He Fought Grown Men for Money as a Tween. As an Adult, He Became a Beast

One night in the winter of 1984, in a run-down motel on the western fringe of Niagara Falls, Bobby Gunn awoke to headlights and voices. His breath plumed in the cold air. Stale cigarette smoke seeped from the shag carpet. He looked at the clock: 2:00 a.m. Lying on his sleeping pad on the floor, Gunn, then 11 years old, looked to his mother, Jackie, who remained still as a corpse in the room’s queen-size bed. Gunn’s father, Robert, was gone, but that wasn’t unusual. He sometimes went on drinking sprees for weeks on end, disappearing each night to bars, returning home at closing time, and getting up a few hours later to go to work.

Yet tonight was different. For the first time, Robert had brought someone back from the bar, and it sounded like a crowd. The door burst open. “Wake up, boy,” Robert said, his cigarette glowing red in the dark. “There’s somebody I need you to fight.”

Situated on the Niagara Escarpment, Niagara Falls, Ontario, is famous as a tourist attraction. This is the 170-foot waterfall where Houdini swam the rapids, where little white boats with tourists putter back and forth all day under its boom and mist. But walk a few blocks beyond the boardwalk attractions, and you find another reality. Like Tijuana or Juárez, Niagara Falls is a border town, a major conduit between the USA and Canada for illicit drugs, guns, and humans. In 2017, over 25 million people crossed the border in southern Ontario, resulting in over 1,600 drug seizures and over 600 prohibited-weapons seizures.

For four months every year, the border town was also where the Gunns called home. “It was like the Wild West back then,” Gunn says. “A very tough town with a lot of bad people. Even the cops didn’t care. So we were forced to live on both sides of the law.” From December through March, when the weather turned too cold to travel the northern plains in search of work, the Gunn family would park their one-ton truck and sixteen-foot caravan behind one of the motels lining the four-lane highway on the western edge of Niagara Falls. Surrounded by strip clubs, liquor stores, and jails, these motor courts were brutal places, no-man’s-lands of drifters and drug dealers and prostitutes. At night, the Gunns had to check their caravan regularly, protecting it from thieves. By day, they scrounged for jobs in the stinging twenty-below winters.

That night, staring at his father in the doorway, Gunn threw off his blanket and stood, naked except for a pair of jogging pants. Far from the hulking 200-pound brawler he is today, he was then just a skinny freckled kid, “an Opie-looking motherfucker,” as he puts it. Shivering, he walked to his father. Robert told him to go to the bathroom, get dressed, and wipe Vaseline on his eyebrows—an old street-fighter trick. In the dark, nobody could see the grease, but it would make his opponent’s punches slip. Gunn was walking to the bathroom when, from the bed, his mother called out. “Please don’t do this,” she said. Ignoring his wife, Robert stared at his son. “I’ve got a real mouthy wee bum here,” he said, nodding outside. “A real cocky wee cunt. I want you to put the head right off him, you understand?” Gunn nodded. “Okay.”

Walking outside, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, Gunn squared off against a larger man in his midtwenties. Under the neon lights of the motel sign, surrounded by cars and bar patrons and a few prostitutes who had wandered out to see the show, Gunn put up his fists. His opponent just looked at him. “Is this him?” the man asked. “That’s a fucking kid.” Gunn hit the man squarely in the nose, following it with a combination to his eyes, starting him bleeding. Suddenly attuned, the man began swinging, his vision blurry, the crowd growing louder. “This guy was throwing punches a mile away,” Gunn recalls. “A real hillbilly. I mean, useless as two tits on a bull.” Gunn quickly picked the man apart, dropping him to the snow-covered ground. “I punched the head right off him.” Afterward, the crowd gone, Robert, a wad of newly won cash in his pocket, looked at his son, checking his face for bruises. He smiled.

“That’s my boy.”

Gunn, 50, is a legend in the sport of bare-knuckle, the first champion the U.S. has seen in more than 120 years. For decades, he ruled its underground world, a pro boxer who fought in mob-backed bouts for cash to put his daughter through private school. Essentially boxing without gloves or rounds, bare-knuckle was once a popular pastime in the 1800s before falling into a secret realm of illegal underground matches. Now, thanks to Gunn, it’s the fastest growing combat sport in the world. In 2008, he introduced the sport to David Feldman, a boxing and MMA promoter who created the Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship, a $411 million juggernaut with 48 events slated worldwide this year. But if the sport has gone mainstream, it owes its roots to one man, a fighter who earned his legend in blood—a world he was bred to rule in a grueling regiment. “There’s only one champion of bare-knuckle boxing,” said world heavyweight boxing champ Tyson Fury, “and that’s Bobby Gunn.”

At age five, coached by his father, Gunn began working the bags at the Shamrock Boxing Club, a Spartan facility in Niagara Falls, soon making a name for himself with his hard punch and devotion to the sport. After training sessions, Robert would take him back to the motel room to watch black-and-white recordings of Rocky Marciano and Sugar Ray Robinson on VHS, telling his son to mimic their moves on a makeshift bag.

At six years old, Gunn began gaining a reputation as an amateur boxer, competing in one-minute rounds in Peewee fights in Ontario. By the age of 10, he was competing in events across Canada. His parents splurged their meager savings on boxing equipment, making sure he maintained his training, keeping their son in prime fighting condition. Gunn was on the rise, his confidence growing along with his reputation as a fighter, leading to hopes he might one day elevate his family with his winnings. It was a brutal regiment, but one that Gunn embraced without question—always trying to make his father proud.

Under Robert’s watchful gaze, Gunn would train around the clock in three separate prizefight disciplines: boxing, bare-knuckle, and rough-and-tumble brawling. By the time he was 11, on the cusp of manhood, he was fighting for money, all his winnings going to his father.

