- The
Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship may be the wildest, most ferocious, and bloodiest show. - If ever you need reminding of that, just watch BKFC 18 - its latest show.
- In clips below, you can see a weigh-in melee, a five-second KO, and a post-fight brawl.
If ever you needed reminding that the Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship may be the wildest, most ferocious, and bloodiest show in town, then the company's latest event - BKFC 18 - was all the proof you could want.
This is the combat-sports promotion that adheres to an aggressive rule set where combatants compete bare knuckle and throw fists at each other until one of them is on the floor, bloodied, and beaten.
The fledgling company, which was founded in 2018, is gaining hype with every event.
In 2019, the promotion pitted the former UFC fighters Jason Knight and Artem Lobov against each other in a fight so gruesome that it caked the canvas in their blood.
Later, the former
But the latest event may have been its most brutal yet.
It all began at a weigh-in ceremony Friday when competing athletes had to make their predetermined weights for Saturday's action.
All was going well until Julian Lane and Jake Bostwick took the stage.
Lane ripped his shirt after making weight, slapped himself in the face while screaming "let's go," and waited for his opponent, Bostwick, to make weight, too.
Bostwick initially refused to look at Lane, but when a fired-up Lane started rubbing the butt of his head into his face, Bostwick threw an open-palm strike in retaliation.
Watch it here:
During the event, which took place at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, Eduardo Concepcion opened the action with a stunning five-second knockout win over Gaberial Brown in the first match.
Concepcion threw punches as soon as the fight began, with Brown seemingly intent on using his face as a shield.
Four punches later, Brown planted the canvas, and Concepcion had won in just seconds.
Watch it here:
-FITE (@FiteTV) June 27, 2021
Lane met Bostwick in the ninth of 14 fights at BKFC 18 and got the last laugh, returning a decision win in their 170-pound match.
Later, the
And Luis Palomino upset Tyler Goodjohn, a fighter with an OnlyFans side hustle, with a victory via points.
Then, things got really interesting.
In the penultimate fight on the night, Hector Lombard scored a controversial fourth-round finish over Joe Riggs to win the BKFC cruiserweight title.
His bare-knuckle rival Lorenzo Hunt then casually walked into the ring as if to challenge the new champion.
Lombard did not take too kindly to this and landed one of the finest two-punch combinations of his entire career.
Check out the chaos right here:
-FITE (@FiteTV) June 27, 2021
Joey Beltran then beat Sam Shewmaker by decision in what was, by the evening's standards at least, a relatively uneventful main event.
The Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship is getting bigger. It's already an accepted part of the combat-sports landscape, and an Insider source said downloads of the company's Bare Knuckle TV app were growing rapidly.
The company returns for its next show on July 23 with BKFC 19, when Paige van Zant, perhaps BKFC's biggest-name star, fights Rachael Ostovich in the main event.