Bare-Knuckle Fighting Championship (BKFC) was treated to as big of a surprise as it could have asked for at its last event.
BKFC 41 went down in Denver, Colorado to close out this past month (April 29, 2023), featuring a massive doubleheader of match ups. The main and co-main events saw former Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) champions, Luke Rockhold and Eddie Alvarez, paired with their fellow former UFC roster members, Mike Perry and Chad Mendes. Toward the tail-end of the event, Alvarez and Mendes’ old foe, Conor McGregor, arrived to spectate the bloody action.
Perry defeated Rockhold via a second-round retirement technical knockout when Rockhold broke his front tooth from a punch (watch highlights). In celebration, Perry invited the “Notorious” former two-division UFC champion into the ring where the pair had an impromptu face-off. Also in attendance that night was Denver native and future UFC Hall of Famer, Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone. According to Chael Sonnen, who was working backstage as an interviewer throughout the event, the plan was originally for Perry to bring in his past opponent.
“We were supposed to go off the air with ‘Cowboy’ Cerrone doing a faceoff with Mike Perry,” Sonnen stated told The MMA Hour. “That is what the script said, and by the way, ‘Cowboy’ and his lovely kids and his lovely wife were all there in attendance. So, I believed it. I was then told that Conor McGregor was going to show up. I said, ‘He’s not.’ There’s a rumor that he fueled up the jet and he’s headed out here to give Dave Feldman $50,000,000. Yeah, he’s just not coming.
“Oh my goodness, you wouldn’t believe it,” he continued. “Conor McGregor comes walking in. They don’t have chairs for him. Feldman decides he’s gonna sit him next to him at the head table. Perry was supposed to call for ‘Cowboy’ like the show sheet said. He overlooked ‘Cowboy,’ he thought there would be enough time. He thought there would be enough time for Conor McGregor to get out of the ring and for ‘Cowboy’ to get in the ring. They didn’t have enough time, eventually, they faded to black. ‘Cowboy’ was red hot. I don’t know anything about the $50,000,000, but McGregor did show up and as far as a night and a piece of entertainment, I feel like we got a real treat there.”
Cerrone didn’t seem all too bothered by the post-event antics, but it makes sense that he’d have been a name to get more involved thanks to his history with Perry. In Nov. 2018, Cerrone earned a Performance of the Night bonus in that very same city at the expense of Perry, earning a first-round armbar submission win.
After a July 2022 guillotine submission choke loss to Jim Miller in their rematch, “Cowboy” called it a career.