This story is from Atrium’s Spring 2025 magazine, which released April 2025.
Angel Keihl hops back and forth, shifting her weight across a padded mat in the mixed martial arts studio where she trains. Behind gloved fists, the 35-year-old hides her face, which has taken a few beatings over the years. Her brown eyes twinkle today, but they’ve been, at times, bulbed and blue and swollen shut.
That’s standard for an MMA fighter, though. And for a new professional in the sport of bare-knuckle boxing, sustaining injuries isn’t just a possibility. It’s predetermined.
Angel continues jumping forward, twisting her body halfway around each time she lands, blowing sharp, brief breaths through her teeth. The exercise will help her float like a butterfly. What she needs to learn is how to sting like a bee.
One of Angel’s biggest struggles as a fighter is balancing an entertaining bout with a quality one. The challenge is something she and her coach, George Panagiotakos, are embracing as Angel trains to fight her next opponent, Miranda Kay Barber.
Miranda goes by SheHulk. She throws a precise punch. And she’s previously fought Angel. The two faced off a decade ago, in Tampa, and Angel, who goes by DaKilla, hit her nose so hard it bled.
“You kept going?” George asks his student, wondering if Angel knocked out her opponent.
Not exactly.
At first, Miranda fought back against Angel’s body weight and quicker punches, even managing to once anchor Angel to the ground. But by the third round, Miranda took several knees to the groin and a series of uppercuts. And despite her pinning Angel against the cage’s black metal gate, it was Miranda’s body that briefly collapsed.
“Keep fighting,” Angel told her opponent. “Don’t stop.”
“Don’t say that,” George now tells Angel flatly and with a pat on the back.
It’s rare for 53-year-old George’s feedback to fly so bluntly — negatively — during practice. He’s established a strong rapport with Angel, even though they only began training together a few months ago. His critiques are always uplifting, and Angel says he’s previously even suggested she train at other gyms to challenge her more. But if George has one nonnegotiable, it’s this: No encouraging the opponent in the ring. Not when Angel is now boxing as a pro.
As a viewer, Angel can’t stand watching rounds that have the “lovey-dovey shit” — the hugs and high-fives exchanged between fighters after a solid punch. But when she’s in the ring, her fighting instincts don’t always align with her heart.
“It’s hard not to have mercy on someone,” she says, “if they need it.”
Angel knows that better than anyone. And, from her decade of fighting, she has the stitches to prove it. But what hurts the fighter most isn’t the eye poke that cost Angel her vision for six months. And it’s not the pain sustained from the ligaments and tendons she’s torn, then healed, then torn again.
What scars Angel are the profound wounds, cut deep below the surface yet worn candidly on her sleeve. There’s the difficult, decadeslong relationship with her father, bound together by the string of the sport. There’s the addiction he passed on to her that she’s long since relied on — though even after a decade without binge-drinking alcohol, the compulsivity still has to go somewhere and Angel puts it into her demanding training.
And there’s the training, an emotional seesaw. She improves by staying active, but that time is then spent without friends and family. She fuels her fight by being with friends and family, but that time is then spent sitting idle.
Angel is constantly asking herself: Is all this worth it?
Her answer in August was yes.
That was when she battled in her first match as a professional MMA fighter. It was a bare-knuckle fight and she won. Now, she’ll continue to compete in at least one more match this year with the fighting promoter that signed her. George says Angel can kiss jiu-jitsu and taekwondo and every other MMA sport she previously competed in goodbye. She’s now a bare-knuckle boxer.
Bare-knuckle has an extensive history, cropping up in bouts among the ancient Greeks and an 18th century enslaved person who earned his freedom by winning a match. But despite being an underground hit for centuries, the sport was never legalized until 2018, when Wyoming held the first organized rumble. Now, about half of the country allows regulated bare-knuckle. In the sport, fighters may only punch with a clenched, ungloved fist above the waist. To preserve boxers’ safety, the sport bans kicks, headlocks and outstretched fingers.
Angel says most female competitors don’t book a second match because cosmetic surgeries for gruesome injuries can get expensive. And most boxers in the sport, even the pros like Angel, don’t make much money. For her fight in August, she said she walked away with $2,000. But athletes who sign with prominent promotions like the Ultimate Fighting Championship or the World Wrestling Entertainment earn six figures per fight while scoring brand deals and sponsorships that feed their income.
Angel doesn’t have that level of exposure yet. So, she works at the University of Florida’s physical rehab center that treats student athletes, scheduling patients for physical therapy — a reminder of the painful limits competitors will push in hopes of accomplishing their dreams. Angel’s is to live off of fighting. Until August, she didn’t know whether that was possible. Then she won her first pro fight and the window of possibility cracked open. Now, after weeks of missed training and stress, Angel is close to cracking herself. She’s left asking, again: Is all this worth it?
