When it was finally over, Joey Beltran walked to his corner, propped his hands up on the top rope and waited. Soon the pit crew of specialists was on him.

The cutman clamping gauze to his face. The cornerman wiping at the blood – some of it belonging to Beltran, some to his opponent, Tony Lopez. The cameraman moving in for a closeup of his personal anguish.

Beltran tilted his head to the ceiling, a drowning man trying to get one last breath of air. The blood just kept coming. The blood was everywhere: on his face, falling down his neck to his shoulders, slathered all over his bare hands, soaking the wraps and dripping off his fingers.

From his ringside seat a few feet away on that warm June night, David Feldman, the president of Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship and the architect of this very scene, stood up and clapped.

“Honestly, what do you think?” Feldman asked me a few moments later, practically shouting to be heard over a small but enthusiastic crowd of roughly 2,000 people crammed into the Cheyenne Ice and Events Center in Wyoming. “Do you think we have something here?”

It’s a question Feldman asked several more times, in several different ways, in the hours and weeks following the event. With Bare Knuckle FC’s second event planned for Biloxi, Miss., this Saturday night, he has a lot riding on the answer to these questions. They are, after all, the culmination of a decade’s worth of work. Another word for it might be obsession.

For years, Feldman has been the lone fight promoter pushing for real, sanctioned bare-knuckle boxing events. A trim, fit man with dark hair and a serious face that borders on constant nervousness, Feldman, 47, got his first glimpse of the bare-knuckle boxing world after meeting Bobby Gunn, a Canadian fighter of Irish descent who bills himself as a bare-knuckle champion with a Paul Bunyan-esque record of 73-0.

Feldman worked with him during Gunn’s occasional forays into the gloved version of the sport, where he fought (and was defeated by) legends of the ring such as James Toney and Roy Jones Jr.

Gunn was still good enough to rack up a record of 23-7-1 under the Marquess of Queensberry rules, though it was his stories of backroom brawls and high-stakes money fights between rival families of Irish “travelers” that really captivated Feldman.

“The more Bobby told me about it, the more excited I got about it,” Feldman said. “It was incredible.”