Patricky Pitbull had a turbulent week in Miami for Karate Combat 61 and, in the end, he never entered the pit for his clash with champion Shahzaib Rind after multiple street brawls broke out. Days have passed, but both sides of the incident remain at odds about who was at fault and how the situation was handled.
Pitbull and Rind had a tense face-off on April 30, which ended with his team trading punches and kicks with Rind. The following morning, MMA fighters CJ Brant and Austin Spivey went to the host hotel with water guns and attacked both Patricky, his brother Patricio, and their wives, igniting a massive brawl that ended with Patricky suffering a cut and being removed from the next day’s Karate Combat card.
The Brazilian brothers attacked Karate Combat for “trying to manipulate” the narrative on social media in order to make them look bad, and promotion president Asim Zaidi defended the company’s work handling the situation. Zaidi told MMA Fighting there was no security for the Thursday faceoff because the athletes involved were “so high level … I really didn’t think it was needed.”
“I don’t think [the Pitbull brothers] meant for it to happen,” Zaidi said. “I think it was a lot of just, like, unfortunate circumstance. Shahzaib went chest to chest, and then the Pitbull brother didn’t want to back down, so he bearhugged him and pushed them back. Then Shahzaib didn’t like that, and it just escalated. But I don’t want to blame anybody. I wish that nobody would keep jumping in against Shahzaib. It was like three versus one, and he was just with his wife and his sponsor. That stinks, but nobody got hurt. I don’t like it, but I didn’t mind it. I said, ‘Okay, good. More attention for the fight on Saturday, and everybody made it out healthy. So, it’s over. I’m happy with that.’”
It escalated the next morning moments after the official weigh-ins. Patricio said he suggested extra security on Friday morning because he anticipated “some kind of incident,” and not doing so was “another mistake” on Karate Combat’s part.
“With the water gun incident, man, it was very stupid,” Zaidi said. “I didn’t have security on this one because it was in front of the commission. We never have security in things that the commission is involved with because who the hell would want to fight in front of somebody that can suspend your license or somebody that can stop you from getting paid, you know? That never happened ever in the history in front of us, so I didn’t expect it. And then these guys, they like to play some prank. They’re, like, 15 feet away, sprinkling the water on the breakfast table and it’s flying over everybody. The Pitbull brothers get mad, they run outside. And what’s weird is, while they’re chasing them, while the Pitbulls are punching and kicking, the guy’s still sprinkling the water. I think he still thinks it’s a joke, but it’s not a joke to them.”
Patricky, a former Bellator lightweight champion, said Rind was to blame for the Thursday incident because he “didn’t respect the faceoff limits.”
“I just held my ground,” Patricky said. “I think the real trouble started when the guy tried to throw two elbows at me. And after I pushed him, he still tried to kick me. That’s when my brother went after him. But if it had just been the usual faceoff tension, it would’ve stayed at some pushing and nothing more. But those guys set everything up for the next day.”
“If you wanted a calm faceoff, you shouldn’t be touching the guy,” Patricio added. “The champion forced my brother off balance and made him step back, and before that happened, my brother went in and hugged him. But it was done in a friendly way too. You can see my brother is smiling. After he tried to throw two elbows, I step in from where I was, telling him to calm down. I see him preparing another elbow and I go there and say, ‘Don’t do that.’ And the guy still tries to hit Patricky anyway. It was only after the kick he threw at Patricky’s face that things really heated up. … Someone hit him from behind, that wasn’t right, but emotions were running high. We knew the guy was alone. I even said back at the hotel that I didn’t like it because, one way or another, it looked like three against one. But it wasn’t three against one at the same time, it was isolated incidents with each person.”
Zaidi admits “there’s no argument as far as what caused the second brawl,” citing Brant and Spivey’s decision to aim at the table where both Pitbull brothers and their wives were having breakfast. Zaidi still questions, “did it go too far or not,” calling both men—who happen to be MMA fighters—“kids trying to have fun.”
