Kimbo Called Out for 'Garbage' Performance

Elite XC’s debut on CBS was a success in just about every way except for the quality of the fights, from the early less-than-impressive one-punch KO’s to the bizarre stoppage of the Smith/Lawler fight to the main event, where the phenomenon known as Kimbo struck me as… not very good at fighting. Which shouldn’t come as any surprise, I guess – beating up a bunch of overweight bouncers and ex-con mamalucs across the backyards of Miami is not exactly the wide world of sports. Kimbo barely made it past James Thompson on Saturday night in a bout that to my eyes certainly didn’t seem like it needed to be stopped.

But whatever you think on that question, there’s no arguing this point – Thompson is a ham-and-egger who’s lost seven of his last ten fights and actually lost his most recent match to one of the dudes on the undercard, Brett Rogers. In other words, Thompson was in there to be, as we say in boxing, an “opponent”, and on my scorecard he was leading Kimbo when the bout was prematurely (some might even say suspiciously) stopped. All of these concerns erupted into controversy at the post-fight press conference when Brett Rogers called Kimbo’s performance “garbage” and intimated that Kimbo had tapped out in the second round of his fight (skip to around 8:30 of the video below to see the bad blood begin to flow, or watch the whole thing and see that Kimbo has much more evolved presser skills than he does in the cage.)
Whether he deserves it or not, Kimbo has become a brand-name with a great story and tough-guy look – something tells me Gary Shaw will keep padding his record for as long as people will shell out to see him. But the sad fact of the matter is that while an inexperienced and notorious fighter served as the headliner of MMA’s big network coming-out party, the very best the sport has to offer was on display the following night in the WEC event on Versus. Two fights on that card, both title bouts, so surpassed the quality of what we saw Saturday on CBS (with some apologies to the women’s fight – Gina Carano was the real star of the evening) as to make it seem like they were the products of a different, infinitely superior sport entirely.

The first mind-blowing bout on Versus was for the WEC’s bantamweight title between champ Miguel Torres and challenger Yoshiro Maeda, a predominantly stand-up strikefest that was contested at an unbelievable level of speed, accuracy, and all-out fury. The bout was stopped after the third round due to swelling that caused Maeda’s right eye to close. Torres, an electrifying athlete, retained his title.

As great as that fight was, however, the headliner, a much-hyped featherweight title bout between “The California Kid” Urijah Faber and “Little Evil” Jens Pulver surpassed it, delivering a five-round smackdown worthy of legendary stature in MMA lore, one of those no-surrender standoffs that prompts writers to classical allusions (I’ll spare you that much) and in the end ennobles both men. I’m not going to recap this fight here but rather urge you to see it yourselves if you haven’t already– VS. will rerun the entire card at 7 p.m. EST this Wednesday. It’s ample proof that if MMA is going to have a crossover network superstar in its next phase of media awareness, it shouldn’t be a gold-toothed sideshow from Miami but a mellow ex-wrestler from Sacramento.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.