The Kenwood World Pillow Fighting Championships was put to bed this year, after a 40-year run. submitted photo
Fans of Kenwood’s World Pillow Fighting Championships will be crying in their pillows this 4th of July.
The pillow fights are no more.
Organizers several months ago made what they said was the difficult decision to cancel the 40-year-old event, which featured combatants armed with down-filled pillows who straddled a horizontal pole above a pool of mud and battled it out at Kenwood Plaza Park.
“It was getting a little bit too big for the area where we were having it,” said Daren Bellach, a fire captain with the Kenwood Fire Protection District. “It’s just that every year… it got harder to manage.”
An estimated 6,000 to 8,000 onlookers came to watch roughly 150 contestants attempt to whap one another into the mud below.
During the course of the all-day event, the crowd would switch from being family-dominated to more of a college-aged crowd, Bellach said, and “there were always five or six drunken incidents.”
But that wasn’t the reason for canceling, he said.
“(That’s) pretty normal for an event of that magnitude. It was never a drunken ball. It was always pretty well handled.”
Kenwood gained fame from the pillow fights. Late-night TV hosts David Letterman and Jay Leno interviewed champion pillow fighters; ESPN, the sports TV network, covered the event.
The pillow fights were the only fund-raising event for the Kenwood Fireman’s Association, a non-profit organization that funds firehouse improvements and buys firefighting equipment. The event netted between $30,000 and $40,000, annually.
“To replace that (pillow-fight) type of event with one single event is nearly impossible,” Bellach said.
The association is planning a crab feed sometime in February as a new way to raise money.
Fire chief Bob Uboldi said, “We’ve got a committee that’s working on some other kind of fund-raising event.”
There’s also been talk of possibly bringing the pillow fights back in 2008 at some new location.
But Kenwood will still celebrate the 4th of July with a parade, breakfast and footrace.
For information, check www.kenwoodparade.org.