“I talked to them and they said, ‘Last night we saw three people attack our friend. All three people trying to punch our friend. The least we can do is sprinkle water on them,’” Zaidi said. “I said, ‘Guys, yeah, but not in the hotel, not in my promotion, not while they’re having breakfast with the family. Is different, you know?’ But they were like kids trying to have fun, you know? They’re 25 years old, you know? It’s just something very stupid that they shouldn’t do.”
The Pitbull brothers claimed, on a video posted on social media, that Karate Combat was aware of the water guns before the situation started, saying they left the promotion’s office at the host hotel.
“There’s no Karate Combat office in a hotel or anywhere,” Zaidi said. “That’s not even a thing. It’s very disappointing because they know this stuff. I think they’re trying to twist it. Maybe because they feel like attacked by so many of the comments because the videos went very viral and a lot of people, especially the American audience, really went hard on them, attacking them, so I think they want support so they’re trying to find like some conspiracy. But if that was the case, if that really happened, then the commission would not suspend only the Pitbull brothers and Diego Brandao and their coaches so far, right? And now they’re investigating into the water gun guys.”
Patricio said that by “office” he meant a room at the hotel where the Karate Combat staff was working during the week, alongside the commission. Also, he’s positive Zaidi “already knew those idiots had those [water] guns.”
“There’s no way he didn’t know,” Patricio said. “They came out from inside holding those guns and he knew things could escalate because we were there with our wives. An honorable man will defend his family. It’s not that we got mad because it was just a water gun, we got mad because they aimed it at her face. Especially my wife. She got hit straight in the face. I saw the guy switching his aim, moving away from me and shooting at her. My brother reacted very quickly, threw a bottle, and that’s when the whole situation blew up.”
The UFC featherweight criticized Zaidi for the way they handled the situation during the week, giving Rind a replacement opponent on hours’ notice and promoting the brawl on social media in a light that benefits Rind’s side. Zaidi said they made sure to get Patricky’s side of the story first, and still collaborated with their posts on Instagram even if they were critical of the promotion.
“Asim is talking like he doesn’t want to twist things, saying the commission was watching, but he actually promoted all of this,” Patricio said. “There was even a collab [post] he made with a Pakistani influencer where the guy was calling us three hyenas attacking one lion. So Asim wanted the chaos to continue to promote his fighter. I can even understand the motive, but it’s completely wrong because he’s the president of Karate Combat and the head coach of our opponent’s team. He even posted on his Instagram congratulating the guy who threw water at my wife’s face and caused all this. He’s contradicting himself. It’s absurd that Karate Combat would allow this kind of behavior, especially initiated by its own president. He should have suspended those guys, disciplined them, and prevented all this from happening in the first place. He can’t come now pretending he doesn’t want trouble, that he just wants everything to settle down and that he wants those guys working for us. That’s not how things work.”
“Yes, we reacted physically because we were defending our family,” he continued. “I’m a martial artist. We have an anti-bullying system at our team and that’s exactly what we teach our kids, to defend themselves. I have zero familiarity with those fighters for them to do something like that to me, let alone to our wives. So what are were we supposed to do? Just argue? No. We’re Brazilian and we handle it differently. When someone you don’t know comes to your table and throws a glass of water in your face or in your wife’s face, there’s nothing left to say. He crossed every possible line. That’s an aggression already. There’s no debate with someone like that, it’s a fight. And that’s what happened. We’re men and we won’t accept that happening even once. Every time something like that happens we’ll respond the same way. We were outnumbered, everyone saw people from outside kicking Junior, throwing punches. Someone even tried to hit the back of my head. Some people were pretending to separate while also taking part in the fight. So that’s it. He asked for it, and that’s what happened.”
Zaidi claimed the hotel wanted to remove the Brazilians from their rooms after the incident, but he defended them. Same for Diego Brandao, who he claims got involved in the brawl as well.
