Kimbo Slice's trainer Bas Rutten agrees with those who thought James Thompson should have been awarded a TKO victory in the 2nd round:
People ask me if the fight should have been stopped at the end in the second round, I say YES because those are the rules, it should have been stopped because Kimbo didn't do anything to improve his situation. But I think what made the ref NOT do it was the fact that Kimbo was giving his thumbs up the whole time to let the referee know that he was OK. This was the refs decission, not Kimbo's.
But lest you think Bas is hanging his man out to dry, he's got a lot of good things to say about Kimbo's performance:
First let me start by saying: "It was his 4th fight".
The fight was hyped up so big that Kimbo needed a perfect performance to live up to the hype. Thompson had the chance of his life time so he trained insanely hard. People expect him to go down but they forgot that he stopped Don Frey and Hidehiko Yoshida, he has a suspect jaw, but he came in to fight!
I think this fight is going to be very good for Kimbo in the future. When you start fighting and competing and you never went the distance in a fight you never know what "getting really tired" means.
Ask any fighter on the planet if they fought more than 1 round when they fought their first couple of fights, how they felt. They will tell you that they thought they were in great shape but got tired really fast.
In training you can do pretty much anything to bring your heart rate up. Focus mitts, Thai pads, takedowns, running hills, explosive weight training etc. but NOTHING compares to getting tired in a fight, it’s just a whole different ball game.
But once you know this and experienced it one time, you know what to expect in the future.
That’s why I think that this fight was great for Kimbo, he really had to dig deep and boy did he do that. He was so tired at the end of round it was crazy, but he went out in round three and just started throwing bombs again, that says a lot to me about his will power, trust me, it has been tested here!
Bas also talks about Kimbo's mistakes in the fight:
He also didn’t close his guard a few times and he should have done that. In round two he had James in a guillotine choke but didn’t close his guard, that was too bad because Thompson escaped exactly how I showed Kimbo that you should escape when your opponent doesn’t close his guard, but you learn from your mistakes so that won’t happen again either.
He had Thompson in trouble the first and the second round with his punches but he got a little bit too “hungry” and kept on hitting which means that he planted his feet and that means that your opponent can go for a takedown, and that happened too. But here I go again, you learn from your mistakes and that won’t happen again.
All in all a very honest assessment of his fighter's performance from Bas Rutten. Just what we've come to expect from the man.
HT MMA Punch .
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