Real American Freestyle is bringing RAF 11 to the UWM Panther Arena in Milwaukee on July 18, with Arman Tsarukyan and Colby Covington set to meet in a catchweight championship match. The card is scheduled for 7 p.m. Saturday and gives the new wrestling promotion its first stop in the city.
That is why the search interest is there today: this is not a slow-build announcement, but a dated event with a headline bout and a local start time. RAF 11 will feature 10 men’s matches and two women’s matches, and the show is part of a promotion that launched in April 2025 with the aim of giving freestyle wrestlers a place to build careers and earn a living in the same way athletes do in other combat sports.
The weight of the card is in the names. The co-headline pairing of Tsarukyan and Covington gives the show an MMA crossover hook, while the other featured bout puts Ben Askren against Belal Muhammad in a cruiserweight match. Askren is 41 and is returning after a double lung transplant last June, a comeback that makes him the most closely watched figure on the card before the first whistle even blows.
Askren’s résumé still carries the kind of range this promotion is trying to sell. He was a two-time WIAA champion from Hartland, won junior national titles and two NCAA titles in unbeaten seasons, went to the Olympics and later became an MMA champion in Bellator Fighting Championship. On the same card, Keegan O’Toole brings four state titles from Arrowhead and two NCAA championships at Missouri, while Chris Minto comes in as a Nebraska silver medalist at the 2026 NCAA championships.
That is where RAF 11 gets interesting beyond the names on the bill. Real American Freestyle is being presented as unscripted professional wrestling, yet the athletes are paid and the production carries links that point back to WWE and the AWA. The result is a sport-business hybrid that wants the legitimacy of freestyle and the spectacle of a fight card, all under one roof in Milwaukee.
Fox Nation is the home for Real American Freestyle, and the Milwaukee show gives the promotion a public test in front of a live crowd rather than a streaming-only audience. What is still not laid out is the exact structure of the catchweight championship match between Tsarukyan and Covington, which leaves the rules themselves as the one piece of the night that is not yet fully on the board.
For now, the date is fixed, the venue is set and the line-up is unusually deep for a first Milwaukee appearance. RAF 11 arrives at 7 p.m. on July 18 with Ben Askren’s return story, a championship-style main attraction and enough crossover names to make the card look less like an experiment than a statement.
