I'm Sorry...

After Thompson’s ear popped, he got hit with a shot or two that made his eyes go all
googley and he was clearly out on his feet. This wasn’t the first time in the bout
either. That’s why it was stopped.

Sure, Kimbo was given more opportunities to win via questionable reffing, but he wasn’t taking much damage from the elbows. Thompson was playing patty-cake and that’s why he was told to work and why it wasn’t stopped in the 2nd.

you don’t stop a fight if his eyes are “googley” while he is still on his feet period. If he is on his back ok but NOT when he is still on his feet !

Now its all clear why Dana wants control. Its clear now that CBS didnt want real MMA fights. Loaded with early stoppages, a fix in par with a TNA wrestling match and a ref that took a shady pay off.
I am truly disgusted, its like my dog died. Elite XC took the only sport I loved and in one 3 hour hip hop, go go dancing show… raped it.
The annoucing however was great, Gina, and the UFC alums did well.
Good article though Brent.

Same thing happened with my DVR. Sux.

In the balance, I think the real story here is that we saw Kimbo fight like a real MMA fighter and he was largely successful. His cardio was a problem and doomed him to a couple minutes on his back, but he still came back and delivered the punching power that has made him famous. End of story. Who’s next for Kimbo?

I think to say that the fight was literally “fixed” is an overreaction. However, I have no doubt that the ref maybe had an extra incentive to let the fight get into Kimbo’s favor. I just think that MMA especially is too unpredictable to completely “fix” a fight.

I think everyone obviously needs to sleep on this one for a night and resume posting when you are more level headed. From the tone of Brent’s post, I would picture him to be a weeping mess right now. This is not going to destroy our beloved sport that we have all been nurturing in our collective womb for so many years now. You are not going to see credible news outlets call this a fix without any hard evidence (except Yahoo! currently on their front page – anyone surprised?), and it’s pretty irresponsible for Bloody Elbow to announce such on their front page. Was this a controversial stoppage? Absolutely. Was it the most controversial stoppage I’ve ever seen? No. Was it the second most controversial stoppage I’ve ever seen? Nope. At the end of this event, 90% of fans are shaking their heads in disbelief of the officiating. So what’s new?

I think that once everyone, especially Brent, sleeps on it, people are going to be much less willing to declare this MMA’s “Donaghy Reffing Scandal.”

...I wouldn’t say the fight was stopped just because Thompson’s ear was popped. He got beat standing and couldn’t get the fight back on the ground.

Early stoppages, late stoppages, yadda yadda.

So did anyone expect this to be the next UFC event? The fights were good for what they were.

I think it’s that some people think there was some money floating around for people who helped the fights go a certain way. I’m not so sure yet because there’s nothing concrete, but there’s always shady business in sports.

Tonight would have been a good night to do “Any Given Saturday.”

Thompson appeared to have a kimura locked in, then he just let it go. It looked like he was thinking to himself, “hey look at this arm here. I think I’m supposed to grab his wrist and them put my other arm around this way. Wait …. now what I’m I supposed to do? Ah screw it.”

I’m going to try and be an optomist and hope the next show is a marked improvement over this one. I’m sure a lot of organizations first few live shows were as messy as this one.

Kimbo was clealy exposed, but maybe he’ll gett better as a result and start training with other people besides baas rutten. Maybe some time at team quest or pat militich’s team will improve his game. Maybe he is just a flash in the pan, but maybe he can get better. I will give them another chance because i like to watch free mma fights. Call me an optomist.

Also, did it appear that kimbe tapped out for a second there when he was getting chocked out?

no other organization has more bull sh*t fights.hey Luke this is why people don’t like him ok or we over him yet?.they could have avoided this if they didn’t make him the face of their organization.if they would have kept him on the under card where he belonged and not billed him as the second coming of Christ.they had so much hype it was almost laughable if it weren’t so pathetic.watching an elite xc event is like watching mad tv do a parody of mma and then trying to compare it to actual mma.people who have seen Thompson fight before know that he has won fights when he was tired throwing those zombie punches.also he was taking kimbozo down pretty consistently.what does it tell you when all those people who were booing Thompson turned on kimbozo by the end of the fight.

Here are a few conclusions after saturday night’ show:

1) 99% probability CBS cancels Elite XC. This was already pretty much done as you can see the next shows date was canceled without any further notice. It doesnt matter what the numbers are the decision was already 90% made before this aired – call it buyers remorse from CBS. It went up to 99% because CBS is looking at a few fcc fines for the foul language that was aired.

- sponsors for the show are already getting emailed to stop sponsoring this show so imagine what CBS is hearing.

2) Dana White & CO knows something most of these bloggers and writers dont…

and that’s: MMA is not ready for network TV. It is better off on Cable and Pay Per View.

If you want MMA on network TV it will be watered down.

3) Elite XC is bad for the sport.

These ex-boxing promoter scum bags want to come in and corrupt our sport for a quick buck.

And most of these writers and bloggers (except for bloody elbow) seem to be giving them a pass… this is not fair to the legit promoters out there.

Where are the real journalists? All we see are cheerleaders who are making excuses for elite XC. Maybe because these geeks finally got credentials to a show?

Hey Josh Gross… get your four eyes in gear and write an open letter to Gary Shaw and tell him to get the fuck out of our sport.

This scumbag is bringing boxings disease to MMA.

