The fight everyone will write about on 29 August is Kai Stewart against Harry Gigliotti. The more interesting story is the paperwork that made it legal.
BKFC 92 is scheduled for Saturday 29 August 2026 at Fenway Park in Boston, with the ring set on home plate. BKFC says it is the first sanctioned bare-knuckle event ever held in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. How it got there is a seven-year story, and most of it is on the record in the state athletic commission's own published minutes rather than in the promotion's press material.
Event Details
| Detail | Info |
|---|---|
| Event | BKFC 92 Boston: Stewart vs. Gigliotti |
| Date | Saturday 29 August 2026 |
| Venue | Fenway Park, Boston, Massachusetts |
| Start | AXS lists a 6:00pm local start. FightMag has first bell at 7:00pm ET. BKFC had not published a final run of show as of mid-August |
| Main event | Kai "King" Stewart (c) vs Harry "The Hitman" Gigliotti, BKFC featherweight world title |
| Co-main | Christine "The Misfit" Ferea (c) vs Sofia Landi, women's world title |
| Broadcast | BKFC's own event listing names the BKFC+ app and Fubo Sports. Third-party schedules also list Prime Video. No pay-per-view arrangement had been confirmed by the promotion as of mid-August |
| Tickets | Sold through the Red Sox and BKFC sites. Resale listings opened around $74 in mid-August; BKFC has not published a face-value range |
| Rules | BKFC ruleset — five two-minute rounds, punching only |
What "first in Massachusetts" actually means
The claim needs care, because Massachusetts has a long bare-knuckle past and almost none of it was legal. Boston's nineteenth-century fight culture — the subject of our guide to underground fighting in Boston — ran on unlicensed bouts staged in barns, on barges and behind saloons, and John L. Sullivan, the last heavyweight champion of the bare-knuckle era, was born in Roxbury. What has never happened before is a bare-knuckle card licensed and supervised by the state.
That is the claim BKFC makes and that Boston Globe and Boston.com coverage has repeated: the first time the Commonwealth has sanctioned the sport. We have not been able to verify it against the Massachusetts State Athletic Commission's own published record — the commission has not issued a statement or a docket number about the licence, and mass.gov blocks automated retrieval of its documents — so it should be read as the promotion's account, corroborated by trade and local press, rather than as a regulator's own words. The Boston Globe reports that founder David Feldman finally received a licence to stage an event in the state, and quotes him saying Massachusetts had been "on the one-yard-line for five straight years."
The seven-year paper trail
Where the commission's record is legible, it is unusually clear about how slow this was.
18 March 2019. Tom Sconzo, working with BKFC, put bare-knuckle fighting to the Massachusetts State Athletic Commission's monthly board meeting, hoping to stage an event in Massachusetts that year. The board did not vote it up or down. It asked that the proposal go before the commission's Medical Advisory Board at its next meeting.
27 March 2019. Nine days later, Feldman and Sconzo appeared in front of that board. Feldman presented injury and laceration figures which he argued compared favourably with traditional boxing; Sconzo covered hand-wrapping technique, the ruleset and the sport's audience. The board's chair was Dr Peter Warinner, a sports neurologist and ringside physician. ESPN, reporting the following year, described that board as having unanimously recommended that the Massachusetts State Athletic Commission sanction bare-knuckle boxing.
17 May 2024. Five years on, bare-knuckle boxing was back on the Medical Advisory Board's agenda, and the minutes record Warinner clarifying that the sport was still not legal in Massachusetts and that legalisation was not what the board was discussing that day. Dr Durkin summarised BKFC's own injury data, and the verdict split two ways: the concussion rate was significantly lower than in comparable combat sports, the laceration rate significantly higher. Warinner noted a lower death rate than in traditional boxing, and recommended a minimum of three ringside physicians for bare-knuckle boxing if it were ever legalised.
2026. The licence came through, the Red Sox agreed to the field, and the date was set for 29 August.
The second is that the sport was still being described as illegal in the state as recently as May 2024.
Two things stand out in that sequence. The first is that the medical objection to bare-knuckle boxing in Massachusetts was never about brain trauma. On the commission's own reading of BKFC's numbers, the concussion picture was the promotion's strongest argument. The obstacle was cuts, and the staffing burden cuts create, which is why the recommendation that emerged was a physician count rather than a ban. The second is that the sport was still being described as illegal in the state as recently as May 2024. Whatever happened between then and the licence, it happened fast by regulatory standards.
