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The Fascinating Story of Bucks County’s Lex Ludlow, Who Went from Broke and Miserable to Undefeated Bare Knuckle Fighter

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Jun 29th, 2026 · 12:00 PM EDT

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Lex Bryan Ludlow always wanted to be a professional wrestler.

He didn’t see himself in combat sports, though he’s currently unbeaten in the Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship and preparing for Friday night’s Liberty Brawl at Xfinity Mobile Arena, putting his 3-0 record on the line against cruiserweight Drew Nolan.

Ludlow is ranked fourth in the promotion’s 205 pound division and chasing a title fight while calling out everybody from Yoel Romero to Chris Camozzi and Fedor Emelianenko. That’s one former UFC bruiser, one former BKFC champion, and a Russian legend of the fight game, one of the best to ever do it.

So, no, inhibition is not something that’s part of the man’s DNA, though the showmanship of sports entertainment certainly is.

As the story goes, the Hatboro-Horsham graduate, class of 2012, was actually named after Lex Luger of pro wrestling fame.

“That’s 100% true,” Ludlow told Crossing Broad in a recent and wide-ranging phone interview. “Mind you, my mom and dad were 16 and 17 when I was born. My mom wanted to name me ‘Bryan Lex Ludlow,’ and my dad really wanted me to have ‘Lex,’ because one of his favorite wrestlers at the time was Lex Luger. My dad watched wrestling all the way back in the NWA days. He was born in 1976, so he probably started watching it in the 80s. He was a big NWA wrestling fan, Luger came around maybe mid-80s or late-80s, and he wanted to name me ‘Lex Bryan Ludlow.‘ So it’s really up to the woman, (choosing the name), but my mom had complications at birth, and she lost a lot of blood and passed out. And (the doctors said) ‘she just needs some rest, she’ll be fine.‘ But she was out cold after I was born, so they went up to my dad and said, ‘What do you want the name to be?’ and he said ‘Lex Bryan Ludlow.’ My mom woke up later (and learned about the name), and maybe that’s a good reason why they aren’t together anymore.”

Ludlow laughs as he tells the story, but points out that his dad is a “great guy.” He notes that ‘Lex Ludlow’ sounds like a villain’s name, something “out of a comic book” but befitting of a bare knuckle fighter who needs to have a personality and sell a fight.

He’s known as “the most hated man in combat sports,” and isn’t shy about saying anything on camera, which checks the promotional boxes for a sport that might not be on the casual fan’s radar.

“They’re going to love me or they’re going to hate me. It’s my job to get them talking, regardless. But I always wanted to be a heel. I’m always going to be the heel.”

Twists and turns on the path to success

Ludlow might be a heel, but he’s got a down-to-earth demeanor and is a deep thinker with a captivating backstory.

It starts at the age of five, when he begged his parents to allow him to wrestle. This was cultivated through his dad’s NWA fandom, and while both parents were on board with the idea, something was lost in translation.

“My parents were separated, and I went home and begged my mom to take me wrestling,” Ludlow recalls. “She finally takes me, and on my way there, I’m thinking I’m going to learn how to hit somebody with a steel chair, how to jump off a ladder, hit somebody with a leg drop, but when I walk in the room, it’s scholastic wrestling. I’m like, ‘What is this?’ I ended up doing it until I was 18 years old. But it wasn’t my passion. I was really good as a kid, but when I got into high school, I just didn’t care anymore. I just wanted to be a pro wrestler. My senior year, I had plans after graduation, and there was a wrestling school called Ring of Honor Professional Wrestling in Bristol. My dad lived in Levittown, so it’s (a few miles down the road). I had plans (to enroll after the summer), and had just enough money to pay the tuition.”

But the plan changed.

Ludlow, a big UFC fan at the time, says he and a friend happened upon a Jiu Jitsu gym while walking around Hatboro, where his mom lived. Out of curiosity, they went in and spoke to one of the instructors, who was holding pads for a couple of customers.

