David Feldman’s rise with the Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship came from learning to roll with life’s punches

The swirling, cold brown water of the Delaware River was David Feldman’s abyss. His ledge was the cracked concrete sidewalk on the Chester side of the Commodore Barry Bridge. He could not feel the spiked texture of the rusted light-blue railing. He could not feel the numbing November chill, either. He had $282 to his name. Cancer was eating his body. His new venture had been turned down by another state. He just had an argument when he decided to drive down West Chester Pike, get on the Blue Route to I-95 South, and head to the Commodore Barry.

This is where he wound up: lugging a visceral hollowness, his face raining tears as he leaned over the edge of a bridge, thinking about ending it.

He will never forget Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2016.

He was standing in the puddle of his nadir. Freedom was 60 seconds away.

That’s when he heard his father’s raspy Mickey Goldmill-like voice inside his head, “You’re not an [bleeping] quitter, you [expletive]” The image of his late, quadriplegic mother trapped in a wheelchair came into full view, too. She was once ruthlessly beaten and run over by a car, left for dead—and she persisted.

That’s when Feldman pushed away from the railing and walked back to his car.

Arms folded, the 52-year-old Feldman is telling this story about how his suicide attempt was aborted while leaning back behind the desk of his luxurious office in Broomall, the headquarters of a risk no one wanted any part of eight years ago: Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship.

Feldman has turned it into a multimillion-dollar corporation that originated in Springfield (Delaware County) to a fighting conglomerate that hosts events throughout the world. BKFC went from three shows in 2018, to six shows in 2019, to six again in 2020 when the world shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, to 12 in 2021, to 22 last year.

This year, BKFC has a show almost every weekend. Bare-knuckle fighting is now legal and sanctioned in 25 states. The promotion went from shows in four countries to putting on events in eight nations this year, already with a show in London and spreading as far as the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and South America.

On April 29 in Bloomfield, Colo., BKFC will be holding BKFC 41, or “BKFC’s Super Bowl,” featuring its main event between Philly’s Eddie Alvarez, a former UFC lightweight champion, and former UFC featherweight contender Chad Mendez for the biggest purse in the brief history of BKFC.

It has been a twisting, mentally arduous odyssey for Feldman and BKFC, rising from looking down at the roaring water of the Delaware River to here.

‘I made a video of myself crying into the phone, saying ‘I’m at the worst place in my life, and I’m never going to be in this place again.’”

Feldman, not to be confused with his boxing impresario brother, Damon, is the youngest of Marty Feldman’s two sons. Their father died of dementia in 2017 at the age of 83. But he entrenched his sons in the sport of boxing, after a local club career as a middleweight. The elder Feldman trained lightweight world champion Charlie “Cho-Cho” Brown, IBF light heavyweight titlist “Prince” Charles Williams, middleweight contender Frank “The Animal” Fletcher, and IBF lightweight champ Paul Spadafora, bringing them all to his Broomall home.

Boxing was omnipresent. Its tentacles were too strong to evade his sons. When David Feldman was 6, his mother, Norma Dees, was beaten, thrown out of a car, run over, and left a quadriplegic. The boys, in addition to helping their mother, were constantly around boxing.

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David Feldman began delving into the boxing game around 2007, promoting local shows. He helped his brother with some of his events before switching to mixed-martial arts in 2010. In his travels, Feldman came across a fighter named Bobby Gunn, who once fought IBF cruiserweight champion Tomasz Adamek and all-time great Roy Jones Jr. Gunn, a descendant of “Irish Travellers,” told Feldman about the roving clans that would fight other families. They would brawl in the emerald Irish fields with winner-take-all purses at stake, along with their manhood.

What drew Feldman was the smack of knuckles on skin.

He had a sound relationship with the people who ran the Fort McDowell Casino outside Scottsdale, Ariz., so he raised the idea of a bare-knuckle main event on an 11-fight card in 2011. Feldman explained to the Arizona state athletic commission what he wanted to do. It attracted the attention of Sen. John McCain, who sent them a cease-and-desist letter. McCain went as far as calling the day before the event to try to shut it down.

