The Rise of Kimbo Slice

CBS Sports, the program that showed us the world's most unforgettable wardrobe malfunction, now brings us the spectacle of what "might be the first Internet-generated athlete to reach mainstream superstardom" according to TIME Magazine's sports writer Sean Gregory.

This Saturday, CBS will air EliteXC (extreme combat) Saturday Night Fights, the new ultimate fighting league, now referred to as mixed martial arts (MMA, and also written about by TIME). The fighter already being heavily heavily promoted is Kimbo Slice (government name: Kevin Ferguson of Miami).

He's the cover of ESPN Magazine's June 2 issue and story writer Dan Le Batard says Slice is "a very scary guy. He is also a thoughtful friend, loving dad and budding entrepreneur." You may recognize him from an infamous YouTube video where he gives new meaning to pugilism. I watched that video and recognized him in another sense, he was, "that dude" y'know, that dude in the neighborhood who nobody messed with. Every neighborhood has a version of that dude and now the Miami version is a world sensation. The story goes — he'd been a high school football player in Miami (I'm asuming somewhere between 1986 and 1992 because he's 34), later dropped out of college and was even homeless for a period but worked odd jobs like strip-club bouncer, porn company bodyguard till he took up street fighting, which apparently is as lucrative a street hustle as any, people will bet more than a little bit of change on neighborhood matchups between big gorilla bucks — this used to happen for free on plantations. You ever read Ralph Ellison's Invible Man? Literary critic Richard Thorman describes one of the most memorable themes in the book:

The man telling the story says that as a boy, white men covered his eyes with a cloth. The white men tell the boy to blindly fight other black boys. The blacks are forced to fight each other to please whites. At the end of the novel the story has moved from the American South to the North. There are riots in Harlem, the black area of New York City. Instead of ten black children fighting each other blindly, grown black men are battling each other to the death. Blacks still are having their strength turned upon themselves.

Make your own call:


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In this weekend's main event, sposored by Burger King, Slice will fight James "Colossus"Thompson, giving the mayhem an equal opportunity angle. The story on Time.com quotes Slice responding to critics of the sport "It kept me away from dealing drugs, and breaking into people's houses. All that thug s---." He says, "I would rather have my son watch MMA and learn to defend himself from a bully than have him watch the hunting channel and see some guy blow a deer's head off." Good point and clear reference to Stephon Marbury's defense of Michael Vick as if this ish didn't have enough controversy already.