AUDIO VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE:
To further the scope of VICE’s popular Dark Side of the Ring series, its latest venture tackles the history of MMA.
While a relatively young sport compared to its contemporaries, the historical telling of its building blocks is rather fertile ground as it’s gone unexplored to the degree that boxing and professional wrestling lean, on their respective pasts.
In 2018, the network launched the ultra-popular Dark Side of the Ring series, which is set to launch its sixth season as the most successful series in VICE’s history. Attempts to diversify the brand have seen it delve into the Dark Side of Comedy, the Dark Side of the ‘90s, and the Dark Side of Football.
MMA has no shortage of characters, stories, and drama. As a closer cousin to professional wrestling than other offshoots of the Dark Side brand, it is more palatable to that audience.
Dark Side of the Cage kicked off this past week with its first episode dedicated to the late Kevin “Kimbo Slice “ Ferguson, a phenomenon of his era that married the sports roots of internet culture with the sport’s boom of the mid-2000s and thrust the charismatic street fighter onto network television.
Kimbo Slice was a perfect example of “time” and “place” in the culture of the sport. If the same fighter came around today, odds are that he would have gone the gimmick boxing route to fight low-level celebrities in the hopes of several large paydays.
He was a product of the halcyon days of YouTube and other file-sharing services, giving fans the feel of raw street fighting that was more akin to a snuff film than the more polished UFC product, which was quickly gaining further acceptance after securing a cable television partner in Spike TV.
Slice was the antithesis of what the UFC was selling by the middle portion of the decade. Dana White was going above and beyond to hammer home the message that this version of the promotion was “running toward regulation” (a claim that doesn’t hold up to history and Semaphore Entertainment Group’s move toward more rules and more commission oversight) but was a great marketing line. To enhance its image, it didn’t promote Chuck Liddell as a cold-blooded knockout artist but instead, waved his resume as a former accountant out of Cal-Poly, or schoolteacher-turned-fighter, Rich Franklin.
This was the new, professional, and upscale UFC representing the opposite brand from “two men enter, one leaves” while embracing the criticism levied by former Senator John McCain, instead of fighting the establishment’s viewpoint.
It was a branding effort and the marketing exercises proved exceptionally wise and slowly brought in larger sponsors. It took a leap from Spike TV to Fox, and the once-taboo idea of MMA on free television became a seminal part of every fight fan’s Saturday night routine.
But MMA at its core was built on the foundation of counterculture and a fanbase that had to dig and track down fights during the “dark days” that preceded The Ultimate Fighter. Where message boards were the town square of choice and personalities like Dana White and Joe Rogan would often frequent.
Kimbo Slice tapped into that DNA for fight fans while bringing along his audience through his Miami roots and street fighting appeal, which fed many stereotypes of the sport but boiled down to a morbid curiosity behind the mystique and charisma he inhabited.
If there was a spotlight moment for Slice, his first viral moment was an underground fight with police officer Sean “The Cannon” Gannon, which became a sensation in the MMA underground. The fight generated enough buzz that it opened the door for Gannon to receive his only fight in the UFC in October 2005 and was not without significant criticism that the UFC would give Gannon such a platform.
But the star was Kimbo Slice and rather than the UFC, it was Cage Fury Fighting Championships that capitalized and booked Slice with former boxing heavyweight champion Ray Mercer in June 2007. The exhibition fight saw Slice showcase his beginner-level submission skills against Mercer’s non-existent submission defense winning by guillotine choke and forcing people to take notice when a name opponent like Mercer fell to the internet phenom.
The pieces were in place and one man who cannot be forgotten in the Kimbo Slice story is boxing-turned MMA promoter, Gary Shaw.
Shaw had his detractors, but he had a sixth sense for feeding the audience a high-sugar diet for maximum impact and going after the coveted “Just Bleed” bro demographic.
MMA was in an expansion phase in 2007, and Showtime saw the need for diversity and entrusted Shaw with its first foray into the sport that year.
