Corey Erdman gets you all caught up on the action from BKFC Fight Night Omaha.
(Photo Courtesy: BKFC)
It was one of the biggest weekends of the boxing year with Oleksandr Usyk becoming undisputed heavyweight champion over Tyson Fury in Saudi Arabia, but the acton got started in Omaha on Friday night.
Watching both events on back to back days illustrated one of the main strengths BKFC has as a television product: Its digestibility, and its low barrier of entry as a viewer. As thrilling as Saturday’s pay-per-view was from Riyadh, the presentation was nearly eight hours long, and closer to ten hours if you include the prelims and associated countdown content. BKFC offered eleven fights in under three and a half hours. If one wanted to watch the replay on Triller+ and had the luxury of fast forwarding through additional broadcast content and ringwalks, you could probably watch this entire show bell to bell in two hours.
For BKFC, I watched with a group of boxing friends—Grey Johnson from BoxRec, Patrick Connor of Boxing History fame, and Aris Pina from CompuBox—and the night zipped along and was never boring. Because most fighters at this point only have a handful of fights in the sport, or are debutants, quick highlight packages on the broadcast quickly got anyone unfamiliar with any fighter up to speed on their entire career. However, with or without context, it’s nearly impossible to have a dull bare knuckle show. If you have friends over for a ten hour show and you want to be a generous host, you’ll be cooking them breakfast, lunch and dinner. Readers of this website are probably down for that, but for the casual fan, BKFC has nailed the sweet spot in terms of length and required attention span.
Here are the must-see fights from the weekend:
Ryan Roberts vs. Bobby Taylor
This fight was like if two fighting machines came off the assembly line and were pitted against one another. Same make, same model, same speed. Which one will hold up the best to the car crash impact?
Both Taylor and Roberts are impossibly wide and muscular for men weighing 155 pounds, and both fight the way you’d think two relatively short, musclebound tanks of fighters would operate, throwing nothing but bombs at all times.
Ultimately, it was Taylor who proved a little more durable than Roberts, sending him to the canvas twice, despite having to fight through a lot of blood that at one point looked like it might pose a threat to end the fight.
This fight was good enough, and the fighters are respected enough as action fighters, that down the road a rematch is 100% welcome, if not warranted. Not because Roberts had a compelling case to have won this fight on the cards, he certainly didn’t, but the fight was so good, and had
swings in momentum that could have sent this fight in another direcHon. A rematch is a near- guaranteed Fight of the Night whenever it may happen.
This one though? Put it on the shortlist for Fight of the Year.
Sarah Shell vs. Crystal Van Wyck
Let’s internalize these numbers for a moment: Sarah Shell threw 327 punches towards Crystal Van Wyck, and landed 160 of them. In ten minutes.
Put in a different perspective: Crystal Van Wyck absorbed 160 punches to the face with bare fists in a ten minute timespan. Her face at the end of the fight looked like what you might expect it to look like after suffering a beating like that.
Van Wyck showed remarkable bravery and resilience, but was carved up by Shell’s non-stop straight punching. With almost robotic consistency and precision, Shell kept a steady flow of technically crisp 1-2s flowing throughout the fight, and did so at a distance where she could land, but Van Wyck could not. The punch stats tell the story in that regard as well. Van Wyck landed 47 shots to the head, which is not nothing in bare knuckle boxing, and Shell may have to dip into her skills as a doctor to heal up some swelling on her right cheek as well, but it shows how often Shell was able to get off with impunity in this fight.
Shell’s volume and dimensions—5’7” with a 66” reach, could make her a serious contender at strawweight.
(Photo Courtesy: BKFC)
Dionisio Ramirez vs. Kassius Kayne
We like to show some love to the prelim fights at Bare Knuckle Nation, and apparently the fans do too. At last count, the prelims for this show had been viewed 120,000 times.
Whatever percentage of that number tuned in live saw an eye-opening performance from Dionisio Ramirez, who scored the prejest knockout of the night over Kassius Kayne.
Ramirez hurt Kayne fairly early in the opening round, and Kayne never really fully recovered. Ramirez also never relented, and ended the night with a nasty right hand followed by a left hook to Kayne who may have already been on his way to the canvas anyway, shades of Ray Mercer vs. Tommy Morrison, except in the center of the ring.
Ramirez took nearly five full years off of fighting, but as we’ve seen in bare knuckle over the years and recently, this is the combat sport for a career revival.
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