In his youth, Robert used to be a fighter, too, excelling on the wrestling circuit. But he couldn’t make enough money in the game, so he quit to work odd jobs and marry Gunn’s mother—all while honing street fighting skills on the side. Once, on a rainy night in Toronto in the mid 1970s, Robert fought a biker in a gravel lot outside a motorcycle bar for $100. The twitchy opponent jumped up and down, proclaiming he’d rip Robert’s head off. Robert asked if he was ready, and as soon as the biker responded, Robert knocked him down in one punch. “See? I told you he had a glass jaw,” Robert told a friend watching, then went inside and finished his drink.

Using what he learned as a fighter, Robert taught his son to push his fist deeper into a man’s throat if he tried to bite his fingers, making him choke. He taught Gunn the most efficient angle to break a man’s arm, snap a leg, or rip out an eyeball with your thumb. He taught him always to turn the lights off before answering the front door, in case he needed to get a jump on someone. He taught him to put kerosene on his cuts, believing that it would heal them more quickly, and how to pull his own broken teeth out with pliers, resulting in summer teeth—“some are in and some are not.”

“He would work with me on the floor,” Gunn recalls. “He would grab me and act like he was gonna bite me, and then show me how to take my two thumbs and spread them inside a man’s mouth, ripping his cheeks open.”

Gunn was a loyal soldier, never questioning his father’s demands. Robert had Gunn wake before dawn, shovel people’s driveways for cash, eat breakfast, and then head out for the day’s barn or asphalt job. In the evenings, he and Robert would go to the boxing gym, Gunn jogging home afterward alongside the work truck, in army boots while carrying buckets of paint, his father yelling out the window at him.

No matter what Gunn did, no matter how many men he defeated or how long he kept pace with the truck, it was never enough for Robert, who often withheld his love, ignoring his son’s accomplishments and compounding his sense of solitude. Robert did this for the same reason he put kerosene on the boy’s cuts: to create the perfect fighting machine.

“A fighter is shaped from the inside out,” Robert says. “And Bobby was tough enough. He was breaking heavy bags in the gym. A lot of referees in the boxing ring didn’t like him for roughing, for using the elbow, but he was perfect for brawling.”

Away from the ring, away from the eyes of the world, Robert soon began training his son for another, more brutal arena: bare-knuckle. Gunn learned to control pain, honing his body with blows from leather belts and baseball bats, transforming his soft childhood skin into armor. He learned to show no mercy, to draw first blood, to disorient a man and break his spirit, finishing him as quickly as possible. Unlike boxing, in which fighters go the distance and are awarded points for finesse, bare-knuckle matches are fast and efficient—all that matters is the knockout.

“My upbringing sounds cruel,” Gunn says. “But it gave me the will to never quit. He knew I needed to be an animal to survive.” Gunn learned to control the tempo, keep his hands up high, see the other guy’s mistakes before he makes them, and aim his shots appropriately. And, most importantly, end fights quickly.

“You’re not getting paid by the hour,” Robert says. “Give a jab, then swing to the right and come with an overhand to break the nose. Get ’em bleeding and cut the eyes—that takes the fight out of most people.”

From 11 to 16, Gunn sharpened his techniques in the street fights his father organized, betting up to $1,000 on the ringer he honed from the cradle. Most of the time, he ended the matches in just three or four shots, the men drunk and off-balance and wildly outmatched, as his father heckled from the sidelines.

“They were perfect victims,” Robert says of the drunks he brought home. “They weren’t no world-class fighters, but they would give Bobby a good workout, two or three minutes in the street. I’d aggravate them and say, ‘Shit, you guys can’t fight. You can’t even beat this fucking kid.’ And they’d get all pissed off and one would say to Bobby, ‘Go sit down, you little punk fucker.’ And Bobby—Wack!—the man’s nose would be bleeding or his eye would be cut and he’d put them out. It give Bobby experience, you see—I was preparing him for what’s to come.”

For Gunn, most of the motel fighters are a blur, a montage of towering bleary-eyed hulks. Yet he does remember one muscled bald man, about 35, who claimed to be a fighter. Thirty seconds into the fight, Gunn hit him with a combination, a right hand to the body knocking the man back so hard, he fell and jammed his body between the wheel and fender of Robert’s truck. As the man lay there, his body at a funny angle, Gunn, his father, and the entire motor court stood in silence, fearing the worst—until the man let out a single “Fu-u-u-uck.”

Gunn jokes about it now, but privately, he felt pain and fear in those motor-court parking lots. “At the end of the day, I was still a little boy fighting men,” he says.

Gunn doesn’t like to dwell on the past. The physical punishments, long hours, and total isolation during training didn’t bother him. Because once he started winning fights, he finally earned solitary nuggets of his father’s affection.

“‘That’s my boy.’ That little word of encouragement from my dad made it all right,” Gunn says. “It was a tough life. Yes, it sounds insane. It was crazy. But everything happened for a reason. And all them things made me the man I am today.”

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.

Bare Knuckle tells the incredible true story of Bobby Gunn, the 73-0 undefeated champion of bare-knuckle boxing. It’s a real-life Rocky tale about a father fighting against all odds for his daughter. After overcoming a brutal childhood spent fighting grown men in parking lots for cash at age 11 at the hands of his father, Gunn become a journeyman boxer whose career fizzled. Wanting to provide a better life for his family, he entered underground bare-knuckle matches for up to $50,000 cash staged by mobsters in New York City to put his seven-year-old daughter through school. This excerpt shares how Gunn learned the art of bare knuckle from his father—a brutal experience that forged him into a human weapon and ultimate champion.

Related: Bobby Gunn: Champion of the Underworld