.

“That is probably the worst I’ve been hurt… That is the only time, knock on wood, that I have been hurt. Other people have horror stories,” McClung said.

When looking back at the national tournament last year, McClung hopes that this year, he can wave his own team’s banner and continue to grow the sport in Alabama. There is already some fruits bearing, with a new team being freshly established in Attalla and working on others in Mississippi and Tennessee.

“When I left Tulsa, I remember feeling really sad and telling my wife that I didn’t want to leave these guys and felt like I belonged there. I didn’t have a team or anything to come back home to, it was just my wife and I; It finally feels like we’re building what they have there. The growth is tremendous. We are genuinely a group of friends,” McClung said.

The Iron Swan will also be fighting at the MadCounty Renaissance Fair in Gurley on June 22, hoping to spread the sport to new faces and maybe continue to grow the region.