News from Ray
Why I Was Ringside at BKB 56
By Ray Diaz · August 2026
I was standing at the ropes at BKB 56 in Los Angeles in a black and gold robe, and the honest reason I was there has nothing to do with fighting.
I was there for Adel.
Adel Altamimi owns Humble Warrior Gym. He is a Bellator fighter, a champion Kyokushin karate black belt, a black belt in jiu jitsu, and the face of Bare Knuckle Boxing. If you have watched bare knuckle at all in the last couple of years, you have seen him. But that is not how I know him. I know him as the guy who reminded me what it feels like to push yourself hard again.
What I lost when I left Las Vegas
When I lived in Vegas I trained at TMT in Chinatown, Floyd Mayweather's gym. That is not a normal room. On any given morning you are in there with Curmel Moton, who Floyd has been building since he was a kid. John Easter, The Candyman, who is 7-0 with seven knockouts. Joseph Brown, The Prodigy. Jursly Vargas, The Gorilla, who I trained with directly.
Nobody in that gym is coasting. You cannot be. The standard in the room does the work for you. You show up and the level is already there and you either meet it or you feel it.
I moved back from Vegas in 2024. And I lost my boxing.
Not dramatically. Nothing happened. I just was not in that room anymore, and without the room the standard drifts. That is the part nobody tells you about training around elite people. You are not only borrowing their technique, you are borrowing their baseline. Take the baseline away and you do not notice it going. You notice it about eight months later.
Running into Adel
I ran into Adel this year, in 2026.
What he gave me back was not conditioning. I want to be careful about that, because it would be easy to write this as a comeback story and it is not one. He did not get me back in shape. He reminded me that pushing yourself hard is fun. That it is rewarding. That there is a version of training that is not maintenance and not vanity, it is just the pleasure of being good at something difficult.
He inspired me to keep staying elite. That is a different thing than getting back in shape, and it is the more useful thing.
He is also generous with it in a way that is not common. Adel lets people be around him and actually learn. He will show you the technique. He will explain why it works. A lot of people at his level guard what they know. He hands it to you.
The room at BKB 56
So when he was on that card, I showed up.
I met David Tetreault, the CEO of Bare Knuckle Boxing. Before bare knuckle he spent over a decade at 20th Century Fox in marketing, then about seven years as Golden Boy's chief business officer under Oscar De La Hoya, where he helped build Ryan Garcia. Talking to him, you can tell the sport is being run by somebody who understands that the athletes are the product and the story is the business.
I also got a photo with Armando Vargas about a week before he fought, and won, at BKB 57 overseas.
And then I ran into King Bach.
Mr. Six Pack
Andrew and I go back to 2015. He was on Resident Advisors on Hulu, playing Sam Parker. I was on East Los High, also Hulu. Same platform, same year, and here is the part that actually made us friends. We had the same publicist.
That is how it works more often than people think. You do not meet at a party. You meet because two publicists put you in the same press cycle and you end up in the same rooms for a month.
But that is just how we met. What the friendship has actually been about for eleven years is fitness.
We are in the same field chasing the same thing from two different directions. Stay healthy, stay sharp, stay in shape, stay on top of it. He looks at it one way, I look at it another, and we have been pushing each other about it since we were both starting out. Mostly me pushing him, if I am honest. But I take plenty from watching how he works too.
So when we ran into each other at BKB 56, he grabbed my camera to record me. Then he handed it back and I said, Mr. Six Pack.
He looked at me and said, you are Mr. Eight Pack.
Eleven years. Two Hulu shows. A bare knuckle boxing venue in Los Angeles on a Saturday night. And the first thing out of both our mouths is about who is in better shape.
That is the friendship. That is exactly what it has always been.
What I actually took from it
The thing I keep coming back to is not the fights.
It is that the standard you hold yourself to is mostly a function of who you are standing next to. That is not a motivational line, it is mechanically true. In Vegas the room made me sharp. Away from it I drifted, not because I got lazy, but because there was nothing pulling upward.
Adel is that pull again. And the correction I would make to anybody reading this who has fallen off something they used to be good at is this. You probably do not need discipline. You need proximity. Find the room where the level is already high and let it do what rooms do.
Then show up when your people fight.