The spark was a drive home from Rise of a Warrior, a promotion in Fort Pierce doing things right - real lights, real production. "That's the kind of event we need to run," Josh said. "What's stopping us?" Mitchell asked. "Money." Mitchell had it, saved from slinging supplements out of a Mazda Protégé. He committed all of it. They trained out of Capital City Combat Club in Tallahassee, and the name at the top of that envelope - Ralph Valdez - won Combat Night's first title and still coaches with the promotion today.
Mitchell was born in Mulberry and grew up in a trailer park in Polk County, raising cattle for FFA auctions. A stretch at Florida State - where, among other things, he was a cheerleader - is what put him in Tallahassee. What put him in Josh's orbit was judo: he had wrestled in high school, picked the mats back up at Tallahassee Community College, and a judo match led him to the jiu-jitsu and MMA gym where he first heard Josh's name.
Both men had come up fighting for promoters who treated them like a paycheck, not a star. Mitchell still tells the story on himself: after a $300 pro fight in a cow pasture, he asked the promoter for one of the event shirts with his own name on the back, and was told it would cost him $20. Combat Night was built to be the opposite: real footage of every fight, merch given rather than sold, and fighters treated like the stars they actually are.
By March 2020, that scrappy start had grown into something that mattered. With the pandemic closing arenas across the sport, Combat Night ran an empty-arena card at Jacksonville's Shrine Auditorium - the only MMA event held in the United States that weekend, as ESPN reported. Seven weeks later the UFC came to the same city, and Jacksonville's chief administrative officer told ESPN that Combat Night had been the gateway to Jacksonville being open to the UFC.
Across 200+ events and 2,500+ fights, Combat Night has run cards in Orlando, Miami, Jacksonville, Tallahassee, Tampa, Gainesville and Fort Lauderdale, has crossed the state line into Georgia, and has been named the best MMA promotion in Florida multiple times over. It is also a launchpad: fighters who first walked through a Combat Night cage have gone on to the UFC, the PFL, Bellator and ONE Championship, and beyond MMA to WWE. Their stories live in the Hall of Fame; the cage where they started keeps making more.