Its maiden voyage leaned on the legacies of the Shamrock and Gracie names pitting Frank against Renzo in its first main event. An unsatisfying finish due to illegal knees thrown by Shamrock could have left fans unfulfilled but the star of the night was 24-year-old Gina Carano, who fought Julie Kedzie.
It was a fight for Shaw just to get the women on the main card and had to compete under the primitive restrictions of three 3-minute rounds. The women went the distance and Carano had her arm raised. It was a spectacular fight and a star was born allowing Shaw to have two silver bullets in his chamber – Kimbo Slice and Gina Carano.
In a modern world of UFC domination, it is hard to imagine anyone competing against the behemoth. In 2007, UFC was the dominant leader as PRIDE ceased its operations, WEC had just been purchased by Zuffa, the IFL was a struggling upstart, and Strikeforce was still a regional-based organization.
Elite XC had the mentality of being able to present something UFC could not – a fighter in Kimbo Slice who went against everything UFC was trying to run away from, and female fights, which were years away from being an accepted part of the UFC.
It thrust the league onto CBS with its two guns placed on the aptly named “Prime Time” event as Kimbo Slice fought James Thompson and Gina Carano met Kaitlin Young.
It was a rousing success as the show averaged 4.85 million viewers with the handicap of several affiliates not carrying the show and UFC counter-programming on Spike TV with a Chuck Liddell documentary and re-airing of a Liddell vs. Wanderlei Silva fight from December.
Carano and Young added more than one million viewers for their three-round fight, but the peak audience was achieved during the main event where 6.5 million viewers watched James Thompson’s ear explode in the third round from Kimbo Slice’s punch. Coupled with Spike’s airing of the Liddell vs. Silva bout, approximately 7.5 million people were watching MMA between CBS and Spike TV concurrently.
A visibly exhausted Kimbo Slice could barely get out his words during the post-fight interview with Gus Johnson. It was a glimpse into one of the many holes in Slice’s game, his cardio, and later learning of an enlarged heart he competed with, which many of the interviewees in the episode grappled with in hindsight and being aware of the impact of his heart issues.
Elite XC seemed poised for success but it was a group littered by exorbitant spending, and burning the candle at both ends knowing that Kimbo Slice could not be protected like this was professional wrestling.
It was a question of when Slice would meet the wrong style of fighter and whether the audience would lose confidence if he was seen as a fighter with limited skills.
October 4, 2008, was not supposed to be that day. By this period, Ken Shamrock was probably the perfect opponent with a legendary name and had just gone through his latest surge of popularity fighting Tito Ortiz twice in 2006 and setting pay-per-view and television records for those fights.
At 44, Shamrock’s best days were behind him but in a valuable lesson for all promoters and fans, one’s physical prime doesn’t always correlate with their drawing peak and Shamrock was still as viable as ever to draw an audience with the right opponent. Kimbo Slice vs. Ken Shamrock on CBS had all the ingredients for a successful formula.
Hours before fight time, an errant rolling session led to a cut on Shamrock, which he had stitched up and rendered him ineligible for clearance to compete. The residual effect of this is astounding but Slice opted to stay on the card and save the show while accepting undercard fighter Seth Petruzelli as his last-minute substitution.
It only took 14 seconds for CBS to go from presenting a card called “Heat” to an unscheduled airing of “The Emperor Has No Clothes” and the Kimbo experiment seemed to have gone up like a set of flames for the appropriately named event. The main event was watched by 5.5 million people and conventional wisdom suggests that would only have grown that much more if the fight had lasted longer.
While omitted from the Dark Side of the Cage episode, the real fallout from the event occurred when Petruzelli was on a radio show and indicated he was offered a knockout bonus (but not a submission one) insinuating that Elite XC was bribing him to keep the fight on its feet.
Whether that was the catalyst or just another straw on the camel’s back, CBS was out of the Elite XC and MMA business and the company never promoted another event.
In time, Strikeforce would get the CBS contract, and with that, Gina Carano.
For Kimbo Slice, many wrote him off and falsely believed that the Petruzelli loss meant his aura and drawing power was dead. The lesson listed above was learned and demonstrated the next year when he entered the tenth season of TUF which led to the show’s largest ratings ever.
