Bare Knuckle Boxing Puts Veteran Fight Execs In Its Corner To Punch Above Its Weight
CEO David Tetreault and his marketing team have built the gloveless combat sport into a global force with prestige lineage and an eye for the modern audience
To take a fight from spectacle to sport, promoters must provide fans consistent quality, access, storylines, and symbols that keep them returning to ringside.
BKB Bare Knuckle Boxing is hitting all of those pressure points as it fights its way into the combat sports mainstream.
Much as there was a time when United States senators (and future presidential nominees) referred to mixed martial arts as “human cockfighting” before regulation and decades of building eventually brought it to the White House lawn, bare-knuckle boxing faced a steep climb from bans and obscurity to resurgence. The United Kingdom brought back legal bare-knuckle fights in 2015 after more than a century of absence, with that fight’s backers Joe Smith-Brown and Jim Freeman founding UK bare-knuckle promotion BKB.
That same year, former MMA fighter Dhafir “Dada 5000” Harris and former owner of NASCAR’s HRT Motorsports Mike Vazquez started the BYB Extreme Fighting Series as a backyard bare-knuckle competition featured in documentarian Billy Corben’s film Dawg Fight. The U.S. never officially legalized bare-knuckle boxing during its 1800s prime and left its governance to an independent sanctioning body—the National Police Gazette. When Wyoming became the first state to legalize bare-knuckle boxing under its state combat sports commission in 2018, 32 other states followed.
But as bare-knuckle boxing drew support and regulation throughout the UK and United States, the promotions smoothed and polished some of the sport’s bonier edges. In 2017, BYB Extreme patented a three-sided, four-roped ring—the Trigon—with just 187 square feet of fighting space that’s less than half the size of a standard 400-square-foot boxing ring. There are few places to run or clinch, promoting more action and what BKB claims is a nearly 90% knockout rate.
In 2021, with bare-knuckle boxing now legal in the UK and certain U.S. states, BYB and BKB began partnering on certain promotions and fights. In 2024, BYB acquired BKB and, separately, The Police Gazette Diamond Belt from the Bare-Knuckle Boxing Hall of Fame in Belfast, New York—a title with history dating to 1881. The new organization rebranded as BKB Bare Knuckle Boxing and has hosted dozens of events in cities including London, Dubai, Miami, and Cardiff.
I listened very closely because I knew how the growth was going, I knew how audiences were building, I knew how sponsors were looking at it differently. I knew how networks were looking at it differently.
David Tetreault, CEO, BKB Bare Knuckle Boxing
The promotion faces competition from the Triller-owned Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship (BKFC)—which includes former UFC champ Conor McGregor among its stakeholders—but diverged from that promotion’s emphasis on MMA fighters to partner with talent across disciplines. Its roster is laden with boxing luminaries including Lee Selby, Paulie Malignaggi, Victor Ortiz, Yuriorkis Gamboa, Alfredo Angulo, Amado Vargas and others—with the promotion regularly in talks with talent including Ryan and Sean Garcia.
In May 2025, David Tetreault joined BKB as its CEO after little more than three years with Triller sewing up BKFC’s streaming deal with DAZN and working closely with top-tier boxing talent including Manny Pacquiao, Fernando Vargas, and Sergey Kovalev. In seven years prior as chief business officer at Oscar de la Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions, Tetreault helped build brand and broadcast partnerships, but also developed an 11-fight stretch that represented the rise and peak of Canelo Alvarez’s career.
When BKB loads its cards with prestige talent and holds them in global epicenters of combat sports—BKB 61 goes to London on Nov. 14, while BKB 62 takes the promotion to Los Angeles for the first time on Dec. 5—Tetreault said it functions like a movie or television studio. He, Vazquez, and team members including CMO Loren Mack—hired in June from the Professional Fighters League (PFL)—“green light” concepts and consider all elements of the narrative just as Tetreault did when Vazquez initially approached him about joining the league.
“I listened very closely because I knew how the growth was going, I knew how audiences were building, I knew how sponsors were looking at it differently. I knew how networks were looking at it differently,” he said. “So when we’re working with our matchmaker Mel Valenzuela and he’s proposing a fight, we’re looking at all of the dynamics: who’s on top of the card, what host city we’re going into, why this fight matters, how we’re going to sell it.”
On with the show
When Tetreault first started his career, he wasn’t in the fight game: He just knew how to sell a generation of viewers the entertainment it connected with.
At his first long-term job as a marketing manager with Sony Entertainment, he spent the first half of the ‘90s building campaigns around series including Seinfeld, Mad About You, Married with Children, Ricki Lake and Parker Lewis Can’t Lose. As a marketing director for Warner Brothers and SVP of marketing at Fox, Tetreault sold viewers and brand partners alike on Friends, ER, The West Wing, The Simpsons, American Idol, 24, The X Files, Futurama, King of the Hill, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ally McBeal, and Malcolm in the Middle.
In seeing the way the studio structure was built from a very young age, right out of college, I got a very good understanding of how high-level decisions were made when you’re greenlighting a project…there’s a lot of pre-planning to see how it’s going to land best with the audiences.
David Tetreault, CEO, BKB Bare Knuckle Boxing
“I was fortunate enough to have some great training from three amazing studios—Sony, Warner Brothers, and Fox—and each one of them have their own idiosyncrasies, specialties, and ways of conducting business,” Tetreault said. “In seeing the way the studio structure was built from a very young age, right out of college, I got a very good understanding of how high-level decisions were made when you’re greenlighting a project…there’s a lot of pre-planning to see how it’s going to land best with the audiences.”