Her answer at 12 years old was yes. That was when Angel’s dream of fighting began, distracting her from her father’s emotional absence while tethering her to the man himself. Professional fighting was their only bond, and they shared it on family Fridays when Angel’s parents would drive their kids to Subway for dinner then to rent UFC matches on VHS.
The Keihls lived in a single-wide trailer on a 1,200-acre farm in Archer, Florida. The property was so big that Angel didn’t know food could be delivered to a home or that some came with neighbors. One of the video stores they rented from was only four miles down the road, but a quarter of the drive was spent just exiting their property.
Angel would nestle herself between her mom and two brothers, both older, on the living room couch. Her dad, Albert Keihl, would pace back and forth, frequently popping in from smoke breaks to watch the matches. Sometimes, the fights were old, but the Keihls didn’t care. They just liked being together weekly — well, in the weeks when Albert could partake. Oftentimes, he’d be working. Or drinking. Sometimes Albert was too physically exhausted from his work laying tiles to spend much time with his kids.
Still, the mostly routine family activity was enough to hook Angel on fighting.
Growing up, she’d tussle with one of her brothers so frequently that their mom would drive the siblings to the entrance of the farm and force them to walk home alone.
In the worst fight they had, Angel threatened to hurt her brother with an axe she grabbed. There was also the time he put Angel in a headlock and cracked her tooth. And, once, Angel broke her own toe from kicking him in the head. Her cast extended all the way up to her knee.
Albert firmly believed men should never hit women, and he raised his boys in such a manner. But sibling fights were different.
Albert lived as he thought a man should. He rarely cried and never accepted handouts. He also never attended Angel’s sporting or school events, despite sometimes making it to the boys’. And with two brothers, Angel believed Albert wanted her to be a princess, not a fighter.
“Some days I’m like, ‘Gosh, man, did my dad ever love me?’” Angel says.
A storm was brewing.
It was the hurricane season of 2004, one of the worst in recorded U.S. history during which over 3,100 people died. Angel, then 15, had taken cover with her family in one of the silos a few miles up the farm while Hurricane Frances raged outside. The Keihls, listening to storm updates via radio, thought it had passed — that it was safe to return to the trailer. They drove back to their house.
Wrong call.
A tornado tore through trees and blew one just a foot between the living room and where Angel was sleeping inside. All she could smell was wet mold and tree bark. All she could hear were her own screams. Albert broke through the wooden shutters blocking the window and pulled his daughter into his arms.
It was Albert who rescued her from the wreckage of their now destroyed home, and it was he who suffered from it the most.
“My dad I don’t think ever emotionally recovered from him losing everything that he worked so hard for,” Angel says.
Albert refused to leave the farm. He married his wife on the farm and raised his family on the farm. He wasn’t about to abandon the life he’d known there for years.
So, he and his wife lived in a separate, smaller building on the property that had no plumbing or space for a bed. For nearly two decades, Angel’s parents slept upright in a set of recliners. When Albert got sick — really sick — he and his wife moved. Angel couldn’t stand the poor conditions, so as a teenager, she started couch-surfing for shelter.
And drinking for comfort.
Angel is awake and keenly aware she doesn’t want to be. But she can’t fall asleep, not when the sound of wind whipping and tree branches breaking serve as her white noise.
Even at 35, she still doesn’t like storms, and Hurricane Milton is no different. It’s just barely grazing Gainesville, hardly a threat to her new home — the first home Angel has purchased. But the ruckus is loud and she’s panicking.
Her boyfriend peeks through the blinds of their large bedroom window.
She asks him to please get away from there.
He tells her it’s OK.
She says, no, he does not understand.
They both decide she’ll feel safer in the living room, so Angel heads downstairs. She huddles under a mound of pillows and blankets. Her 7-year-old orange Pomeranian, Striker, usually jumping from couch to floor and back again, sits calmly glued to her side.
This has been a tough few weeks for Angel.
Knowing she had to reduce her training for an upcoming radiofrequency ablation, a procedure for her chronic neck pain, she recently added an extra practice session with coach George during her lunch break.
On one day of training, she power walks through her job at the physical rehab center down the hall to the staff cafeteria — and though she’s watching her diet and will not be having lunch, the faint scent of her coworkers’ meals wafts through the air and up to the building’s high ceilings. Barely inside long enough for it to hit her, Angel is now speeding at a pace just shy of a jog across the staff parking lot (where she doesn’t park) and toward a nearby student apartment complex (where she does). The spot is closer to her martial arts studio, which shaves a few minutes from the drive.
