As an outsider looking in, war is not always as it seems. The media, the politicians, and business interests will often embellish what is actually going on in such a hyperbolic manner that sometimes people don’t know what to believe.
Looking at a map of southeastern Europe prior to 1992, there was a fairly large country called Yugoslavia, which was in existence from 1918 to 1992. It was largely made up of what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro and Serbia. However, while there had already been ongoing conflict in the region, in the Spring of 1992, a mostly ethnic war broke out when the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina became internationally recognized. The war went on for just over three years and resulted in approximately 100,000 deaths and 2,000,000 people displaced.
Veteran martial arts professional Denis “The Bosnian Menace” Purić turned seven years old, right around the time the war was starting. He was born in Slovenia, but he is 100% Bosnian in heritage. He was a child when the conflict erupted.
“When the war started, the first shots were fired in Slovenia,” Purić told Combat Press. “We were living in Slovenia at the time. My dad got worried, packed up our stuff, and we went to Bosnia, not knowing that that’s where the real conflict was going to be.”
Purić’s family was stuck in the region throughout the war. The family was in a refugee camp twice when attacks were happening nearby. The town his mother is from, Velika Kladuša, is where they were living, but when the town got attacked, it was evacuated. The family started moving toward Croatia, but the border was closed, so instead of turning back toward the violence, they camped out in fields for three nights. Then, the men started building shelters to live in. After three months, they heard the soldiers had pulled out, so they went back to the town. However, his dad, Rasim, went to the front lines to fight, because the village he was from was being attacked. While there, his father was shot in the leg, and the family assumed he was missing in action. The town was attacked again, and the family escaped again, only this time without his father.
As they were living back out in the fields, Purić and other kids had to find things to do, as he was being taken care of by his mothers and uncles.
“As kids we used to play soccer, but we played soccer in the minefield,” Purić explained. “We didn’t know that it was a minefield until one day there was a horse running by, stepped on a mine and blew up. It was about 200 meters away from us. Part of his leg just went off. The horse was actually still alive, but I think he lost one of his limbs, one of the legs. We just looked at that, and we ran away. We ran into the house that we were staying at. In the house, there were five families. The parents are like, ‘Well, you are never allowed to go back to that field to play again.”
As life can seem like it is random, and has no design, that exploding horse actually led Purić to a strange encounter, but, before that, it started with his first experience competing in some form of combat.
“So, man, because it was war, I guess somebody came up with this with this game,” uric elaborated. “This fucking crazy game. It was more like a battle between camps. So, there were these camps from Camp 1 to, like, 40. We would battle different camps. Say we were camp 32, we would battle against camp 33. We would make these things out of shoelaces or just rope where you can put a rock in the middle, like slingshots with rock. So we would meet in the field, our camp versus the other camp, where we’re just fucking killing each other with these rocks.”
As crazy as it seems, the rock wars would turn out to send Purić toward a reunion he was not expecting.
“So I got hit with with a rock, ran to my mom and I’m like, ‘fuck, I’m bleeding everywhere,’” My mother took me to the border, where they stopped us, saying, ‘Hey, my son is bleeding. He needs to go to the hospital. So, one of the soldiers put me in a car and drove me to the hospital, and they are like, ‘What’s your name?’ I said, ‘Denis Purić.’ They said, ‘Oh, we have somebody here by that last name.’ We go to this room, and my father was in the room with his leg up. He got shot. That’s where I found my father who was missing. For about almost a year, we thought that he was dead.”
After going back to the refugee camp, the slingshot wars needed to stop, and this is where Purić got his first introduction to martial arts. There was a guy teaching karate, and this kept the kids occupied and out of trouble. Eventually, they learned of a guy who was smuggling refugees out of the camps and across the Croatia-Slovenia border, and his father had family in Slovenia.
“One night, we just kind of packed up,” Purić explained. “Now, mind you, my dad got shot in the leg, so he was on crutches. So, we got dropped off right before the border, and we ran into the woods. My dad was kind of recovered, but not fully, and he wasn’t really using his crutches. We had to kind of throw the crutches away and just drag him with us, me and my mother. The soldiers had seen us and started coming after us, but we were too deep in the woods already. That was during wartime, they were too scared to come in. It wasn’t even the Army, and they were just like officers – like, the border patrol. We went deep in the woods, hid, and they took off.
“For about 10 kilometers, because you can see the lights of where the border is, we try to get closer, and if shit was still too close, we got to go back into the woods, but keep going deeper down until we passed the border lights.The signal was to get a bunch of grass, put it on the road. When the guy comes and sees that was the spot, that was the signal. Then, the truck will come by and blow all the grass away, and we see the guy drive a few times back and forth, but he couldn’t stop because there was also cars behind. When the coast is finally clear, the car brings us into Slovenia to my father’s nephew’s house.”