I remember your hypocritical letter you wrote Dana on the steroids issue when you were the editor of a site who would continually cover promotions who never test and rank fighters who competed in these promotions.

I gotta tell you, out of all the writers on this site I agree with your opinions the least. But you made a fan for life today with this article. It took a man to put this in print, and I admire you for it. Good job and I for one will look forward to reading you in the future.

As for EliteXc, I hope you get canceled and go far, far away. I will never forgive Gary Shaw for the damage he did to my sport. He set us back to 2004 in my opinion tonight. And one guy that deserves some heat but is usually untouchable in the hardcore fans eyes, Bas Rutten should be ashamed. He used his name and his clout to lend legitimacy to Kimbo, and it bit back hard tonight. Kimbo is not what they thought he was, he may be someday. but he was not ready for this type of responsibility. And as his trainer he should have stepped up and stopped this. Bas, you helped bring the sport to where it is, and now you helped bring it back to where it was. Thanks for nothing.

It seems most of you who are commenting right now are avid fans of MMA (rightfully so), so I feel compelled to give you guys an opinion from someone who doesn’t follow it nearly as regularly. If you want to completely disregard my thoughts so be it, thought it can’t hurt.

First off, my background with MMA:
I find MMA very, very interesting and entertaining, yet I don’t find it something that I go out of my way to watch. If, flipping through the channels, I stumble upon it, I will more often than not watch it. I suppose part of that is due to my general lack of knowledge about the sport. I am an avid sports fan, I follow far too much (from baseball to soccer to cricket to etc etc), which I suppose prevents me placing too much focus on learning about it. So I have seen a fair number of UFC fights when cmpared to the general public at large.
I will also add before I get to my actual thoughts, that I was rooting for Kimbo to prove himself to be a legitimate MMA fighter. I caught wind of his youtube vids a while back and was enthralled by them. I thought perhaps that his methods would lend themselves to boxing (I freely admit that I could be very wrong there), but thought if he worked on his ground game he could be a fair fighter.

Anyway, enough of the prose, onto my thoughts

The pagenty surrounding the fights were ridiculous. Honestly, the dancers? I was tuning in tonight to see A.) Kimbo Slice B.) Some quality fights on the undercards. I didn’t need all that other nonsense.

As far as B.) is concerned, I was fairly impressed with some of the fights but disappointed by others. As others on the site have already gotten into, some of the stoppages were curious, though it may lend EliteXc some credibility that all the fights seemed to be stopped with them erring on the side of caution. Consistency in that regard helps, I reckon.

Now for A.) I’m still a bit confused by it all. First and foremost, I was definitely excited while watching it, though I realized that it was definitely not a well fought fight by say UFC standards. After Kimbo got up from his back the first time, I thought that maybe all his work on his ground game had paid off, but once he got tired it seemed that he regressed greatly. I can’t imagine the state of his ground game prior to this fight if he looked so poor and helpless this time out.

In the second round, I thought that the fight was going to be stopped for sure when Kimbo was prone for over a minute. I was rooting for the clock to wind down, thus saving his ass, but it was obvious (at least to the extent of my knowledge) that since he was prone, and didn’t even seem to attempt to get out that the fight should have been called. Hell, had it not been for the bell, Kimbo would still be catching elbows.

In the third, the ref may have stopped the fight a touch early, but had it not stopped there, I think it would have been stopped soon there after. In my eyes, at least, Thompson looked dazed on his feet and I’m sure Kimbo would have continued attacking his ear which would only increase the blood flow. I think the amount of blood coming out made the extent of the injury look worse than it actually was but considering it was on CBS I figure that had to play into the decision to stop.

Overall, I enjoyed watching the fights, but it left me wanting more. Not more in the sense of wanting to watch more MMA fights, but more out of those fights itself. I’m not sure how these fights will affect my future views of MMA, though I certainly value the quality of UFC far more than the sideshowish attractions of Elite, so I may not give CBS too many more tries. I probably won’t got out of my way to watch it on CBS again, unless they do a stupendous hype job. I’m disappointed that Kimbo didn’t acquit himself on the ground, but perhaps there is still potential there. If he turns around and gets pimped for another CBS fight anytime real soon, I probably won’t watch; maybe I’d watch highlights to see if he gets knocked out. If Kimbo though, takes time off to seriously train and work on his technique, etc then there’s a good chance I would tune in again.

I think I had more to say, but I ended up getting long winded so I’ll cut it here (well after this next bit). I think in the end, this set of fights piqued my interest in MMA as a whole a bit more than where I was at prior, but I don’t really have any faith in Elite or CBS. It’s UFC or bust if I were to get into this. I will qualify that statement though by the fact that I have gotten into boxing more in the past couple months, so it could be more a function of a greater enjoyment of combat sports, so the pique I mentioned could be independent of the fight.

So take my thoughts for what they’re worth. Cheers

5 oz of Pain – Kimbo & Brett Rogers tangle at post-fight press conference. And the best part – Kimbo’s “crew” got into it and were talking shit to Rogers.

Oh boy.

People can slam Dana White and the UFC all they want, but last night’s event was a joke. All the main event needed was for Jim Ross to be doing play-by-play and it could have just as easily have been a WWE show. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me to find some of those who are new to the sport lumping it into the same category after this.

Kimbo tapped at 2:47 of the first round. Watch it for yourself!

http://www.mmatko.com/kimbo-slice-vs-james-thompson-fight-video-elitexc/