a marquee fight for BKFC’s King of Violence title<\/a> between reigning King of Violence champion Mike Perry and longtime UFC knockout artist Jeremy Stephens at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey.<\/p>\nEdgar (24-11-1 MMA) is widely regarded as one of the greatest mixed martial artists of his era. A 43-year-old native of Toms River, New Jersey, Edgar retired from the UFC in November 2022 following a brutal knockout loss at the hands of Chris Gutierrez. The setback was Edgar’s third knockout loss in a row and ended the legend’s MMA run with a 2-6 record over his final eight UFC bouts, four of which ended in first-round knockout defeats. Edgar has not competed in combat sports since falling short against Gutierrez.<\/p>\n
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Edgar is best known for his early UFC run, which saw him capture the undisputed UFC title as an undersized lightweight with back-to-back upsets in 2010 over fellow Hall of Famer B.J. Penn. Edgar then retained his title twice in 2011 with an iconic pair of come-from-behind wars against Gray Maynard. Edgar ultimately lost his belt to Benson Henderson in 2012, but continued to find success as a top featherweight and bantamweight contender for the majority of his career, beating the likes of Charles Oliveira, Urijah Faber, Cub Swanson (x2), Chad Mendes and Yair Rodriguez, among others.<\/p>\n
Edgar now steps back into the arena to take on fellow New Jersey native Rivera (23-5 MMA, 2-2-1 BKFC).<\/p>\n
After exiting the UFC in 2021, Rivera signed with BKFC the same year and has since fought to mixed results. His best bare-knuckle win came in a 2024 decision over former Bellator champion Daniel Straus. Rivera dropped a decision to BKFC featherweight champion Kai Stewart this past November in his most recent appearance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Frankie Edgar is picking back up his gloves \u2014 at least metaphorically. The UFC Hall of Famer and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":93830,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[63725,63726,63728,63722,63724,99,63729,6493,63723,63727,20164],"class_list":["post-93829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-bkfc","tag-chris-gutierrez","tag-chris-unger","tag-frankie-edgar","tag-jimmie-rivera","tag-sports","tag-the-ufc","tag-ufc","tag-ufc-hall-of-famer","tag-ufc-knockout","tag-uncrowned"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93829\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}