“I started telling him that I wrestled for a long time, and I always wanted to have at least one fight, but I told him I really wanted to be a pro wrestler,” Ludlow says. “By September I’m going to wrestling school and blah blah blah.’ He told me, ‘How about you come tomorrow, you do a free trial for two weeks, and I guarantee you’ll be obsessed with this and I guarantee you’re gonna change your path and want to be a fighter. You’re going to forget about pro wrestling.’

“So I showed up the next day and got tapped out like thirty times, choked unconscious… next thing I know I’m like, ‘Alright I’m gonna put pro wrestling on the back burner and I’m gonna go do MMA.'”

From there, it’s a whirlwind, a pursuit of the American Dream with more ups and downs and twists and turns than a rickety Knoebel’s rollercoaster.

Ludlow says he lost his first amateur bout “very badly” to future UFC fighter Karl Roberson, recalling that he was dropped “five or six times.” So he hired a boxing coach and paid him $400 a month “that I didn’t have.” But the training part of it worked out, if not the monetary side, and he went on to win his next two amateur fights before earning a Roberson rematch, which went down this time as a close decision loss.

After that, he rebounded with a three-fight win streak and claimed an amateur title with Xtreme Caged Combat, submitting Jim Rendeiro with a first-round guillotine choke:

A short time later, Ludlow started dating his future wife, turned pro, and proceeded to lose his next three fights.

He was burned out after years of gym work and weight cutting, estimating that he was going down from 220 pounds to 185 pounds for that early run of seven amateur and pro bouts. He was shedding 35 pounds every time, and the constant dieting was exhausting while living with his girlfriend at his dad’s house.

Eventually, the pair got an apartment of their own, but the money wasn’t exactly flowing. Ludlow couldn’t afford to train because he was paying the bills while his girlfriend finished up nursing school, which resulted in the young couple moving out of the apartment and into her parents’ house in Mayfair. That’s when Ludlow started to train again, but he wasn’t entirely committed to fighting while working full-time for Amazon.

“Horrible job. Worst job I ever had,” he says with a palpable disdain. “You have to meet these quotas, and if you don’t meet these quotas, you get warnings. You could be at 99.9% (rating) and you’d still get a verbal warning. If you keep getting that 99.9%, they’ll eventually fire you. You have to hit that 100% for your quota. It’s a very stressful environment.”

Nevertheless, he soldiered on, deciding to train at Martinez BJJ on Cottman Avenue while welcoming the birth of his child, a daughter.

She was two weeks old when he destroyed his knee.

“I ruptured it. If you tear your knee, you still have the ACL there. If you rupture it, the ACL is completely gone. My ACL blew up inside my knee, I tore everything else – LCL, PCL, can’t even remember the names of them all. And I shredded my meniscus to the bone. I had to be in surgery for eight and a half hours. I get the surgery done, but now I have no money. I had a thousand dollars in a bank account and a thousand dollars in credit. I have a newborn baby, and yeah, we were living with her parents, so I didn’t have rent, but I had to feed us. I have a car payment, insurance, and need to buy formula and diapers for my daughter. I’m waiting for them to give me disability while going to physical therapy, and one day Amazon cuts my medical insurance.”

Ludlow ended up with a type of medical disability leave in which he received $350 every other week. It was money, but it wasn’t enough, and it got to the point where had $25 left on his credit line and wasn’t sure how he was going to feed his family. One night, sitting at home, he saw a commercial for Domino’s Pizza, $8.99 for two pies, so he went and bought Domino’s for dinner, taking his account down to $13 and bringing him to a point of inflection.

“I’m sitting there looking at my kid, looking at the pizza, looking at the fucking credit card limit, and I was like, ‘I’m never going to put my wife and kid in a situation like this ever again.’ So when my knee got better, I (put MMA aside) and committed to a full-time job. I ended up buying a house. I became a driver for UPS and was making really good money, like really good money. Then I quit UPS to work at Ward Trucking as a forklift operator, and I got promoted to be a dock lead, making more than $100,000 a year.”

