The Pillow Fight Championship has crowned its first ever winners in an event in which the children's sleepover pastime became a professional combat sport. Saturday's pay-per-view event in Florida had 16 men and eight women — most with mixed martial arts and boxing backgrounds — face off as they advanced through a bracket-style competition until a champion emerged. This was not your little sister's pillow fight. Participants wore mouth guards and lashed each other with heavy blows using specially designed pillows. “The fighters don’t like to get hurt, and there’s a lot of people who don’t want to see the blood. They want to see good competition, they just don’t want to see the violence,” Steve Williams, chief executive of the Pillow Fight Championships, says on the organisation's official website. The Pillow Fight Championships have “quickly evolved into a very popular sport-based showcase complete with all the strength, stamina and strategic skills of the other more brutal combat sports but with a massive amount of fun”, the website says. On the women's side, Brazilian Istela Nunes knocked down American Kendahl Voelker and in the men's final, American Hauley Tillman defeated countryman Marcus Brimage. Each winner earned a title belt and $5,000. <i>Reuters contributed to this report</i>