When Tetreault arrived at Golden Boy in 2015—around the time that the promotion was presenting a string of big fights for Alvarez—his studio experience felt especially prescient. His team had to look at what it was bringing to its audiences, which marquee matchups would have the most appeal and what the data and the calendar said about timing—especially around holidays.
That wasn’t much different than a movie launch, and Tetreault and De La Hoya rolled out the red carpet for some of the greatest fights of the last decade as the industry weathered a shift to streaming and an insatiable demand for social-media content and shoulder programming. He watched Turki Alalshikh and Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority invest in boxing and saw Dana White’s approach to audience building through The Ultimate Fighter on Spike, Fox, and ESPN.
Finally, at Triller, Tetreault gained insight into how bare-knuckle boxing was connecting with younger Millennials and Gen Z through BKFC. Combined with Vazquez’s experience launching his NASCAR team in Mexico, Tetreault had a plan for where he wanted to take bare-knuckle boxing and BKB in particular.
The promotion has plans to expand its reach into Mexico by 2027. It continues to grab onto known fighting talent where it can, with Bally FightNight BKB taking former Terence Crawford foe Hank Lundy to Dover, Delaware, on Nov. 20. For its first Los Angeles card on Dec. 5, it’s pitting Paulie Malignaggi against Victor Ortiz at the city’s 100-year-old Orpheum Theatre.
“L.A. is the richest demographic for all of boxing in the entire world, so bringing that product to L.A. in a really exclusive theater gives us all the fundamentals of what goes into launching a major mega fight inside of BKB,” Tetreault said. “So all of that thinking goes into the way we approach it: From the way we title it, the way we match it for host city, the marketing, how much we’re going to spend on that marketing, where that marketing is going, and how we’re going to speak to our short form and our shoulder programming.”
Making an impact
When fans want to catch BKB bouts, they can check in on talkSPORT in the UK and Ireland, VICE TV in the U.S. and Canada, and Telemundo for Spanish-language audiences across the U.S. Or they can just head to TikTok, where BKB claims it is the most-viewed live sports property in the world.
Tetreault noted that, back in June, BKB found itself at the table with other networks and platforms, but TikTok seemed most interested in showing the promotion’s preliminary bouts in their entirety. In turn, BKB rebuilt its prelims so that TikTok is effectively showing their own feature fight, main event, and co-main event with boxer Andy Ruiz stepping in for occasional promos.
BKB’s traditional broadcasters handle the calls, while Power Slap champion Elle Dempster and influencer Taylor Feingold conduct exclusive locker-room interviews for the TikTok broadcast. Tetreault considers 1 minute and 20 seconds a “very good” watch time, while an “exceptional” broadcast will hold viewers’ attention for 2 minutes and 30 seconds. BKB’s TikTok fights have averaged 4 minutes and 30 seconds, with a July 25 fight in London clocking in at just over 7 minutes.
“There’s more things that are going to be happening with TikTok that we’ll be announcing as we get into LA with different pieces that will include gifting and you know different ways that we’re connecting with influencers,” Tetreault said.
BKB’s 16 events each year in the U.S., UK, and, eventually, Mexico, were a key draw for Tetreault not only for their broadcast potential, but for their accompanying infrastructure. The Bally FightNight prospect series not only takes place in Bally’s casinos, but is streamed through their Bally’s Live app that uses sensors to calculate punches by round and determine number of punches, types of punches, and force of punches for use by bettors. BKB also partners with Seneca Casinos in New York and Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut.
Boxing notables continue to gravitate to BKB as well. Former heavyweight champion Tyson Fury dropped in on an event in Miami. Ruiz made an appearance at a BKB stop in Tijuana. Fernando Vargas has been a presence with two sons in the promotion. Tetreault said reality and shoulder series telling the stories of the fighters are in the works.
But the brand partners have already followed. Within the last five months, Tetreault said BKB has added sponsors including Tuff Shed, Adios Spirits, Hydroshot, Rainbet, and Producer Mezcal. He noted that BKB has attempted to be clinical with sponsorships, choosing partners who’d not only embrace the promotion but would be a fit for developing talent like Sharif Rahman, Amado Vargas, and Fernando Vargas Jr. as they split time between their traditional and bare-knuckle careers—who’d sponsor main events, but also podcasts and other content from BKB’s new brand studio.
My philosophy is that you live and die by the brief, and if you don’t have a brief, you’re going to die…you have to be thinking as an enterprise, and that’s the way that we’re going about everything.
David Tetreault, CEO, BKB Bare Knuckle Boxing
As Tetreault looks toward BKB’s future, he and Vazquez, Mack, advisor David Siegel (formerly with the Los Angeles Dodgers) and the rest of the team see room for revisions as growth and audience dictate the promotion’s direction. Increasingly, however, athletes, broadcast partners, and sponsors are green lighting it for production—even with a few necessary alterations.
“My philosophy is that you live and die by the brief, and if you don’t have a brief, you’re going to die and if you have a brief, you got to make sure that everybody’s held accountable to what the goal is and if there’s changes that need to be made, they need to be documented,” Tetreault said. “But we’ve changed some of the culture internally from a regional promoter into a sports and entertainment entity that has the same attributes of the Los Angeles Dodgers: You have to be thinking as an enterprise, and that’s the way that we’re going about everything.”
