Kimbo Slice(d)

It was very early on in the life of this blog when I made the case that Kimbo had started his decline as a fighter.

Roy Nelson obviously agrees.

I've noticed, in the time that I've been paying attention to MMA, that a pattern often asserts itself in the careers of the bigger fighters: a scrappy start with occasional losses blossoms into a string of dominating wins that takes the fighter to (or very near) the top of the profession; yet after a point, a flood of losses in which the fighter looks weirdly off his game--fights usually ended by a single, not always impressive blow to the head--finally shuffles that fighter out of the upper echelons of the sport (or out of competition entirely).

I watched it happen to Randy Couture, Chuck Liddell, Vitor Belfort, Tim Sylvia, Andrei Arlovski, Ken Shamrock...you get the idea. (Granting that my main focus has always been on the universe of the UFC.)

I don't believe anything in Kimbo's career has qualified as distinguished. Still, for much of it he at least had his reputation as a mean dude on his side. It's gonna be harder to rock the fearsome facade after performances like this. (I mean, it's rare enough that I see someone get caught in a crucifix, but twice in two rounds? Really, dude? Didn't you remember how much it sucked when it happened the first time, like, four minutes prior?)

Here's hoping, for the sake of his future prosperity, that he has a good radio voice...

Chuck Liddell Gets His...Ahem, Heart Broken

MMA has hit the mainstream so hard it's even knocked itself silly.

And honest kudos to Liddell who, despite his string of recent losses, is at least still winning at the bank.

Kyle Maynard

I have a feeling this video is just beginning its swine flu-like ascent up the WHO scale of viral transmission. (I guess this post could be considered my personal contribution to the pandemic--an infected specimen's small, uncovered cough into the sweat-scented communal air of the interwebs, as it were.)

Unlike some stranger cases, to which reasonable men should have been immune, the Maynard fight virus sports a bit of DNA custom built for internet incubation: the "holy shit, did you see that?" gene. (Incidentally, those individuals who carry two recessives of this characteristic--creatures many refer to handily as "mouthbreathers"--often wind up party to backyard incidents involving alcohol, video cameras, and modified firearms. For the Darwinians among you: a peek at an active petri dish. Essentially, if the House of Romanov had a frat hall, these would be the pledges.)

But back to Mr. Maynard. I will be neither the first nor the last to praise the man's spirit. Maynard suffers from congenital amputation of all four limbs, meaning he has no hands or forearms and no feet or shins. Considering that half of the game is striking and that submissions depend heavily on applied leverage, his stepping into an MMA cage fight is equivalent to an outlaw gruffly thumbing the edge of his Bowie knife before heading over to the O.K. Corral. We Americans, as the esteemed T. Pynchon elucidates, succinctly refer to this type of folk as a "badass."

That said, I'm guessing that I will be one of the few who viewed this particular parade and felt a sad duty to go piddle all over the giant balloons. Badass though it may be, when you scrub the manly patina off that outlaw metaphor, the poor guy is basically bringing a knife to a gunfight. Military strategists have a word for a person who knowingly enters an engagement at a severe disadvantage and, I hate to say, it's not a compliment. Maynard looks less like a man trying to prove himself and more like a man with something to prove.

Bang.

(And a word to Brian Frye, the able-bodied gentleman scurrying la cucaracha-style around the purlieus: unless you're planning to market yourself as the Reggie Strickland of ultimate fighting, then punctuating your nervous circuits around the ring with the occasional half-hearted jab not only looks cowardly against an opponent who lacks both fists and feet with which to strike back, what's worse, it smells suspiciously of revulsion. Maynard was man enough to step into the ring in spite of a clear debility; respect him enough to knock his block off. For reals, don't be some kind of pussy. Kthxbye!)

The true feel-good story here, I do believe, belongs less to Maynard and more to mixed martial arts itself. MMA at the moment is smack dab in the hormone-addled center of its growth spurt into a legitimate sport. I think the message the Auburn Fight Night organizers sent to the rest of the world is exactly right: any person of sound mind and body (and yes, Maynard qualifies; he could probably crush a mouthbreather's can o' Bud between those shoulder muscles) can compete against any other person of similar basic adequacy, and do so safely. And notice that that sentence is gender neutral. Women's leagues are sprouting just as quickly as men's.

Whatever his motivations, Maynard honored the sport by stepping into the cage despite an astounding disability, and the event organizers honored the sport by ignoring the disability entirely. As camp counselors would say after a particularly spirited round of boot tossing, everyone's a winner!

The down side is that this includes Brian Frye. If they could scrounge up someone with a foot to finally kick that dude's ass we'd be all set.

A More Perfect Union

Congratulations are in order.

