Duel Arena 1
Perry vs Danis

The card

• Mike Perry×Dillon Danis MMA · Welterweight · 170 lbs · MAIN
• Paul "Gypsy Crusader" Miller×Ben "King" Azoulay Kickboxing · Heavyweight · CO-MAIN
• Jimi Manuwa×Chase Sherman Boxing · Heavyweight
• Phil Rowe×Javanis Ross Boxing · Light heavyweight · 175 lbs
• Alex Nicholson×Brad Taylor MMA · Heavyweight
• Patrick Clark Jr.×Ryan Pownall Boxing · Cruiserweight · 200 lbs
• Blake Anthony×Nate Morrow MMA · Featherweight · 145 lbs
• Jack Grady×Wade Stokan Influencer boxing · Exhibition · 165 lbs
• AJ Cunningham×Joe Penafiel MMA · Lightweight · 155 lbs
• Daniel Cao×Mason Ajester Boxing · 165 lbs
• Shane King×Thomas Phillips Boxing · 120 lbs
• Ossi "Monarch" Ketola×Patrick Holden Boxing · Middleweight · 92kg vs 41kg

Where and when

The main event

Mike Perry against Dillon Danis is the fight the card was built around. The two have been trading insults online and squaring up at press conferences for years without ever being contracted, which is exactly the kind of thing Duel likes to put its name on.

Perry fights out of Orlando, so this is a home card for him. He holds Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship's King of Violence title and returned to MMA rules in May after a long spell away from them. Danis is a jiu-jitsu black belt and a former training partner of Conor McGregor — a grappler by trade against someone who wants a fight in straight lines.

The ring matters here more than usual. A cage gives a grappler a wall to work against; ropes do not behave the same way in a scramble — that is unpacked in the main event preview. More on Perry and Danis.

Manuwa's return is the real story

Jimi Manuwa has not competed since June 2019, when Aleksandar Rakic stopped him with a head kick. He is 45, he is coming back after nearly seven years away, and he is doing it in a heavyweight boxing match rather than the light heavyweight MMA division where he built his name stopping fighters like Ovince Saint Preux and Corey Anderson.

Then the opponent changed. Rashad Coulter came off the card and Chase Sherman — a former UFC heavyweight who beat Coulter at UFC 211 — stepped in on roughly ten days' notice. A seven-year layoff is hard enough without an upgrade in opposition a week and a half out.

Full background on Manuwa and Sherman.

The rest of the card

Miller vs Azoulay is the kickboxing co-feature at heavyweight.

Phil Rowe vs Javanis Ross at light heavyweight is Rowe's professional boxing debut — a UFC welterweight moving to a different sport and up in weight, which is a bigger ask than it reads. See Rowe.

Alex Nicholson vs Brad Taylor is heavyweight MMA. Nicholson fought in the UFC's heavyweight division; more here.

Patrick Clark Jr. vs Ryan Pownall at cruiserweight pairs former WWE developmental talent — Clark wrestled as Velveteen Dream — against Pownall, who is making his own professional debut. Two debutants, which changes the read entirely: more on Clark.

Blake Anthony vs Nate Morrow at featherweight is the late addition and possibly the best pure matchup on paper: an undefeated prospect against a submission specialist. Broken down here.

Grady vs Stokan closes the announced card as an influencer exhibition. The remaining bouts — Cunningham vs Penafiel, Cao vs Ajester, King vs Phillips — fill out the undercard.

The promoter is fighting on his own card

Ossi Ketola — Monarch, the man who built Duel and put $63 million across a poker table on stream — is on the card himself, boxing Patrick Holden. Ketola is billed at 92kg and Holden at 41kg, and both men are making their boxing debuts.

The promotion is presenting it straight, describing the matchup as hard to call and predicting it goes the full twelve rounds. Read that as the promotion talking. A fifty-one kilogram gap is not a competitive weight class in any sanctioned sport, and the bout is on the card for the same reason the rest of Duel's output exists — it will be clipped.

Full breakdown on the bout page. Worth stating plainly rather than pretending otherwise: this is the spectacle strand of the business, not the sporting one. The main event is a real fight between two professionals. This is the founder appearing on his own promotion, and the two things sit on the same card by design.

Results

The card ran on 29 August. Confirmed results so far:

Two bouts are accounted for differently. Cao against Ajester appears on every published version of the card, but no outlet has reported a result — both men were making combat sports debuts with no record to write about, and the fight simply was not covered. The founder's bout with Patrick Holden is a different case: it does not appear in any published results list at all, and it was absent from the live card listings on the night. On the available evidence it did not take place, and we are not recording a result for a fight nobody reported happening.

The main event fell apart before it started

Dillon Danis withdrew on the Thursday, two days out, reportedly over an arm laceration that needed stitches. Brandon Jenkins came in on short notice and the bout was reworked around him, so the card that was sold as Perry vs Danis was run as Perry vs Jenkins. Perry appeared to injure his shoulder in the opening minutes, Jenkins landed a kick to the body, and it was over at 2:38 of the first round. Ariel Helwani reported that Perry's purse was cut in half for the reworked fight. Footage and the rest of it on Perry's page.

The broadcast plan changed too. Arena 1 was announced and sold as a pay-per-view on duelarena.tv, then given away free on YouTube instead.

The best finish of the night was on the prelims

AJ Cunningham knocked Joe Penafiel out with a spinning back elbow at 4:04 of the first round, in a lightweight MMA bout that ran on the free preliminary card. It is the cleanest piece of fighting anyone produced all evening, and it happened before most of the audience had arrived at the broadcast.

That placement is the whole card in one line. Cunningham is 11-5 with UFC experience and a genuinely rounded record — four knockouts, four submissions — and Penafiel is a long-serving veteran. Matched anywhere else, it is a main-card fight. Here it sat under a mascot exhibition and a founder's novelty bout, because the card was built around attention rather than merit.

Trouble in the stands

0:56

0:30

0:52

The night's most circulated footage is not from the ring. Reporting on the incident ties it to the co-feature: after the scorecards were read for Miller over Azoulay, an altercation broke out between Miller's team and people in the crowd as they moved backstage, with punches and kicks thrown and at least one person visibly bleeding. Security spent close to a minute separating people while the card continued.

It was not the only flashpoint. Other footage from the night shows spectators climbing across seat rows as a scuffle spreads through a stand, and a further disturbance closer to the ring apron. Three separate captures, one venue, one evening.

The bout that produced the first of them had been sold on exactly the friction that spilled over. That is not an accident of the night; it is what the matchmaking was for. More on the fight itself on the Miller vs Azoulay page.

Every clip from the night

14 captures from Arena 1 are on this site. They sit on the page of whoever they belong to rather than piling up here, so this is the index:

The full catalogue, including everything from Duel's studio streams, is on the clips page.