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 grew up in a trailer park in Polk County, raising cattle for FFA auctions, with roots back to Kansas City. A stretch at Florida State - where, among other things, he was a cheerleader - is what eventually put him in Tallahassee, and in Josh's orbit.
Both men had come up fighting for promoters who treated them like a paycheck, not a star. Mitchell still tells the story of a fighter charged $20 for an event shirt with his own name on the back, after a $300 pro fight in a cow pasture. 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: Combat Night ran what it says was the world's first no-fans MMA event, in Jacksonville, weeks before the UFC's own pandemic-era return to the same city.
Across 180+ events and 2,500+ fights, Combat Night has run cards in Orlando, Miami, Jacksonville, Tallahassee and beyond, and was named the best MMA promotion in Florida in 2016, 2018 and 2019. It is also a launchpad: fighters who first walked through a Combat Night cage have gone on to the UFC, the PFL, Bellator and WWE - seven big-league alumni and counting. Their stories live in the Hall of Fame; the cage where they started keeps making more.
