By Larry Goldberg

A kickboxing match sold on the antagonism between a white-supremacist streamer with a federal firearms conviction and a Jewish opponent. An announced exhibition between a 202-pound casino owner and a 90-pound opponent. Mike Perry, the main event fighter, taking a purse cut of half for saving the show on two days’ notice, as Ariel Helwani confirmed. All of it on one permit, issued by the same Florida commission that told the United States Senate in April it was the model for health and safety.

Let me be precise about what the commission did and did not approve, because the charge only lands if it is exact. Nobody in Tallahassee signed off on a tweet or a t-shirt. What the commission controlled was the card itself: which matchups were fit to carry the state’s sanction, and who certified them. Under Florida’s rules, the competitiveness of a kickboxing match is certified by the promotion’s own matchmaker, not by commission staff. The commission had the discretion to look at this booking and this promotion and decline. It issued the permit.

Here is the booking it permitted. Paul Miller built his audience under the name Gypsy Crusader, streaming racist and antisemitic abuse at strangers on Omegle. In 2021 he was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison on firearms offenses: felon in possession of a gun and ammunition, plus an unregistered short-barreled rifle. Ben Azoulay is Jewish and said he was fighting for Israel and the Jewish people. The promotion put them in its co-feature.

Nobody had to guess what the fight was for, because the promotion said so itself. After Miller won a split decision, Korra, a staffer for Duel, the crypto casino that built and paid for the whole event, posted: “The world’s first Anti-Jew vs Jew boxing match, and the Anti-Jew came out victorious. Congratulations to Gypsy Crusader.” That is not a troll in the replies. That is the promotion’s own herald describing the product. The bout was kickboxing, not boxing; the account selling the hatred could not be bothered to get the discipline right.

The rest matched the marketing. Jewish Breaking News reported, and post-fight footage circulating online shows, a cornerman in a “FCK Israel” shirt, Miller performing Nazi-style salutes, and a melee after the decision between his entourage and people in the crowd.

Combat sports have always had a circus tent, and there is nothing wrong with the circus. Bad fights, mismatches, influencers who cannot throw a jab, owners who want to play fighter for a night. The circus has been part of boxing since the carnival days, and the sport has survived every clown who ever climbed into a ring. The fighters on this card who did their jobs, Perry included, deserve better than to be lumped in with what the promotion built around them.

What the sport cannot survive is hate as a business model. This was not two rivals who happen to dislike each other. Promotions build fights on personal animosity every week and there is nothing wrong with that either. This was a promotion that found a man whose public value is antisemitism, matched him with a Jewish opponent, and then congratulated “the Anti-Jew” from a staff account when he won. The hatred was not an unfortunate byproduct. The hatred was the product.

And every bit of what the commission controlled was handled by the book.

That is not a defense. That is the indictment. I hold promoter licenses in two states, and I answer a commission’s questions every time I run an event. That process exists so that somebody who does not work for the promoter decides whether a card is fit for the state’s sanction. Florida delegated the competitiveness question to the promotion’s own matchmaker, asked for a license and a fifteen thousand dollar bond from the promoter of record, and asked nothing about the offshore casino whose name was on the event or what that casino was selling. New York and New Jersey have declined far tamer bookings than this one. On their track records, this card does not get approved anywhere but Florida.

This is the same Florida commission whose executive director, Timothy Shipman, sat in front of Senator Ted Cruz’s committee in April and held Florida up as the model. “I have seen firsthand how strong health and safety regulations can make a difference,” he testified. The pending federal legislation would run national certification through the organization he leads. Congress should watch the tape from Orlando before it takes that testimony at face value.

Here is what should happen, and it is not much. Commissions should use the discretion they already have. Approving a fight card is not a rubber stamp; it is a judgment that an event is fit to carry the state’s sanction. A card whose co-feature is congratulated by the promotion’s own staff as a win for “the Anti-Jew” was not fit, and a commission that cannot tell a grudge match from a hate rally has no business lecturing the Senate about standards.

Venues, platforms, and sponsors should understand what they carried on Saturday. And everyone in this business, promoters, managers, broadcasters, writers, should say plainly that this is not ours. Boxing, MMA, and kickboxing belong to the fighters who bleed for them, and every one of those sports is debased when a casino can rent a ring, sell hatred as the attraction, and call it combat sports.

The fights were real. The blood was real. The hate was real too, and it was the point. Keep it out of our sports.