DENVER NATIVE TRADES BOXING RING FOR BARE KNUCKLES
Bare-knuckle brawling seeking legitimacy with Cheyenne bouts
Alma Garcia accepted the offer knowing full well the reaction. A 25-year-old Denver native who signed up to remove her boxing gloves for a bare knuckle fight broadcast live on pay-per-view?
“They just tell me I’m kind of crazy for it,” Garcia said of her family and friends. “But I’m a fighter.”
The inaugural Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship, or BKFC, will be held Saturday night as part of a decade-old brain child of former professional boxer and current fight promoter David Feldman. He sought to revive the traditional art of bare-knuckled Irish brawls for a modern audience with its first legitimate platform since 1889, and in Feldman’s opinion, the purest form of hand-tohand combat.
But when Feldman reached out to the boards of martial arts and combat sports in 28 different states, each turned down the offer to sanction and regulate a professionally produced bout with a full set of MMA-modified weight classes. He said: “It’s perception. They Google bare-knuckle fighting and what they see are bar fights and street fights. They don’t see what bare-knuckle fighting is or can be.”
Feldman then turned to Wyoming, and finally, the BKFC was
life.
That’s when Garcia got the call.
“It’s going to obviously be something completely new,” she said.
Garcia previously competed in mixed-martial arts and fought in about 20 combined boxing matches as both a professional and amateur. She spends her days working as a commercial roofer in Denver and her nights training with Poor Boys Boxing Club. Saturday inside the Cheyenne Ice & Events Center, she faces UFC fighter Bec Rawlings with tape wrapped only around their mid-hands, thumbs and wrists. Their matchup is one of 12 bouts, each divided between five-to-seven rounds lasting two minutes apiece. No kicking permitted.
“I’m not really worried about how it might hurt,” Garcia said. “It’s basically boxing without gloves. I just think it’s a little bit more exciting to me.”
The art of bare knuckle fighting, Feldman said, is safer than boxing or MMA when using the right technique. “You just can’t get hit as hard with bare knuckles,” he said, “and you can’t take as many punches with bare knuckles as you can with a boxing glove on.” The BKFC will also provide two board certified physicians to stitch up faces and have ambulances at the ready. The event’s professionalism extends to production as well with a 4K high-definition broadcast.
Underground bare knuckle fighting has long existed outside the regulation of individual states’ combat sports commissions. Feldman estimates he’s witnessed as many as 90 such bouts in his development of the BKFC. The most jarring difference for fight fans who tune into Garcia’s match? The sound.
“When you hear a fist hit the skin, and not the glove, it’s crazy,” Feldman said. “The sound is like — wow. I’m on the edge of my seat every fight.”