Fast facts
- Division: Middleweight (No. 5 in the Knockout Daily rankings); also competed at welterweight in the UFC
- Record: 26-3 (MMA)
- Nationality: British (born in London)
- Team/gym: London Shootfighters
- Notable wins: Kevin Holland, Douglas Lima, Paul Daley, Evangelista Santos, Nursulton Ruziboev
On October 10, 2026, inside the Copper Box Arena in London, Michael Page walked to a boxing ring the way he always wanted to walk to a cage. MMA Fighting described it as an Undertaker, WWE-style entrance, and then KSI took the microphone and told the crowd at the Misfits Fight Night that “MVP” had signed a multi-fight deal with Misfits Boxing. No opponent was named. No date was set. Page stood in the ring and looked out at a crowd that had come for something else entirely and got him anyway.
That’s a fitting place to find him. Page has spent his whole fighting life doing things slightly sideways from everyone else, and he has paid for it and profited from it in roughly equal measure.
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A house full of fighters
He was born Michael Jerome Reece-Page on April 7, 1987, at St Mary’s Hospital in London. His father, Curtis Page Sr., worked for British Telecom and came from Trinidad. His mother, Pauline Reece, was a nurse from Jamaica. Both practiced Lau Gar kung fu, and his mother’s brother, Master Stan Brown, had taught his father. Page grew up in NW8 near Edgware Road and Lisson Green, one of 10 children, three of them adopted, and almost all of them on a mat somewhere. His sister Sefena and brothers Curtis Jr., Jamie and Kalon all became kickboxing champions too. When nearly your entire family fights, joining in is the default setting.
He started Lau Gar at three. He entered his first kickboxing tournament at five and his first international event, in Germany, at eight. His instructor through all of it was his father, which is the detail I keep coming back to. The flashy hands-down style that would later get compared to Anderson Silva was built in a family gym by a man who held a day job at a phone company.
The work behind it was absurd. By 13 Page was entering adult divisions and training five hours a day, five days a week. He sometimes fought 14 times in a single tournament day because he entered three weight classes, and once fought 22 times in a day across five. He won his first world title at 12, at the ISKA US Open in Orlando in 1998, and went on to collect 10 world championships and more than 25 British titles in points kickboxing and sport karate. He traded wins and losses with Raymond Daniels and Krisztián Jároszkievicz across Europe, took silver at the 2010 World Combat Games in Beijing, and turned down an approach from the Great Britain Taekwondo team to chase a professional career instead.
The crossover
He was tired of the politics and the lack of exposure in kickboxing, so in July 2011 he walked into London Shootfighters. He’d thought about American Top Team, since older siblings lived in Miami, but he stayed home. His MMA debut came at UCMMA 26 on February 4, 2012, against a late replacement named Ben Dishman. Page finished him in the first round with a tornado kick, the clip went viral, and he was paid £200 for it.
Bellator signed him soon after. He knocked out Ryan Sanders 10 seconds into his debut at Bellator 93 in March 2013, and the highlight machine never really stopped. The defining image of that era came at Bellator 158 in July 2016, when he landed a flying knee on Evangelista Santos in the second round that fractured Santos’ frontal sinus, then celebrated with a Pokémon Go bit that went around the world.
The Bellator years were also full of fights that never happened. Paul Daley turned him down over and over, choosing Douglas Lima, Rory MacDonald and Lorenz Larkin instead, while injuries and visa problems scrambled other bookings. When Page finally got Daley in the Welterweight Grand Prix quarterfinal at Bellator 216 in February 2019, it was a flat unanimous decision with almost no offense from either man. His father had died on December 26, 2018, weeks before that fight. A year earlier, before beating David Rickels at Bellator 200, he’d used his open workout and post-fight interview to honor his cousin Helena Ramsay, who was killed in the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.
The first loss came in the Grand Prix semifinal at Bellator 221, when Lima knocked him out in the second round. Page answered with flying knees and knockouts against Richard Kiely, Giovanni Melillo and Shinsho Anzai, then beat Lima by split decision in their 2021 rematch at Bellator 267 in London. A title shot against Yaroslav Amosov was set for Bellator 281 in May 2022, until Amosov left to fight in the Russo-Ukrainian War. Page lost the interim belt to Logan Storley by split decision. That August he went to BKFC 27 and lost a majority decision to Mike Perry in a bare-knuckle main event that needed an extra round.
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The UFC run
Page entered free agency in July 2023 and signed with the UFC that December. MMA Fighting noted the signing was announced almost as an aside during a Dana White post-event press conference, which tells you how much fanfare the promotion planned to give him. He beat Kevin Holland by unanimous decision at UFC 299 in March 2024, lost a unanimous decision to Ian Machado Garry at UFC 303 that June, and never lost again in the Octagon. He faced Sharabutdin Magomedov in 2025, beat Sam Patterson at the O2 in London on March 21, 2026, and closed out his deal with a decision over Nursulton Ruziboev at UFC Paris in September.
Five wins in six fights, a ranking in two divisions, and the UFC let him go. MMA Fighting called it a head-scratching run, and also conceded his fights left something to be desired, which is fair. The kickboxer who used to land tornado kicks spent much of his UFC time winning carefully.
Page told The Stomping Ground he felt boxed in by more than the opponents. “I’m a very creative person,” he said, pointing to “my walkouts, my entrances, my exits” as things he wasn’t allowed to do. “For me, it’s a shame,” he added. “But I went in there, and I was top-10 in two divisions, I was calling out everybody, wasn’t getting any feedback.”
He said the Misfits deal came together fast, still unconfirmed three or four days before the announcement, and that the promotion has told him to be himself. “That’s going to help me be my best self,” he said.
At 39, Page has fought in kickboxing, MMA, boxing and bare-knuckle, and he’s heading back to the ring with no opponent and no date. He sounds sure of what comes next. “The big fights, the big names that are out there, that are away from other shows, it’s all going to happen,” he said. The walkout, at least, is already sorted.
