Joe Lauzon won his BKFC debut by second-round stoppage over Braeden Kuykendall at Fenway Park in Boston on Saturday, 29 August 2026, in his first fight in seven years.
The Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship (BKFC) held BKFC 92 at the Boston ballpark, the first legal bare-knuckle boxing card staged at the venue, as reported by The Boston Globe.
Lauzon, 42, had not fought professionally since 2019.
Inside the Joe Lauzon BKFC debut at Fenway Park
Lauzon stopped Kuykendall by technical knockout at 0:49 of the second round. Kuykendall had entered the contest winless in the promotion at 0-2, carrying a 6-2 mixed martial arts record in which all six wins came by stoppage, and he did not see out a third bare-knuckle bout.
A technical knockout in bare-knuckle boxing is called when the referee judges a fighter unable to continue, without a count being completed. Cuts open more readily without gloves, and referees and ringside doctors stop contests earlier than they would in a gloved bout.
Lauzon last competed in 2019, when he stopped Jonathan Pearce in 93 seconds at an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event in Boston. He built his reputation over more than a decade in the UFC’s lightweight division, taking 17 of his 28 career wins by submission rather than on the cards.
Why the Fenway Park bare-knuckle card mattered
Bare-knuckle boxing was illegal across the United States for more than a century before individual states began sanctioning it in 2018.
BKFC 92 was the first card of its kind permitted at Fenway Park, a venue that opened in 1912 and is best known as the home of baseball’s Boston Red Sox.
What Joe Lauzon said about his BKFC future
Asked at the BKFC 92 press conference whether he would fight again, Lauzon told reporters he did not look past whoever was in front of him. He tied any return to how the Fenway Park night went, and left the answer open:
“Maybe I like it, maybe I don’t. If they come back to Fenway and everything goes smoothly Saturday, 100 percent, I’m down to come back and do it again. But I might go, ‘the hell with this, let’s get out of here.’ We’ll see.”
Those remarks were made before the fight, and no comment from Lauzon after the stoppage was available at the time of publishing.
His seven-year absence had followed a run in which he became one of the more familiar names on cards staged in his home state of Massachusetts.
Lauzon left Fenway Park with a win and a second fight tied to whether BKFC comes back to the ballpark. He had returned at 42 to a version of the sport he walked away from in 2019, fought without gloves and over two-minute rounds, and no return date had been announced.