By the time Purić had made it into Slovenia, he was 10 years old. He had found a Taekwondo gym to train at there. However, they had trouble getting into schools because of citizenship issues, and the fact that his father had fought in the war had barred them from being able to enter the United States. Instead, they ended up moving to Canada.
“We moved to a very, very cold place, Regina Saskatchewan. “I found another Taekwondo school, and I joined the Taekwondo school, and I got my black belt. Then, we moved from Regina, because it was fucking -60 [degrees], dude. We went to Winnipeg, Manitoba, and we lived there for about a year and a half. My dad was trying to find work, so he came to Ontario to get his trucker’s license and really liked how Ontario was. And then, when he came back, it was like, pack up, we’re moving to Ontario. So we moved to Hamilton, a town just outside of Toronto, like 30 minutes out. And we’ve been there ever since. It was the Summer of 1999, and I was 14.”
Fast forward to today, and Purić has built quite the career in combat sports. He has amassed a record of 39-12 in kickboxing and Muay Thai, and 8-5 in MMA, He is a former multiple-time Canadian Taekwondo champion, a 2005 Taekwondo world champion, and he has fought in K-1, Kunlun, Bellator and ONE Championship. He currently owns and is the Head Coach of Soi Dogs MMA & Fitness in Hamilton.
For the last three and a half years, Purić has been fighting under the ONE banner with all but one of those fights taking place in Muay Thai, where he is 3-3 with one no contest, after Elias Mahmoudi tested positive for a banned substance after defeating Purić in Dec. 2024. His sole ONE kickboxing bout was a decision loss to Rodtang Jitmuangnon in Jun. 2024. His last outing was a loss due to a body-kick knockout at ONE Friday Fights 100 in Mar. 2025, but he was still feeling residual effects from the Mahmoudi fight.
“That last fight I had with Jaosuayai – he was a very, very tough opponent,” Purić admitted. “I lost with the body shot. Before that fight, I fought a guy, Elias Mahmoudi – a very tall fighter – and he really messed up my ribs, because every time I would come in, he would catch me, because he was long. Every time I come in, he would catch me with the knee coming in. So, my ribs were banged up, man. Four months later, I had got offered to fight Jaosuayai. Me, I’m the type of guy that never says no to fights, so I went in not fully recovered.
“He had seen that I got dropped in the fight with Mahmoudi. I got dropped with the body shot in the last second. So, he went for the body, knowing that probably I was not fully recovered, and I just went down, man. They called the fight.”
Purić, now 40 years old, will be back in action at ONE 173 on Sunday, Nov. 16, live from the Ariake Arena in Tokyo, Japan. Only this time, he is preparing his body to handle an onslaught, in case his next opponent, the legendary Takeru Segawa, tries to do the same as the last one.
“This time, I’m fully recovered and we’ve been working on the body, making the abs bulletproof,” Pruic said. “So, we’re making sure that it doesn’t happen this time, because we know that Takeru likes to do those little stabs to the body. We know what he’s coming for, and we’ll make sure that the body’s bulletproof and ready. And yeah, man, I’m in shape.”
For fans of kickboxing, Takeru needs no introduction. With a record of 44-5 with 26 knockouts, the longtime Krush and K-1 World champion entered ONE Championship in 2024 with only three professional losses. However, his first fight in the promotion was at ONE 165 in Jan. 2024, and he lost a unanimous decision to another legendary kickboxer Superlek Kiatmoo9 for the ONE flyweight kickboxing title. His next fight was eight months later, when he knocked out Thant Zin with a body kick and punches. His last fight was at ONE 172 last March, when he lost another superfight, as he was knocked out by Rodtang in just 80 seconds of Round 1. Purić is obviously intimately familiar with Takeru, and he is not taking this fight lightly.
“He deserves the hype, man,” Purić said. “The guy’s done a lot with it during his career. You know he’s a three-division K-1 champ. You can’t take that away from him now. Throughout the years, I feel like his chin is not holding up very well. So, we’ve seen that in his last couple fights.”
Purić is no stranger to combat, as his life story proves. At this stage, he is a battle-tested athlete, a coach, a mentor, and a father to his own son, Neihden. While his son doesn’t currently train in martial arts, he is an athlete in his own right as an avid soccer player. Outside of running a gym, coaching and spending time with with wife and son, there is an immediate task in his sights, and that task is beating Takeru.
“This time I’m fighting a legend,” said Purić. “And my fights, win, lose or draw, they’re never boring. You know, when I come in, it’s going to be a banger of a fight. You know I always put on exciting fights. This one’s going to be a war. If you’ve seen my fight with Rodtang, that was a spectacle. So, this one is going to be no different.”
ONE 173 airs live on ONE Championship pay-per-view starting at 11 p.m. ET on Saturday night, Nov. 15, in the U.S. and Canada, which will be 1 p.m. in Tokyo on Sunday, Nov. 16.