Justin "The Nightmare" Street

Justin Street is a bare knuckle fighter from Michigan, seventeen years into combat sports, which he counts from the day his uncle walked him into a boxing gym at thirteen.

Storm Athlete Management put Salty's Fight Talk in touch with him, and Cason Banyas already knew the name. He had watched Street fight in Atlanta in December at the first BKFC event he ever went to, and had wanted him on the show since. Street took the call from a gym in Florida with the lights off and his shirt soaked, days out from BKFC 70 in Hollywood, matched against the man who never made it to the ring the last time the fight was booked.

Seven years of boxing came first, then ten in MMA, where he won four titles and was the number one amateur in the state of Michigan in two weight classes, at 135 and at 125. He turned professional with no management team, and what followed were the fights a promoter could sell him, at whatever weight and on whatever notice. He now trains at Smith Brothers Combat in Florida, 3,000 miles from home, getting rounds in with Ryan Reber, Jay Jackson, Lorenzo Hunt and Angel Hernandez. Holding his own in there changed what he expects of himself, and his plan for fight night is to treat it like a sparring match and pick his shots.

As a freshman in high school he broke his neck, fractured his C7 and snapped a vertebra in half. He was told he would never walk again or play contact sports again, and the doctor denied him physical therapy, so the family went and found a different doctor and ground through nine months until he walked out of that hospital. The cost after that was money. By the time the Nathan Rivera fight came up he had no gym and no home, living week to week in hotels, and he took it at 145 on short notice because the weekly bill was due. He says he should never have been in a ring at that weight, that it should be the only loss on his record, and that he was fighting for the wrong reasons.

He is 3,000 miles from his sons for this camp and keeps circling back to them. If dad can chase it, he says, they can. What he wants past the belt is for the next kid living the way he lived, poor, moving again by the end of the month, fighting because he is the new one wearing the wrong shoes, to look up his story and see that a person can come back from it. When he gets to the top he says no poor kid gets left behind. Until then it is chin down, knuckle up, move forward.