Feldman’s inner Delco surfaced, and he and his team went ahead anyway.

On Aug. 25, 2011, Feldman sold 5,500 tickets, though more importantly, the event drew 700,000 views on the streaming network when before the paywall broke.

“I came off that show thinking this was unbelievable, with all of the attention it received,” Feldman said. “We just didn’t have many state athletic commissions willing to give us a chance. We tried, I don’t know, 29 states, to get bare-knuckle sanctioned, while I was promoting MMA events up and down the East Coast and all over the country. We had to take risks. We went underground with bare-knuckle fights for about five, or six years, where Esquire, Men’s Journal did stories on them.

“I had to risk everything to get this thing off the ground. Think about the movie Fight Club, well, this was like the real-life version of that. Our priority was building up attention, which was literally built from the ground up on the underground circuit. People were talking about this. People wanted to see it. But state commissions would tell me that they could not take the risk; that they weren’t willing to be the first state to say OK.”

That changed through Feldman’s dogged persistence. He had a cellphone tethered to his ear, calling every state athletic commission he could reach.

In March 2018, Feldman got the answer he needed. The Wyoming Combat Sports Commission chairman Bryan Pedersen was the first to approve bare-knuckle fights. That commission does not regulate boxing; it is an MMA-only state commission. Pedersen, whose background is in the financial field, was a former Wyoming state legislator whose three previous attempts to revive a state boxing commission, which collapsed in the late 1980s, were ignored. Pederson began collating information and took investigative steps to legalize bare-knuckle fights in 2016.

On June 2, 2018, Feldman held the first official BKFC event at the 2,000-seat Cheyenne (Wyo.) Ice & Events Center.

Other states followed. Florida, Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, and 20 more states have now allowed bare-knuckle fights. Feldman is still looking to get into Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.

Feldman is not trying to hide anything. Bare-knuckle fighting is brutal. Some would scoff at its barbarity, though it is no more vicious than football, ice hockey, certainly boxing, wrestling, and mixed-martial arts. In the winter, thousands are sporadically entertained by bare-knuckle fights for public display.

They’re called hockey fights.

Bare-knuckle fights consist of five two-minute rounds and last an average of 2.5 rounds, or just over 10 minutes. The fights take place in a 22-foot padded circle inside four ropes on a 28-foot platform. The fighters start from two four-foot lines separated by 3 feet. The BKFC has three women’s divisions (115, 125, and 135 pounds) and the men have nine (125, 135, 145, 155, 165, 175, 185, 205, and heavyweight). They hold day-before weigh-ins and fighters cannot rehydrate more than 10% of their weight.

John McCain sent them a letter warning them to stop. McCain went as far as calling the day before an event to try to shut it down. Feldman’s inner Delco surfaced, and he and his team went ahead anyway.

The fingers and knuckles are uncovered, with two fingers from the knuckles to the wrist wrapped. The dynamic of throwing a punch with a bare fist from a professional fighter is also different than what you would assume. Do you think NFL players would fly around the field if they played without helmets? Of course not. With your hands wrapped and gloved up, you feel like you can punch through a wall. Professionals who fight bare knuckles know that a high-velocity punch thrown with all their might may do more damage to their hands if they hit bone than they would to their opponent, so their punches are more calculated.

Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship’s TV production has grown exponentially, rising from the quality of what looked like a local-cable high school football game to a high UFC-level event.

“I think what’s surprised me the most is being accepted as fast as we have in the combat-sports world,” Feldman said. “We have Eddie Alvarez and Chad Mendez, and more large names are calling us. We have never stiffed anyone. I mortgaged my house four different times to keep this alive. We did London in August 2022, and we had to beg, and borrow from anyone willing to hear us. It was a huge turning point for us. We got $100,000 from Tony Ruffo to get this started, and he backed us to fund our first event [Ruffo holds a small percentage]. Ryan Kavanaugh and Triller came to us in December 2021. He loved it.”