With his wife out of nursing school and making good money herself, the financial situation was remedied.

But Ludlow says he was “pissed off” at fighting and stopped watching it. He stopped following UFC, Bellator, PFL, and the regional circuits. He would click the button that says “see less of this” when MMA posts would appear on social media.

At the same time, the lack of training had a significant negative impact. He ballooned to 320 pounds and began to have trouble with the physical demands of his job, which required lifting the metal “dock plates” that go between a truck and a loading platform. It’s the equivalent of deadlifting 400 pounds, which Ludlow says he was able to do “with one hand” before his weight got out of control. He knew he was heavy, but didn’t realize how bad it was.

“I just remember feeling so miserable one day. And a big UFC (advertisement) popped up (on my phone) and it was one of my favorite UFC fighters, and I was like, ‘Alright, let me go watch him.’ I bought the pay-per-view, next thing you know I’m on Tapology at work, looking up the records of the local guys, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘You know what? I could beat this guy.’ So one day I just went up to my wife and said, ‘What would you think about me quitting my job?‘”

Ludlow’s wife agreed, and he became a stay-at-home dad, taking care of the house and his children, now numbering three. But he couldn’t shake the feeling of isolation, amplified by the death of his grandfather. He wasn’t around other people or socializing at the gym to begin with, then the loss of a close family member only made the feeling worse.

He checked into a mental hospital.

“I went and got help. And when I came out, I said ‘I gotta do something with myself.’ So I started to train again. I didn’t think I’d fight again. It was to get back in shape and socialize and be around people. I started beating people up again and thought to myself that I wanted to do this. At the time, I was 280 pounds, and I was training at a gym called MPR (Endurance MMA, in Bucks County) and I always wanted to go and train with the Daukaus brothers (Kyle and Chris). It was always in the back of my mind because I knew how good they were and saw how good they were (during shared training sessions at Martinez in 2018 and 2019). I always saw something in them, and I ended up leaving MPR to go train with them. I could always tell they were just different people. They had been through a lot themselves, maybe not like me with my home life, but professionally. Kyle I think had just been cut from the UFC and was 2-4, and Chris was 4-0 before going on an 0-4 streak, so I knew I could relate to them. Not on that level, but in how I went 5-2 as an amateur, and won a belt, and everyone’s telling you you’re gonna be in the UFC and that doesn’t happen at all. So I started training with them.”

Brotherly love, and support

Ludlow says he’d walk into the gym every Sunday and the Daukaus brothers would proceed to “beat the living shit” out of him. They didn’t care that he was out of shape and 280 pounds and unable to catch his breath. In fact, there was a three-week stretch in which Kyle dropped Ludlow every time, sparring sessions in which Ludlow says he wouldn’t even touch the younger of the brothers. It made him question if he was good enough for an MMA return.

He was, admittedly, lacking for confidence, but it was those sessions that restored the focus and belief.

“Those guys built me up, and I really owe them a lot. I told them a way deeper version of my (personal story), that I’ll never tell to the public. I sat them both down at a Texas Roadhouse and told them. Kyle Daukaus is a hard man to break and a hard man to get through, to really get to know. When we left that Texas Roadhouse he sent me a text and said, ‘If you ever need me, need to talk, even if it’s about nothing,’ he was like, ‘Please call me. Please reach out to me.‘ And ever since then I’ve been close with those guys.”

With renewed confidence, Ludlow returned to MMA in 2024, TKO’ing R.J. Hayes in 10 seconds at Art of War Cage Fighting 35. Ludlow notes that Hayes is a “fat guy” and “pedophile,” with news reports showing that Hayes was indicted on felony sexual abuse charges that same year.

He then fought Cameron Graham at Art of War 38, and was “beating the crap out of him” until Ludlow got tired and lost via unanimous decision.

“I shit the bed on that one.”