How a sport with no rulebook of its own gets licensed here
Massachusetts does not have a bare-knuckle chapter in its regulations. Its combat-sports rules, 523 CMR, are built around boxing and mixed martial arts, and everything else falls into a catch-all: 523 CMR 17.00, "Unarmed Combat Contests and Exhibitions Other Than Boxing and Mixed Martial Arts." That chapter applies to unarmed combat matches not expressly provided for elsewhere in 523 CMR and required to be licensed under M.G.L. c. 147, § 32.
The mechanism inside it is the interesting part. Under 523 CMR 17.02, a contest must be conducted under the official rules for the particular art; the promoter has to file a copy of those rules with the commission before it will approve the holding of the contest, on top of the ordinary promoter and event paperwork that 523 CMR 10.00, "Arranging and Promoting Programs of Unarmed Combat", already requires. In other words, a promotion in BKFC's position does not lobby for a new rulebook to be written into state law. It hands the commission its own rulebook and asks for approval to run under it.
The commission has not published which provision it used to license BKFC 92, so we are describing the pathway that exists rather than asserting the one that was taken. But it explains why the ABC unified bare-knuckle rules mattered so much to BKFC's national expansion, and why the promotion's state-by-state licensing history reads as a sequence of individual negotiations rather than a single legislative breakthrough. Every state is its own approval.
Why Fenway, and why the field
Feldman has been direct about the venue. Asked about the negotiation, he told Yahoo Sports that the sticking point was where in the ballpark the ring would go: "You're not going to hide me in a concourse underneath the stairway somewhere." He also framed the whole thing as a shift in leverage: "We're not begging anymore. We're not knocking on doors only to have them slammed in our face."
That concourse line is not rhetorical. Boxing returned to Fenway Park on 7 June 2025 after a sixty-nine-year absence, but "Fight Night at Fenway" was staged on the ballpark's Big Concourse rather than the playing surface. The last card on the field itself was on 16 June 1956, when Tony DeMarco, the Boston Bomber, outpointed Vince Martinez. BKFC 92 puts a ring back on the grass and dirt.
The physical configuration reported by the Boston Globe: ring on home plate, an initial setup of about 11,000 seats that can be expanded towards 20,000, with Feldman saying he hopes for around 18,000.
The card
Two world titles are scheduled.
Main event: Kai Stewart vs Harry Gigliotti, BKFC featherweight world title
Kai "King" Stewart is 9-0 and the inaugural holder of the BKFC featherweight belt, which he won against Louie Lopez in June 2023. He is not a crossover signing. He came out of Great Falls, Montana, on a wrestling base, a high-school state title at C.M. Russell and then college wrestling at the University of Providence, and all nine of his professional bare-knuckle bouts have been under the BKFC banner. He has defended the title five times, against Howard Davis, Bryan Duran, Jimmie Rivera, Tommy Strydom and Nico Gaffie.
Fenway would be the sixth. BKFC's marketing calls that a record, and its own copy has described the same fight as both record-tying and record-breaking. The mark a sixth defence would reach belongs to Luis Palomino, who made six lightweight title defences between 2020 and 2023, the longest run of defences on record in the promotion. On that arithmetic a win at Fenway ties Palomino rather than passing him.
Harry "The Hitman" Gigliotti is 6-0 with five knockouts and comes from Haverhill, about thirty miles north of the ballpark.
Harry "The Hitman" Gigliotti is 6-0 with five knockouts and comes from Haverhill, about thirty miles north of the ballpark. His record is worth reading precisely: the 6-0 is his overall bare-knuckle mark across promotions, not a BKFC record. He has one BKFC bout, a second-round knockout of Timothy Mason at Mohegan Sun on 28 March 2026. Before that he won the inaugural BYB Extreme super-lightweight title in England and took the Police Gazette World Diamond Belt, the lineal bare-knuckle title first held by John L. Sullivan. That belt is biography here rather than a stake. It is not on the line at Fenway.
The stylistic question is plain enough. Stewart has two knockouts in nine wins and took his last defence to a unanimous decision; Gigliotti has five stoppages in six. For odds, prices and method-of-victory analysis, that material lives on our BKFC 92 betting preview rather than here.
Co-main: Christine Ferea vs Sofia Landi, women's world title
Christine "The Misfit" Ferea defends against Sofia "Geisha Argentina" Landi of Buenos Aires, who is making her BKFC debut. A promotional debutant challenging for a world title is a notable line on any card.
