Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship (BKFC) will make its Australian debut this Saturday, April 18, when the burgeoning promotion brings its roadshow of blood and brutality to the Townsville Convention Centre, headlined by a heavyweight rematch between Haze Hepi and Krzysztof Wisniewski.
Fighting in the co-main event, two-time WBA world cruiserweight title challenger Mark ‘Bam Bam’ Flanagan (26-9, 19 KOs) will make his ungloved debut in his hometown, returning to the prize ring after a four-year hiatus to face Montenegro’s Dilan Prasovic. By his own admission, the lengthy break couldn’t have come at a better time.
Having just fought a close majority decision loss to future IBO world champion Floyd Masson, a bout widely regarded as Australia’s best that year, in December 2021, after time on the road competing against high-level opponents like Denis Lebedev, Arsen Goulamirian and Jai Opetaia, Flanagan found himself overweight and going through the motions in a six-round bout a few months later. Though he won the contest by fourth-round stoppage, the now 35-year-old, with the benefit of hindsight, can see just how empty his mental fuel tank was.
“In that last one, my performance was dogs**t, and my mind, motivation, and heart weren’t there. I wasn’t enjoying the fight at all,” Flanagan told FightsATW.com.
“I’d had my chance at a world title and then went back to the domestic scene and won the Australian title and had that fight against Floyd. Once I lost that, it basically broke my heart. They gave me that one last fight, and my heart wasn’t really in it, but I trained for it anyway.
“I was missing basically half the punches I was throwing because my mind wasn’t on the job. That’s when I knew it was time to hang it up for a bit.”
Now with a refreshed level of ambition, Flanagan enters BKFC’s squared circle eight years after the prospect of ‘knuckling up’ was first put to him. In Philadelphia to train alongside two-time world cruiserweight champion Steve Cunningham before traveling to France to challenge for the aforementioned Goulamirian’s world title in 2018, the Far-North Queenslander met with the promotion’s president, David Feldman.
Aiding the discussion was Flanagan’s former trainer John Bastable, who had early ties to the sport through another pupil and BKFC pioneer, “Rowdy” Bec Rawlings. Although talks didn’t progress past pleasantries, a seed was planted, and a promise was made by the coach to his then-fighter to keep him in the loop should an opportunity arise.
Somewhat dismissive of the concept at first, the passing of time has led to a much more open-minded approach, and in weighing up a potential fight on the organization’s ‘Down Under’ debut card, the 200-plus-pound slugger found that the pros well outweighed the cons.
“I hadn’t heard from John for a while and just out of the blue he called me and said, ‘I said if anything ever came up I’d give you a call, well something’s come up. It’s going to happen in Townsville with or without you. You being a Townsville boy, I thought I’d give you a call,” Flanagan recalled.
“I figured I wouldn’t let this opportunity go to waste. It’d be silly to let it go past, particularly with it being in Townsville. It was going to happen with or without me, so I’d better show my face at least.
“I’ve always been real particular with my hand wraps in boxing. I’ve always liked minimal gauze on my knuckles. I’ve always been real particular with gloves and never really wanted much padding. I’ve always been really fond of having my knuckle through the glove. I’ve never been too big on cuts. I’ve got giant hands and been known to be pretty tough. They’re calling me, I’m not looking for it. It’s in my hometown, on my wife’s birthday, another good reason to go. I told her I’d take her somewhere nice.
“It wasn’t so much of a ‘why?’ for me, it was more of a ‘why not?’. It’s one last little hoorah.”
The form that “hoorah” takes remains a matter of conjecture. Maybe ‘Bam Bam’ has this lone dance in front of his Townsville fans before riding off into the sunset, or perhaps his fights become a promotional pillar that BKFC uses to build a foundation for its venture into Australia. If things play out positively, he could even mount a run at world title gold yet again, albeit of the more bloodstained variety. In any case, the Flanagan standing opposite Prasovic on Saturday night will almost certainly be a far cry from the man ready to walk away for good four years ago.
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