With under an hour to train, her only opponent today is time. She leaps two steps forward and two back while lightly throwing a fist toward George, who tells her she needs to jump quicker and with fluidity. She needs to move without thinking.
Thirty-five minutes left. She circles a punching ball suspended in the air, chained to the floor. Her fists fly forward for real this time as her head ducks, dodging the ball’s return. She eyes a clock in the corner of the room.
Angel has to be changed and seated at her desk in 20 minutes. Before leaving, she throws her stuff in a gym bag and briefs George on next week’s plans.
“I have to take a day off for my procedure,” she says, “but I’ll just be here Tuesday.”
“You have your procedure on Monday you said, right?” George asks.
“Yeah.”
“So you’re gonna come in on Tuesday and do what? Just hang out?”
“I’m gonna try to work out,” she says, more a question than fact.
“Listen, don’t try to work out if you need a day of recovery,” he says. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“We’ll see how bad it is,” she says.
Then came Tuesday. And it was bad. Despite having had this exact procedure twice before, this one leaves her in severe pain and unable to turn her head to the side for two days, so she takes the whole week off.
Angel, frustrated, thinks back to her competitor, Miranda. “I bet she’s training,” she says. “I bet she’s training a lot more and she’s not taking off.”
As a preteen, Angel drank at parties and a friend’s house here and there. But the vice quickly turned vicious when she lost her home to the storm.
She’d show up to school hungover and spend all her money on alcohol. She’d graduate high school at 15 and she’d work toward an AA degree the next year at Santa Fe College, but that only granted her easier access to feed the addiction — Angel says Gainesville bars in the early 2000s allowed her inside with just a college ID.
Then, at 22, she was arrested and charged with a DUI.
She’d been driving home from a club when she was swerving between traffic lanes. In her arrest report, a police officer wrote that Angel admitted she’d had “a few drinks” and that her blood alcohol content was more than double the legal limit.
In 2012, a judge placed her on probation, ordered her to complete 50 hours of community service and fined her almost $1,000.
“I have also learned a very hard lesson,” Angel wrote in a letter to the judge, requesting early release from her probation. “DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE!!!”
Just a year later, her addiction peaked. She missed both her parents’ birthdays, which she’d never done before. Angel considers birthdays holidays, and she takes holidays very seriously (in October, she strung her walls with cobwebs; in December, she dressed her door in wrapping paper).
This was a big deal.
She had a talk with God: “I told him, ‘Listen, if you get me through this, I’ll change my life.’”
And she did. She moved back onto the farm, reinstated her driver’s license and worked at a sports store. She sold a man boxing gloves and, after asking where he trained, added, “Could I go with you one day?”
Her first training session at the New Team Trauma in Ocala, an hourlong drive away, was brutal. But it led her to the next session, and the next after that. At 24, after training for a few months, she fought in her first match.
She emerged from a foggy, strobe-lit tent and entered the ring.
“I’m gonna be honest with you all,” the announcer said, Angel’s family and friends hollering in support. “This girl hits like a dude.”
Round One
Within 20 seconds of the fight, Felicia Spencer, who goes by FeeNom, pummeled Angel with two, then four, now five uppercuts, backing her into the ring and slamming her body to the ground. Then she pulled an armbar, trapping Angel’s arm tight between her legs.
Round Two
Angel matched a few of Felicia’s fast kicks and punches — until Felicia mounted Angel back onto the ground, and pulled yet another armbar.
Round Three
Within nine seconds, Felicia tackled Angel into the ring behind her.
When Felicia’s win was announced, hand held to the sky, Angel clapped and fist-bumped the air, ever the good sport. But her head hung low.
That was, until the announcer invited Albert Keihl into the ring.
That day, Angel didn’t know whether her father would be coming to watch her debut fight. He said he would, but she thought it was possible he was drinking and couldn’t drive. And she didn’t know if he even cared.
But there he was. She watched him chart his way from the white plastic chairs where spectators sat and up the stairs toward her. She cried. So did he, though he sneakily dried his tears with a blue hand towel that hung over his shoulder. He always carried one with him. Sometimes to grill. Sometimes to hide these kinds of vulnerable moments he thought made him weak.
Despite Angel’s loss in the match, she took comfort in knowing her father had witnessed it. He showed up. And he shared his love for his daughter — who he said could never be a loser in his eyes.
They side-hugged, and he threw up a peace sign for a photo.
The picture, along with Angel’s mouthguard and gloves from her debut fight, is still hanging in her mother Dian Keihl’s house today.
In the Williston, Florida, home, it’s a pleasant Saturday afternoon for two reasons:
One: Angel, sporting turkey slippers, is enjoying the weekend before Thanksgiving by watching the home football game between the University of Florida Gators and the Ole Miss Rebels.
Two: The Gators are actually winning.
