Local fighter Ryan Petersen improved to 2-0 in the Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship in Temecula earlier this month by defeating Matthew Socholotiuk by unanimous decision.
It’s been a long road for the 39-year-old Petersen, who was born in Fort Bragg and spent time growing up in Piercy. Petersen was adopted but the couple that adopted him soon split up. His mother remarried, but Petersen’s step-dad ended up not being a positive influence, living a life filled with drugs, alcohol and violence.
“I was always afraid of violence,” Petersen said. “As I got a little bit older, I was always intrigued by it too.”
Petersen dropped out of school early into his freshmen year of high school. He stopped attending school after his mother was taken to a hospital after attempting to take her own life. Petersen, now without parental supervision, decided he was done with school and soon after found himself getting into trouble. Eventually Petersen began going to the gym and put his energy and aggression to good use.
“I was so totally petrified of it, it becomes a point where you have to run into fear. I needed to face what actually scared me,” Petersen said. “And I started kickboxing.”
While Petersen was able to break away from old tendencies, not all of his contemporaries were as lucky, with Petersen noting that he received a phone call from a friend incarcerated at a Washington State Correctional Facility just minutes before his interview with the Times-Standard.
In addition to being 2-0 in Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship, Petersen is 3-0 in professional bare knuckle fights which got him the nod into the BKFC. Before all of that, Petersen was kickboxing. He believed that kickboxing would continue to be his passion but after bare knuckle fighting was legalized in 2023, he immediately made the jump.
Petersen moved around during his upbringing, but when he began kickboxing, he was living in Washington with his mother. Petersen would travel to Canada every day to train at the World Kickboxing XTRM in British Columbia.
“My goal was to go through kickboxing. I loved kickboxing,” Petersen said. “As soon as I saw it (bare knuckle fighting), I knew that this is what I had to do. I love this and honestly there’s nothing more in my life that I’m built for, I am absolutely born for bare knuckle fighting.”
Petersen compared his infatuation with bare knuckle fighting to being like a duck to water and since his introduction to the sport, Petersen has continued on his path.
“It’s raw. It’s original combat,” Petersen said of the sport. “The very first fight that ever happened in history had to have been just a bare knuckle fistfight, right?”
Petersen returned to Humboldt County at 19 after a bout with homelessness in Washington. In 2002 an elderly woman, who was a neighbor of Petersen’s grandmother, gifted Petersen with a ‘82 Mercury Zephyr, which he called home for a period of time. Petersen took the Zephyr back down to Humboldt County and hasn’t moved from the area since.
“Going from living on the cold street to an ‘82 Mercury Zephyr was like a palace,” Petersen said. “Most people would say ‘Oh, you don’t want to live in your car, that sucks.’ Well, I didn’t want to live in my car but coming from living on the street, living in my car was fantastic.”
Petersen began his bare knuckle fighting career at Bear River, after initially searching for a kickboxing match, he had to settle for a bareknuckle fight, which Petersen won with a knockout. After the win, Petersen began reaching out to the Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship.
Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship eventually accepted Petersen’s offer to come and fight for them, where he earned a second-round TKO in Los Angeles in November. In Humboldt, Petersen trains at Redwood Muay Thai in Fortuna, Next Level Boxing in Eureka as well at his home gym on his ranch.
Petersen’s nickname in the ring is ‘Ryu’ (pronounced rye-u, rather than the Japanese pronunciation). He was given the name as a 6-year-old playing “Street Fighter” from his friend Jason, who started calling him Ryu due to the similarity to his first name Ryan.
He’s still waiting for when/where his next Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship bout, but his eyes are set on fighting in Italy this April. Petersen now has two sons and cherishes the fact that they get to see their father compete.
“Being a father is absolutely the best thing that ever happened to me,” Petersen said. “Any of the trauma that I could not reconcile, I downloaded why it happened after I had kids. It was like alright, this was your purpose, to go through all of these hardships to show these guys a better way of life.”
Dylan McNeill can be reached at 707-441-0526.