At that point, he was contacted by Bare Knuckle FC and offered a contract. Unsure, he called the Daukaus brothers, who told him to go for it, and Ludlow committed while at the same time scheduled for another MMA fight at a casino in West Virginia’s far northern panhandle. Fighting for just $500 guaranteed, with a $500 victory purse, he wasn’t convinced that he wanted to continue, but drove eight hours to New Cumberland anyway, still without a job while focused on dad duties. That’s when he says the brothers showed up to his fight, driving eight hours out and eight hours back to watch him defeat Sean Dinan via TKO, and solidifying the relationship for good. That led to Ludlow joining The Forge MMA, a gym opened by Chris and Kyle in July of 2025 off Academy Road in Northeast Philadelphia.

“I’m gonna be with them until the day I’m done fighting, for sure.”

From MMA to Bare Knuckle boxing

It was only five weeks after the West Virginia fight that Ludlow switched over to Bare Knuckle, beating Connor McKenna in a split decision at the 2300 Arena of ECW Fame. He fought three months after that, a KO/TKO win against Lewis Rumsey, also at 2300 Arena, then improved to 3-0 with a dominant decision win over Zach Calmus at Knucklemania VI this past February inside of a sold-out Xfinity Mobile Arena.

He’s racked up three wins in less than a year, climbing the rankings at 205 pounds.

“I think these guys just don’t look at the sport like I do,” Ludlow surmises. “I really play to the rules, read the rules, I understand them. I know when to go and when not to go. And I feel like I’m hard to hit in general. One thing Kyle always says is that I have really good defense. And I’m awkward in the ring, a lot longer than maybe you would expect when I’m standing in front of you. I hit hard and I think I’m a lot faster than I look and I think that when they start fighting me, it’s ‘boom – how did that happen?‘ Zach Calmus, he just started running away from me the entire fight. I think he only engaged once or twice after that first initiation. Plus, this isn’t boxing. Boxing, if you clinch, they break it up right away. I’m allowed to wrestle a little bit, and I feel like I’ve always been good in the clinch and I’m very good at not getting hit on the outside. I just feel like it meshes well. I’m number 4 in the world.”

Next up is Drew Nolan, who has a 1-3 record in bare knuckle. Ludlow isn’t overlooking the fight, but he doesn’t think much of his opponent’s resume.

“His entire combat sports record, he’s 3-22. I believe he’s a lot shorter than me. His height it says 5’10” but you look at him against 5’11” guys he’s significantly shorter than them. And you know what’s crazy? He asked to fight me! I’m not trying to be cocky… but I know that when I hit him he’s gonna go down. I’m gonna make him quit.”

Nothing is to be taken for granted in combat sport, of course. Look at the recent UFC White House card, and Justin Gaethje’s incredible underdog victory against the previously unbeaten Ilia Topuria.

But Ludlow will go into this one as a betting favorite, fighting in his own backyard for the fourth time in four BKFC fights.

It’s a curious topic because Bare Knuckle FC is headquartered in Philadelphia and has found a lot of success here. But it’s led to criticism from other fighters, who say the Philadelphia contingent has yet to be challenged, pointing out that guys like Ludlow and John Garbarino have largely fought on home turf against lesser opponents.

This is a narrative that Ludlow is aware of. He “hates” it and disagrees with it, pointing out that his first bare knuckle opponent, McKenna, was an amateur MMA champion, and made sense for a debut fight. His second opponent, Rumsey, was 13-15 in MMA with professional boxing and kickboxing fights on his resume. Then came Calmus, who was formerly ranked 5th in the promotion’s cruiserweight division.

“I don’t say no. I don’t say no to any of these guys. These guys are offered to me,” Ludlow points out. “And when Drew Nolan messaged me and wanted to fight me, that’s literally how it happened. I didn’t go to the match makers. They didn’t come to me and say ‘hey we want you to fight this guy.’ This guy messaged me, begged me for it, and all I said to him was, ‘listen, I don’t think you deserve it, I’d rather fight a tougher guy, but if you can get them to offer this to me, I’m not gonna say no.’“

And Ludlow will get tougher guys, so long as he keeps winning.

That’s the story, for now.