It was a rebirth for Kimbo Slice and a humanizing one where fans saw the down-to-earth and genuineness of the person, Kevin Ferguson above the persona of Kimbo Slice.
On TUF, he fought Roy Nelson and led to 5.3 million people watching a taped fight from months prior in 2009.
Remarkably, he only got two fights with the UFC after TUF, battling Houston Alexander to a dull unanimous decision, and being stopped by Matt Mitrione at UFC 113 in May 2010 and ending his UFC tenure.
Kimbo Slice was just not a UFC-caliber fighter, but he was someone with a raging fanbase that likely would have given him more rope than the UFC was willing to in 2010 and squeeze several more fights out of the enigma.
For whatever reason, his next chapter diving into pro boxing didn’t achieve any of the same attention that his MMA career did. He went 7-0 as a pro, fighting low-level heavyweights between 2011-13 with six knockouts.
If you were about to write him off during that period, refer once again to the lesson above.
Scott Coker was an astute promoter and after taking over the helm at Bellator, he knew he needed big names to achieve big numbers on Spike TV. Like professional wrestling, if you have a history of being a draw, you will be given chance after chance.
Kimbo Slice got his next chance in the organization in 2015 and produced the fight that fell apart seven years prior, meeting Ken Shamrock on Spike TV.
The result was one of the most successful events the promotion ever presented with 2.4 million watching the fight, a record for Bellator in 2015.
That record would be broken the next year at Bellator 149 with a co-main bill of Ken Shamrock vs. Royce Gracie and Kimbo Slice vs. Dada 5000.
The card drew a nearly $1.4 million gate at the Toyota Center in Houston with the peak of the broadcast coming during Slice’s fight with Dada 5000 at 2.5 million viewers.
The fight was the furthest thing from pretty inside the cage. It was downright scary and not exaggerating to state Dada 5000 could have died.
It was an inflection point for Bellator as the legends drew incredible numbers but there was a grand price to pay. They narrowly escaped a fighter tragedy, Ken Shamrock and Kimbo Slice both failed drug tests and there was no evidence that the audience brought in for these types of fights were being converted to regular Bellator viewers and enhancing its other fight cards.
But Coker was not done with the Kimbo Slice hype train, and the viewership stats did not lie. Coker was ready to promote another rematch, putting Kimbo against James Thompson in the summer of 2016.
One month before the fight, the world was stunned to hear of Slice’s unexpected death at the age of 42 due to congestive heart failure along with a mass discovered on his liver.
It was shocking on many fronts, and it is explored in the Dark Side episode of whether Slice should have been cleared to be competing for as long as he did as they cited a long-term issue with an enlarged heart.
Time and place remain the words that come to mind regarding Kimbo Slice.
If you did not live through this era, it is hard to transport someone back to a time in MMA when the crossover of a fighter was not an everyday occurrence. Where an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live or landing the cover of ESPN The Magazine was a statement on the inroads of the sport. Most importantly, there was a fighter achieving this without the UFC brand.
If there is one snapshot of the phenomenon of Kimbo Slice, it’s February 16, 2008.
Kimbo Slice and David “Tank” Abbott sharing a cage in front of a raucous crowd in Miami at the perfectly named “Street Certified” event.
The outcome was hardly in doubt with Abbott living off a name from a bygone era but still of interest to the fanbase against the rising tide of Kimbo Slice. This is an audience that is wound up and ready to explode and once the hands of Slice opened, this audience was palpable and reached its peak 43 seconds later when the fight was waved off and Kimbo Slice was the King of Miami that night.
History can be taught and learned but to truly understand is to live through it.
Kimbo Slice was the unlikely bridge between online fights and network-televised ones and while he was never going to be a world champion, it is impossible to tell the story of MMA without Kevin Ferguson.
Additional reading:
– Wrestling Observer Newsletter – Elite XC debut (June 9, 2008)
– Bellator 149 averages nearly 2 million viewers in record-breaking Spike TV broadcast
