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Steve KimESPN
A card featuring boxing, kickboxing, MMA and bare-knuckle fighting has been scheduled for June 6 at Forbes Field in Topeka, Kansas.
“We’re going to have a ring and a cage side-by-side,” said John Carden, the head of Carden Combat Sports, which is staging the event.
He said that the venue for the promotion “could possibly change.”
For the moment, this show — which will be streamed as a pay-per-view event — will not have fans in attendance. Most states have implemented stay-at-home orders the past couple of months and have banned large public gatherings due to the coronavirus pandemic. These restrictions are now being slowly lifted to varying degrees in different states.
“We can maybe put a limited number [of people] in there, but right now that’s not the plan,” said Carden, saying revenue will come from sponsorship and pay-per-view.
At this moment the bout sheet has not been set. Carden is communicating with promoters and managers who are interested in placing their athletes in this show.
“We pretty much had this done toward the end of last week,” said Carden, who was waiting on clearance from the Kansas commission to announce this show. “We wanted to make sure we crossed all of our hoops and so forth, before we went forward with it.”
Adam Roorbach, the executive director of the Kansas Athletic Commission, told ESPN Tuesday afternoon that “our senior ringside physician (Dr. Mathew Bohm) is a member of the commission, and he is on board with this. Obviously, we’ll be following the governor’s guidelines as we phase back in-and-out.
“We’re going to go with the local government and the state government, and what our senior ringside physician says.” he continued. “As far as exact coronavirus testing, I’m not sure, but I’m confident we’ll be doing temperature testing and obviously the questionnaire that everybody is doing.”
The state of Kansas just lifted it’s stay-at-home orders and will eventually ease up on restrictions for gatherings, with social distancing measures still in place for the foreseeable future.
“Us as an agency are not going rogue on this,” Roorbach said. “We have been in constant communication with our superiors. We are following the governor’s plans. If the governor comes back with ‘We’re going back to phase 1’ (which disallows gatherings of more than 10 people) — the shows are off. We are going by what the highest level of medical professionals are saying is OK, and the highest levels of government is saying it’s OK.”
Roorbach added: “As long as they are approving it, we want to get these guys back to work and get our industry going again — and in a safe manner.”
As we inch closer to the summer months, more combat events will start to be scheduled in states such as Kansas that have given promoters the clearance.
“I’ve reached out to some of of the bigger promoters, (and) it’s obviously one of the situations were if Top Rank, or somebody else wanted to come in, I could easily set up a venue and leave it for them,” said Carden.