“We got a touchdown, bubba,” Angel coos to Striker, asleep on her lap.
Angel drives to her mom’s house, located about 45 minutes from Gainesville, as many weekends as possible. The pair call and text daily, pinging each other when they leave one place and arrive at another. But being together, even watching the home game on TV, is always better.
An advertisement for a medication that treats Alzheimer’s plays on a commercial break. A woman’s mother has fallen deeper into her disease, becoming agitated and violent with her own daughter.
“God,” Angel says. “I can’t even imagine that.”
There’s a calmness between the women in this house — a stillness much different than the chaos Angel opened Dian’s front door to four years ago.
It was raining, and hospital staff members were carrying Albert inside on a stretcher.
This was the man so prideful he wouldn’t accept a new refrigerator from FEMA. And yet, here he was lying on a gurney with a deteriorating mental state. The staff almost dropped him going up the stairs, but Angel, disturbed, still couldn’t believe her dad was dying.
Just weeks prior, Angel was living and training as a boxer in Tampa, and dating her previous fighting coach she met in Ocala. But when Dian called to say Albert’s lung cancer was back and worse, Angel, then 30, uprooted her life and moved in with her parents at their new home a few miles from the farm. Albert refused to tell anyone about his illness, including his daughter, who sold him a white lie that she needed to come home because she was having financial problems.
Albert underwent chemotherapy and radiation but refused to ring the bell that signified he was healthy, because he didn’t think his cancer was gone. Still dealing with his alcoholism, he bought a pack of beer after his last treatment, keeping one can to prove he could restrain from drinking it. Four years later, the beer still sits today, full, above Dian’s TV.
Angel cared for her dad. And she watched Dian serenade him with Tanya Tucker’s “Would You Lay With Me” in his final hours.
“Will you bathe with me in the stream of life…will you still love me, when I’m down and out.”
She saw it all. She just couldn’t believe it.
“I thought he was invincible,” she says, “and he wasn’t.”
When Albert died, so did Angel’s connection to the sport that rescued her from her alcoholism.
She became angry and, weeks later, broke up with her boyfriend and coach who suggested she jump back into training. Then he was diagnosed with cancer himself.
It was an existential, depressing time, and Angel couldn’t see any point in living. When she came close to ending her life, she thought of her mom. That’s who she fought for until fighting itself eventually came back into her life.
It happened during a random gym visit. She was working out when she locked eyes with a man who looked familiar. He introduced himself as Kenneth Panagiotakos, owner of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Swamp Academy — George’s son. He recognized her from cross-training at the martial arts studio she frequented in Tampa.
Kenneth asked Angel to attend a class at The Swamp. He followed and messaged her on Facebook to ensure she did.
When Angel prepared for her first training after 10 months, she was nervous.
“I expect a lot out of myself,” she says, “and I knew I was going to fail.”
She joined the others at the mat and began rolling with a nearby partner.
As the two sparred, grappling each other’s bodies and hoping to tap their partner out, Angel felt her body was stiffer than usual and her stamina nonexistent. But she didn’t tap out.
There were many days before then where she was asking herself: Is this all worth it?
But, after everything, her answer was still yes.
“I knew in my heart,” she says, “that I still wanted to be a fighter.”
She sat up from the mat and started to cry.
On the mats today, almost four years later, Angel is much freer as she spars. In one of her first practices since Hurricane Milton, she exudes positivity, bantering with each of the classmates she punches in five-minute-long fights.
She spots a fighter she hasn’t seen in a while who tells Angel he’s missed training because he pulled his hamstring.
“That’s what I say,” Angel replies with a wink.
After an hour, Angel and her beet-red peers signify the end to the hour’s exertion with a selfie. George departs quickly. But Angel lingers, her eyes alert and lit as she chats with the fighters who understand this kind of addiction like few others.
During her lunch break training session two months ago, there wasn’t any time to stay and talk. In fact, when practice was over, she sprinted to her car and raced back, unbuckled, to her job. She zipped through student apartment complexes and shopping centers, doing all the “illegal shit” she could to arrive back in time — which she did. This wasn’t her first lunch practice. With fight camp, where training intensifies, and the match looming, it won’t be her last.
That day, a lot plagued Angel’s mind: The fact that she may have to reduce her work hours soon to make time for more training, her health (physical and mental), her diet, Striker and her boyfriend, coach George, her mom, what it means to be a fighter.
But she paid no mind to her car’s acceleration and speedometer, or the posed portrait of her dad affixed there.
Both he and her dashboard would tell Angel this: She was speeding.
Angel Keihl is slated to compete against Miranda Kay Barber in a bare-knuckle fight later this year. If she’s victorious, it will be the fifth win for the fighter whose career spans a decade.
