Matt
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Posted on Wed, May. 28, 2008
Any way you slice it, this is barbarism
BY GREG COTE
CBS-TV lends the fraud-sport grandly calling itself Mixed Martial Arts the false imprimatur of legitimacy by this week inaugurating a new prime-time series, EliteXC Saturday Night Fights -- with Miami's own inexplicably popular Kimbo Slice the first headlining act.
Pardon my not swelling with civic pride over one of our own hitting the big-time at last for what amounts to legalized criminality, a plain barbarism that would tend to discourage hero status.
Kevin Ferguson (Kimbo's real name) informs, from the pages of the current ESPN The Magazine, that he dreams of tearing off a man's arm and beating him with it.
Taking liberties, I'll guess that when Martin Luther King said, ''I have a dream,'' he had somewhat nobler pursuits in mind.
Surely the ghost of Edward R. Murrow is weeping over his network's self-debasement by association, though not for the first time.
This is just more reality TV, when you think of it. Except instead of people singing or dancing, this show has people trying to beat each other unconscious in a ''sport'' that makes traditional boxing seem refined and genteel.
Leave it to network television to be slow on the uptake, of course. Just when pugilism's bastard sons, MMA and rival UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship), seemed to have peaked -- whatever happened to Chuck Liddell? -- and started a merciful decent from Next Big Thing back to bizarre fringe/niche status, along comes CBS to help resuscitate a beast better left gasping for breath.
On a positive note, at least the ringside analyst won't be Walter Cronkite.
CAN IT BE MAINSTREAM?
Can the combination of network backing and the fleeting flare of Kimbomania legitimize MMA or make it mainstream? If the question is necessary, the answer begs a good laugh or at least an incredulous harrumph.
Something does not achieve legitimacy simply because it is widely seen.
Hence, Jerry Springer.
Nor does something achieve legitimacy simply because it might entertain the more depraved among us.
That's why Michael Vick is in prison.
Vick, by the way, staged dogfights not much more vicious, or less civilized, than the type of combat that Kimbo and these other so-called ''freestyle fighters'' shame themselves to practice. (And that we shame ourselves to watch).
At a recent UFC ''cage fight,'' a combatant named Wanderlei Silva defeated a man named Keith Jardine by holding him down by the throat in a suffocating chokehold while pummeling him into bloody submission with a pistoning right fist.
Ah, sport!
Michael Jackson happened to take in that UFC card, attending with his face covered by a black sheet with eyeholes. Seriously. I'm not sure which was the more dubious endorsement for the sport: That Michael Jackson would be interested in it. Or that he would try his best to avoid being seen at it.
This form of fighting is all but bare-fisted, with less-than-gloves covering the knuckles. Anything including kicking goes. (I suppose eye-gouging may or may not be frowned upon).
It is only slightly less primal than what you'd see from two men at Folsom going at it until the guards show up. It's sort of an adult version of teenagers beating up a homeless guy. It appeals to our most vile fascination with violence, from the same mind-set that makes the Grand Theft Auto franchise a video-game phenomenon: The notion of doing wrong vicariously.
''Ultimate fighting'' is to boxing sort of like what skateboarding is to Alpine skiing, except that Tony Hawk isn't trying to knock his opponents unconscious.
That our own Kimbo Slice is the reigning king of this organized lawlessness is as dubious as this made-up sport's popularity to begin with.
ESPN The Magazine is right to call it ''human cockfighting'' in what is otherwise a cover story on Kimbo straight out of a publicist's dream. The article encourages us to applaud the man because, from the mean streets of Miami where he grew up, he resisted the urge to murder or rob -- bulletin: not everybody from the means streets does -- and chose instead to make his living by legally beating the crap out of other people.
He says in the article, ``I've got to be a guide to my kids.''
Hmm.
SLICE OF LIFE
Our society might officially need a reality check -- or rather, perhaps, a check from reality -- if Mr. Slice should be anybody's role model, whether on hard streets or in leafy suburbs.
Kimbo reportedly spent one month homeless living in a 1987 Pathfinder a couple of years out of Miami's Palmetto High. We believe what's oft-repeated to be true. Although it may or may not be a too-perfect dramatic touch out of a rough-draft movie script: That a desperate man would find his life's direction in a Pathfinder!
There is something about the Slice story that feels manufactured. Orchestrated. Kimbo began as a ''YouTube legend,'' meaning videos of him fighting were posted in an effort to make him a YouTube legend. It worked. It led to MMA, where his talent beyond his cartoon-celebrity status is yet to be determined.
Kimbo's only two previous MMA ''fights'' were against designated divers named Bo Cantrell and Tank Abbott, two ''fights'' that lasted a combined 62 seconds.
Our man's pro rÃsumÃ
thus far might be subtitled ''Bumfights,'' and Saturday's prime-time bout doesn't figure to be much different.
Kimbo's designated Red Klotz for Saturday night is one James ''The Colossus'' Thompson, 6-5 and 270 pounds of dead meat. He's a Brit who has lost seven times by knockout or TKO. And who once lost to Butterbean!
So Miami's own will win again, surely, and likely in a matter of seconds, because further cultivating the Kimbo Legend is in the vital interest of an illegitimate sport trying to find a legitimate foothold.
Meantime be thankful for small favors.
When watching a Kimbo Slice fight, it's over before you even have time to feel guilty for not turning away in disgust.
Â2008 Miami Herald Media Company. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miamiherald.com
Various areas of factual incorrectness, and anyone calling Kimbo a 'reigning king' clearly isnt following too closely.
Sad that this perception still exists, although interesting to note that he thinks MMA has peaked and is on the decline....
Thoughts?
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