Fenway Park will trade baseball for bare fists Saturday night, when Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship stages Massachusetts' first-ever legal bare-knuckle boxing tournament directly on the historic ballpark's playing field. BKFC 92 starts at 6 p.m. and features a championship main event pitting undefeated titleholder Kai Stewart against a local challenger looking to end his reign in front of a hometown crowd.
The event marks the first bare-knuckle card sanctioned in Massachusetts, according to Axios. Bare-knuckle fighting resembles boxing except that fighters do not wear gloves, though they can tape their wrists and palms up to an inch from the knuckles, per the outlet's report. Fights consist of five two-minute rounds, and the sport prohibits kicking, elbowing, kneeing and grappling, allowing only closed-fist punches.
Bare-knuckle fighting was illegal nationwide until 2018, when the practice began its return to legal sanctioning, and it has since spread across more than 30 states, according to the same report. The Massachusetts State Athletic Commission formally sanctioned BKFC 92, positioning the Bay State among more than 30 states that now permit the sport since Wyoming became the first to regulate it in 2018.
A Boston Fighting Legacy Revived
The return of legal bare-knuckle boxing to Boston carries historical weight the city has not felt in over a century. Boston native John L. Sullivan became bare-knuckle boxing's world champion in 1889, in what stands as the last officially sanctioned bare-knuckle heavyweight title fight before American boxing moved permanently to padded gloves, according to Boxing News 24. Sullivan's win over Jake Kilrain came in a grueling 75-round bout in Richburg, Mississippi.
BKFC bouts today take place in a specialized 22-foot circular ring nicknamed the “Squared Circle,” where fighters start each round with a front foot planted on scratch lines set three feet apart at the ring's center, per Unsanctioned Fights. The circular design removes corners fighters might otherwise use to stall, forcing continuous exchanges. Promotion president David Feldman, who campaigned for years to legalize the sport, told Axios the effort to bring BKFC 92 to fruition took years of campaigning and changing perceptions.
Montana Champion Faces Massachusetts Challenger
The main event features Kai Stewart of Great Falls, Montana, who enters undefeated at 9-0 and is making the sixth consecutive defense of his BKFC Featherweight World Championship, according to Meet Boston. He is the inaugural 145-pound champion and the longest-reigning titleholder in the promotion's history. Stewart's opponent is Harry “The Hitman” Gigliotti of Haverhill, Massachusetts, who enters undefeated at 6-0 in bare-knuckle competition across two organizations while also holding a 9-5 professional boxing record, per Axios.
Feldman said league data suggests the sport produces fewer traumatic brain injuries, concussions, and broken noses, hands and faces than boxing or mixed martial arts. That claim finds some support in the medical literature: an observational study of 141 professional bare-knuckle bouts found that while 36.6 percent of fighters suffered injuries, mostly facial lacerations, the concussion rate was 2.8 percent, compared with estimated rates of 6 to 12 percent in gloved boxing and 14.7 percent in MMA, according to research indexed on PubMed. Fighters throwing full-force punches without padding risk breaking their own hands against a skull, which may push them to adjust their mechanics and reduce repeated head trauma even as visible cuts increase. Still, Axios reports that available data remains insufficient to conclude how dangerous bare-knuckle fighting truly is, and the Association of Ringside Physicians has shared similar injury data with the BBC.
New England Fighters Fill Out the Card
Local talent runs deep on Saturday's lineup. Bridgewater resident and former UFC lightweight contender Joe Lauzon is making his bare-knuckle debut at Fenway Park, facing Stash Kuykendall in the welterweight division. Lauzon earned 15 Fight Night performance bonuses across 26 UFC bouts, tying for the second-most fight bonuses in UFC history, according to JoeLauzon.com.
Peabody's Charles Rosa will make his BKFC debut in the lightweight division, while Boston's James Murrin debuts in the featherweight division. Southbridge's Robinson Perez will make his BKFC debut in the ironweight division, Springfield's Pat Casey will compete in the middleweight division, and Plymouth's Peter Barrett will compete in a separate lightweight division. The co-feature pairs BKFC Women's Flyweight World Champion Christine Ferea against Sofia Landi of Buenos Aires.
Feldman Eyes an Annual Fenway Tradition
If all goes well, Feldman wants to make the Fenway Park championship an annual event and add other bare-knuckle fighting events in Massachusetts going forward, per Axios. The card arrives roughly 18,000 seats deep on the ballpark's actual playing field rather than its concourses, a setup Sports Illustrated reports could set an attendance record for the promotion. BKFC's expansion has been fueled in part by celebrity investment, including former two-division UFC champion Conor McGregor, who acquired a part-ownership stake in the promotion in April 2024 through his company, McGregor Sports & Entertainment, joining majority owner Triller, according to Insider Sport.
The promotion has also been pushing further into the mainstream this month with a newly announced “World's Baddest Man” tournament, a $20 million prize pool open to everyday tradesmen, firefighters and mechanics that will stream as a documentary series on FOX Nation, as Hoodline reported in its earlier coverage of BKFC's expansion. Whether Saturday's Fenway Park card becomes the annual tradition Feldman envisions may depend on how Boston's crowd responds to watching bare-knuckle boxing return to the city that once claimed its most famous champion.
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