At King of the Ring, violence is the means and the end

“You fighting, mate?” Warren, an ex-doorman whose face is framed with grey fuzz and a Balenciaga cap, asks me as I arrive. I’ve come to King of the Ring, an unlicensed boxing event tucked behind an old social club in Stockport. 

No, I’m not fighting, I say. I’m writing. A bit ashamed of the quaint rhyme, especially here, I try to bluster past it. But then another guy, a medic, spots me and says: “Ah, yeah, you’ve fought with us before haven’t you?” Again, no. 

That’s a shame, because they need someone to fill the 75kg slot. Someone dropped out and now a man called — I shit you not — Warlord, has no one to fight. I’m not 75kg, nor am I in any mental or physical condition to fight Warlord. As it happens, neither is Cam, but he steps forward anyway. 

Cam is laconic and has the word “haunted” tattooed above his right eyebrow. He has a two coils of barbed wire tattooed on either side of his lips and “Loyalty over Royally” on his left pec. It seems they forgot to cross the t. He only came to watch his friend Adam, who has been on the fight card for weeks and had at least some time to prepare, but will now fight. They take him for a medical check and weigh him. He’s hovering around 60kg but is still up for it.

I ask Cam why — on a hot Sunday, when he could have just had a few beers and watched others fight on the hard, dead earth behind this social club — he is doing this. Warlord has 20kg on him. Warlord has veins running down every limb like pulsing forks of lightning. Warlord literally is the current King of the Ring. Cam says: “I was just like, put me in. Pass the time.”

King of the Ring was launched in 2022 by RemDizz — a sobriquet he prefers I stick to — and was conceived as an antidote to knife crime. The idea being that if two people had a problem deemed serious enough that it could come to one stabbing the other, they could instead fight it out here. Its strapline is “put down the knife, use your left and right”. 

“We first started it to just squash beef”, RemDizz says. “So, if you are one of those types of people in that lifestyle, if you have serious beef with someone and it's going to go further, then you need to come down and settle it.” RemDizz himself, who is in his mid-twenties and grew up in Chorlton, was never drawn to the type of lifestyle, i.e. criminal, he is referring to. But he saw an opportunity after watching similar boxing tournaments on YouTube and wanted to follow in the footsteps of his brother, who has always had an entrepreneurial mindset.

The concept, lesser violence preventing lethal violence, initially strikes me as flawed but I’m assured otherwise. “I’m telling you,” Warren says, “this place has saved lives.” He tells me about one fighter, who he doesn’t want to name, who habitually uses the tournament as a forum to resolve street conflict. Particularly when he has, say, robbed someone’s cannabis supply. He’ll get them down to “K.O.T.R” to patch things up. It’s a convenient arrangement for him, as Warren tells me: “He just fucking batters everyone”.

But as time went on and K.O.T.R’s popularity grew (it has a YouTube channel with millions of views), those with other reasons started turning up. There were guys who wanted to dip their toe in the water before starting out as licensed, amateur boxers. Others wanted something to train for and work towards, as one might a marathon. Another contingent, the Cam’s of the world, just wanted a fight. 

Fin Foley, an 18-year-old former mixed martial artist, paces the balcony overlooking the courtyard where RemDizz and others are putting together the ring. No bigger than a paddling pool and maybe only slightly sturdier, the ring is hung with K.O.T.R’s strapline and various sponsors. 

Fin sees the tournament as the prelude to a career as a fighter. “I want to be a world champion one day,” he tells me, like it’s obvious. “This is the first hurdle”. Fin is one of the lightest fighters on the card, in the 60-62 kg category. He looks a little peaky, pulling on a vape and sometimes stopping to bounce on his toes. Inside the club, where it’s cooler, others shadow box and hit pads, coming out to pace topless around the courtyard and eye up their opponents.

It’s a bit melodramatic, and the bravado feels a tad confected. But that is another draw. As an unlicensed fighter, your options don’t extend much beyond this or your workplace’s charity boxing match, where your colleague who only talks about the UFC can finally give himself a ring-name like “The Destroyer” and post about it on Instagram. 