“They asked me to kick out three people and I said no, I made sure that they could stay,” Azim said. “They wanted to kick out Diego Brandao and the Pitbull brothers. When the police came, the hotel complained only about the Pitbull brothers and Diego Brando to the police. Police asked me, I said, ‘No, it’s not like that. It was different.’ I defended them. ‘Nobody’s hurt. Please go.’ Police left. I sent the stitch doctor to stitch Pitbull in his hotel room so nobody would get in trouble and everything was good. But I’ve been protecting these guys. So for them to turn around and say that we’re controlling a narrative or something, there’s no narrative. I need them to fight. I flew their whole family from Brazil so they could fight, not to cancel a fight.”
Zaidi maintains that having a brawl not only hurts the image of his promotion, but means money lost as the fight was cancelled after bringing Pitbull and their families to Miami for fight week. Patricio disputes Zaidi’s account.
“He said he brought the entire Pitbull brothers’ family to the fight,” Patricio said. “He didn’t bring anyone. He didn’t pay for anything. I went to support his event, because my brother was fighting, but he didn’t do anything for our family. On the contrary, the fight started and ended and he never spoke to my brother at any point. I was the one who asked Asim for a doctor, and the doctor who came wasn’t even an eye specialist. The guy who stitched up Patricky’s face did it out of goodwill, and I’m grateful for that, but he wasn’t even a specialist, he was just someone from the event.”
Zaidi considered offering Patricky Pitbull a fight on their upcoming card in Azerbaijan, but it’s looking unlikely the sides will come to an agreement for future events.
“I think a lot of my team will be mad at me saying this, but yes, I would work with them again,” Zaidi said of the Pitbull brothers. “But I would be more careful because now — I know the Pitbull brothers, but I was never a big fan of Bellator. I didn’t know the super deep history until after all this happened. And then after all this happened, I kind of got the idea like, ‘Oh man, it reminds me of I was a kid, it reminds me of Chute Boxe.’ I rather get on a call with both of them and say guys, your student is my longest champion. You guys are a great team. Let’s just do the right way next time. It’s no problem for me. I really don’t like that they believe I am trying to make them look bad or orchestrate something. But I hope that we can get on a call one day and squash everything and actually do business together because there’s good business to do together, for sure.”
Patricky criticized Zaidi for his “completely unprofessional” behavior all week, “taking sides” on his incident with Reid.
“I think a guy who’s the president of an organization shouldn’t take sides, right? He should be neutral,” he said. “At no point should he encourage a fight or try to benefit from it. That’s completely unprofessional on his part. A guy who’s the president of an event can’t take sides or encourage conflict. To me, that’s exactly what he was doing. There were several bizarre things that, in my opinion, don’t match the behavior expected from an organization president.”
Patricio went on to call Zaidi “a coward, a terrible promoter.”
“He doesn’t deserve to give interviews to anyone,” Patricio said. “He doesn’t deserve any spotlight. If anything, he deserves to be forgotten and buried.”
The Florida commission is considering sanctioning both Pitbull brothers. Zaidi said that the entity is looking at the Friday brawl as a continuation of the Thursday melee, which could make things worse for the Brazilians. He admits, however, that “there’s wrong sides everywhere, but it’s multiple wrong sides.”
“It got way too far, man,” Zaidi said. “What stinks is, I think if it was just the Pitbull brothers, nothing would have happened. I think it would have stopped. But the problem is all the coaches around joined in and they kept restarting the fight. The fight broke up very quickly, but the coaches around kept restarting the fight, restarting the fight. The security camera shows like, I think it’s a 12-minute fight. I never heard of a street fight [for] 12 minutes. It’s a long, very, very long fight. And then I came out with the commission, maybe two minutes into the fight, and we’re watching it live. The head of the state commission is standing watching live. He analyzed the video later, but he didn’t have to analyze, he got to watch the fight in front of him. And guys are running from one place to another, one place to another. The fight stops, restarts and the commission decided to suspend on the spot the people they felt were at fault. And they’re investigating the water sprinklers to figure out what they’re going to do with them.”
A sanction by the commission could prevent Patricky from being paid by Karate Combat.
“The president is saying the commission blocked the payment of my purse,” Patricky said. “It seems like one of the intentions is not to pay me, even though I did everything I was supposed to do. I made weight and agreed to cooperate with media obligations for the event.”
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