He thinks about the simple terror he endures each morning as he walks his seven-year-old daughter, Charlene, into the private school he pays for with his bare-knuckle winnings. He prays the other suburban parents don’t discover his side hustle, prays the world never shuns his little girl for his own sins. “The other parents have no idea who I am,” he says, “and I don’t want them to.” Gunn pauses. “The last thing my little girl told me this morning was, ‘Please, Daddy, don’t come home with a black eye.’”
Gunn shakes his head and walks into the center of the garage. The chatter dies down. The crowd’s circle tightens. The only noise is the whir from an industrial fan. The referee, Danny Provenzano, an ex-con who served five years in a state prison and who also happens to be the grand-nephew of Anthony Provenzano, a key figure in the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, looks at the aging fighter. “You ready?”
Gunn nods.
The two men circle. McClendon seems jittery. He feints and jabs while dancing on his toes, exhaling loudly with each punch. A few land, but most miss. By contrast, Gunn has undergone a stark transformation. He is calm, relaxed, his feet planted squarely on the concrete, keeping time with his opponent, dodging and weaving with his upper body. He throws fewer punches—sharp jabs, mostly to the body—but lands all of them. “Oof,” McClendon says, shaking his head after a shot to the chin.
“Bring it to the body,” Dom calls.
About a minute into the fight, the men clench in a sweaty embrace, catching their breath, slowing their racing hearts, diagnosing each other’s exhaustion. Then Gunn pushes McClendon away.
The end is sudden. Gunn shoots a left hook to the stomach, a right hook to the kidney, and a devastating deep left hook straight to the heart. As his opponent doubles over, Gunn delivers a final jab to the chin. McClendon goes down. “Get him up! Get him up!” Gunn yells, jacked up, marching back and forth.
On the ground, McClendon shakes his head.
“That’s it, that’s it,” the ref says. “No fight.”
Gunn helps his opponent up. “Good punch, dog,” McClendon says. Gunn holds him by the shoulders, staring at him fully as if for the first time. They smile and embrace. The fight is over.
“I don’t know if you ever took a sledgehammer to the face,” McClendon later says. “But it was pretty equivalent to that. I’m actually surprised that my mouth is still moving.”
The crowd cheers. Gunn is some $5,000 richer, but he looks like a guy who just missed his train.
“I’m tired of fighting in the shadows like this,” he says, rubbing his knuckles while a mechanic slides the garage doors open and sunlight fills the room.
“I want to make this sport legal.”
1Gunn and other fighters are often cagey about the exact amounts of their purses in underground fights. In this book, I give a precise amount when verified. Otherwise, I give an approximation, when told to me, or no number at all. “They don’t want attention from the IRS,” says an underground fight promoter. “Bobby will tell you he’s only made enough off bare knuckle to buy a Subway sandwich. It’s more like he’s made enough to buy a Subway sandwich franchise.
From Bare Knuckle: Bobby Gunn, 73–0 Undefeated. A Dad. A Dream. A Fight like You’ve Never Seen. by Stayton Bonner. Used with the permission of the publisher, Blackstone Publishing. Copyright ©2024 by Stayton Bonner.
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