Two fighters in particular, Flash (real name Jack, like Jumping Jack Flash) and Caleb, have whipped themselves into a very watered down Tyson-Holyfield rivalry. They’ve shit-talked each other in the group chat set up for the fighters, a long rally of audio messages I took the time to listen to while taking a walk the previous morning. Flash said he would never let someone like Caleb, who has a Playboy tattoo on his lower abdomen, knock him out. Caleb defended the groin-adjacent artwork and made clear that, despite it, he would still knock Flash out. That’s honestly the long and short of it. But, to my dumbfoundment, it’s made them something of a hot-topic during the pre-fight build-up. 

Flash has fought every month since March, and is on a bit of a redemptive arc. In 2022 he was in a car accident that shattered his femur, twisted his knee and broke his ankle. “I thought I was never going to walk again, " he says. “Then I thought, fuck it, signed up to Street Beefs [a similar event to KOTR], without even a training session”. Two months ago he was in Manchester Crown Court for possession with intent to supply cannabis, “I was selling weed, got my life into… thingy. Found fighting, and I’m never gonna look back, I’m just legit going forward.”

Caleb took the fight on short notice and also agreed to wear 4oz gloves — tiny MMA gloves that offer virtually no protection. Fist-bumping him just feels like tapping marble wrapped in leather. Like Cam, Caleb seeks no redemption, nor finds any higher sense of purpose, in having his face torn up by a fist wrapped in a pointless glove (this is exactly what happens, in the first and only seconds of the bout). 

“Fuck knows mate,” he says when I ask what he’s doing here. “Just fancied it. I was in the group chat and they needed a fighter, so I was like yeah, something to do.” That nonchalance might be a practiced part of the bravado on display as they strut around in the sun — flexing their backs like exoskeletal bugs. But I’m struck by how many are here for nothing more than a fight. 

Due to delays with getting the ring delivered, things start late. The first fight of the day is between Sam and Archie, everyone is announced by first- or ring-name. Sam is ghostly white with jet black hair, Archie with a light beard and floppy fringe. The crowd of maybe 50 — I’m told this is a quiet one — manifests at RemDizz’s demand when he announces the fights are going to start, and it wants blood. 

Sam lands a clean shot on Archie and the latter grunts in shock, air escaping him. It reminds me of watching fights at school. The pit-of-the-stomach nervous energy, the real, guttural sound of a face warped by a fist. Everyone fights three frenzied, one-minute rounds. The size of the ring, shared with RemDizz as referee, means there’s precious little space between them, leaving each of them in a constant state of attack. 

Some of the fights are horrendously one-sided. Fighters, stepping into the ring for the first time, are reduced to cowering wrecks, while the other swings gleefully, landing punches at random. At one point Adam, the guy Cam came to watch, almost screams with rapture as his friends cheer him on. His opponent, leant over double, just hobbles around the ring, face engorged but weirdly serene as Adam chases after him. 

But the even fights are the worst. Both are whittled down over the rounds until neither of them have anything left to give. After one round, a fighter comes back to his corner with spittle dangling from the hairs on his chin and his legs giving way and asks them to call it. “I can’t go another,” he pleads to the medic assigned to his corner. The medic tells him he’ll regret it if he throws it, tells him his opponent is tired too and keeps dropping his left glove — if he gets him with a hook he’ll be done. 

While this is happening, a small video team films the fights. Trying to get the right angle on the big shots and also get the reactions from the crowd. The real king of the ring is the content. The Instagram reels these fighters can share later and watch back. In fact, at one point, when a fighter called Brad is vomiting over the ropes, Flash shouts “remember mate, this is going on YouTube, forever.”

The penultimate fight of the day is Warlord vs Cam. Even RemDizz, calling the fighters, has a little pause. “Next we’ve got Warlord and… Cam.” Cam’s friends hype him up the best they can, and he rushes out like a warrior into the fray, hungry for glory, kleos, whatever. He is gassed out, red and puffy by the end of the first round. Down in the second and again in the third. But he lifts his gloves when it’s over and is happy. Just passing the time.