Could there be a better pairing of someone whose genius is beating men up with someone whose genius is beating men off?

May their wacky combination of prepositions bring nothing but happiness!

And then kick someone's ass.

Just saying...

If she'd had to wear gloves like these her career might have turned out differently.

Evan Tanner, R.I.P.

I discovered the UFC after a very necessary romantic break up left me with a one bedroom apartment in Harlem, just under a couple hundred dollars in what used to be a shared bank account, and a not-so-great paying job to buoy the lot. What I also had was a Blockbuster card and, thanks to the low ebb of that buoy, a bevy of free evenings. And Blockbuster, being the Shoney's of cinophelia, had such treats as Black Ninja IV, Ghost Dad, and--in perfect keeping with its bread-and-circus MO--real-life bloodsport in the form of the UFC.

Now, Ghost Dad and BN4 would both have driven me to violence, whereas the UFC expended the energy behind that furious urge to break teeth and bone with one's bare hands successfully and dependably. Clearly, the latter was the healthiest way to invest my $4.23.

Among the first fighters I came across and learned to admire was Evan Tanner. He and Randy Couture (among a few others) had a kind of bonhomie to their presence in the Octagon--a love of the fellow man they were beating the holy crap out of--that impressed me deeply. Couture's was based in an All-American sense of sportsmanship. Tanner's was more a Zen thing--an unalloyed joy in the here-and-now, no matter how painful the present moment might be.

I realize that I'm coming to this wake several months late, but after occasionally wondering where the man is now I discovered that he's gone. As was his wont, he went in search of life's most extreme conditions and--to his credit and our loss--he found them.

Watching the elan with which he both gave (did he ever!) and took (really, did he ever!) a beating, I always had the sense that his spirit was at peace. So I'll content myself to say goodbye to his body solely.

Evan Tanner, R.I.P.

Kimbo Slice

Kimbo Slice. He'll show up at your nice, Florida house, stand by as his entourage tears up your expertly pruned azaleas, then beat the holy living He-Is-Risen crap out of your biggest friend.

What can I say, the man's scary. Has been ever since those backyard videos out of Miami started catching eyes on YouTube. (You remember that; it was a little like stumbling onto your parents' porn stash: your thoughts turn into a flaming jumble of "is this real? so this is what it really looks like! am I allowed to watch this? this has to be illegal...," all the while you're dimming the lights and keeping one ear cocked for footsteps outside your bedroom door.)

With this in mind, I was half amused by his recent, much jabbered about entry into the daintily gloved world of professional MMA. (Excepting Rio Heroes, I guess. Just....wow.) Now, I don't begrudge any man using his talents to work his way up the payscale. Still, there was one video of Kimbo that always stuck with me, a fight between him and one Sean Gannon, an off-duty policeman slumming the underground scene. Long story short, after the artwork he makes of Gannon's face, Mr. Slice gasses out. (The end is actually kinda sad.)

Which leads to the amused half of my response to Kimbo's newfound professionalism: when faced with an opponent who was better prepared than the run-of-the-mill thugs populating his suped-up schoolyard--i.e., a trained policeman, with all the day-to-day drilling and physical conditioning that that implies--Kimbo couldn't close the deal. The idea that searching out a (caged) forum where attention to diet, rest, and technique is the norm among vetted athletes would be more to his advantage than his continued pummeling of unknowns in between courses of BBQ’ed meat was—and here I speak only for myself—of the Barnum&Bailey school of spectacle. As might now be obvious, as far as Kimbo goes, I have silently leaned toward the “not” of the well-known B&B slogan.

Endurance wasn’t the deciding factor in his fight against Seth Petruzelli. At first, I thought it was a simple slip that Petruzelli capitalized on. On second glance, I noticed that as Seth’s desperate right jab lands, Slice’s front leg goes stiff—rather unmistakable evidence of some CTL-ALT-DEL going on in the higher brain functions. On third viewing, though, it’s painfully obvious: the dude got his clock re-timed with a single bunny right by a fighter who had a whole half a foot on the ground from which to leverage. For Kimbo, the end, once again, is kinda sad.

I think we’ve seen the beginning of the end of Kimbo. And I don’t rejoice at that. The sport depends on awe--amazement at the athletes’ power, prowess, endurance, all in the face of rather serious corporal punishment--and shattering that magic mirror, even for me, still provokes a certain amount of disdain. When the veneer of invincibility cracks with this brand of fighter--as it did with Shamrock, Tito, Belfort, and Liddell, for instance--multiple, humiliating defeats are only a few blearied blinks behind.

I would gamble my azaleas that Seth Petruzelli has unwittingly handed Kimbo a career as a distinguished MMA commentator.

I believe it would be wise of Mr. Slice to take it.