Lee Selby won his second bare-knuckle fight Saturday night, and his face is going to need a lot longer than Ollie Sentance’s to recover. The former IBF featherweight champion took a split decision over the previously unbeaten Sentance in the BKB 61 main event at indigo at The O2 in London. Bloody Elbow called the result controversial and described the injury as a horror show: an early shot from Sentance raised a hematoma that eventually swelled Selby’s left eye completely shut.
The super-lightweight fight went all five rounds. According to Bloody Elbow, Selby got hurt early, struggled with the eye the rest of the night, and still leaned on the boxing skills that made him a world champion. Those are the skills that earned him the nickname Lightning, and Marko Martinjak, in a pre-fight interview with Bare Knuckle Bowker, went as far as comparing him to a Welsh version of Floyd Mayweather. Bloody Elbow’s report didn’t include the scorecards, so I can’t tell you how wide the split was or which judge went the other way.
How They Got Here
Selby (now 2-0 in BKB) came into the Trigon at 1-0 with one knockout. He debuted in June at BKB 55, a Cardiff homecoming, and stopped Antonio Rizzo in the second round. Before making the switch, he put in MMA training specifically to get comfortable in the clinch, which is a smart move for a career boxer entering a sport where nobody is going to let you work from range all night.
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Sentance, who fights under the nickname The Death, had been 2-0 with two knockouts. He stopped Nico Earwaker in the fourth round at BKB 51, then finished Corey Healey in the second at BKB 55. Same card as Selby’s debut, which gives this matchup some built-in logic.
Not everyone liked Selby going in. Aaron McCallum, who fought Simey Doherty in a title eliminator rematch on the same card, told Bare Knuckle Bowker he’d put his money on Sentance. “Ollie’s got that dog in him,” McCallum said, adding that Selby had flinched when he got punched against Rizzo and that Sentance would have seen it on tape. That read looked pretty sharp in the first round. It looked a lot worse by the fifth.
The card’s co-main had Martinjak defending his bridgerweight title against former British cruiserweight boxing champ Matty Askin, and Amado Vargas, son of Fernando Vargas, returned against Callum Nulty. The main card aired on VICE TV and Telemundo in the U.S. and talkSPORT in the UK and Ireland. Nothing has been announced yet for Selby’s next fight.
My Take
Martinjak warned before fight night that going long in bare knuckle leaves you looking like “a mix of Leatherface, Jason, and Freddy Krueger after fight,” and Selby basically auditioned for the role. I don’t love a controversial split in a headliner, because promotions bringing in big boxing names should want those wins to be clean. But a guy who has already been a world champion had every excuse to coast or fold with one eye, and he did neither. He walked in against an unbeaten knockout puncher, got his face rearranged, and still took the zero home to Wales. BKB should book the rematch before the swelling even goes down, because half the room thinks Sentance won it.
