For better or worse, it’s been quite a year for Mike Perry.
The former UFC welterweight turned bare-knuckle boxing standout continued his winning ways at the start of 2024. Fresh off arguably his two biggest career wins over former UFC champions Luke Rockhold and Eddie Alvarez, Perry followed up the chaos by taking on one-time UFC title challenger Thiago Alves. “Platinum” kept the ball rolling and scored another finish with a 60-second knockout.
Perry’s wins catapulted him to the forefront of BKFC as its clear face of the promotion. While he’s been content in the promotion, he’s happily left doors open to other possibilities whether in gloved or gloveless combat.
For the largely forgettable Logan Paul vs. Dillon Danis boxing match in late 2023, Perry acted as the bout’s backup fighter. He ultimately wasn’t needed but he got his toes wet back in the world of boxing, which he was absent from since 2015. Then Logan’s younger brother Jake needed a filler after Mike Tyson was dealt a health scare ahead of a July dance date. In came Perry, and out he left with his first post-UFC loss across any combat sport when Paul knocked him out in Round 6.
Perry, 33, was then arrested for driving under the influence in October and issued a public statement of apology after bodycam footage showed him repeatedly hurling anti-gay slurs at officers.
Now Perry is hoping get back to what he does best.
Ideally, that means a return at BKFC’s big 2025 kickoff event KnuckleMania 5 on Jan. 25. Negotiations are already underway for “Platinum,” but he can’t say who the potential opponent is.
“I don’t know if he wants to accept the challenge. I don’t know what’s taking so long,” Perry said Tuesday on Uncrowned’s “The Ariel Helwani Show.” “I know (BKFC president) David Feldman wanted to bring me to Philadelphia for the first-ever (BKFC) card in Philadelphia. He’s been wanting to bring it home, and I know he would want to have me on the card, being as I am the most exciting bare-knuckle fighter that people tend to tune in to watch.
“Who knows if it’ll be pushed. I possibly was going to fight before the end of the year. That got pushed, that was fine to me. January sounded really good. I would love to start the year off with a banger, and depending on what happens, I do have three fights left on my contract with bare-knuckle. I would love to fight those fights [in] 2025.”
“Especially with all the fans talking about if I was fired or not — you guys, Bare Knuckle, come to bat for your boy out here and get me a dang fight so I’m not out here looking silly,” Perry added, referring to BKFC part-owner Conor McGregor’s infamous public lambasting of Perry’s performance against Paul.
Aside from staying busy in the ring, Perry has added to his plate outside of it as well. This past Saturday, he officially launched Dirty Boxing Championship, a new promotion that features hybrid rules bouts that mix the striking arts of boxing with elbows, five-ounce gloves and limited ground-and-pound.
The event came as somewhat of a surprise, and according to Perry, that was by design. Three-time UFC title challenger Yoel Romero headlined the show and knocked out Power Slap veteran Duane Crespo in the first round.
For Perry, the idea of bringing a new fight league into the fold was birthed a few years back.
“I’ve always had this [hope] to be a Dana White type of guy who’s just living his best life and gets to throw on the fights,” Perry said. “I’ve always loved going to the fights. When I’m there, I want to get in on the action, but also just sit back and enjoying the action that the fighters are putting on. All the guys and girls gave me great respect at the show. They were excited to perform.
“I’ve had lots of interviews and talks, and lots of questions kept coming up the past couple years. What would I be doing [if I wasn’t fighting]? How would I do it? What would I want to see if I was Dana White or if I was a promoter making a fight league?
“As we had meetings with the team down in Malki (Kawa’s) office in Miami, we put things together and I said, ‘It should be this way.’ I think we’ll get great fighters if we put small gloves on. We have a chance to reach a different audience and a different group of athletes as far as boxers themselves, they just put a little smaller glove on, they probably want to try it out, see how punching somebody like that would be.”
Having traveled to Russia in recent years to corner some of his friends and teammates, Perry has seen his fair share of chaos — in some cases, he was even a part of it.
Some of the biggest takeaways from those trips led to this past weekend. Regarding the unique rules, Perry saw Russian boxing matches staged with four-ounce gloves, which was adopted. He even took from one of his own experiences, vividly recalling when he knocked down Michael “Venom” Page in their August 2022 bare-knuckle boxing collision.
“I thought if we get a knockdown with a good strike, there should be a chance to follow up, ground-and-pound to finish your fight,” Perry said. “Adding elbows to boxing also, this is just such a treat for the fan base the way that the fights go. All the action, the power punches, they’re slipping and rolling and throwing big hooks. If they wobble their opponent or they’re guarding too heavy, you can elbow straight through the guard, up the middle. And if you drop them, you ground-and-pound them. The kicks slow it down, in my opinion. I think this has a real shot to be so popular.”
Dirty Boxing Championship provided a wildly unique atmosphere not often seen at modern combat sports events. It was dark, smokey, and unexpectedly reminiscent of watching something straight out of John Wick movie nightclub scene. Adding to that underground fight club feel was the presence of fighters like UFC heavyweight champion Jon Jones in attendance.
Although it wasn’t streamed live for fans to watch in real-time, that only helped capture interest and get people wanting to find out what happened. That won’t be permanent, however, as Perry was adamant in wanting to work out the kinks first. In 2025, he believes there’s a 60% chance Dirty Boxing will be live-streamed to audiences around the globe and talks are already underway with distributors.
The event also whet Perry’s appetite to compete on a future Dirty Boxing event himself.
“We had a lot of good people in the building and we were happy to have them there,” Perry said. “We wish we could have invited everyone or streamed, but it was a concept, and we needed to showcase it to see if it works. I think it works, and trust me, we want to share this with people, but there are some things we have to tweak and we only want to release the best. Because all these people involved, we’re all for high quality. Not quantity. We don’t just want to shove crap down your throats.
“We want to make a very quality product. We were able to put on a very good show, but there are some tweaks we need to make and we want to come back in early 2025 and have our first live-streamed show, depending on how that works and who we’re going to work with in order to do that.”
