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   All Show and No Go

Just caught the Kimbo Slice CBS fight from this weekend on-line and if you haven't seen it, let me save you the time - don't bother. I've gotten into mixed-martial-arts big time in the last 18 months and have a great appreciation for the incredible skill, conditioning and courage these athletes have. In my novice opinion, and this is what I felt going in, Kimbo has none of those qualities and is nothing more than a promotional creation.

Not sure if you know his back story, but Kimbo is a former bodyguard who made his name beating up 9-to-5ers on YouTube. If you watch these backyard - literally - fights, Kimbo's opponent is scared to death and the first thing the guy does is turn his back and start taking shots to the head, wanting to go down. That's not MMA and while the guy Kimbo fought Saturday was a journeyman heavyweight at best, the guy was a pro and not the least little bit intimidated.

Kimbo ended up winning on an awful stoppage in the third round. His opponent had the worst cauliflowered ear I'd ever seen. It was like a golf ball on his ear. Kimbo hit it with one good shot in the 3rd and it exploded, which isn't that hard with all the scar tissue. He followed up with a few solid shots and the ref stopped it. Bad. The guy was rocked, but not in danger. I give MMA refs credit for stopping most fights a little too early instead of a little too late, but that was well too early.

Anyhow, Kimbo was totally lost on the ground, gassed in the 2nd round and looked like a guy who was big, strong, but had been training MMA for 6 months - which is exactly what he is. No wrestling skills, no ju-jitsu, no kicks, a rank amatuer with a great "look" and some heavy hands, which were decidedly lighter as his cardio left him and with an opponent who was an actual fighter, not a repo man or bouncer pulled off the street. He also doesn't look like that good of an athlete and isn't fluid or natural in the cage.

That said, the TV rating was decent and he has popular appeal.

Hulk Hogan wasn't a good - or even average – pro wrestler, but he brought people to the arena and Kimbo does that. Dean Malenko was a great “wrestler,” Hulk Hogan had a great look. Five people never showed up to watch Malenko wrestle while Hogan is an American cultural icon.v Hopefully Kimbo can be a Trojan Horse and get people to the TV who then become turned on to the sport by the other fighters because he's a joke and it's obvious. He may legitimately not be among the top 50 heavyweights - maybe not the top 100. I don't know enough about it, but he's a pretender.

Kimbo is training with a legit coach, but he picked this sport up too late. Most guys come into MMA as wrestlers or ju-jitsu guys started training when they were 8-years-old. Fortunately for Kimbo, the heavyweight division is easily the weakest in the sport.

I didn’t go out of my way to watch Kimbo fight and I’m glad I didn’t. And that’s why within the MMA world there was a backlash to Kimbo headlining the sports’ first foray on network television. Inside the sport, everyone knows he’s a joke and that was proven Saturday.

Kimbo Slice is to MMA what the “And-1 Mix Tape Tour” is to basketball. Showy, interesting, but ultimately insignificant. Imagine if basketball were the sport trying to break through to the mainstream and instead of Kobe Bryant or Kevin Garnett, ABC put on Hot Sauce and Half-Man Half-Amazing dribbling off their opponents heads lobbing endless ally-oops.

Would that be representative of what basketball is about? How athletic, how skilled, how competitive it can be? Not at all, and Kimbo’s slog Saturday was a poor introduction to the nation of what mixed-martial-arts at the highest level can be.

For that fight to be the main event of the first MMA match on network TV is a shame – particularly when a great fight took place on Versus just 24 hours later with Urijiah Faber beating up Jens Pulver to retain his 145 pound WEC title. But Faber and Pulver are tiny guys and the American public, and TV, loves big.

Kimbo slice is big. Big guy, big hype, big look, but in the world of MMA where skill is vastly more important than size – as evidenced in the early days of the UFC where smallish Royce Gracie was dominant against men far larger than him – Kimbo’s a sham.

I’m not an MMA snob. I want the sport to grow so it can become a major topic of conversation on TV and radio and so these great athletes can be recognized for their brilliance, but Kimbo Slice reinforces all the negative stereotypes about the sport: it’s savage, unskilled, glorified backyard brawls.

At the same time, this is a business and he moves merchandise so if it takes Kimbo Slice to help further break MMA into the mainstream, I’m behind him.

Just know this, if anyone tries to tell you that Kimbo Slice is “bad,” you can say, "you're right, he is bad."