One caveat on the division. BKFC's event page files the bout at women's bantamweight, but the belt Ferea has held since the inaugural title fight in February 2022 is the women's flyweight championship, and she has defended it five times. The published listings do not agree on which title is actually at stake, and the weigh-in will resolve it. Our breakdown of the promotion's divisions is at BKFC weight classes explained.
The Massachusetts contingent
The undercard is built around local names, which is the point of a Boston debut.
| Bout | Weight class | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Joe Lauzon vs Stash Kuykendall | Welterweight | Lauzon's bare-knuckle debut and first fight since 2019 |
| Charles Rosa vs Charon Spain | Lightweight | Rosa is a former UFC fighter from Peabody |
| Peter Barrett vs Elijah Harris | Lightweight | Barrett is 2-0 in BKFC and a Massachusetts fighter |
| Rico DiSciullo vs Tray Martin | Featherweight | Two unbeaten featherweights |
| Pat Casey vs Dallas Davison | Middleweight | |
| Taylor Starling vs Kat Paprocki | Strawweight | The card's second women's bout |
| Guilherme Viana vs Robinson Perez | Ironweight | |
| James Murrin vs Chris Rooney | Featherweight | |
| Jake Pilla vs Angelo Colon | Featherweight | |
| Shane Jordan vs Daniel Pettit | Bantamweight | |
| David Burke vs David Simpson | Light heavyweight |
Joe Lauzon is the recognisable name for a Massachusetts audience, a long-serving UFC lightweight making a bare-knuckle debut and fighting for the first time since 2019, when he stopped Jonathan Pearce inside two minutes at UFC Boston. His opponent, Stash Kuykendall, is 0-2 in BKFC. It is a soft landing, and worth naming as one.
What is still unsettled
In the interest of not overstating a card that is still two weeks out:
- Bout count. BKFC's own event page listed 13 bouts in mid-August. Third-party schedules do not all agree, and cards this size routinely lose or gain fights in the fortnight before the weigh-in.
- Bout order and the main-card split. BKFC had not published a running order as of mid-August.
- Fighter records. Several fighters on the card are listed at 0-0-0 by BKFC because Fenway is their bare-knuckle debut, not because the data is missing. Where a fighter's mark was carried over from another promotion we have said so rather than presenting it as a BKFC record.
- Ferea's division, as above.
We are not aware of any announced bout having been publicly scratched, but no promotion publishes a cancellation list, so treat the card as provisional.
Where BKFC 92 leaves the map
The Boston Globe puts BKFC's current reach at 34 US states and 13 other countries. That is the number Feldman likes to set against the origin story: 28 states turned the promotion down before Cheyenne, Wyoming, staged the first legal American bare-knuckle card in June 2018. Massachusetts is the newest addition and one of the last big-market holdouts to move. Our state-by-state legality guide has the full picture, including the states, New York foremost among them, where the sport still has no route in.
The pattern the Massachusetts file shows is the one that has repeated everywhere BKFC has won. The promotion does not arrive with a bill for a legislature. It arrives at a commission's medical advisory board with injury data, a rulebook and a physician-staffing proposal, and then it waits, in this case for the better part of seven years. For the wider organisational history, see our BKFC profile and the major events timeline.
Results and a full recap will follow after 29 August. Broadcast options are listed on where to watch BKFC.
Sources
- BKFC — official BKFC 92 event page
- Boston Globe — BKFC set to take over Fenway Park on Aug. 29 and the Gigliotti feature, 9 August 2026
- Yahoo Sports — David Feldman and the BKFC have come a long way in 8 years
- Massachusetts State Athletic Commission, board minutes of 18 March 2019, Medical Advisory Board minutes of 27 March 2019 and Medical Advisory Board minutes of 17 May 2024
- 523 CMR 17.00 — Unarmed Combat Contests and Exhibitions Other Than Boxing and Mixed Martial Arts
- MLB / Boston Red Sox — Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship event page
- MLB — boxing returns to Fenway Park for the first time in 69 years (2025)
- ESPN — Blood sport: bare-knuckle fighting emerges from shadows, the source for Dr Warinner's medical advisory board having unanimously recommended sanctioning
- Fight records and title-defence tallies cross-checked against Wikipedia's pages for Kai Stewart, Luis Palomino and Christine Ferea
For odds and predictions rather than the card itself, see the BKFC 92 betting preview. For the rules under which the fights are contested, see BKFC rules explained.
