Daytona’s Welcome To Rockville, one of the largest rock-metal festivals in North America, is expanding beyond music with an event featuring not just bands, but bouts.
Blood4Blood, a bare-knuckle boxing and music event, is scheduled for the Ocean Center in Daytona Beach at 7 p.m. May 6 — the eve of Rockville. It features four fights, with abbreviated performances by four metal acts in between. Tickets are on sale now, starting at $37.
“We’re excited to bring together live music and combat sports in a way that creates a different kind of experience for fans, while still connecting to the energy surrounding the festival,” said Lynn Flanders, Ocean Center director. “It also allows us to welcome visitors into our venue and offer something that complements everything happening across the community that week.”
The event is a joint venture between BKFC — the Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship — and Danny Wimmer Presents, promoter of Welcome to Rockville.
Who will be part of Blood4Blood in Daytona Beach?
Alex Terrible, a Russia-born deathcore singer, will do double duty, performing with a band and in the ring.
Terrible is frontman for Slaughter to Prevail, which is headlining the Vortex Stage at Rockville on May 10. That gives him just four days to recover from whatever damage might be inflicted on him from a light heavyweight match with Cameron “The Bull” Delano, a professional bull rider who won his first bare-knuckle fight last year in Fort Worth, Texas.
BKFC bills Alex Terrible as “Alex The Terrible” after the much-tattooed rock star won his first fight in seconds.
Other fights on the card include BKFC veteran and London-born Jake “Brutal” Bostwick (4-2-1 in BKFC, but also 18-10 in MMA) against Roderick Stewart (2-3 in BKFC) in a middleweight bout. Stewart, of Abilene, Texas, goes by the nickname “Ice Water.”
Sergey “Kratos” Kalinin (1-0), another Russian, will box 40-year-old former MMA fighter, the “Alpha Dawg,” Brock Walker (1-1) of Stone, Virginia, in a heavyweight match.
In a women’s flyweight fight, Taylor “Killa Bee” Starling (5-4) of Rock Hill, South Carolina, takes on Sydney “Sundance” Smith (1-3).
The heavy metal band Black Label Society, which performs on Rockville’s Apex Stage on May 7, will also play at the Blood4Blood event, along with Crowbar and Malevolence.
Bare-knuckle fighting … is that even legal?
For more than 100 years, bare-knuckle fighting was a sport that hearkened back to the 19th century, when it largely became illegal.
In 2018, BKFC became the first organization to get legal clearance to host a legal, sanctioned and regulated bare-knuckle fight in the United States since 1889.
Blood4Blood is its 152nd event.
Bare-knuckle fighting in the strictest sense — boxing without gloves — remains illegal in Florida. The Legislature didn’t change that law, but the Florida Athletic Commission created a regulatory loophole for the Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship and other organizations. The fighters must wear gloves, but the gloves may be modified to expose their knuckles.
So the bare-knuckle pugilists began pummeling each other starting in 2019, and several fight nights a year have been held around the state since.
“The way Florida legalized bare-knuckle boxing was certainly comical if not outright embarrassing,” said Erik Magraken, a Canadian attorney and author of the blog, “Combat Sports Law.”
In an email to The News-Journal, Magraken has followed developments in bare-knuckle boxing for years and stands up for it.
“BKB is bloodier than gloved boxing. More cuts. More blood,” he said. “But likely less brain trauma. Traumatic brain injury is the real danger in combat sports. To that end, I don’t have any issue with BKB being a legal and regulated combative sport.”
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