BKFC x @triller
pic.twitter.com/UhYi2SAL1D— Bare Knuckle FC (@bareknucklefc)
February 23, 2022
Two promotions that have helped alter the landscape of combat
sports in recent months are forming a partnership.
Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship president David Feldman
announced Wednesday during an interview on “The MMA Hour”
that Triller, the social media company that has expanded into
combat sports promotion, has acquired a majority stake in BKFC.
“We grew this thing to a point where we thought that we got it as
far as we could take it by ourselves right now,” Feldman said.
“We’ve overcome so many obstacles and so many people telling us no
and, ‘this will never happen, you’ll never make it work.’ And we
got to a point where we’re pretty well accepted among the combat
sports community right now, and we needed to make a partnership
that was going to take us to the next level, create more
opportunities, more resources, more funding, more things like that
to acquire some more fighters, take care of the fighters that are
already there, and just create more opportunities for
everybody.”
BKFC was founded in 2018 and become the first company to hold
sanctioned bare-knuckle boxing events in the United States since
1889. It has held 27 events since its debut and has attracted a
number of MMA notables to test their skills, including Chad Mendes,
Paige
VanZant, Mike Perry,
Chris
Leben, Artem Lobov,
Joe
Riggs, Chris Lytle
and Leonard
Garcia, to name a few.
Triller, meanwhile, entered the fight game in November 2020, when
it
promoted an exhibition boxing match between Mike Tyson and Roy
Jones Jr. on pay-per-view. That event also saw Jake Paul
knock out former NBA player Nate
Robinson on the undercard, a viral finish that helped launch
the YouTube personality into a Showtime Sports deal. Since then,
Triller has held a card that saw Paul knock out former Bellator
champ Ben
Askren and another event topped by boxing matches between
Vitor
Belfort and Evander Holyfield and Anderson
Silva and Tito Ortiz.
More recently, Triller
launched Triller Triad Combat in 2021, a hybrid of boxing and
MMA that saw former UFC heavyweight king Frank Mir fall
to heavyweight boxing contender Kubrat Pulev via first-round
knockout in the main event. In an MMA vs. boxing theme, the likes
of Matt
Mitrione, Perry, Albert
Tumenov and Derek
Campos also saw action.
Feldman claims that BKFC will remain largely the same, just with
more resources and opportunities than in the past.
“Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship will remain as-is,” Feldman
said. “We will be self-sustained as far as operations continue, the
fighters, everything. Nothing is really going to change in the
operations of Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship. We’re now just
going to have more assets, more resources, and more
possibilities.”