Last Aug. 19, Kavanaugh and Feldman made an agreement that Triller would own a majority percentage of BKFC. Kavanaugh was once a major Hollywood mogul. In 2003, he co-founded Relativity Media, which produced or financed movies like The Fighter, Hancock, Mamma Mia!, The Social Network, Salt, and Cowboys & Aliens. In July 2015, Relativity Media declared bankruptcy, with Kavanaugh facing a mountain of lawsuits.

According to Feldman, other investors have recently inquired with significant offers, numerous feelers coming from the Middle East, under the condition Feldman would still be in place as BKFC’s CEO, and his son, David Jr., BKFC COO and broadcast executive producer. Feldman says other celebrities have also shown interest in investing in BKFC. The more quality investors, the better the purse money. The better the purse money, the better the fighters and the quality of the fights.

BKFC’s total staff is 37. It started with three: David Feldman, David Jr., and current BKFC matchmaker Nate Shook. On BKFC’s first event, it had a fight-day staff of 14. It had no broadcasting deals. Today, its fight-day staff consists of 180 people, with 42 countries that it’s broadcasting to, and sponsorship deals with DraftKings, Crescent Tools, the Lions Not Sheep apparel line and Nerd Focus Energy Drink. Their fights are now airing on Fox Deportes, and BKFC is currently negotiating with a major sports network on a much larger deal.

Getting into Pennsylvania is a priority.

The Alvarez-Mendes fight could be a considerable help toward that goal. In late 2022, the five-member Pennsylvania Athletic Commission voted bare-knuckles down. BKFC is drawing C-level fighters in past-prime boxers like former junior middleweight contender Austin Trout and former IBF junior welterweight world champion Paulie Malignaggi. Feldman is looking to build fighters within BKFC who want to jump right into bare-knuckles, and he has plans on opening a training facility in Florida.

BKFC has a few budding stars already in 185-pounders Mike Richman and Lorenzo Hunt.

“We’re always open and it’s possible BKFC can reapply for sanctioning some future time, but right now, it’s something that we’re not honestly interested in,” said Greg Sirb, the executive director of the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission. “We need to see how safe their fighters are and how they do things. There is no question that it is growing. We’re willing to look at it again. I am going to need to see the quality of the participants, the injury rates, the overall day-to-day procedures that they have to ensure the safety of all of their fighters.

“We are still looking particularly at the quality of their fighters. As they get bigger and bigger, maybe they will entice a better quality of fighter. We are looking at the overall quality of the athlete that [is] coming into the sport.”

Right now, it’s something that we’re not honestly interested in.”

There were myriad starts and stops in the beginning, along with piles of doubt.

“June 2, 2018, was the turning point because none of us knew what we were doing,” said David Feldman Jr., laughing. “I think we all learned on the go. I knew nothing about production, and look where we are now. We have over a million Instagram followers. I remember when we hit 20,000 on our first show and we thought it was a big deal.

“We really did not know our demographic, though it seems to lean more toward MMA fans. It is a guy sport. It relates to anyone who associates with a street fight. When MMA first came out, you couldn’t relate to it much, because no one knew then what a heel hook was, or what a rear-naked chokehold was. Everyone knows what a punch in the face is.”

Out in the main lobby of his father’s office are two white grease boards with lines of dates, with cities in Thailand, various major U.S. cities, and London, coupled with lists of who will be headlining these promotions.

The elder Feldman looks up at the list and shakes his head. He often thinks back to where he was and where he is. He crawled and scratched his way out of a deep, dark place.

“I still have the video I took of myself that day, Wednesday, November 2, 2016, standing there on the Commodore Barry Bridge, I was going to jump,” he tearfully recalled. “I was 60 seconds from jumping off the bridge. I just got diagnosed with cancer for the first time. My father was dying of dementia. I was broke.

“It’s the hardest I ever cried in my life. Something hit me and saved me. It was father’s voice telling me that ‘You’re not a [bleeping] quitter, you’re not a [bleeping] quitter, you’re not a[bleeping] quitter.’ I made a video of myself crying into the phone, saying ‘I’m at the worst place in my life, and I’m never going to be in this place again.’”

A few minutes after relating that story, Feldman had to get on a conference call. It was with a host of sponsors for the April Alvarez-Mendez show.